The photograph is famous. Two steam engines, massive like steel destriers, one aimed at either distant coast, converging on that sliver of Utah countryside. There are men everywhere in frame that there is room for them. The men here are hard men, chambray men, grimed and lined by sun and grit. A man stands atop one hulking engine and proffers a champagne bottle to a man man opposite him holding an empty slender glass. There are other men in suits with watch chains bridging the rounded landscape between their lapels. The emotions visible are only the barest expressions of reserved pride. Men lean poised on the sidewalls of the steam engines, reposed on crooked arms, their mouths sly smiles beneath the shadowed coronas provided by their hats. In the foreground, two men make a show of shaking hands. And of course, behind these two men, standing somewhat timidly, much of him obscured by an unfortunate top hat, is The Beacon. The steady glow emitted from the portal at the face of his helmet is evident as a bright blur in the primitive nineteenth-century photography.

-from The Beacon

Even for a medium that exists to make the unimaginable manifest, the Beacon’s existence as an enduring cultural figure strained credulity. Just one of many heroes created in that spiritually depressed period during and following the American Great Depression, the Beacon faded into obscurity rather quickly following the first set of issues. Created by Herbert Dresden in 1932, the hero was stalwart, stoic, not very talkative, and quick to take decisive and authoritative action against anyone he perceived as a threat to the “eventual reinstatement of the American superiority.” Of course, it’s somewhat unfair to indict these early Beacon stories without a consideration of the sociopolitical climate in which they were written. Siegel and Schuster’s inimitable Superman—often credited as the first true American superhero— was still years away, and the American repository of mythology was running dry. The nation was craving a figure to rally around, a body onto which they could see their own trials and anxieties represented, a hero for an age bereft of hope.

If one of the principle signs of genius is the ability to recognize a lack and fill it, then Dresden would certainly qualify. Rather than dwell on the uncertainty and inequity of that dark time, Dresden looked back to a period of adversity overcome, of evil defeated. The brilliance of this move is apparent—for a nation that emerged afresh from the tangle morass of civil war could certainly again rise from the depths of destitution and lack. In a 1933 interview—when the Beacon’s popularity was rising—Dresden said he intended the character to “ignite the fires of hope under a despondent populous.” It was clear that Dresden has a poetic sense of self-heroics from the beginning, a trait we find common in analogous men of ambition.

One could argue that Dresden indeed forged the template by which other superheroes—most notably Siegel and Schuster’s Superman and the creations of Marvel’s Stan Lee—would be created. In Lee’s stories, the genesis of heroes are centered on pre-existing cultural anxieties about the advancements of science and the mysteries of atomic power. Dresden’s analogue is the growing acumen of American industrialists at the end of the Civil War and during the reformation. The Beacon himself emerges from an industrial accident as a freak of genetics and nature, a man concurrently blessed and cursed with the strangest of physical dispositions. Put simply, the Beacon possessed the ability to absorb all ambient heat energy from the space around him. In a mechanical sense, he was the perfect machine, able to convert ambient energy into work with one hundred percent efficiency. In a world predicated on the power of its emerging class of machines, the Beacon was the perfect specimen.

-a bit from the big pile of The Beacon work I’ve got sitting disheveled on the floor.

Okay, long post. Buckle up.

I haven’t been posting about writing very much lately because writing’s been hard for the past week or so. I was discouraged today–pulling my old bad habit of wanting to give up on a project just because it’s not immediately easy for me. The past novels I’ve written have all come out rather easily, not always a smooth delivery, but they’ve always gotten written, at least in first draft. It took some talking out with D today to make myself realize, probably again, that I’m an impatient writer. I want my book to be written right now, and often that means barreling ahead when it’s just not there that day, worried more about filling pages, because that’s what writer do, right? They fill pages. If they pages aren’t filling, the book’s not being written, and I get grumpy and want to do something else.

I wrote nine pages this past week, and maybe a page or two felt right. The rest was me telling myself the story. And while that step is important, it really amounts to prewriting. But, dammit, pages were filled and the book was being written. Since the pages were crappy, the book was crappy, and I was in a general crappy mood about the whole business, ready to toss is aside and start something else.

The major problem is, as important as telling yourself the story first is, it does not usually make enjoyable prose for a reader. D, who as usual was a repository for sound writing advice, urged me to trust the gaps in the narrative, and to trust the reader to make connections and observations themselves, without me telling them flat-out in my excessive exposition.

