What if Disneyland were staffed by animals? A completely deranged pile of insomniac scribblings from a slow and sleepless Saturday.
Thanks to an unexpected bout of insomnia last night, I am currently operating with approximately 3.5 hours of sleep. I also have 39 pages of rambling, incoherent, hand scrawled notes for something called The Cleverest Beast, which apparently felt very compelling in the wee hours of the morning.
I have transcribed those notes here because, you know, why not?
Without further ado, I give you the deranged ramblings of the Hyde-esque antimatter alter ego who apparently takes control of my faculties once I cross the insomnia event horizon:
Here beginneth the account of Zombie James
According to an interesting article sent to me by a friend, Franz Kafka believed that insomnia (from which he suffered most of his life, in case you couldn't tell from his million yard stare and/or the fact that everything he wrote was a waking nightmare) was a great artistic tool.
I don't know how much I wish to base my life on Kafka's (for one, I'd like to live more than another 14 months), but, lying in bed wide awake in the wee hours of the morning, I thought, "Why not write something?"
So, I got up, lit a candle, busted out my least broken fountain pen, and wrote:
"WHY THE [eggplant]-ING [eggplant]'S [eggplant] CAN'T I [eggplant]-ING SLEEP?!"
Note: To protect the sensibilities of delicate readers, all potentially offensive language has been replaced with the inoffensive word "eggplant."
Note 2: It has been brought to the editor's attention that the eggplant emoji has, in the hieroglyphic trade pidgin of younger and more smart-phone-assailed generations, certain obscene implications because of the fact that it is vaguely shaped like a [EGGPLANT]. The editor finds this strange, for there are surely far more suggestively shaped members of the plant kingdom, such as the [EGGPLANT], the [EGGPLANT], or even the [EGGPLANT], especially when arranged with a pair of apricots, which this editor does every time he passes an unsuspecting fruit basket because, on an emotional level, this editor has yet to pass approximately age 12. Anyways, the editorial team offers its sincerest apologies to those young and online readers who may have been shocked and/or permanently scarred by any unintended orgiastic implications accidentally inserted into the previous censored statement. A revised edition has been prepared for those of you who found yourselves unable to read the aforementioned statement due to moral horror:
"WHY THE [completely non-phallic member of the plant kingdom]-ING [completely non-phallic member of the plant kingdom]'S [completely non-phallic member of the plant kingdom] CAN'T I [completely non-phallic member of the plant kingdom]-ING SLEEP?!
To soothe any still hurt sensibilities and/or dopamine levels, here's a split screen video montage of screaming human heads growing out of toilets, Subway Surfer footage, Fortnight dances, and recordings of fatal school bus crashes:
Anyways, I wrote several pages of the above statements before a strange question arose in the back of my mind:
Was this really the best use of my sleeplessness?
If there is one complaint that modern man has, it is the complete lack of human connection in a cold, technical, isolating world that keeps us overfed and under nourished, cut off from every good thing that the human body was designed to need and spiritually persecuted by a never-ending firehose of digital stimulants until we are shivering husks of what we were supposed to be, crying out from the filth-caked walls our opium den prison for more of what makes us die just not having enough time in the day for all the things we love.
I had been given the gift of extra hours in the day. Was I really going to spend it complaining? The vague memories of that Kafka article came burbling up from the hidden recesses of my mind.
What would Kafka do?
Well, he'd probably write some deranged [COMPLETELY NON-PHALLIC MEMBER OF THE PLANT KINGDOM].
(Either that, or have a self-loathing sadomasochistic affair with a 25-year-old Belgo-prussian schoolteacher, but I didn't have any of those on hand, so I stuck to writing.)
Anyways, inspired by everyone's favorite dead Bohemian nightmarist, I grabbed an as of yet un-defaced sheet of paper and started scribbling away. I don't think that the end result is all that Kafkaesque, but it is something that I wouldn't have written otherwise.
[The Cleverest Beast]
"What could there possibly be for us here?" said the fatter fat man.
"Good things," said Vendry, "Good things to eat and cool, clean waters."
