The Farthest World: 2008

About a year ago I boasted that I could write a story about anything. Someone overheard me, and challenged my assertion with a request.

"Write a story about a crane," he said.
"A crane? What kind of crane?"
"A construction crane, like you might see anywhere in a modern city."
"You're on!"

A year later, here I sit: no story, no crane.

I found the idea so intractable, so utterly uninspiring, that the four or five times I sat down to try tackling it resulted in about half a page of lacklustre dribble. I can summarize the gist of these failed attempts:

A monster crane tries to take over the world.
A child climbs up a crane and unwittingly discovers a portal to another dimension at its peak.
A committee of statesmen, politicians and military brass gather together to address the problem of the rogue cranes, who have emerged from some kind of extreme evolutionary latency to develop a savage intelligence.
A wise old man narrates the story of the cranes to a rapt audience: it was the cranes who conceived of mankind, and the City, and it was they who used us as tools to realize their vision.

The same guy who suggested the crane story recently told me that he longs to see range in my writing. He didn't offer any explanation beyond that, but since I generally respect his opinion, I was left with no alternative but to interpret his meaning.

Range can apply to a number of things. There is range of subject, content or theme. There is emotional range. And then there is stylistic range.

Well, I wrote a sentence in my previous post, "It is a cruel and manipulative deceit, and I wish very much that I would desist." that my friend took issue with. The problem was specifically in the "desist" part of it. A little too officious, too bland, lacklustre, deflated. Had no real pathos.

We can apply the two latter types of range to modifying this sentence, and see what happens.

Emotional/Stylistic Range Experiment

Sadness:
What have I become? A slave, a slave, a putrid slave of my own conceits! Oh God, my sickness pours from me with each stroke of the pen. Oh God!

Comment: Seems a little overwrought, with pretensions of Shakespeare that really should be excised. And the sadness sounds more like someone trying to overact from a bad script. Let's try a more modern tone.

Sadness qua Modern:
I sicken myself. I stare at mirrors and see only poison eyes and black orifices, waiting like dumpsters to fill up on someone else's excresence. I tape a label, "Writer" above the headboard, and laugh a little at the comical portrait. An ironic and disgusting prison I seem to have trapped myself in. I push at the edges of the mirror in jest, but then start to panic when it seems I can't actually get out.

Comment: Better. A little more of the darkness comes in. A hint of surrealism is always a nice touch. Still a bit low on energy. Let's try...

Sadness qua Modern add Unspoken Fear of Sudden Death:
Scratch the eyes! Shatter the mirror and stab the specks and pockets and blisters that were. Fuck! Three coiled strands of rope, two for escape and one for a noose just in case. So I lied, they're all for escape. The door's pounding, or maybe it's my head. There's pain, and pain, and pain, and it just comes back, some perverse cyclic untwining of the cosmos but trapped, fucking STUCK, in the narrow shallow shit-heel confines of my head, and it wants out, and it suppurates a little bit through the holes I just made, STAB STAB STAB, there are now pockets of release. Where are the pockets of resistance? I'll write to them with the blood that washes my hands now, so they know what kind of prisoner they made me. The words will know what they did and they won't be silent.

Comment: Not baaaad. Definitely getting better. Now, imagine myself being that person and writing words with their blood on the floor of some nightmarish room, covered in dirt and fragments of shattered glass. What would I write?

Sadness qua Modern add Unspoken Fear of Sudden Death and ???:
SICK! SICK! SICK! Mommy wants a piece of this? Daddy wants a piece of this? Knock the door down, knock the door down, take the prize, go for they eyes! What will you find? What will you find? Rot inside! NOT INSIDE! GOODBYE!

Comment: Now I'm detecting something Oedipal. That adds good subterranean creep-vibes. Plus the image is pretty tragic. But it still isn't particularly SAD, you know? They are, after all, just words.

So what's the point of all this? And why did I mention the crane thing? Well, you'll find out in Pt. 2.