Monthly Archives: August 2011

For those who don’t know, The Silmarillion is basically J.R.R. Tolkien’s version of the Bible. (Okay, Tolkien was a Christian, so his version of the Bible is, you know, the Bible. But stay with me.)

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings make a lot of references to people, places and events from thousands of years before the story. Those references aren’t just extra details Tolkien thought up on the spot. They’re part of a vast mythology he constructed and revised throughout his life. After he died, his son Christopher gathered his notes and edited them into a cohesive story. That’s The Silmarillion.

All of which is a long way of saying that if you like Tolkien and you haven’t hit the big S yet, it’s  flippin’ sweet. Like the real Bible, it’s dry in places, has a lot of names to keep track of, and may be tough to get through on your first time reading. But it also features origin stories for Gandalf, Sauron, and, you know, the entire universe. So that’s a pretty good time.

As I read it, I pictured Tolkien as a kid, carefully setting up all his toys. You go here, you go there, this is your name, okay, and you’re related to this guy, and these two guys are friends. The beginning is like that. And then at a certain point he looks around and says “Everybody ready?” and goes RRREEAAAAAAAAAAAHHH and starts tramping around like Godzilla, kicking dudes over and knocking down cities. After that, the rest of the book is basically the whole world going to hell, over the course of a couple hundred pages.

I’m not gonna lie, it’s pretty cool. There are balrogs and dragons and everything.

I mention this because I think lots of writers fail here. They get the first part right: they set up their world with meticulous details, figure out the characters and what they’re like and who knows who, they draw maps, they establish backstory. But then they don’t do the second part. They lose their nerve and throw out a couple of softball conflicts, but never get in there and really start tearing shit up.

I’m not saying every story has to feature an apocalypse (although it would be nice), but you’ve gotta make it real. You’ve gotta put your characters into some real trouble, some trouble that seems impossible to handle, and then you’ve gotta throw out something else on top that makes the first trouble seem like a trip to Happy World. You’ve got to throw out some serious, Morgoth-level sadism.

(For those wondering: Happy World? Actually kind of a creepy place.)

So what’s up, hypothetical readers? Any Silmarillion fans in the hizzouse?

You’ve played Tetris, right? Tetris is strange because you can’t actually win. The blocks keep piling up, and no matter how good you are, they eventually reach the top of the screen. When you start a game of Tetris, the only question is how well you’re going to fail.

If you didn’t understand that – if you thought there was some way to Win At Tetris – you might be disappointed by that failure. But if you realize that there are only varying degrees of failure, you may feel less frustrated when you get to Game Over…and, more importantly, you may be more likely to play again.

Writing is like that. It is almost impossible to Win At Writing – to successfully translate any piece of your soul into a sequence of letters. Novelist Hari Kunzru talks about “the disappointment that this finite collection of words is all that remains of your infinitely rich idea.” I’ve heard many writers describe finishing a novel (or poem or story) as “giving up” – that is, you reach a point where you just decide to stop fiddling with it, because it’s never going to be perfect.

This built-in failure is a daily, visceral experience for me, because it happens every time I write a blog post. When I’m finished, I always read over what I’ve written and think, well, that’s okay. That’s not really it, not quite the glowing spark that was cartwheeling around in my brain, but it’ll do. I’m not bitter or frustrated about it. It’s just a thing that happens. Words fail me. More generally: words fail. But they do the best they can.

The thing is, there do seem to be occasional exceptions to this rule. You do sometimes read something and think, yeah, that’s it, he absolutely nailed that. It’s hard for me to imagine a more perfect expression of entropy than “Ozymandias,” or a better image of unraveling society than “The Second Coming.” I’ve even had that experience myself, sometimes, of writing something and actually thinking, that was exactly what I was trying to say.

I think, though, that this dead-on perfection can only occur in poems and short passages. Anything as long as a novel is bound to fail at some level. So maybe writing novels is like Tetris, whereas poems are more like Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts. Really hard to beat, but theoretically possible.

I’ve never actually played Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts. I kind of want to do that now.

All right, that’s all I’ve got. Have a good day. Fail better.

Maybe you’ve heard this before: Ernest Hemingway’s friends were all like, “Hey, I bet you can’t write a complete story in just six words,” and he’s all “Oh it’s on now,” and he comes up with the following:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

And then his friends were like “Oh no he didn’t.” But he totally did.

Of course, Hemingway wasn’t the first to attempt the six-word story. Julius Caesar beat him to the punch by two thousand years:

I came, I saw, I conquered.

Now, you might argue that the Hemingway story is probably apocryphal. Or you might point out that Caesar’s story was only three words in the original Latin, and may be apocryphal too. Whatever. Point is, a lot of folks seem pretty taken with this whole business of writing a story in six words.

Well, listen up kids, you’re in Buckley’s world now. I’m going to tell a complete story in just five words. In fact, I’m going to tell three stories in five words each, just because I can.

You ready for this? Let’s get it done:

1.
Kill me again. Dare you.

2.
Lathered. Rinsed. Repeated. Still single.

3.
infinitely looping stories are like

Oh. Oh, yeah. That felt good.

All right, hypothetical readers, what’s up now? Ready to boycott The Sun Also Rises now that you’ve tasted the genuine magic? Want to punk Hemingway with a five-word story of your own? Going to punk me with a four-word story? Leave it in the comments!