2011 Fiction Map: Results

This year, with the aid of an app for iOS called ‘Notehub’, I plotted a whole bunch of places on a map. These were not places I went to in real life; rather, they were the fictional places I visited by means of novels, short stories, films and TV programs.

The reason I did this was two-fold:

First I wanted to become a little more aware of the world around me. Second, I wanted a visual representation of my literary and cultural influences. I say in the ‘About’ page of this blog that I focus on New Zealand and Australian literature, but I wrote that a couple of years ago. I suspected that I’ve moved away from this focus now, and that most of the stories I’m into tend to be set in the Northern Hemisphere. Turns out I was right.

THE WORLD

Here’s my world map of fictional journeys 2o11:

What you can’t see without zooming in, is the number of pins overlaid upon pins. This happens over New York and London. It happened nowhere else.

AMERICA

Here’s America. As you can see, I read/watched stories set all over America, with emphasis on the East Coast. But when I say ‘America’ I mean specifically ‘The United States Of’. I didn’t read or watch a single story set in Canada or in South America. I say this after having meant to remedy this over the past few months and never getting around to it. Isn’t it interesting that I have to go out of my way to. That’s how USA-centric we have become, I guess.

After plotting onto this map I definitely have a better sense of American geography. One thing this exercise had me doing was keeping on the lookout for clues about where something is set, and I’m now a lot more confident to guess whether some place on a movie looks set on the east or west coast, is northern or southern. I’ve never been to America, so this isn’t something that comes naturally, despite a lifetime immersed in American culture.

Maybe next time I meet an American I won’t be afraid to ask them where in America they’re from, because this time I might have a general sense of where it might be. I identify with Bill Bryson in a lot of ways. And here’s another:

Delaware may well be the most obscure of all the American states. I once met a girl from Delaware and couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her. I said, ‘So you come from Delaware? Gosh. Wow.’ And she moved quickly onto someone more verbally dextrous, and also better looking. For a while it troubled me that I could live in America for twenty years, have the benefit of an expensive education and not know anything at all about one of the fifty states. I went around asking people if they had ever heard Delaware mentioned on television or seen a story pertaining to it in the newspaper or read a novel set there and they’d say, ‘You know, I don’t think I ever have,’ and then they’d look kind of troubled too.

- Bill Bryson, from The Lost Continent

EUROPE

Normally I wouldn’t have been even this cosmopolitan in my fictional habits but, perhaps because I was doing this map as a project, I went out of my way to watch foreign films on SBS. In doing so, I sat through some right royal shockers, but I also stumbled upon some excellent, thought-provoking and truly original foreign films. So I guess it was all worth it. The problem with subtitled films is that you can’t do another single thing while you’re watching them. Not even ironing (unless you don’t mind the smell of burning finger flesh), but on the upside, subtitled films force you to drop everything and concentrate, which can be a good tonic for those of us inclined to multi-task with media.

NEW ZEALAND

I spent about a month in my home country this year, so this effort’s a bit shameful given that most of these pins are probably the result of homegrown programmes I just happened to watch on my parents’ TV.

AUSTRALIA

Considering I live here, there aren’t many pins on Aus. And not a single pin on the West Coast. Yet there’s plenty of good, award winning work coming out of Western Australia, so next year I will have to remedy that. I guess the paucity of pins reflects how little TV I’ve watched this year. Now we subscribe to DVDs online, and I’d almost always watch a movie or a rented serial drama than whatever happens to be on the box. I wonder if this trend is making us all more America-centric in our fictional lives.

ASIA

AFRICA

And I read not a single thing set in Africa.

It’s not that I ignored Africa completely; we watched an excellent but frightening  documentary called The Future of Food (you may have seen it) and another about coastal cities which are already suffering terribly from rising sea levels. This second series focused on parts of Africa also. I just didn’t think to read or watch any made up stories from that continent. Perhaps in Africa, more than in any other part of the world, I feel like fact will always be stranger and more frightening than fiction.

And I’ve heard Alexander McCall Smith say that this is what disappoints him about some of his potential audience — the mistaken idea that among all the poverty in Africa there can’t also be great joy to be had. I’m sure he is right. I’ll look into that for next year.

*

I would recommend this pinboard thing as an exercise to anyone — it’s addictive! I’d especially recommend it for teachers and their primary school aged children, as a cross-curricular reading/geography assignment. Most children are no longer asked to rote learn our countries, capitals and major exports (as my parents were forced to do) and I think we might assume in this globalised economy that children simply absorb that sort of information. Some do, but some of us didn’t! Those into SF and fantasy could have great fun appending their own hand-drawn maps, because naturally many fictional places are not set in any real world venue.

Related Link: 10 Real Life Places That Inspired Fiction.

Describing Physiological Reactions In Fiction

I wonder if anyone’s ever had a GOOD case of diarrhoea.

- @stephenfry

Descriptions of physiology are hard to write well because:

1. We all know what the feels to be thirsty/humiliated/busting to go to the toilet, so why does an author feel the need to explain it again, as if her character is any different? Why not just tell and not show?
2. Every possible physiological response must have been written before, over and over, so how to sound original?
3. It’s so easy to sound unintentionally comical.
4. Certain physiological reactions can be cringe inducing unless done masterfully.

