The thing is I think being a writer sounds perfect. Getting to work from home, rising each day early enough to water my plants and drink some strong coffee, and then settling down to write. That's my favorite way to work; as much as I hated the stress of having to produce original scholarship every 11 weeks, I really enjoyed the finals week schedule during graduate school. You think and write furiously for maybe 8 hours, and then enjoy life. Watch a movie, read a novel, go to the gym. I kind of do that now, except that I spend 8 hours a day performing menial tasks in a house of cards attempt to climb the corporate ladder, and then spend several additional hours catering to my students' needs. It's a funny life, I guess, but funny stupid. Funny pointless. Funny turning me into a cynical bookselling soul-sick pawn to the Man who has actually started fantasizing about the life of a stay at home mom funny. It's just so worthless!
And just to confirm my suspicions that a monkey could do my day job, nepotism has landed a really dimwitted 17-year old in our department for the summer. Really not good for office morale.The real problem--and this is a doozy--is that I have no idea what on earth I would write about. I'm in the process of writing a short story, but I'm keeping it under wraps in the off chance that it's terrible. So aside from my story, and my blog (which is grossly inconsistent and only has two readers anyway), what do I have to share with the world that might also be lucrative? And don't suggest a fictionalized account of my travails as a lowly bookstore clerk come college professor, because that's what my story is about, not that I'm saying anything about it because it's so totally under wraps.
So, dear readers. Suggestions?
Before setting pen to paper (or fingers to keypad), if it isn't too late, bear in mind the following:
ReplyDeleteExperimental fiction is the art of telling a story in which certain aspects of reality have been exaggerated or distorted in such a way as to put the reader off the story and make him go watch a television show. Another aspect of the experimental story is the innovative use of language. Whereas a boring realist writer might write, "Lillian sat at the black table," an experimental writer says, "Lillian sat at the flat plane of ebony, the night-shaded planar surface, the nonwhite spatial expanse on which one can put things, such as ashtrays, if one smokes." See how that is more innovative, because not just anyone could have written it, just the nerdy kids in school or your friends' smart-ass son who rolls his eyes when you say what bands you like?
And to be superexperimental, one could have Lillian, at the black table, turn into a chimp. To show that bourgeois life is a sham. But when she is a chimp, she is still Lillian. That is the deep part. Her husband, Brian, likes her better as a chimp and always makes her banana milkshakes. Until one day a milkshake develops vocal cords and begs Brian to spare him because he is terrified of chimps. In retaliation, Lillian has an affair with an orangutan, who is either from the zoo or from another experimental story. See how edgy that is? You will never look at your wife, a milkshake, or a chimp in the same way again. Whenever you see these things, you will be like: I am a capitalist oppressor.
The ending of an experimental story is very important. It should make no sense, thus disrupting the reader's dominant paradigm. You, the reader, should just sit there, stunned, asking yourself, "Wait, am I missing the last page?"
But guess what? You're not.
George Saunders