Stories and Storytellers

“So, what if I kill myself, right now?”

“IRight/I now?”

“Yeah.”

“You die, I guess.”

“No shit. After that?”

“Nothing. Your page is ended. Flip the number, read the next one. See how it affects the story.”

“Exactly. So, Iwhat happens if I kill myself right now/I?”

“IOh/I, shit, sorry. I thought you were being metaphysical.”

“I am, in a sense.”

“Can I get a drink first? I hate when you get metaphysical.”

“Why, would you rather I just got physical?”

“Dirty mind. You should write porn.”

“Heh.”

“OK. So, I’ve got my pineapple juice, Iwith/I umbrella, and you want to know what happens next?”

“Absolutely.”

“Alright. I scream. Necessity. Lack that, audience turns off. Nobody gives a shit, your book doubles as an unaerodynamic boomerang on a one way trip to the incinerator.”

“That isn’t a word.”

“Author’s caveat. So, I scream, oh, how are you killing yourself?”

“Don’t be morbid.”

“It affects what happens next. Can’t answer if I don’t know.”

“Ornamental knife, stabbed in the top of the head, ritualistic style.”

“Fucking hell.”

“I write fantasy, okay?”

“No, but I’m aware of that.”

“Serious question, I expect a serious answer.”

“Oh, come Ion/I! I know you better than this. You’d Inever/I have someone kill themselves like that.”

“Well…”

“This isn’t an entirely theoretical discussion, is it?”

“Answer the goddamn question!”

“You make baby Jesus cry. Alright… I won’t get too technical. Okay. You’ve stabbed yourself in the head, I’ve screamed. You drop face first onto the table. Ashtray bounces, contents spill, glasses wobble, two fall over, one of the full ones, let’s say it mixes with your blood for visual effect. Hell, that thing practically fucking glows anyway, and there’s something poetic about a person’s drink mixing with their blood directly, I think.”

“Say what?”

“Well, alcohol’s a poison, anyone’ll tell you that. You poison yourself deliberately to have fun, but you do it slowly, it goes in through the mouth, enters through the gut, shabing shabang, you’re drunk. Then you die, and all of a sudden this raw alcohol’s mixing with your blood as it spills on the table, final, deepest drink imaginable in your dying moments. Realistically, you wouldn’t be dead, might not even be unconscious at this point. Maybe you can feel it. Actually, back up on whatever over-long abomination you’re creating and tell it from the perspective of the man who’s dying.”

“OK boss.”

“Want to take notes?”

“STFU. I can remember a one sentence critique.”

“People who use net slang IRL get AIDS.”

“You did it.”

“I got it from you.”

“So we’ve both got AIDS, huh?”

“Dirty mind, pal. Leads you dirty places. Get me another drink.”

“Sure. Back in two shakes of a cat’s tail.”

“Gah! Quit with the anachronisms! Fuck. My grandmother used to say that Iincessantly/I. And you know it! Bastard! I expect Ia lot/I of drink as reward for the mental pain you just caused me. Go on. I’ll think about your puzzle.”

“There you go. Drink.”

“Drunk.”

“So, what happens next?”

“We cut from death to life, screaming, people come to check as the blood drips off the table. I’m hysterical because for some unknown reason I care about you.”

“Twins.”

“Twins? You’re using Itwins/I as a plot device again? Jesus man. Do you have more than one string?”

“Two, at the very least.”

“So I’m screaming, people come to check. Lots of people at this point freeze up. Contrary to popular belief, people do not always start screaming at the sight of blood. At least not straight away. First thing they do is they freeze, ask themselves if it’s real, do a quick systems check, boot Microsoft Word and type up a ‘help’ form for their logic department. So, you’ve been dead about twenty seconds, I’m screaming, people are talking, now one of them starts screaming. Out of this we get a couple of cool heads who try to calm me and everyone else down, we get one person who’s actually on the ball, maybe a bouncer, who immediately starts clearing the floor. Manager’s pale, but he’s professional, so he calls emergency services.”

“Obviously.”

“Now, people don’t know what’s happened here. They probably think I murdered you. You see a knife in the top of someone else’s head, you sure as hell aren’t going to think they stabbed Ithemselves/I. So, even though I’m screaming, there’s at least a couple of people wondering if I did it, maybe the bouncer’s got me pinned against the wall now and he’s asking me ‘what the hell did you do’ or something like that.”