Yet now and again I come across a physiological description that’s original and engaging and poetic, and I’m filled with hope that it hasn’t all been done before. And then I think, “The field of possibles has just narrowed. I wish I’d written that!”

being hot in summer

Wherever you went in the summer in America it was murder. It was always ninety degrees. If you closed the windows you baked, but if you left them open everything blew everywhere – comic books, maps, loose articles of clothing. If you wore shorts, as we always did, the bare skin on your legs became part of the seat, like cheese melted onto toast, and when it was time to get up, there was a rippling sound and a screaming sensation of agony as the two parted. If in your sun-baked delirium you carelessly leaned your arm against the metal part of the door on to which the sun had been shining, the skin where it made contact would shrivel and disappear, like a plastic bag in a flame. It was a truly amazing, and curiously painless, spectacle to watch part of your body just vanish. -Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent

Since I come from a Land of Celcius, I had to look up ’90 degrees’. I found out it’s a measly 32.222 degrees celcius, which means Bill Bryson should make it to Australia one day. (Oh that’s right. He did.) Part of what makes Bill Bryson so funny (to many, at least) is his creation of unlikely similes. He sometimes takes something quite grand (say, a landmark river) and compares it to something everyday and unremarkable (a drink spilled across a table). He compares many things to food. (Like legs, to cheese on toast.) If you are writing comedy, it’s possible to be endlessly original about physiological reactions, because you’ve got an infinite list of bizarre imagery at your disposal.

AWESTRUCK

Nothing prepares you for the Grand Canyon. No matter how many times you read about it or see it pictured, it still takes your breath away. Your mind, unable to deal with anything on this scale, just shuts down and for many long moments you are a human vacuum, without speech or breath, but just a deep, inexpressible awe that anything on earth could be so vast, so beautiful, so silent. Even children are stilled by it. I was a particularly talkative and obnoxious child, but it stopped me cold. I can remember rounding a corner and standing there agog while a mouthful of half-formed jabber just rolled backwards down my throat, forever unuttered. I was seven years old and I’m told it was only the second occasion in all that time that I had stopped talking, apart from short breaks for sleeping and television. The one other thing to silence me was the sight of my grandfather dead in an open coffin. – Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent

I love how the first paragraph is serious, mock poetic, with the three adjectives listed to conclude. Of course, this is a build-up to the clincher: Grand Canyon compared to an old man dead in a coffin, which I probably shouldn’t find funny, but do. Wonderful juxtaposition.

KISSING

And then we’re kissing.

I lean in this time, and she doesn’t turn away. It’s cold, and our lips are dry, noses a little wet, foreheads sweaty beneath wool hats.

- from Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by John Green and David Levithan

It’s very easy to sound Mills-and-Boonish when approaching anything sexual, and it’s sometimes safer to make it deliberately unarousing. The wet noses make sure of that. (Unless you love dogs, perhaps…)

HOMESICK

It was like hell, she thought, because she could see no end to it, and to the feeling that came with it, but the torment was strange, it was all in her mind, it was like the arrival of night if you knew that you would never see anything in daylight again. She did not know what she was going to do.

- Colm Toibin, Brooklyn

So ‘homesickness’ isn’t technically a physiological reaction. But the psychological is connected, somehow, to the physiological.

Notice the very long, run-on sentence making use of commas rather than full-stops. This echoes the feeling of ‘no end’ in sight. It’s almost always a good choice to follow such sentences with a short, pithy one, and this is exactly what Toibin has done.

SEXUALLY AROUSED

It is like a little pocket of air has rushed into her mouth and sent a little shiver down her back and tugged at the empty half-basin of her pelvic bone. She feels a prolonged and dislocated swoop in her belly and a yank of emptiness in her ribcage, and suddenly she is  much too hot. Isolde feels this way sometimes when she is in the bath, or when she watches people kiss on television, or in bed when she runs her fingertips down the soft curve of her belly and imagines that her hand is not her own. Most often the feeling descends inexplicably — at a bus stop, perhaps, or in the lunch line, or waiting for a bell to ring… Here in the hallway Isolde is thinking, Did I feel this feeling then, that night? Did I feel this jangled swoop of dread and longing, this elevator-dive, this strange suspended prelude to a sneeze?

- Eleanor Catton, from The Rehearsal

That’s the most original description I’ve read. (And in case you’d thought that was all that could be possibly said on the subject, it goes on in totally original fashion for another few pages.)

A more succinct description:

He turned to look at her…Purl felt her pelvic floor contract and she steadied herself against the bar.

- Rosalie ham, from The Dressmaker

Accurate enough, I suppose. Functional writing. Slightly comic, which is the intention. That’s the thing about making use of the correct anatomical terms. It can come across as comic even when unintended. A few years back I complained that a drink was too hot and that it had ‘burned my esophagus’. This was not met with sympathy, but laughter. Apparently it was only funny because I’d used the correct term. Besides, some body parts can’t help sounding comical, and esophagus is one of them.

I woke up half an hour later, when she sat down on my bed, her butt against my hip. Her underwear, her jeans, the comforter, my corduroys, and my boxers between us, I thought. Five layers, and yet I felt it, the nervous warmth of touching — a pale reflection of the fireworks of one mouth on another, but a reflection nonetheless.

