I've been taking a sketch writing class at Coldtowne for the last couple months. I've noticed in my comedy writing that I tend to write a lot of low-status men with emasculation issues. I suppose deep down, I find this funny, as a sort of antipode of male asshole humor. The only thing is, my recent exposure levels to male asshole humor are quite low. I generally don't roll with the comedians who correlate the female reproductive system with aquarium fodder and who the hell gets married anymore? No stupid wife jokes to make if you're still living with your parents. Yet strangely, no self-deprecating "I still live with my parents jokes?"
Anyway, I rewrote the first ten pages of the novel, so the Writers League mannyscript contest got the old, discarded version, which probably won't impress too many people since it's not written in the present tense. For what it's worth, I find the present tense to be slightly pretentious. Here, a parody of an amalgamation of award-winning short stories:
She is slathered in marmalade not two metres from a beehive buzzing and shaking like an angry fist. She is wild and safe and beautiful. Her ldaughter is mashing leaves in to dirt by the baseboards of their creaky clapboard house. Summers in Kansas had not been kind to the structure, its old white paint peeling like tears. Leila knows that her time here is limited, these acres of corn and wheat that form a fence around her miniscule little world soon to be sold away, leaving barren the flat, dry land.
I write like I improvise: strong character from the get-go. Popular, award-winning fiction writing these days is all cock-tease, all flimsy settings described with pretty words. Here is the new first paragraph of my novel:
I was twenty-eight years old and in the business of trading off between elation and nausea, of silly girlish crushes on unattainable boys well past the time I should have known better. I was having an affair with a married coworker, and I liked it. I took giant handfuls of whatever Eric Leaf offered me and crushed them to my face like a toddler with a cupcake. I thought I knew what I was doing. Remorse or common sense did not factor into it. I was addicted. I was in love with this man, this ridiculous, beautiful man, and he liked to put his hands down the front of my dress.
Okay, I can't really comment on that, but it's not some woman in Kansas standing outside covered with marmalade. The toddler with a cupcake thing is a little pandery, but so what? I want to publish this thing!
Posted by Zerd at March 15, 2007 01:37 PMi can't wait to READ your novel!!