Eddie Whitlock's Blog: Reader and Writer

One of the writing projects I'm currently working on is a zombie apocalypse story set in 1980 and featuring Jimmy Carter and my dog Marvin as major characters.

Marvin, of course, is only 9 years old now so this would be a fictional version of Marvin. To my knowledge, he has never met Jimmy Carter or any other POTUS.

The story has stalled for two different reasons:

First, I am not happy with the other characters in the story. There's a main character who is pretty much a standard noble protagonist. There is a jerk character who serves as foil to the protagonist.

I had two good female characters who didn't work out. I painted myself into a corner with the protagonist's wife and found her far too stereotypical as the woman-in-a-zombie-story who is bound to eventually fall while running because she is wearing high heels.

I am exaggerating, of course. I just wanted a better, stronger female. I tried to get that with the other female character, but the plot killed her off too soon. It was logical, but still it undermined my desire to have a strong, non-stereotypical woman.

My second problem has been Jimmy Carter. I met him a few years ago. He's a nice fellow with a strong presence that you don't get in the media portrayals of him, I don't think. As I try to write a fictional version of him, I found it to be difficult to latch onto an angle that worked.

Be aware that I have not followed my own political opinions in developing real political figures as fictional characters. In other words, the story I wrote about George W. Bush shows him as stronger in character than I really think he is.

I wanted to make Jimmy Carter a distant, bureaucratic figure, but I kept being drawn to having him personally and humanely interact with others.

The story is so screwed up now that I may leave it out all together. We'll see.

If you want to read my story about George W. Bush, you can find it in the NOTES section of my Facebook page.

By the way, I'm working on other tales featuring William Henry Harrison and John Tyler, James Buchanon, FDR and Nixon. Maybe those will go better.

When I was in junior high school, I wanted to be an architect. I am not sure why except that the architects on television seemed happy and comparatively rich. Plus, they didn't seem to do anything resembling work, which struck me as a major plus.

They drew. And they got paid a lot of money to draw.

Then I found out that architects had to know a lot of math. Well, knowing math had already become "work" to me by then so I wasn't as interested as I had been.

Then journalism came along. How had I missed it before? Apparently there were no journalists in sitcoms. (I am sure there were; I just don't remember any.)

Somehow I became convinced that as a reporter, I could right wrongs and be something of a real-life superhero by doing so. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

When I got to high school, I worked on the school paper. When that was discontinued, we created our own "underground" newspaper for our senior year.

I majored in journalism in college and got an Associate's degree in the subject. Then I went to the University of Georgia. Holy crap! I walked into a room of about 200 people and was told that in any given year, there were likely to be 2 new journalism jobs in the state. Really? WTF? Shouldn't there have been a UGA career counselor at the door to the Journalism Department, blocking the entrance?!?

So. I am no journalist. Still, what I learned in that field helped me to be the person that I am today.

One of the things we learned about was how media had shifted from broadcasting to narrowcasting. This was around 1979, so the shift was coming about through cable television. We were going from having three networks that sought to capture a significant percentage of the viewing populace to cable providers of programming who were able to get by with a much smaller audience.

Ah, those were the days.

Thirty-plus years later and we have the internet that makes it possible for there to be thousands of providers of programming - or "content," as it is called now.

If we consider the programming to be a creative endeavor, we were selling our art to the masses. With narrowcasting, we sell out art to a smaller and smaller sliver of "the masses."

We have less of a cultural identity as a result, but that's not what I'm writing about here.

My point of view is from the person who creates the "art." If the artist seeks an audience, he is likely to be disappointed. Though the access is easier, the competition is so greatly increased as to diminish the end result.

Does the artist care? He shouldn't. Creating should be an end unto itself.

Does the artist care? He does. Without an audience, he might as well be the tree falling in the forest where there is no one to hear it make a sound.

And so.

We have moved from broadcasting to narrowcasting and - I believe - to uncasting: to art that no longer seeks an audience but merely exists as an unwanted product from the artist, who probably ought to have studied math harder so that he could have become an architect.

I tried to write a story about a better America that was part of a better world. The whole "better" part hinged on Franklin Roosevelt. For those of you who know my admiration and love for FDR, that should be no surprise.