- finding alaska by John Green

A perfect portrayal of a teenage proto-relationship.

orgasmIC

Elizabeth stared up into the darkness. She could feel, like tiny electric shocks, involuntary muscular spasms at the very core of her being, as if her body, like her mind, was trying to come to terms with what had transpired.

- Judy Nunn, from Maralinga

I don’t read much romance but I’m sure there are plenty of better examples. I’ll add a few more excerpts if I come across them. Even so, I’m thinking ‘spasm’ might be a popular choice of word.

Related Post: Why is there no good sex in fiction prize? from The Guardian.

GAGGING FOR A DRINK

Dick had not been married long and at the thought of the beautiful and curvaceous Dinah a clot of emotions lurched sweetly, a sensation he had come to terms with. It was a sensation which cried out for strong drink. Dick had found Dinah an exotic dish to have on his menu. Her presence, her absence, the very thought of her, called for a heady sauce. He took a turn around the room and peeped into the cupboard, although he knew before he opened the door that the bottle with the famous label which stared blankly back at him would be a skinner.

- Came A Hot Friday, by Ronald Hugh Morrieson

Two emotions are described above: wanting a drink, and being in love. For this character, the feelings are similar and he’s unable to fully separate the two.

TIPSY

I wanted to like booze more than I actually did (which is more or less the precise opposite of how I felt about Alaska). But that night, the booze felt great, as the warmth of wine in my stomach spread through my body. I didn’t like feeling stupid or out of control, but I liked the way it made everything (laughing, crying, peeing in front of your friends) easier.

(several pages later)

With her mouth half open, it occurred to me that she must already be drunk as a I noticed the far-off look in her eyes. The thousand-yard stare of intoxication, I thought, and as I watched her with idle fascination, it occurred to me that, yeah, I was a little drunk too.

- looking for alaska, by John Green

drunk

I don’t know how many beers I had, but – I will be frank here – it was too many. I had not allowed for the fact that in the thin mountain air of Santa Fe you get drunk much faster. In any case, I was surprised to discover as I stood up a couple of hours after entering that the relationship between my mind and legs, which was normally quite a good one, had broken down. More than that, my legs now didn’t seem to be getting on at all well with each other. One of them started for the stairs, as instructed, but the other, in a burst of petulance, decided to make for the rest-room. The result was that I lurched through the bar like a man on stilts, grinning inanely as if to say, ‘Yes, I know I look like an asshole. Isn’t this amusing?’

- Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent

I’ve never been drunk, myself, so all I know about being drunk is what I’ve read in books and hearing people whinge about it afterwards. I’ve heard that you don’t always lose control of your legs when you get drunk – it depends. On what, though? Anyone know?

HUNGOVER

pic from columnfive

“All right. All right. No screaming. Head hurts.” And it did. I could feel last night’s wine in my throat and my head throbbed like it had the morning after my concussion. My mouth tasted like a skunk had crawled into my throat and died.

- looking for alaska, John Green

I can’t see that being hungover is any different from any other kind of dehydration headache. Anyone willing to comment on that?

STUFFED WITH FOOD

The… plate was such a mixture of foods, gravies, barbecue sauces and salad creams that it was really just a heap of tasteless goo. But I shovelled it all down and then had an outsized platter of chocolate goo for dessert. And then I felt very ill. I felt as if I had eaten a roll of insulation. Clutching my distended abdomen, I found my way to an exit. There was no moving sidewalk to return me to the street – there’s no place in Las Vegas for losers or quitters – so I had to make a long weaving walk down the floodlit driveway to the Strip. The fresh air helped a little, but only a little. I limped through the crowds along the Strip, looking like a man doing a poor imitation of Quasimodo…

- Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent

Blergh. I hate that feeling, evoked excellently here.

NAUSEOUS

It was too dark to see the gemstones in the sand now. She was fighting back nausea and swallowing back a bile in her mouth that tasted like warm beer, pasta, and woody aftertones… all mixed with a hint of self-loathing.

- from Girl At Sea by Maureen Johnson

violently ill

Alternating waves of hot and cold washed over her, and she knew she needed to get out of the bed, but her legs would not hold. Remaining on her knees, she crawled to the door. Shaking violently, she tried once again to stand. This time her legs stayed under her, but she could not get her equilibrium. She felt as though some central ball bearing inside her that made balance possible had been knocked loose… Never had she been this sick before. Kneeling with her head over the commode, she was so violently ill that the contractions sent pain into her neck and back. Her head throbbed so that she no longer saw shapes, only patches of gray and black. She felt as if she were being turned inside out, as if she were being scoured.

- Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

…the urge to be sick became even more intense then before, forcing her to get down on her hands and knees and vomit a thick liquid with a vile taste that made her shudder with revulsion when she lifted her head.

The ship’s movements took on a harsh rhythm, and replaced the sense of lunging forward and then being pushed back she had felt when she woke first. … There was hardly anything left to vomit, just a sour bile that left a taste in her mouth that made her cry…

- Colm Toibin, Brooklyn

FRIGHTENED

The room was big. He could feel its size although he could not clearly see. He could feel a cold breeze in his face, the blood in his heart. It was cold, too, the blood, and it felt as if it cracked — like ice — when his foot bumped into a soft heap on the floor. A body, a dead body.