The guests grumbled and sighed and slowly tottered their collective bulk into the rest cabana.
Vendry held the door, and wondered how these loathsome creatures could share 98.7% of his DNA.
_
In his relaxation kennel, Vendry watched the stars and nibbled at the wrapper of his last ration cube.
"Do you ever think, 'What if I trip them?'" said the voice of Keeba, somewhere in the dark, "Could they even stand?"
Vendry could not listen.
"The guest is man," said Vendry, "And man is holy."
The next morning, Keeba's pelt was nailed to the Baobab tree, and Vendry knew the test had been no test.
"I am sorry," whispered Vendry, but he dared not go to Keeba's scraps because the foreman was there, putting color in the water.
_
One of the guests grabbed Shelky by the tail, and she bit him.
Vendry avoided the Boabab for a week, and got his water from the broken sprinkler at the garden.
_
A woman in a pink jumpsuit cornered Vendry and spoke at him about something called fire insurance until the foreman came. As Vendry scampered off, she pressed a little paper booklet in his hand. That night, Vendry took it to Letters, and had him read it out loud.
A man called Hitler had been an agent of a place called the Vatican.
_
The rats grew fat on dropped concessions, but Vendry was forbidden to eat them.
He licked his ration cubes and listened to the silence that used to be Keeba.
_
Vendry put the trackers on each car before it left.
"Why?" he asked the foreman, but the foreman only frowned.
That night, Vendry won Cleverest Beast.
He lay in his kennel for a long time, holding the ticket this plan that to catch the light of the moon, but Keeba said nothing.
_
The next morning, Vendry lined up at the boabab tree with the other ticketholders.
The foreman opened the door set in the trunk, and they all stepped into the Higher Park.
_
"You have shown yourselves exceeding bright," said the voice behind the screen, "Eat and drink, for we shall make you full citizens of the kingdom."
The table was full of sweet meats and nectars, but Vendry could only think of Keeba rotting on the trunk.
_
When the others clutch their bellies and convulsed, Vendry crawled among them and lay still.
_
The foreman took them one by one to drop into the chute.
He took Vendry by the tail, and Vendry took him by the throat.
_
Vendry took a branch and put it in the chute and held it there until it was ablaze.
The Boabab shone brighter than the moon.
_
Vendry walked up to the edge of the electric line, and there was no sound. The only smell was burning wood.
He stepped across and breathed.
_
The squirrels were very fast, and the birds were even faster. Vendry eight snails, and was sick.
In the morning, he found Waynur's body in the mud. Cholly's was not far away. Their meat was ruined by their fight.
_
The squirrels were even fewer, and the birds grew even faster. Hunger gnawed at Vendry's belly.
_
In his relaxation kennel, Vendry found a dozen ration cube and a whip.
"To a very clever beast," said the note when Letters read it, "And a very good new foreman."
_
The inspirations of Jeff Vandermeer are probably quite obvious to those familiar with his books. I have a little bit of a love-hate relationship with Vandermeer: I have quite enjoyed many of his Ambergris stories, but some of his other things, like Veniss Underground, strike me as devoid of restraint.
A brief note on the importance of restraint vs artistic indulgence
Restraint is, ultimately, what separates art from pornography.
Restraint is one of my (many) great personal obsessions. Restraint is what defends readers from writers, and defends writers from themselves.
The end destination of artistic indulgence is pornography, and the end destination of pornography is the dysfunction of the user. (There are many kinds of pornography, and only a few of them are sexual, but more on that later.)
Personally, that sort of indulgence has always left me disappointed as an audience.
I have always thought of myself as a highly visual person, and just about all of my stories evoke a strong image of the place in my mind as I write them, but the image is always an outgrowth of the story, rather than the other way around. I start with the words (sometimes just random words), and the image slowly comes to mind as I go. In the afterword of Veniss, Vandermeer talks about seeing a cathedral in the real world and then writing the image into the story (altered into a body horror gore-fest, naturally), which for some reason feels very odd to me to. Not that I have never done it, but it feels unnatural. Stories, in my mind, are words that become images. I have gotten the impression that, for Vandermeer, stories are images that become words. I think that sometimes, like the more phantasmagoric elements of Veniss, those images failed to truly blend into the narrative.
