Everywhere, the paint is brown and drying. The walls are thinning, and the plot continues to gain substance, solidify into some turbid sap, something viscous, something akin to water, something like skin on the surface, all too close to drowning. He hates lavender and he hates butterflies. But there is nothing else to tell.
I tried to talk the last couple weeks about narrative voice, but all I can remember now are the faces of the voices. One was pinched, pained, huddled around a fire and talking in a singsong manner about the people that continued to come and go from his little palaver. One stared with eyes that reflected what she wrote, when she wrote in fire. She never sang. One had lost everything dear and I didn’t even know it. I never talked about it. I’m not even sure I thought it. But when I finally did, I realized why he hates lavender and butterflies.
As I was sitting here thinking about the nature of plot, the best way to write a halfway decent plot, that motive force of all-consuming creation, I found myself dancing around the edges of something, like some idiot moth, afraid to get too near to the fire, afraid of what it would illuminate, of the nature of the characters, of myself and my thoughts about those characters. Plot defines fake people just like real people, with the full force of the nature of life itself.
A man is a hero one day and a villain the next, and can be so (and often is) with absolutely no change in character. No change in judgment values, in cognitive reasoning or in emotional upbringing. The world just turns. And leaves him there. In the darkness. Or maybe in the light. Both at once. The most intriguing character traits, persona aspects, are leaves before the winds of change. Plot is change. Plot overpowers its characters. Steals their agency? Gives it to me?
But, ah, plot also overpowers the author. As Gardner points out, “the writer is more servant than master of his story.” (192) When one of them, one of those characters, said to me, “I saw three years die and wither in a moment defined by the thoughts swimming behind a living eye. I saw everything change again in these winter months in ways that only apophenia can elucidate. I saw her disappear. And now I can’t stand the smell of lavender. And now I completely appreciate the fickle, flighty nature that earned her her half-cynical, half-sentimental pet name,” I couldn’t help but think, “Well, why did you cheat on her? What did you expect to happen? You were living on borrowed time.”
That was what he said to me, in as many words, before he died – far less eloquently honestly (the saying, not the dying); after all, he was only a plumber – before he overdosed, and left a daughter to be raised by her mother. And this is what I thought about what he said to me, beyond what I replied: “He was really talented. And he never saw that. Never saw it in himself. He just went to clubs and bars, never drinking an ounce, always sober enough to drive home, and he drove home often because he played every night, like it was all he ever really had, even though what he really had was a day job and a daughter, one he loved enough that he was at home and awake to make her breakfast every morning before sticking his hands in shit to help pay for her happiness when happiness is equivalent to a smartphone.” This is what I thought.
He never wondered that maybe the pet name made her angry, his ex- I mean. That she thought he had a lot of nerve to talk about her being flighty when he had slept with Coraline, “that fucking skank in pediatrics?!” He never considered that his offenses were as egregious as hers, his ex- I mean. He had prayed that she would let it go. He finally convinced himself he thought she had. He was probably wrong to do so.
He had a lot of problems. But he’s not the problem I’m dealing with anymore. This is all exposition diagrammed. His daughter is the problem, his daughter that he left behind in an irrational moment of absolute, stark, utter regret over the choices he had made in his life. His daughter that loved her dad and in many ways hates him now, and hates her mother too for some reason she can’t quite understand herself yet, and maybe never will.
What she doesn’t hate are some random lyrics from some random Pearl Jam song that drifted into his head through some open window and then wouldn’t leave, acting like the worst kind of house guests, gently whistling insanity that sounds plausible. And not just plausible. But easy. Easy insanity. Plausible irrationality. Comforting thoughts warming the mind against a heartless reality. How could she hate that? She doesn’t know that. She just knows that her dad killed himself when she was ten years old, and left her a free ticket to be fucked up in the head for life. She doesn’t know about the song that became a metaphor that floated around in his own head, torturing him until he pried it out with pills.
The days get shorter still. With so much more to do in each. Gotta pack it in, make time where you can. Is that how you make plot? I think so. Self-rising? The story could go in a number of directions, and start a number of places. Dealing with the surviving family’s relationships, kicked off at the funeral. Dealing with the girl’s memories of her dad, as she shoots up, and then takes a drag. Why not both? It’s all a little rough, but it seems to get the ball rolling. Inertia (energia?) and gravity should take care of the rest. Surely that’s how plot works. Surely.