- Christopher Pike, The Party

That one doesn’t work for me at all. I think it’s something to do with the extended metaphor of ‘cold blood’ – which is hard get away with, because it’s so old. (Truman Capote, anyone?) Not only is the blood cold, it’s ‘frozen’, and cracks, which is overdoing the metaphor.

Blomkvist shut his eyes. He suddenly felt acid in his throat and he swallowed hard. The pain in his gut and in his ribs seemed to swell.

- Stieg Larsson, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Most often ‘bile’ is mentioned in this case, to the point where ‘bile rising in one’s throat’ is almost cliche. I think it’s therefore wise that the translator made use the word ‘acid’ instead. I think I know this reaction, but I may have led a sheltered life because I can’t think of a time in which I was so shocked and frightened that I actually experienced it. I wonder if  I have a stronger stomach than most, or if it takes extreme stress to produce the bile in one’s throat (the sort of stress most often recreated in thrillers), or if this physiological reaction is used disproportionately more often in novels than happens in real life.

She woke screaming, the smell of burning fabric assaulting her nostrils… Although she didn’t see or hear anyone in the room with her, it felt like a pair of strong hands grabbed her from behind and pulled her out of the room… Vivi’s fear was so strong she could taste it in the back of her throat. So strong it caused her to pee ever so slightly in the borrowed boxy panties she wore.

- Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Wells hasn’t mentioned ‘bile’; instead she says ‘could taste it’, which is judicious, given the aforementioned cliche.

Her head was in her hands, and when she looked up at Vivi and Pete, her black face was streaked with tears that shone silver in the fading light… Vivi could hear Genevieve’s screams coming from the master bedroom. She ran past Shirley and up the stairs. When she stepped into the bedroom, Genevieve was slapping Mr Whitman on his face, his neck, his arm, whatever she could reach. Teensy stood by herself, near the bay window, her hands covering her face.

- Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

The character of Shirley describes the involuntary scream of shock (at a son’s death) as ‘the screech howl’, which is executed perfectly in the film. One woman commented on the YouTube segment of this movie that unless she had personally witnessed her own auntie’s reaction at losing a child, she’d not have believed that this screech howl happens in real life. She would have considered it melodramatic. It does seem that people do unexpected things when faced with terrible news; some more than others, some cultures more than others.

For a moment, everyone in the gym was silent, and the place had never been so quiet, not even in the moments before the Colonel ridiculed opponents at the free-throw stripe. I stared down at the back of the Colonel’s head. I just stared, looking at his thick and bushy hair. For a moment, it was so quiet that you could hear the sound of not-breathing, the vacuum created by 190 students shocked out of air.

I thought: It’s all my fault.

I thought: I don’t feel very good.

I thought: I’m going to throw up.

I stood up and ran outside. I mae it to a trash can outside the gym, five feet from the double doors, and heaved toward Gatorade bottles and half-eaten McDonald’s. But nothing much came out. I just heaved, my stomach muscles tightening and my throat opening and a gasping, guttural blech, going through the motions of vomiting over and over again. In between gags and coughs, I sucked air in hard.

- looking for alaska, by John Green

CRYING

She began to cry until tears soaked her face, her hair, her gown. She did not remember putting on the gown she wore, did not recognise it. She needed terribly to blow her nose, but she did not have a handkerchief. She could not bear the thought, but she decided she was going to have to blow her nose on the sheets.

- Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Crying is one of those things that you can’t get away with much in a book — I don’t identify with characters who mope about and cry all the time, regardless of their circumstances. I think this has something to do with passiveness. Also, the act of crying can sort of absorb the feeling which caused it; if the character cries, the reader doesn’t have to. That said, it’s done well in the paragraph above.

On Tidy Desks

by henry...

I only ever knew one journalist with a truly tidy desk, and he was eventually arrested for molesting small boys. Make of that what  you will; but just bear it in mind the next time somebody with a tidy desk invites you camping.

- Bill Bryson, from The Lost Continent

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk ?

- Laurence J Peter

There are plenty of self help articles extolling the virtues of tidiness in the work space, proclaiming, beyond any doubt, that tidiness leads to greater productivity. But where is the evidence for that? Logic works both ways:

1. Any time spent tidying, wiping and vacuuming is time that could have been spent producing actual work.

2. Are there any studies which show untidy people are any less productive than tidy people? Even taking account extra time spent searching for things which haven’t been returned to their ‘proper’ place, I’d wager searching time doesn’t outweigh the time tidy people spend on tidying.

3. A workspace which looks untidy to the visitor may well be as organised as its user needs it to be. My desk is cluttered, but I know exactly where to reach for a pen.

Besides, is it possible to turn an untidy person into a tidy one (short of sending them to army bootcamp)?

Tidiness is like spelling and punctuation. An individual either sees the point, or not. And if you don’t see the point, it’s almost impossible to persuade them otherwise, because tidy freaks, like grammar freaks, can be rightly accused of worrying about trivial matters which are not the slightest bit important in the scheme of things.