While I'm picking fights with far more accomplished fantasists, I also dislike the extended descriptions of reality-hopping "hell rides" in Roger Zelazny's otherwise quite engaging Amber series. They would have been a very visually stunning transition montage in a movie, but on paper, they simply felt like a page-long waste of time: the story pauses while the writer closes their eyes and tries to describe the cool picture in their head. If the cool picture is the next frame of the character's narrative journey, or an atmosphere integral to the emotion of the story, all well and good. However, if it is just a cool picture, a certain sense of restraint has been lost: I have stopped doing things for the effect they have on the audience and started doing them for myself or because I cannot bear the thought of a reader imagining – gasp – their own version of what I am saying. The album cover in my mind is so cool, and you might be picturing a wrong, bad, stupid version of it! Let me grind the story to a halt and make sure that we are both on exactly the same page. I wouldn't want you sullying my imagination with yours.
Far be it from me to rank one writing method over another (for I believe that every writer must find their own individuality), but I think that writing words first and deriving images from them has this going for it: You experience things the same way that readers do. Words become images. If you want to tweak the image, you tweak the words. Reading is also a creative process. When the two processes are close to one another – when you as the writer are also almost feeling the story as a reader – then you can attempt to design an experience, rather than simply trying to cram the grand and limitless idea form playing in your head into imperfect words and pausing regularly to double check and be sure that the reader is seeing exactly the same image you are.
But then, "How will this feel to the user?" is the obsessive lens through which I try to view all creative endeavors.
Perhaps, I am not a writer at all. Perhaps, I am just a themepark designer who happens to make stories.
All the things that I have loved the most, from books to movies to games, have said to the audience: Come, and imagine with me.
If I point to a random sentence in my stories and ask myself, "Why is this here?" I always want the answer to be, "Because it makes the reader feel X." If the answer is "Because the image looked cool in my head," I have lost who I am writing for. I do not want to write for my experience as a writer, but for the reader's experience as a reader.
Anyways, let's do some revising!
With this experience design lens in mind, let's take a look at the beginning of the story again. (Beginnings are almost always the weakest place in a first draft for me, because I wrote them before I knew what the story was about.)
"What could there possibly be for us here?" said the fatter fat man.
This tells us that the speaker is petulant and entitled. The description "fatter fat man" adds overfed to the mix (with all the subtlety of a brick) and tells us that there is a group of such people. Hopefully, the reader begins to feel the emotions of terrible customer service jobs with terrible customers.
"Good things," said Vendry, "Good things to eat and cool, clean waters."
Vendry's line tells us that Vendry is not necessarily an ordinary person. He is describing things the group should be interested in (given that earlier bit of fat shaming that I did), but he is describing them in strangely simple, almost animalistic terms. He is perhaps deferring to the group, but in what capacity is unclear: guide, host, servant? It is, perhaps, too wide open.
The guests grumbled and sighed and slowly tottered their collective bulk into the rest cabana.
"Rest cabana" is useful – it tells more aware we are and what our characters are doing, and sets a certain kind of tropical resort vibe – but the bulk of this sentence just reiterates what we already know about the guests, perhaps, with too much mean-spiritedness.
Or perhaps, this bit of extra spite is okay: after all, Vendry is our viewpoint character, and an overworked animal subsisting on ration cubes would certainly have a way of viewing those whose lives of leisure have allowed them a caloric surplus to the point that it is impeding their survivability. Just being fat might be an enviable trait to an animal ('tis it not the dream of every cat and dog in the universe?), but to be so much that one can no longer move is – to a thinking animal in a dog-eat-dog corporate environment – a bad thing.
Of course, we don't know that Vendry is any of those things. All we know is that he talks strangely and simply, and is maybe serving or hosting these people. By default, we will assume that he is human area depending on how we feel about things, we might think that he is a bit of a jerk are thinking of people this way. Or, perhaps more likely, think that the author is a jerk for contriving such completely unlikable people to persecute our protagonist.