The challenge wasn't in thinking that -given a few key changes- FDR could have done even more had he survived. The challenge was writing an interesting story set in a utopian world. Where does the conflict come from?

I think every alternate history story I have ever read spun its tale by juxtaposing an inferior fictional world with our superior real world. That's hard for me to swallow as the cynic that I am. Yet...

Suppose that the 9/11 plot had been uncovered rather than being carried out. Would it change history? Of course it would! Would we be grateful? Of course we wouldn't! How could we be grateful for the avoided disaster?

I think this is why the books I've read that tried to offer an improved world soon undercut it with human mischief and misbehavior. It's not just interesting: it's what happens.

I think sometimes that if there had been no 9/11, something else would have happened. But that is ridiculous. That is the kind of defeatist thinking that has brought us to where we are in the world today.

But I am not a formulator of reality. I am a conceiver of the unreal. So. Why am I unable to dream up a world better than this one and make it believable? Is this really the best of all possible worlds?

I think it would be entertaining to have a day - maybe one day every year - when people have to wear a number on their backs. The number would tell how many of the Ten Commandments that person has broken.

It wouldn't say which ones, just a number of how many.

You gotta figure most people would probably score five or six at least. Those are some pretty tough commandments, after all. And we're pretty lousy creatures.

I find the whole list pretty confusing (they overlap) and vague, if you listen to people who tell you that if you hate someone, well, that's like killing them.

Me? I scored anywhere from 8 to 11, depending on how well I was counting.

I realize that this would be impossible to enforce. It would also open an interesting door: The guy who has the number ONE on his back tells you that his only sin is lying. Heh heh heh! Gotcha there!

Godzilla is my metaphor for an apparent life-changing event. I used to imagine seeing Godzilla rising up on the horizon, like he did in the great Japanese sci-fi movies. Why? For me it was this: "Look! Godzilla! No school tomorrow!"

Beyond there being no school tomorrow, life would change. The daily monotony of the cycle of birth-school-work-death would be interrupted by something different.

Different.

There are no Godzilla moments in most people's lives. My father's death was the biggest life-changing event for me so far. I was with him when he died and it haunts me that I let him die (I told a nurse, who assured me that he was fine, but I knew better and didn't push her to do anything). I spent the next few weeks sad and sometimes crying at my desk and telling sad stories to people who did not want to hear them. But.

Routine returned and life went on and I hate myself a little for letting it, like normalcy now should be impossible and that to strive for it is an insult to the Old Man.

No, his passing was not the Godzilla Moment.

I don't think I'm the only one who longs quietly for something that will upset the routine. We comfortable Americans know we are "blessed" and ought to be grateful. But. We long for an upset to the routine.

I'd say this is an unmentioned motivation for fictional characters, too: this desire to break routine. It is not a quest for "freedom." In some cases, it's the opposite. It's a quest for a life without the need to plan, to execute, to evaluate, to control.

I think it may be the secret motivation that makes smart people do dumb things. South Carolina's former governor went to South America to be with his mistress while telling staff that he was "hiking the Appalachian Trail," a euphemism if I ever heard one. Mark Sanford just had his dumb thing in a very public way that most of us miss.

Of course, he is running for office again. It's proof that if there is a Godzilla Moment, it's not something we ourselves can create, though we may try to do so.

The ending of the sequel to Evil is Always Human has not been completed on paper (or on computer drive, to be accurate) though I do have the vision for it in my head. I would equate it with being in Dothan, Alabama, with a destination of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. You know where you're headed and the direction, but the actual course could vary.

Meanwhile I have become pretty discouraged with the whole thing. I came close to just deleting it Saturday, erasing the 77,000 plus words I have written so far. That would be difficult to really do because I save back-up copies often and in different locations. Erasing the official file would still leave several not-quite-current versions that could still be retrieved and completed.

I've created and cloned a monster!

My discouragement isn't so much about the last leg of my journey in writing as the worth of the writing when I am done with it.

The first novel featured an abused child as the narrator. It concluded with his being an abusive adult. This novel picks up with his being exactly what life has made him: conscienceless.