That sort of sparse, economical writing is something I’ve done in short fiction, even longer short fiction like “All Our Imaginary Friends Are Dead.” D explained that, when you write short fiction, you can see all of the machinery, the way the parts work together and click against each other to drive the story. When you write a novel, he said, that machinery is much more vast, often stretching off into the darkness. The exposition-heavy narrative I’d written in the past week was important for throwing some light into that darkness, but it wasn’t the book. The book could only be written after some of the machinery was illuminated.

So this is my long winded way to begin to talk about revision, and the work that I try to do when I revise. So, for the sake of comparision, here’s a scene from that tedious bit of back story I’d written, typos and all (I’ve omitted a few paragraphs that came before this–believe me, they’re not all that important):

As she crossed the street, she remembered proofing some of John Mark’s earliest scripts, the ones that had gotten him noticed. Unlike the troglodytes writing the medical articles, John Mark had a beautiful way with words, had ever since he had been a teenager writing lyrical poetry to his sweethearts, herself of course being the latest.

There was a boy on the stoop, bent over a comic book, reading by the last of the sunlight as it peeked over the roofs.

“Hi there,” Norah said.

The boy looked up and blinked, as if he had just come out of a dark cave. “Oh, hi,” he said, and dropped her head back to the page.

She edged closer to him. “What are you reading.”

“Just some book,” he said. “Why?”

She shrugged. “Just curious.”

The boy closed the cover with his thumb marking his place and presented the cover. His thumb was tucked about halfway through the issue. The cover showed The Beacon, huge in his metal containment suit, regarding a line of young men, all of them lean and muscular. The Beacon’s hand was on what passed for his chin, and big swooping letters below asked the questions WHO WILL BE THE BEACON’S SIDEKICK? THE INCREDIBLE ANSWER IS INSIDE CARETAKERS!

Caretaker was the sobriquet ascribed to fans of the Beacon. She assumed it was some sort of half-baked pun on the lighthouse imagery of the Beacon’s name.

“What do you think of it? Is it any good?”

The boy glanced at the cover and wiped his forehead with his free hand. “It’s pretty good, I guess. I’m not done with it yet.”

“Just pretty good? So do you think I should read it?”

“Yea, I guess. It’s pretty good, but I think I know what’s going to happen.”

“Okay, well, happy reading.”

The boy didn’t answer her—he was reading again.

Norah slipped past him and through the front door of the apartment building. Upstairs, she found her apartment empty. It had been hotter than expected that day, and neither she or John Mark had opened the windows, so the air in the room was dense and heavy. She hadn’t been sweating outside, but now sweat was standing out on her forehead and under her arms. She felt clammy and dirty. She set her purse down on the kitchen table with her keys and the comic she held under her arm. She wanted to read it, but knew that she had time. As much as she loved him, she also relished the evenings to herself, the scant few nights that she would not have to pass listening to the clack of his typewriter, or the scratch of his pencil, or that little chuckle that he made when he thought of something clever. She thought it sounded like a chuckle underwater.

Tonight, at least until late, the apartment would be hers. She turned on the radio they kept in the bedroom and ran the shower until the bathroom was filled with steam. Standing in front of the mirror after, wearing only a towel, her hair hanging in a wet frame around her face, she pressed her finger to the mirror and drew, very carefully, a mask over her face. She drew protruding ears, the horizontal slitted eyeholes and smiled to herself. Before she got into the shower, she wiped the doodle away.

She loved the shower—the steam rose up in waves, making the air thick, making it almost difficult to breath, but she loved the water almost hot enough to scald, so that when she got out, she was red, all of the nerves in her skin firing, so that when she left the bathroom and hit the cooler air of the apartment, the effect was all the more intense and refreshing. She wrapped a towel around herself and stepped into the bedroom and found John Mark seated at the kitchen table. His head was in his hands. Norah had never seen John Mark cry, and the puffiness in his face, the redness of his eyes, informed her that she had missed seeing it this time by less than a half hour.

“John,” she said, pulled the towel tight across her chest, he hair hanging damp and limp.

He looked up at her and sniffled.

There’s not much that’s bad about this, but it’s not very much fun to read because so much of the back story between the characters, and the woman’s inner world, is revealed overtly. We get too much of Norah here through the narrator, and not enough through Norah’s actions herself. It’s a violation of one of the most cliche, but still relevant, adages of writing: show, don’t tell. However, this expository prewriting is crucial for clarifying in the writer’s mind the world (internal and external) that these characters live in. These are things that the writer needs to know, but the trick to prose is parceling out this information to the reader in a way that will be interesting and engaging. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is an amazing example of this sort of narrative control.