One thing that I usually try to avoid is ever giving the reader the idea that I, the author, hate a character. This always feels indulgent in a grotesque way to me when I see it in books – the author has created someone in order to hate them, like a kind of emotional self gratification, and is inviting me to join them in what feels like psychological pornography. (Major Frank Burns in MASH is a good example of this in the wild: he is a collection of every possible negative trait – a war hawk, a coward, an idiot, terrible surgeon, a bad soldier – who exists only for the author to point at and say, "Laugh at this pathetic wretch!" It seems to me the creative equivalent of the late Romans binding a child's limbs to create artificially deformed clowns. Major Frank Burns is not a character but an object; in the same way that the characters of a pornographic film are objects of sexual gratification, major Burns is an object of contemptuous gratification. They are both dehumanized nonpersons who have been designed to indulge our baser desires beyond the bounds of reality.)
Even worse, it also makes the sympathetic characters feels as if our sympathy for them is being manipulated out of us. If you need this strawman pooping his pants next to you in order to look brave and smart and virtuous, what does that say about you? Like a celebrity with a professionally short member of their entourage whose sole job is to stand next to them in photos so that they look taller, it all seems cheap and weak when I notice it.
Perhaps it's just the 3.5 hours of sleep talking, but this kind of strawman feels to me ultimately harmful even to those who enjoy it. If pornography leads to the sexual dysfunction of those who are addicted to it, as we see increasingly amongst young men (and sometimes women) who can no longer feel desire for the non-artificial, what does the pornographizing of judgment, mockery, hate, and violence do to the emotional function of those who become addicted to it? The constant, artificial stimulation of our baser urges is a dangerous path to take for the human soul, and one that the rest of the modern world devotes great amounts of energy to propel us down. I feel no need to add to it. This is, perhaps, an unpopular opinion, but it is my opinion, and I can say it if I want. Tesselated creampuff pantaloons. I can say that too. …Sleep deprivation is interesting.
Anyways, all that is to say that I am putting an asterisk next to this sentence – I want to be sure that any hatred is Vendry's and not my own. As the author, I have a moral obligation to create characters, not punching bags, pets, or porn stars.
This brings us to the last sentence of the intro:
Vendry held the door, and wondered how these loathsome creatures could share 98.7% of his DNA.
"Loathsome" tells us that these judgments are Vendry's. (Loathing requires a loather.) We also learn that Vendry is not human. More than that, "98.7% of his DNA" tells us that he is not a fantastical creature, but a scientific one. This is not a visit to faerieland, but a gross misuse of reason and law. 1.3% is what makes him a nonperson.
Okay, so now that we know what effects our intro is (hopefully) having on us, I'm going to go back through and ask myself: is there a better way to elicit these effects, or better effects that I should elicit instead?
First off, I don't like that opening line. I think that it would elicit what we want to elicit better if it was something like this:
"You call this fucking lunch?" said the fatter fat man.
This better conveys the relationship he will have with Vendry, and also starts to layer in the feeling that wherever we are is kind of low rent.
I'm also going to add another line:
Vendry bowed the shallow bow that kept his cap from falling off.
This establishes Vendry in a subservient, possibly service kind of role. The cap hints at a kind of uniform, perhaps. (I am already thinking of busboys.) It also reinforces the low rent feel: lunch is bad, and Vendry doesn't even have a cap that fits him.
Now, I have Vendry's first line:
"Good things," said Vendry, "Good things to eat and cool, clean waters."
I like this as it is – even more than before, actually, now that it is less of a clear response to the man's statement. Vendry sounds a little weirder and also a little more like he is clumsily trying to stick to a script.
Now, we could establish that Vendry is inhuman right from the get-go with a line like:
Vendry blinked the hourglass eyes that advertised his legal inhumanity and smiled.
That would tell the reader the premise right off the bat: this is a story about the legally inhuman and their treat. This is often a good tactic with speculative fiction, where you want to seize the reader's mind with an intriguing premise whose ramifications the rest of the story will explore.
