Things Seen By The Story Guy

Posted on March 20th, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Rinn Reads 13 Feb 2014.

You see, the thing is, I’m a story guy.

I would be a story guy even if I wasn’t also a writer of fiction and therefore a producer of stories myself.

My hunger for story is insatiable; it is in large part what drives me. It probably drives me too much. I live what is very likely too much of my life following lies about nonexistent people, caring about them as if their troubles impact my own.

I can bore you senseless, just on the subject of Batman.

But part of being enamored of any form of art is growing so familiar with its various manifestations that you recognize when a practitioner has done a half-assed job. This makes us incomprehensible pains in the ass to those whose love of the art in question is not quite so fervent.

As a story guy, I am therefore in the position I observe when a music guy (or for that matter gal) insists on telling me that a certain song is a three-finger exercise, a piece of hackwork shit, when I am less sophisticated myself and know only that it’s something I can hum.

Few things demoralize a story guy more than when we point out that a given story contradicts its own premises, makes up its rules as it goes along, makes no sense, depends entirely on you completely forgetting in any given five minutes what happened five minutes earlier, and is morally reprehensible to boot, and the friend not a story guy sniffs, why do you have to analyze everything? Can’t we just, you know, enjoy it?

Yes, I suppose you can.

If you’re not a story guy.

Me, I always see where the scaffolding has been left behind when the story has been declared done.

Always.

Even in classics.

I see how this one brilliant writer I can name, whose talent I venerate and whose prose is driven by rich sensual description and an unerring sense of place, inevitably runs into a wall at the two-thirds mark of his novels, when he realizes that the story he’s been writing will soon have to be wrapped up; and he’s still only midway through the first act. I see how his prose becomes less lush, how his narrative speeds up to the point of desperation, and how he is all too clearly in the part of his tale that he didn’t plan for and must somehow wrench to an end anyway. I see that this never quite works. I still think he’s brilliant. But plot is not something he excels at.

I see how one very popular series of novels works only because the writer happens to be very good at making sure you don’t ask some pressing questions about its universe. I further notice that there was a vast and important element of the background that the writer just didn’t want to get into at all, and that the solution was having everybody tell you that the only person who could tell you about it was so boring he put people to sleep. I see how this fulfills the desired function of putting all that dull stuff aside, and I have actually praised the solution as perversely brilliant. But I also see how it renders the narrative all foreground, dependent on you the reader not asking questions you might otherwise be moved to ask.

I see how in this classic epic story that the entire world loves, the writer maneuvered himself into a situation where his characters were so thoroughly screwed that the only way to get them out of trouble was to invent a whole bunch of previously unestablished supernatural allies. I see how this story is driven by many such cases of the author playing favorites with his characters, acting as a kind of benevolent God to make sure they all make it through okay. I see how this becomes harder and harder to ignore on subsequent exposures.

I see how in one of the greatest books in all of American history, the writer established a murder mystery, somehow didn’t find the time to get back to it in a story that happened to be about matters richer to the human condition; and how, with the end of the book in sight, he threw in some half-assed shit on the last page, just to wrap it up.

I see how in one of the most important works by one of our most beloved genre writers, he found himself wandering around for the length of a shorter book trying to find the story again; and how he finally did find it again, and how he managed to hide the fact that what happens between then and the end of the book still doesn’t quite work.

I see how one of the greatest works by one of the greatest writers who ever lived builds to an unbearable tragedy at about the 2/3 mark, that results in the protagonist being estranged from his whole support system; and how he simply returns not long afterward to grins and smiles and to disastrous consequences that an idiot would have been able to see coming.

I see how another great work by yet another of the greatest writers who ever lived depends on coincidence; how a love story subplot is the deadly dull poison pill at the center of it; how the young couple involved are pretty damn intolerable; how it is impossible to go without that subplot but it’s less a compelling story element of its own than a McGuffin that wrenches a lengthy tale into its final act.

These are all books.

One of my favorite movies is built around the search for all-important documents that, at the end, don’t have much to do with anything.

Another depends on a ruthless villain somehow failing to do the most practical thing, which she has actually threatened to do.

Another depends on a trapped protagonist not realizing until the last five minutes that he can defuse a dangerous situation by doing something that he could have done hours earlier.

These are all, mind you, things I see in stories I love.

They are all real examples, so real that I suspect story guys (and gals) reading these words may be able to identify the individual works by their capsule descriptions.

