I’m a funny guy. I make a lot of jokes, and I can make people laugh. I write funny stuff too – for years I’ve written a fake Christmas newsletter (“this year Cee Cee won the Nobel prize for physics and flew on the space shuttle”) which we send out with our holiday cards. People look forward to getting it. My last post, The Case of the Threadbare Diaphragm, was me improvising on a funny idea.
So why are my short stories so dark? Over the past two years I’ve written eighteen stories. And with the exception of a couple that I wrote basically as improvisations, they are all about great loss and its aftermath. Over the weekend I read over these stories, and I realized that all my central characters are basically the same person – a watcher, a person frightened by the onrushing changes that life brings, and who keeps trying to arrange and control his/her life to make it less scary. This, of course, is an illusion. And the stories are about the moment this illusion is shattered.
I’ve never thought much about where story ideas come from. I get an idea, and I try to write it the best way I know how. I’m working on another one right now, and as a result this trend, this tendency, the attraction to these dark places, has really been on my mind.
The non-improvisational stories I write are all about trying to communicate an emotion, a feeling. I want to put the reader into that moment where the carefully-built foundation of a character’s life is torn out by events beyond his/her control. Nothing is left, and the character finds him/herself alone on some unfamiliar beachhead of life, facing the very uncertainty he/she worked so hard to avoid. That sense of isolation, powerlessness and fear of the unknown – that’s the moment I’m after.
Unsurprisingly, this is a page right out of my own life. I’m a watcher, and although my life doesn’t scare me the way it used to, the memory of those “beachhead” moments is always with me. With improvisation, I can stay at the surface and be funny. But when I dig down deep, this is what I seem to hit.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Neither, probably. It’s just a thing. My experiences are my experiences – and whatever they are they form the emotional basis of my writing. I think sometimes that my stories are a way of processing these moments of loss, putting them into perspective. Was that what Hemingway did? Fitzgerald? Cheever? I don’t know. What I do know is that the act of writing them (and, heaven knows, so far no editor has shown any sign of wanting to read them) has made me a better writer. Perhaps, too, my dark places have become a little less dark in the bargain.
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