“Yeah, that all follows. So the immediate response to someone dying is to double check and be sure it’s really happened, panic, then seek blame. Makes sense, adds up. Logically, the person nearest probably did it. Which is true, after all, Iyourself/I is about as near to a crime as you can get. Right?”

“Horrible way of putting it, but yes.”

“So, we have stability. Next?”

“Services arrive, ask questions. What happened, why, who did what. I might be calm enough to speak, though I’m crying a lot. Let’s say I’m sitting down with a cup of coffee and I’m talking my heart out, ranting and raving, maybe, knowing you, I’m spouting arcane, prophetic babble. Right?”

“Not right. These twins aren’t prophetic. Magical, but not prophetic. Daughters of the world’s Ionly/I mage, set to follow in his footsteps. So the world’s magical potential just got halved right there, and nobody knows why.”

“Hmm. That’s actually kinda interesting. Anyway, emergency services, or whatever name you call them in this setting, are asking what happened. I’m hazy. Yeah, I saw it all, but it can’t make sense to me. I mean, someone I love and know has just killed themselves right in front of me. If it had something to do with what we talked about, I sure as fuck don’t want to go over it, I don’t want to think about it. Maybe I scream if people try and touch me. I’m probably in shock, especially if I’ve never seen someone die before. In fact, this is so significant I’d say shock is a necessity. Narratologically it gives you an excuse to hide what’s happening from the reader, too. You still write third person, don’t you?”

“Guilty.”

“Right word for it, too. OK. What you Idon’t/I want to do is show it from her angle. Not explicitly. Your readers know this is their heroine, their main character. Maybe their faith’s shaken by how you’ve started out, but by the end of this Prologue or Chapter,”

“Prologue.”

“they expect they’ll know. Point is, the moment they hear things from her angle, they want to know what the hell just happened. You’re starting with the death, right?”

“Yup.”

“So you’ve started in media res. The audience knows that Ishe/I knows what the hell is going on and they want to be in on the secret ASAP. So Chapter 1, you give that to them. But you leave it out of the Prologue. That’s the excuse for them to keep reading.”

“I love the way you call it an excuse.”

“It’s the way I see it. You’ve got your Prologue right there.”

“Thanks. I can work with that. But seriously, an excuse? You act like people don’t want to read anymore. If that was really the case why would we be writers? If there was no market, which would mean nobody wanted to read anymore, then we couldn’t be writers. So don’t you think that ‘excuse’ is a bit cynical? An example of ‘wrong thought’ as the Chinese might say?”

“Maybe. It’s how I feel, though. I think people do Iwant/I to read, but we’re all so fucking cynical that a strong gust of wind can turn us off things. So you have to give them an excuse, a reason for them to justify spending some of the time they should be spending making money in an office reading your story. I think they want to, but they’re so caught up in Itime/I that they feel they can’t.”

“Okay, yeah, I sort of see that. But there’s a proper word for that. It’s called a ‘story hook’. You give people hooks, they have a Ireason/I to read on.”

“I’m not saying that, though.”

“No?”

“No. A reason suggests a judgmental mind. A lot of the time that just isn’t the case. Especially for what you’re writing, which is basically entertainment, people are picking it up because they want to read it. But it’s crap, you know? It’s nothing. So they need an excuse to justify reading it. Simple pleasure’s practically a crime today.”

“Thanks for bigging me up. How’d you feel if I called your stuff ‘dumb existentialist claptrap’?”

“Wouldn’t. I’m too postmodern for feelings.”

“Fuck you.”

“You wish, but II/I only drink fruit juice. You probably couldn’t get hard now if you tried.”

“I’m perfectly sober.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“IOK/I, as they say on the poker tables, that’s me out of the game. I don’t think I have a comeback to that one. IDon’t/I! I can see that smile. Don’t dig yourself deeper or I’ll send you a frozen cat in the mail again.”

“Will it be chocolate again?”

“Of course.”

“Ever the gentleman. Go on, flee. Where you off to?”

“Home. Where else? IYou/I are pretty much my social circle these days.”

“Oh God. Are you seeing a therapist yet?”

“Nah. Letting you stand in for one. You’re cheaper, and that’s not including the clothes in the assessment.”

“Ha!”

“Next week, then?”

“Sure. Tell me how it’s going.”

“Only if you do.”

“What the fuck Ielse/I do we talk about? You’d think we had no lives and no awareness of anything that goes on outside our little fantasy worlds.”

“Isn’t that mandatory? We’re Iwriters/I.”