Forgive me if I’m a bit garbled and parenthetical. Tonight I almost flunked Writing 102 (and I may yet!)
Okay, I wasn’t going to flunk tonight. I was going to drop it. Tonight. With two weeks left in the semester. And I’m a bit embarrassed about it. I can give you all the excuses, but the simple fact is that I thought I had a week longer than I do, so I didn’t work fast enough. Because I was avoiding it.
But why would I, a writer, avoid writing? Especially when it’s a self-paced, show-up-when-you-want class and I don’t have to deal with any obnoxious classmates?
Let me tell you. But if you’re worried about spoilers from literature, you should probably not read any farther.
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All right. If you’re still here, then you can’t complain when I tell you the ending of some stories.
Here‘s the first story we read for the course. If you don’t want to read it (I don’t blame you) it’s about some boys playing around in a dangerous place, and someone takes disapproving action, possibly just to scare the boys into making smarter choices, but instead one of the children falls to his death.
Yeah. Dead kid, no warning. Thank you so VERY much. I had to walk away from my homework to rant at my poor unsuspecting roommate.
Well, it happens. People write about death. It’s natural. With some people, it’s really popular. I point to the current show-that-must-be-watched, How to Get Away With Murder. (In a side note, today my 17yo was complaining that in that show, named, I’ll repeat, How to Get Away With Murder, a lot of people die.)
So. Dead kid, but it was just a story. Onwards. Next assignment we have to choose three stories from short blurbs about them, read, and then write about their story elements. (Plot, theme, characters, setting–all completely new to me, of course.)
I chose three stories. Any guesses how they all ended?
I’ll give you three hints: dead, mad, and kidnapped, certainly to be raped and probably to be murdered. And oh–that character was 15.
When I was done frothing at the mouth, I sat down to write the required paper. Once I hit word count I had to go back and edit out the “f— you”s I’d felt compelled to include.
Then I had to write a little more to make the required word count.
I’m not saying these things shouldn’t be written about. Of course they should. Death, insanity, kidnapping–these things happen. They should be part of stories–I just don’t get why they should be the LAST part. Why do people want to write that? And even if we explain that riddle, why do people want to read that?
It reminds me of a character in a book I can’t quite recall. It may (may!) have been the novelization of a movie I never saw, Clash of the Titans. But anyway, the character wrote plays, and he explained to the lead that when he was young and serious, he wrote tragedies, but when he got older he saw the world was full enough of tragedy, so he wrote comedies instead.
More than “who needs that?” though, to me it feels like a cheat. When I was in the 7th grade and told to write a story for class, I was deep into a tale of a late-night UFO landing when I realized that 1) the period was about to end and 2) I had no idea where the story was going next. So I (very cleverly, I thought at the time) had my character wake up from her dream. Ending a story with “and then he died” is pretty similar, I think.
These stories weren’t written to be included in literature classes; at one time they were meant for public consumption. Spending three pages introducing the reader to someone only to make them care when you kill them feels like a cheap stunt to me, a shallow attempt to grab my attention. Screw that. If you want to wow me with your storytelling ability, show me how to get the character out of that mess they’re in, and make me believe it. Death is easy. It’s life that’s hard.
Far be it from me to criticize the likes of Jack London and Joyce Carol Oates (aside from the requirements of my course, anyway) but I’m on Ammon’s side (if it was him.) Keep your tragedies. Give me stories of triumph against odds. Give me stories of digging deep and winning the day. Give me stories of striving and stretching, of humanity growing into all it should be.
Give me those stories, and I will write them. Give me those books, and I will read them.
In the words of Imhotep (from The Mummy, not the real world one) “Death is only the beginning.”
Agreed. 🙂