For the rewrite, I moved up the start of the action and concentrated on two things: telling the story of the characters inner world (her personality, habits, etc) without the narrator encroaching on that space, and making the prose more interesting. The scene really still starts and ends in the same place, but is told in half the words. Here is the same scene after a rewrite, typos and all:

She clicked down the sidewalk, a small purse over her shoulder, a pen, forgotten, behind her ear. There was a boy on the stoop, bent over a comic book, the pages held tilted in the last angles of sunlight. The clicking stopped and she stood over him. His contrast between the dark of his skin and the light of his shirt was almost absolute.

“Do you like it?”

The boy looked up and blinked, exposing a flash of tooth, as if he had just come out of a dark cave. “What?”

“The book. That’s The Beacon, right?”

He closed the book over his thumb and looked at the cover, as if he wasn’t sure himself. There was a large man in a metal suit, and four young men in a line under big garish words. “Yea, so?”

“Is it any good?”

The corner of the boy’s mouth and his eyebrow raised in unison. “It’s okay. Why?”

She shrugged, “Just curious.”

The boy turned back to the page, and the woman walked another block, stopped in front of another stoop. She slipped off her clicking shoes. Her nylons whispered against the steps as they went into the building, carrying her legs along inside.

In the summer, the apartment was an oven they paid rent to live in. Even with the sun at the back of the building now, with the blinds closed, it was still heavy and uncomfortable. She set her purse down and stripped her nylons, balling them into a soft fists and tossing them into the trash can beside the refrigerator. They kept a radio in their bedroom, and it played brash and tinny, and crackled when there were storms. A man was talking about the heat.

She slid out of her dress and let it fall crumpled to the carpet where it collected stray hairs and downy lint. When the bathroom had filled with steam, she stood before the fogged mirror with a towel wrapped around her middle. She traced lines of clarity with her finger, enclosing her blurry reflection with a metal helmet—she wiped a square clear around her eyes to see through. She frowned at her reflection and drew the pen from behind her ear, tossing it through the doorway and onto the bed. The bathroom had become so warm that she had begun to sweat into her towel. She deftly removed it, wove it through the rod, and stepped into the steam.

She shivered while she dressed, her skin raised in an archaic Braille of gooseflesh. Her dress was the color of sunflowers, faded by washings, threadbare in places—and it loved her body. A man on the radio was talking about construction in St. Louis. She wrapped the towel around her head in a loose turban and found John at the kitchen table with his head in his hands.

In the rewrite, concentrate on the economy of your language–say what you want to say more clearly, more interestingly, and, usually, in fewer words. Whenever possible, let your characters tell the reader about themselves, rather than trying to do that work for them as a narrator. This last suggestion is of course mutable; this particular section of the book is written or told in the future by a character who can logically have no internal knowledge of this character. In narratological terms, to preserve the mimetic (the logic and believability of the story world) I wanted to have as little intrusion on the story by the narrator as possible.

In my experience, revision seems best when it is done slowly, carefully considering each sentence. The scene I’ve rewritten will likely be rewritten again, but it’s much closer to the scene I wanted.

That’s the basic goal: with each revision, get closer to what you wanted to say in the first place, whether that be by working with what you have or trying a scene in a new way.

If nothing else, it’s a way to force yourself to be patient, and to give the story another chance to tell you what it is.

Good stuff’s happening lately. On Sunday, I got unstuck with The Beacon, and now have a pretty good idea about how all five layers (!) of the novel are going to be working. Now it’s just a matter of getting back to the scribbling, but I’m excited about it again. And after a week of being blocked and disinterested, that’s a good feeling.

Also, found out that an abstract I proposed to the MnCUEW (Minnesota Colleges & Universities English and Writing) conference was accepted, so, in addition to the Undergraduate Research Symposium on campus in late April, I’ll also be presenting “Talking Across Our Boundaries: A Case for Creative Nonfiction” in front of real-live professors and academics next week. Kinda freaky, actually, but I love that paper and the ideas in it. That’s coming up on April 3rd.

A thin man in a black robe spoke from a small podium. He wore thin, wire-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down his nose as he spoke. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” The man removed his glasses and folded them, holding them before him in his folded hands. “I always have trouble at memorial services,” the man said. “On one hand, I have my faith, which has guided me through some of the darkest periods of my life, which has seen me through to brighter skies.

“But the thing we often forget about faith is that it is not universal. I may stand up here and tell you what I believe, but for me to presume that my beliefs have any bearing on yours would be unhelpful. The fact is that we are all very different. All of us here today believe different things. Our beliefs divide us more deeply than any other facet of our multi-faceted lives. But it is days like today that I am reminded that there is so much more to us as a people than that which divides us. It is something that I often wish that I could carry with me, but epiphanies and aphorisms are often forgotten and taken for granted. Days like this, tragedies like this, when the full magnitude of the uncertainty of this world is thrown into sharp relief for us all to see, those lessons come back. Often, we feel ashamed. I do. Ashamed to learn that the wisdom we thought we had, wisdom for which we have fought and struggled, through those dark passages of our own life, is but a phantom, an empty signifier. A semantically empty sentiment. But life is punctuated across its line by instances that again show us that what we have is fleeting and tenuous and easily disrupted.