Going West

I was entering a land of drifters: dreamers, losers, vagrants, crazy people – they all always go west in America. They all have this hopeless idea that they will get to the coast and make a fortune as a movie star or rock musician or game show contestant or something. And if things don’t work out they can always become a serial murderer. It’s strange that no-one ever goes east, that you never encounter anyone hitch-hiking to New York in pursuit of some wild and crazy dream to be a certified public accountant or make a killing in leveraged buy-outs.

- Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent

In Australia, the weird, wonderful and marginalised go to the Northern Territory, or anywhere in the outback, which is why the Australian outback makes such wonderful setting for dark, horrific fiction such as Wolf Creek – because it’s entirely plausible that you would happen across psychopaths – regardless of what the true proportions are.

For anyone interested in literature from WESTERN AUSTRALIA in particular, more here, from The Book Show.

Narcissists in Fiction

I watched an Insight documentary on narcissism – a fascinating topic. (Transcript here.) What I learned:

• Narcissism is the opposite of empathy.
• Psychopathy is the malignant form of narcissism. Psychopaths, like narcissists, lack empathy, but also get a sadistic  pleasure out of inflicting pain upon others.
• Narcissism is part of a developmental stage, and is not necessarily clinical. For example, two year olds are about as narcissistic as you can get. Narcissism – meaning self-promotion and care of self image – continues to be very important during the partnership forming years. (Teens and twenties.) I’m quite sure this is part of what makes some young drivers so dangerous on the road: the delusion that they are better drivers than older people.
• Clinical narcissism is seen more often in men than in women, in the same way psychopathy is seen more often in men.
• Corporations tend to reward narcissists, so narcissists often get promoted. But those same behaviours are very hard to live with, so narcissists have turbulent home lives unless they learn to adapt according to the situation. In relationships they are referred to as ‘emotional vampires’ in pop culture.
• Narcissism doesn’t necessarily respond well to therapy, because therapy can reinforce undesirable narcissistic behaviour in much the same way psychopathic behaviour can be inadvertently validated by therapy. (Think Tony Soprano.)
• Narcissists have a sense of self-entitlement. They genuinely think they’re more special than other people. They don’t believe they need to do the work to get the reward (they deserve early career promotion, say), and in a relationship narcissists think they are the more important half. Unfortunately, they tend to see all their own negative qualities in the other person. Narcissists can’t see that they are no better than other people. They don’t see themselves realistically. They genuinely think they’re more beautiful/talented/funny than other people.
• The worst thing that can happen to a narcissist is that their true self is revealed to themselves. If a narcissist’s ‘balloon’ is pricked – if they have an epiphany of sorts – depression often follows. Sometimes this happens some time around middle age. (Midlife crisis?)
• Not all heavy users of Facebook/Twitter are narcissists, but narcissists are more likely than non-narcissists to be heavy users of such platforms. The usage habits of narcissists also tend to be different: posting lots of pictures, frequent status updates, aiming to gather many ‘friends’ and garner attention. Non-narcissists are more likely to sit back and observe what others are doing on Facebook, or to message privately.

No doubt about it: narcissists make fascinating fictional characters – probably because they feel so real to us.

1. angela hayes – AMERICAN BEAUTY – FILM DIRECTED BY SAM MENDES

Narcissism is a major theme in American Beauty. Every character is a large part narcissistic: Lester and Carolyn Burnham, Angela, Colonel Frank Fitts. The characters with the most realistic view of themselves and others are Jane Burnham and Ricky Fitts.

Ricky understands that the worst thing he can tell Angela is that she is not special:

Angela Hayes: Yeah? Well, at least I’m not ugly!
Ricky Fitts: Yes, you are. And you’re boring, and you’re totally ordinary, and you know it.

Sure enough, in the car with Jane she confides:

Angela Hayes: I don’t think that there’s anything worse than being ordinary.

2. BERTHA YOUNG – BLISS – SHORT STORY BY KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Many of Mansfield’s characters were narcissistic – always wondering what others are thinking about them rather than thinking about other characters. I suspect Katherine Mansfield herself never really got through the narcissistic phase. She died young. Her last stories, however, show a shift towards bigger themes such as death, and whether some people really are more important than others (eg. The Garden Party).

3. BRASS IN POCKET BY THE PRETENDERS

‘CAUSE I GONNA MAKE YOU SEE
THERE’S NOBODY ELSE HERE
NO ONE LIKE ME
I’M SPECIAL, SO SPECIAL
I GOTTA HAVE SOME OF YOUR ATTENTION
GIVE IT TO ME
‘CAUSE I GONNA MAKE YOU SEE
THERE’S NOBODY ELSE HERE
NO ONE LIKE ME
I’M SPECIAL, SO SPECIAL
I GOTTA HAVE SOME OF YOUR ATTENTION

GIVE IT TO ME

4. don draper – mad men

The classic corporate narcissist.

Two types of parenting lead to narcissism – the overindulgent type and the cold, distant type, where the child is only noticed if they do something the parents consider worthy. Don Draper’s flashbacks tell us he falls into the latter category.