However, I like teasing it out a little bit. I want each sentence in the intro to reveal just a little bit more than the one before it, and that means putting things in order of escalating weirdness, with Vendry's legal inhumanity as the finishing blow.
Next, we have the asterixed line, where I worried that the story may have broken its neutrality and made the guests too much of an object of resentment.
I am going to rewrite it like so:
The man shook his head and lumbered through the door. The other guests followed.
I am also going to follow it with a new line:
The woman who smelled sick patted Vendry's head.
This gives us a more nuanced view of the guests and Vendry's relationship with them, while still maintaining a power dynamic: the woman might be trying to be nice, but it is also patronizing act from a master to a servant (or an owner to a pet). It also raises some questions: Vendry can smell that she is sick? Just how sick is she, and how sharp is Vendry's nose? Things feel even stranger, and we have introduced an animal sense: smell. (My own sense of smell is severely lacking, so I have developed a bad habit of ignoring it in my narrative descriptions.)
I'll revise the last line to continue this thread:
Vendry picked his cap up off the ground and wondered how these weak and clumsy creatures could share 98.7% of his DNA.
The act of kindness is both condescending and thoughtless, for it has knocked poor Vendry's hat onto the ground (bringing us full circle to the low rent quality of the place.) Here's how it all looks together:
"You call this fucking lunch?" said the fatter fat man.
"Good things," said Vendry, "Good things to eat and cool, clean waters."
The man shook his head and lumbered through the door. The other guests followed.
The woman who smelled sick patted Vendry's head.
Vendry picked his cap up off the ground and wondered how these weak and clumsy creatures could share 98.7% of his DNA.
Vendry's opinions of the guests are now more clearly his own and also more ambiguous. Later on, when he tells Keeba that man is holy, there's a chance that he might believe it. Our first draft Vendry was a more resentful and angry character. This Vendry is less pigeonholed, which I like: The whole story becomes a little more nuanced. Vendry is a morally unclear character whose actions and reactions invite questioning and examination.
After all, it is entirely possible to create an object of sympathetic gratification which is every bit as empty as the object of derision.
Now, if I was a writer of great grit and determination, I would continue this process with the whole story, and keep doing it, over and over, until I had a masterpiece of speculative microfiction. However, what I actually am is a writer of 3.5 hours of sleep, so I will hold my nose and call it good enough for now (TM).
- Post Script -
PS: While Jeff Vandermeer is an obvious inspiration, a couple of other things were clearly bubbling around in the back of my head when I began scribbling this all out in the lonely minutes after 1 AM.
First off, I came up with the name Vendry a million years ago as the name for a weird Tomagatchi-esque indirect control game about being an AI and repeatedly sending a cloned beast man out into a weird science post apocalypse to carry your code to a new home. The titular Vendry was supposed to be both infinitely expendable but also kind of sad and sympathetic. I never made a single drop of it, other than a slightly hallucinatory design document, but the name stuck with me. A few years ago, I tried to reuse it for a mystery story about genetically engineered non-persons, but I never got past the first few pages (in which a slightly more deranged Vendry was used as a disposable assassin.)
A more off-the-wall inspiration was this: 16 years ago (or more), I read an article about animal rights activists breaking into a mink farm in Finland and freeing thousands of minks. Chaos ensued. Half of the minks returned to the farm, because that is where they were fed, and no animal in his right mind is going to give up a free meal. Of course, as members of the weasel family, minks are not animals in their right minds: The other half rampaged through the local ecosystem, devouring everything that they could get a hold of and besieging a local bird sanctuary, where they slaughtered endangered birds as furious conservationists attempted to defend their location with rifles, like the end of Beau Geste, but with goofy weasels and angry Finns instead of Gary Cooper. Sometimes, we've made things so unnatural that there is no natural solution.
Anyways, that's the fun thing about insomnia writing: You never know what's going to come bubbling up!
None of this would exist if everything went the way I wanted it to last night.
Now, if you excuse me, I need to go to church. Or maybe sleep. Or maybe seize on this incredible energy and launch into my next great creative enterprise.You know, I've always wanted to write a rock opera…
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