“The thread that holds us to life is delicate as any spider’s web, but it is precisely that fragility that renders our experience so meaningful. The fact that, for any of us, the end can never for certain be placed more than an eye-bat away from where we are now. It’s a cliché to say that the future is not certain for any of us. I knew some of the people who will be laid to rest here today, most of them I did not. I have no idea what they were like, what their dreams were, what they were to their families. But in this gathered group today we have the apotheosis of those lives—we have within our collective hearts memories and impressions, and it is within us that these people, our loved ones, taken from us unexpectedly, will live on. And in that thought I find comfort. Because even though we all must die, none of us can ever cease to exist. The work we do in this world, the people to whom we connect, the physical and emotional bonds that we forge in this fleeting collection of moments on this earth are what will link us to it for the duration of eternity. We lay sixteen people in the ground today. All of them will be missed. Because there is a piece of the world that has been vacated—an absence in space.

“But in our hearts, and in our minds, those people will never perish, will never fade, will never vanish into the fogs of history, because we hold them close to our hearts, and close to our hearts it is warm, and it is safe, and it is there at that they will find their final rest. Regardless of what you believe happens to the soul after its final voyage, or even if you believe in a soul at all—all of this is not important on this day. Let the dead have their experiences, and let us instead focus on our own. Because we carry these people in our hearts through the duration of our remaining time on this earth. And let us strive, with all of the conviction that we can muster at this trying hour of our day, to remember this feeling, remember how it felt to experience the icy wind at the razor’s edge, to gaze into the abyss at the very end of life. And let us step back with the knowledge that none of us knows the precise time when we will finally walk over that precipice. But let us walk our remaining steps on this earth, however many they may be, working to secure our place in the hearts of the ones we love. Because that is the immortality of gods and titans. That is the only universal endurance of the soul.”

-from the new book

“You wear that patch, but you have no conception of what it means.”

High Tide examined his arm. “Of course I do. Peace only means getting rid of everyone who opposes or oppresses you. It’s also an abstract joke of a concept. You ask me, the only peaceful world is a world with only one person. As long as there are two people around to rub their ideologies together, there will always be conflict, there will never be peace. I wear this to remind me of that. We all have our individual icons, Sarge. You wear that badge—metaphorically—because you think it stands for something. But it doesn’t stand for anything anymore than this chicken foot on my shoulder stands for something. We are all just drones in the service of abstractions. Though, I have to admit the prospect of a world with only me in it is one of my principal fantasies.”

“And you’ve spent your life trying to make that so.”

High Tide leaned forward. “No. No, not at all. I said that it would be interesting. But it surely would not be fun. That’s the thing about peace—it’s boring. The moment no one has anything to fight is the moment that everyone gets bored. And boredom breeds malice and malice breeds war. Peace cannot sustain itself, that’s just the fact.”

Opera considered. “So you wear that symbol as justification for the work that you do. The evil that you do.”

“In a tremendously reductive sense, yes, I suppose that’s true.”

-from the new book

There is a famous photograph—one that is ubiquitous on some of the more grotesque regions of the internet—of a young girl wrapped in the collapsed hood of a car. The photograph purports to be of the woman instants after she had committed suicide by jumping off the Empire State Building. The photo was widely circulated in the early 1960s, and made its photographer, Earl Livish, a brief celebrity in the world of photography.

The image, when you first see it, is macabre in its deceptiveness. Given the height from which she had fallen, our instincts tell us that there is no way that the woman should look like she does; instead of broken, deformed, bleeding, the woman instead may as well be sleeping peacefully, her legs crossed at the shin as if in repose, her chin arched up as if dreaming. In the background of the photo, over the horizon of the car hood, one can see the tops of onlooker’s heads, some turned away, and others turned to view the horror directly. When the image appears on the internet, whether on a page or circulated in a viral forward, there is usually a block of text accompanying it, proving once and for all that people would rather have a gruesome story than a true one, the vague and exploitative text block has become the standard narrative.

But, as often happens, the truth is much more interesting. What it true is that the photographer was named Earl Livish, and he indeed did come by a modicum of fame as a result of the photograph, but the story of the girl, the girl’s name, and even the location of the death, are all completely and utterly wrong. Conveniently wrong.

-from the new book