Deep down, Don Draper feels like he is nothing — the most terrifying prospect for a narcissist. But he has found the perfect environment in which to behave this way: an advertising corporation, where he is almost expected to take full credit for group effort, and to be dismissive of others who are beneath him in the pecking order.

This same behaviour doesn’t work in his personal life, however, and in that part of his life he’ll keep going from disaster to disaster.

Don Draper can be charming and persuasive, but he lacks true empathy. This works to his advantage because it allows him not to care. This aspect of Don was demonstrated most clearly in his treatment of Faye Miller in season four, but was foreshadowed in his long relationship with Betty.

Every now and then Don Draper catches a glimpse of his real self and this always coincides with a downfall.

5. I’M TOO SEXY – RIGHT SAID FRED

Vanity is different from narcissism. But vanity is a component of narcissism. Also, body image and self image are two different things. It seems vanity is mistaken for narcissism, and self-consciousness mistaken for vanity. Is it vain if a teenaged girl refuses to leave the house without mascara and heavy foundation, or is it self-consciousness?

As a psychologist said on the Insight discussion, narcissism is a poorly understood condition. Everyone knows about mental disorders like depression and anxiety but few are able to pick a narcissist upon first meeting one – unless you’ve had a lot to do with one personally, of course. Narcissism is more than vanity, and this does come through in the myth:

Narcissus was a hunter from Thespiae, renowned for his beauty. He was exceptionally proud and disdained those who loved him. Nemesis saw this and attracted Narcissus to a pool. In the water, Narcissis saw his own reflection and fell in love with it, not realising it was merely an image. Unable to leave the beauty of his reflection, Narcissus died.

6. Edie Britt – Desperate Housewives

That series is full of narcissism and you could easily argue that Edie isn’t a standout case but I’m thinking of the scene where she says to Carlos:

I’m hot, you’re hot. On paper we should be having great sex.

7. TRUMAN CAPOTE

Now I’m cheating, because Truman Capote was a real man who wrote a real book. Sometimes I think narcissists are their own best creations, and Truman Capote is therefore one hair’s breadth away from existing in our memories as a character of fiction.

Bill Bryson nicely encapsulated both the man and his book in The Lost Continent:

Fifty miles beyond Dodge City is Holcomb, Kansas, which gained a small notoriety as the scene of the murders described with lavish detail in the Truman Capote book In Cold Blood. In 1959, two small-time crooks broke into the house of a wealthy Holcomb rancher named Herb Clutter because they had heard he had a safe full of money. In fact he didn’t. So, chagrined, they tied Clutter’s wife and two teenaged children to their beds and took Clutter down to the basement and killed them all. They slit Clutter’s throat (Capote described his gurglings with a disturbing relish) and shot the others in the head at point-blank range. Because Clutter had been prominent in state politics, the New York Times ran a small story about the murders. Capote saw the story, became intrigued and spent five years interviewing all the main participants – friends, neighbours, relatives, police investigators and the murderers themselves. The book, when it came out in 1965, was considered an instant classic, largely because Capote told everyone it was.

There has since been a movie made about Capote’s obsession with this murder… and about his obsession with himself, I might add.

I have 94 per cent recall of all conversation. I tested it myself.

Sometimes when I think of how good my book is going to be, I can’t breathe.

I wonder if you agree that Truman Capote was a narcissist. I also wonder if Capote would’ve spent five years researching for In Cold Blood had he not been so sure of his own abilities and the book’s success.

Alan Bennett had this to say about Truman Capote (and homophobia) in a diary entry from 21 March, 2000:

Read the hitherto unpublished extracts from Sylvia Plath’s diaries without much interest. I hadn’t known about Hughes’s homophobia — though I’m not sure that antipathy to Truman Capote can be so subsumed, Capote really deserving a phobia to himself.

The Truman Capote Insult Quiz

8. ALAN BENNETT’S AUNT KATHLEEN

Speaking of Alan Bennett, and real narcissists: Alan Bennett’s Aunt Kathleen was a real person. Bennett describes her in senility — a state which perhaps amplifies our true selves in the same way alcohol can:

Surrounded by the senile and by the wrecks of women as hopelessly, though differently, demented as she is, she still clings to the notion that she is somehow different and superior. Corseted in her immutable gentilities she still contrives to make something special out of her situation and her role in it.

‘He’ll always give me a smile,’ she says of an impassive nurse who is handing out the tea. ‘I’m his favourite.’

‘This is my chair. They’ll always put me here because this corner’s that bit more select.’

Her life had been made meaningful by frail, fabricated connnections, and now, when the proper connections in her brain are beginning to break down, it is this flimsy tissue of social niceties that still holds firm.

- Alan Bennett, from Untold Stories

Bennett has a genius for human insight, and I think he has encapsulated in that character sketch how the demented elderly can slip back into that narcissistic state otherwise common to two-year-olds.

9. HUD

This is a great classic movie from 1963 which hasn’t really dated. I love the honesty of it. Hud is a bastard at the start, and a bastard at the finish, and there’s no character arc. There is a character arc with Lonny, his young nephew who realises what an asshole he has for an uncle, and who leaves the family farm to find his own way in life. But we know when Hud slams the door on the camera in the final scene of this film that Hud will continue to live in exactly the same fashion, and end up a lonely old man.

