"There's nothing that is against the rules. If I feel that I want to write in first person and completely make it up, then I'm going to do it. And I realize that it is a powerful...um...that the I in songwriting is powerful because people tap into the celebrity of it really. They go, 'Oh, that guy,' and I don't mean that I'm a celebrity, but that they're interested in the personality behind the celebrity. 'The guy that's singing that actually did that.'"
-- excerpted from "A Really Tough Year" off of the iTunes Originals: Ben Folds
This quote is really about the song "Brick." Here, though, as a lot of people know, Ben was actually writing about stuff that happened after his 16 year old girlfriend got pregnant. It's weird thinking that he really did have to go around town selling christmas gifts that he got. He went to go sell this stereo, a JVC tape deck that he really wanted and that his entire family pitched in for so that he could get it as a gift; and as he was getting the money from the clerk at the stereo shop, his parents walked in. And seeing that, you know that they had to suspect that something was going on in young Ben's life.
Ben also goes on to talk about how difficult it was to write the experience as song. It was not until Darren Jesse came by with a chorus he was working on that the song really took shape. And with that really memorable chorus, the experience became abstract enough to really drive the whole effect home, as it were.
And so, as I often do, I was looking at some old stuff that I had written. I realized that a lot of what was going on there was based in reality too much, whether fictional or not. I think it's paradoxical that the abstraction can make something appear and have the effect of being more real. And the abstraction need not be complicated, although it often takes the shape of metaphor or irony. Of course, maybe that really is what makes true genius. I had a high school biology teacher who would remark on genius being a statement on the uniqueness (and correctness also, I suppose) of ones vision of the world. So finding that special abstraction makes people feel giddy inside. Two unlike things become like, and the world seems to be turned upside down while bearing down upon you the sense that nothing has ever been so right. Dealing with abstraction in a literary sense though seems to be helpful because it can really take away the sense that there is some conceit that is driving the piece as a whole. I think it's a funny thing that if you can make a real experience seem abstract enough, the effect can be something along the lines of, "wow, that's some profound shit."
Maybe what I'm really trying to say is that when a writer puts in the effort to make his piece driven by an abstract idea, rather than some personal vendetta for example, then there is a simple honesty and sense of reflectiveness that makes that piece substantially more powerful. And when you look at a song like "Brick," at least in this instance it seems to be true.
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The phone rings. Scott angrily storms through the gaping window opening. With the grace of an enraged idiot, he stumbles and falls flat on his face. Cursing the damn irony of it all, he gets to his cordless and answers the phone.
“Scott, I need you, come meet me.”
“Where are you? Where the fuck are you?”
“I need you.” There was a distinct apprehension in her voice that Scott was able to pick up on right away. The apprehension drifts into the room and chokes the life out of a young man convinced that he’s been fucked in some way. Incensed and passionate, these current qualities infecting his life are clearly counter-indicative of large-scale Nyquil consumption.
“You’re over there right now with him, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please come get me.”
The phone goes click. The stubbornness of his father might be a counter-indication of Scott’s unshakeable, yet altogether untenable, belief in his own cool self. He grabs the un-installed window and slams it indiscriminately towards the open air, landing squarely upon the hood of someone’s car. “Oh shit.” He slumps over and the tears come. Scott reasons that the terrible emptiness could be filled if he played it off right. He waited for her to call back. The quick fix in his mind became entangled with the hope that later they’d fuck anyway. Sadly passionate sex seems like an odd way to patch up broken relationships. No matter how much vengeance he exacted on the poor window, re-installation clearly would not be in the cards tonight. The Nyquil makes its warm, slender, and kind grasp upon poor Scott’s brain. The crying, the rage, the lack of sex, the poor ineptitude paled in comparison to the anxiety that made its iron grip squarely around poor Scott’s gastrointestinal inner-workings. Tiredness wages its losing battle versus the 420 pound gorilla making knots out of Scott’s innards.
The phone rings.
“I FUCKING HATE YOU.”
Click goes the phone. Crash as it strikes the brick wall on the opposite side of the room.
“She’ll be here soon but only to torment me further,” he reasons with the lucidity of a senile, old man battling medicinally induced hallucinations
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So, in this above thing that I wrote, what I was trying to accomplish (unwittingly of course) was to really place some of the emotional ties that I felt for a semi-real moment and place them onto my new, and improved, third person protagonist type character. I also see that there are some interesting images at work. The theme of self-medication, a popular one in our self-help culture, also adds an interesting slant on things. But, this example was also one that I don't think really captures the abject loneliness and hopelessness that this experience is really about. I really do like how there is this heavy sense that the character has misdirected his anger. The misdirection really intensifies the emotion, and things quickly come to a boil near the end here.
Here though, is a situation where I thought I got things right (at least to my tastes).
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Without a care, they laugh hysterically throughout the night, wrapped within their own local universe. Like a true inertial frame, the movement between them is constant and unfaltering, time and space does not speed up or slow down. Talking for hours and hours and frightened by the rising sun as light glimmers through the window blinds, slowly working to separate the two from their wholly good, yet mistimed and misplaced, tryst. They know deep within their consciousnesses that questions and problems abound once they leave this sanctuary from reality. Escapism at its finest, those thoughts are furthest from their minds. Instead, they wrap each other in exploration in thought and in body. Minds reel as time advances forward and synapses oddly fire. Fueled by this strange passion and curiosity, the pair move forward together slowly through time and space.
The boy asks, “How am I going to get out of this place?” The girl has no real reply. She didn’t think that far ahead. Reckless and irrational, their cruel fate leaves for but a moment. Severe irony does not escape them because there is no escape from this place. Hearts were not made hard enough and tempers not steeled well enough against harsh realities. Sneak out the window… no that’s too far of a drop. Wear a disguise…that’s just ridiculous. Walk out brazenly, without a care in the world…that’s just insane. Sneak out carefully, through the side door…that’s going to have to do. Getting by on good enough seems to be the course of the day, and leave well enough alone seems to get thrown out and kept away from the pair’s feast upon fate’s expense.
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I thought I got things right in this one, primarily because the 'characters' are not introduced until later on. Also, there is a dream-like quality and a proper amount of physics references to satiate my tastes. I thought I had made enough abstractions from reality to give this moment its proper due -- by revealing a lot without having to do too much. And when you look at the first example I threw up there, I really do think that too much was revealed to allow for it to hide from its own reality.
Is it a cop-out that I'm using old material to write new posts? I apologize.
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