What I had hoped would be a portrait of this man has instead turned into a rather pitiless string of horrible events. I feel sympathy for him, but I don't know that anyone else would. Even if they read the first book, would they see the man as worthy of sympathy?

Can a character unworthy of sympathy be the focal point of a story?

Can I pass this failed tale off as an existentialist reflection on life?

Well.

I haven't deleted the story yet. So. It could happen, I guess.

I just realized that there is another living author whom I would love to meet: Cormac McCarthy. This guy doesn't write books. He writes literature. If people aren't reading his stuff 200 years from now, it's because there are no people.

The Road was the first of his books that I read. I grabbed it when I first heard about the movie, wanting to read it before seeing it. I love a good post-apocalyptic tale and this is one of the best. It is sad and hopeless. That's what an apocalypse would (or will) be like. It's also horrific in a way that horror novels only want to be. The worst monster is us.

Outer Dark is a creepy tale of a girl looking for her brother, who took away - and maybe killed - her baby. It is also a horrible story, wonderfully told. It hurts to read it. Still, it is wonderful.

Child of God is the heart-warming tale of a necrophiliac. Okay. Maybe "heart-warming" is not accurate. Well. It's totally not accurate. Child of God manages to make an outcast at least human. Most of us have experienced being outcasts at some point. McCarthy lets us see the loneliness of a man willing to touch the dead in an effort to touch someone.

Blood Meridian is a Western and it is one I recommend to those fellows who think how much better it would have been to live in the untamed American West. I don't think so. You'd have starved to death. Or been killed by some lunatic. Or died of disease. And any of them long before you hit middle age.

So. To recap: Read Cormac McCarthy. Trust me.

Last night, I deleted a passage because it just wasn't going to work. Here were three things against it:

(1) It introduced a character who was a stereotype more than a character,

(2) It took the plot in a direction that eliminated a motivation for one character and created an unlikely motivation for another and

(3) It negated the role played early on by a different character of the same profession.

Still, it was darned hard to delete twelve hundred words. It had taken several days to come up with them because I am struggling to give resolution to a certain plot strand in a way that is both realistic and satisfying. I felt like the fellow who is told he is going the wrong way and replies, "But I'm making such good time!"

So tonight - and particularly tomorrow night, my productive Wednesday Writing Night - I hope to get back on track. We are so close to the end of the rough draft that I can't wait.

I just want it to be worthy of my readers' time.

There are fewer and fewer people I would like to meet. In general, I have been disappointed when I met celebrities. Meeting a politician is like meeting a walking void. If there's a group left I can still respect on whole, it's authors.

I missed my chance to meet Vonnegut. It's probably just as well. I don't think he would have enjoyed the encounter with me - I'd have been a nuisance to his schedule, I am sure. The same is true of other authors who passed away in recent years.

I did get to meet Stephen King thirty years ago, around the time he finished Firestarter. He was great and friendly and - even though this was a sign-the-book event, he took a little time to chat.

Jerzy Kosinski is dead. Richard Braughtigan is dead. Again, neither would want to waste his time with me.

So who is left?

Joyce Carol Oates, that's who.

I swear, that woman writes so many great books, it is hard to believe that she is just one person. For a while there, I was convinced that she was a team of people writing under the name Joyce Carol Oates.

The first thing I read by her was We Were the Mulvaneys, a book about a typical family that suffers tremendously. Reading that one prompted me to look up a high school friend and apologize for something that happened 25 years before. He didn't remember it. Still, I needed to do it. His family were the Mulvaneys in my little world and I had not given him credit for living through that.

I've read several other of her works, including Zombie, a fictionalized story of Jeffery Dahmer. It's a first-person take on a person who is without conscience: another amazing book.

Right now, I am listening to Give Me Your Heart, a collection of short stories. The stories are wonderfully creepy and yet extremely human.

I'm enthralled with this woman's skills as a writer and wonder what it would be like to engage her in an informal conversation. Her ability to elicit such emotions from readers is amazing. I wonder how she keeps that superpower under control in her everyday life.

Words have power.

This week this power was evidenced by the careful use -and avoidance of the use- of the word "terrorism" in discussing the Boston Marathon bombing.

The truth? If you avoid a word so much that people notice you are avoiding it, you have given that word even more power.