Hud is an example of a teenage narcissist who never grew up – even in his thirties he ‘doesn’t give a damn’ about anyone except himself. He completely lacks empathy for others, which makes this character an unambiguous narcissist.

This is a great film, and I think stories get away with nasty characters when they’re surrounded by such empathetic characters. The grandfather is truly noble and lovable. We warm to the nephew. It’s when every character in a film is unlikable that I wonder what I’m doing, trapped in a room with all these people.

ANYONE THINK OF ANY OTHERS?

Related Links

1. How to stop checking yourself out, from The Hairpin

2. Evolution of Narcissism – Why we’re overconfident and why it works, from National Geographic.

3. Narcissism Has Higher Health Costs For Men from Freethought Blogs

4. Five Ways Narcissists Screw Everything Up from Jezebel

5. Why They Can’t Feel Joy: Narcissistic Shallow Emotions from Psychology Today

You Can’t Go Home

by willhybrid

 

“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing’s sake, back home to aestheticism, to one’s youthful idea of ‘the artist’ and the all-sufficiency of ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘love,’ back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time–back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

-  Thomas Wolfe

As I always used to tell Thomas Wolfe, there are three things you just can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again.

- Bill Bryson, from The Lost Continent

My dad told me this when I first left home. He said, ‘Once you’ve gone, you’re always welcome back, but it’ll never be the same.’

He was right, especially since when I first left home it was to a different country, on a student exchange aged 17. I wonder if he realised the extent to which he was correct; that it wasn’t simply that I would never feel at home in my natal family house, but that my own country would never quite feel the same either, simply from having experienced a country and culture so different.

Dad also said that once you learn to drive it’s never the same being a passenger again either. Once you become a driver, you’re always checking for traffic at intersections, listening for strange rattles in the engine, thinking your driver should probably have his foot on the brake pedal by now, and did they see that dog?

He was right about that too. Be in no great hurry to drive.

pic by Cayusa

 

Bush Tomato and Herb Sausages

pic by bmann

This hasn’t suddenly morphed into a food blog. We’re having sausages tonight, and I’ve been thinking about adjectives, is all.

Would our sausages taste better if they were simply Tomato and Herb (without the Bush?) Food seems to taste better when accompanied by adjectives of a high degree of specificity. You’ll see it at its best in sit-down restaurants.

What about when writing fiction? Might the same thing apply? Can we make use of adjectives without sounding like a restaurant menu, or a packet of Aldi sausages?

In fiction, the reasons for making use of specific adjectives are slightly different. Whereas the ‘bush tomato’ is designed to make me think my sausages are tastier than just plain tomato sausages, in fiction the specificity would help me to believe that those sausages really exist. I didn’t just make them up.

After all, who could make up such a thing?

by Sebastian Mary

 

“Well, how about some ice-cream? We’ve got chocolate chip, chocolate fudge, chocolate ripple, chocolate vanilla fudge, chocolate nut fudge, chocolate marshmallow swirl, chocolate mint with fudge chips, and fudge nut with or without chocolate chips.”

“Have you just got plain chocolate?”

“No. I’m afraid there’s not much call for that.”

- from The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson

Writing Activity: The Dud

by nickwheeleroz

Think of something you once bought, or received as a gift, or gave as a gift, or which someone else bought (etcetera) which failed to live up to expectations. The more disappointing, the better.

First an example, from Bill Bryson, who purchased something advertised in the ‘Zwingle catalogue’ (whatever that is):

Once in a deranged moment I bought something myself from one of these catalogues, knowing deep in my mind that it would end in heartbreak. It was a little reading light that you clipped on to your book so as not to disturb your bedmate as she slumbered beside you. In this respect it was outstanding because it barely worked. The light it cast was absurdly feeble (in the catalogue it looked like the sort of thing you could signal ships with if you got lost at sea) and left all but the first two lines of a page in darkness. I have seen more luminous insects. After about four minutes its little beam fluttered and failed altogether, and it has mever been used again. And the thing is that I knew all along that this was how it was going to end, that it would all be bitter disappointment. On second thought, if I ever ran one of those companies I would just send people an empty box with a note in it saying ‘We have decided not to send you the item you’ve ordered because, as y ou well know, it would never properly work and you would only be disappointed. So let this be a lesson to you for the future.’

- Bill Bryson, from The Lost Continent

And from Alan Bennett:

[I] Remember the device advertised in comics sixty years or so ago called, I think, a Seebackroscope. It was a small funnel in black Bakelite containing a tilted mirror about the size of a sixpence; this device you were meant to hold to your eye or screw into your eye socket in order to check that you weren’t being followed. It was intended, presumably, as part of the equipment of a schoolboy sleuth (invisible ink similarly) and my brother even sent off for one. When it came we were swiftly disillusioned, the mirror never reflecting anything useful or even in focus. It was a definite stage in that process of discovering that things were never as good as advertisements cracked them up to be.

- from Diaries: 2000, 2 April entry

I’m pretty sure you’ve thought of your own example after reading those. If not, you probably know someone who loves hunting for bargains, going to garage sales and whatnot. No doubt that person has bought some dodgy things in their time.