I am still capable of loving the stories I cite because I also see what they do well. I see how they illuminate. I see how they resonate. I see how they are flawed gems and not just rickety structures. I get to the point where I regard the flaws I’ve mentioned with bemused affection, as the imperfect elements that make the surrounding beauty possible. I see the achievement. But I can feel solidarity with even the greatest of writers, losing rhythm while spinning plates.

So when I point at some much lesser work and say, no, this doesn’t work at all because of this, this, this, and this; when I conclude that the sins overwhelm the virtues, and that the story just isn’t very good; when people accuse me of being a picky scold out to ruin things for everybody else, I absolutely understand how they feel.

But I’m a story guy.

I honestly can’t help myself.

And when your defense of a work you love is a sputtering, “It’s just a story! You’re over thinking it! It doesn’t HAVE to make sense!”, I simply don’t understand you at all.

Tags: Batman, Life Wisdom, writing | Category Books, Horror, Humor, Life Wisdom, Science Fiction, Writing

Story Excerpt: “Death Every Seventy-Two Minutes”

Posted on March 18th, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

From the short story “Death Every Seventy-Two Minutes,” appearing this month at Lightspeed.

{Negelein is at his workstation working on the Lafferty file when the cannibal’s bone spear arcs over the sea of cubicles and strikes just above his right ear, penetrating his skull with a wet crunch. Oblivion is not quite instantaneous; his neurons all fire at the moment his brain goes soggy with blood, giving him in his last instant an overwhelming taste of peppermint. He is prevented from doing a face-plant on the keyboard by the spear, which arrested in its flight comes to rest with its ends hung up on his opposing cubicle walls, making it a clothing rod of sorts from which his corpse hangs like a tailored suit. He sighs. And dies.}

*

“…something like every hour and ten minutes.’

“Seventy minutes, then.”

“Yes, that would follow. Christ, why was I even referred to you? Couldn’t you come up with something a little more helpful?”

“Now, now. I was briefed by your regular doctor, but it’s an unusual condition, I can be forgiven for taking a few seconds to absorb what you’re saying. This is once every seventy minutes, correct? Not just in times of stress; not just when you’re exposed to certain high-pressure environments. Every seventy minutes.”

“Yes. I — ”

*

{He is driving on a narrow and twisty road, high in the mountains, the jagged rock face to his right, the bottomless drop to oblivion to his left. It is raining and the pavement is a cascade of water, flowing down from higher elevations; there is no bloody reason for him to be driving here under these conditions, no place worth the suicidal idiocy of braving this weather, but the vision’s logic cannot be argued with, and so he maintains a steady pace, ten over the posted speed limit and twenty over what he should be maintaining, with the rain lashing so hard that he can barely make out anything beyond the hood. Then the vague silvery blur in front of him goes dark, eclipsed by an improbably spherical stone, the mass of a respectable bus, that has come loose of the dirt higher up and landed on the road, just ahead; a rock that rests as if dazed for all of ten seconds before starting to roll toward him. There is no room to evade it, not unless he wants to steer his car into a drop of a thousand feet, and so he does the only inadequate thing he can and brakes, putting off the moment when he is crushed or knocked off the side of the road for the few precious heartbeats he can. He lives just long enough to hear his body go squoosh.}

*

“…as it happens, sir, not every seventy minutes, but a little over every seventy-two. Over the course of our day of monitoring, we have logged several thousand intervals of neurological disruption, marked by these spikes here, here, and here; each time lasting for less than a tenth of a second.”

“They seem to last so much longer.”

“That’s not surprising. Your accounts reflect so much in the way of incidental detail that they’re less dreams than experiences, which your brain seems intent on generating out of whole cloth. Subjectively, as in your more elaborate deaths, they may afterward seem to have lasted more than an hour. I can assure you, however, that they’re all instantaneous, as is your transition back to the everyday world. It is why you can still function. They’re over in an eye blink…”

*

(The story is already available at LIGHTSPEED if you buy the issue, but will be public shortly.)

Tags: Lightspeed Magazine, Science Fiction, Story Excerpts, writing | Category Blog Business, Excerpts, Fantasy, Horror, Humor, Science Fiction, Writing

On Being Able To Accept That The Weird Blue Filter is “Night”

Posted on March 11th, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

Tags: Death of a Saleman, King Kong, Mad Max Fury Road, Movies, Stage | Category Commentary, Movies