You might follow a similar structure to Bryson’s paragraph if you get stuck writing yours at any stage:

1. Describe where you first saw your item. Maybe someone else had one, or perhaps it was advertised on TV, or in the newspaper/magazine, or you’d heard about it.

2. What was it meant to do?

3. What did it actually do?

4. Something unlikely does the same job better. (Luminous insects, in Bryson’s example.)

5. What you ended up thinking about this product. Perhaps you wanted to write a nasty letter to the manufacturing company. Perhaps you regifted it to someone you didn’t like, or maybe you still have it, stuffed away in some drawer. (In Bryson’s case, he figured the company may as well send out empty boxes.)

This is enough for a warming up sketch, but you may be able to turn it into a short story, or microfiction.

1. Did this item have an unlikely alternative use? Could it be redeployed as something else? (With disastrous or comical consequences?)

2. What if the person who bought it wasn’t you, or anyone you know, but a crazier version of you? What might that person have done in the same situation?

3. Is there any way this thing can come back to haunt you?

4. Perhaps this thing didn’t work in the way you expect, but does it have some other, magical use? (Foray into magic realism.)

5. Is it possible this thing is almost animate, with a mind of its own? Has it turned against you, without you even knowing? (Is it ‘cursed’?)

6. Bill Bryson compares the torch to a bug, and even extends the metaphor with use of ‘fluttered’. If your item were an animal, what would it be? Can you make use of this imagery somehow?

7. How is its owner changed by the end of the story? And where does the item end up? (Destroyed, regifted, sent back, refunded, killed…)

Conveying Setting in Fiction

Use the Landscape. Always tell us where we are. And don’t just tell us where something is, make it pay off. Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character. Look at the openings of Fitzgerald stories, and Graham Greene, they’re great at this.

JANET FITCH

Lesson #456 from my writing group:

Critter: “Where the hell is this story set? As far as I can tell, this could be set in any number of English speaking countries.”

Me: (to myself) “Fool. I gave you enough clues. IT’S SET IN NEW ZEALAND. Where else do people wear ‘jandals’?”

But of course, my readers can’t be expected to know this about footwear (versus flip-flops and thongs) unless they’re either a New Zealander (chances quite slim), or unless they’ve been deep in conversation with a New Zealander, specifically about thongs.

One mistake I have made in the past, when inflicting early drafts upon others via internet, is expecting readers to deduce from random clues where my stories are set.

I’ve learnt not to do that. It pisses people off. Some readers don’t care where they are. Others have to know. So there are two types of people, and it extends beyond the printed page: On holiday, some people get obsessed with maps, have you noticed? Others (like me) are more than happy to get on a coach and get taken for a ride, without caring particularly which town we’re passing through.

Bill Bryson writes humorously about the former group of people when he suggests all Midwestern Americans are obsessed with their maps and directions. He writes:

Directions are very important to them. They have an innate need to be oriented, even in their anecdotes. ANy story related by a Midwesterner will wander off at some point into a thicket of interior monologue along the lines of ‘We were stying at a hotel that was eight blocks norht-east of the state capitol building. Come to think of it, it was north-west. And I think it was probably more like nine blocks. And this woman without any clothes on, naked as the day she was born except for a coonskin cap, came running at us from the south-west… or was it the south-east?’ If there are two Midwesterners present and they both witnessed the incident, you can just about write off the anecdote arguing points of the compass and will never get back to the original story. You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west.

- Bill Bryson, from The Lost Continent

With such readers in mind, when it comes to Geographic Setting-up in Fiction, better for a writer to just come out and say it. But how? Do you just get it out of the way before going any further?

Dave Eggers does just that in his short story Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly. He does it very well. These are the first two sentences:

She lies, she lies, Rita lies on the bed, looking up, in the room that is so loud so early in Tanzania. She is in Moshi.’

- from The Best of McSweeneys, Vol One.

Next time I write a story set in New Zealand,  I’ll just go ahead and open like that, because unless my story is submitted to a New Zealand competition or something local, my readers are international, and international readers don’t expect a story to be set in New Zealand. Americans (apparently) think of England, because I’ve used British spelling. Brits wonder why I’m writing about ‘dollars’ because I say ‘petrol station’, not ‘gas’. It’s all very confusing. Some readers assume I’m completely messed in the head because, to an outsider, New Zealand English sounds like a cross between Britishisms and Americanisms.

Of course, New Zealand English is a distinct type in its own right, drawing from other cultures as we see fit. ‘Dollars’ is no more American than ‘dog’.

But whatever made me think that I could get away with not being upfront about my setting? That’s complicated.

1. American writers don’t need to do it. Unless the story is particularly Southern, or particularly regional in flavour – unless the story is about the setting, it’s taken as a given that a story is set in America and can we please get on with it now.

2. Because the Brits don’t need to do it. Same deal.

3. Because I plain forget that, to non-locals, I do have an ‘accent’, even when I write.

4. Because I’ve actually lived in 3 different English speaking countries, and each time I sit down to write I must decide, ‘Which brand of English should I use today?’ This is a huge pain in the butt and I wish I didn’t have to do it, but most writers have lived in more than one country, it seems. This thing isn’t specific to me.

Anyway, thanks Dave. I’m following your lead.