Storytellersunplugged

Tonight, I am Frankenstein.

Not the monster, the doctor, Victor or Frederick depending on your context and your tolerance for that sort of thing. I am bolting together slabs of prose from different drafts, different versions, different takes on a novel. I am ripping great hunks of unnecessary verbiage out and consigning them to the offal heap or the cut file, whichever is nearer. I am creating a monster, so that when all the pieces are there, all the parts assembled, I can see what’s missing and give it the jolt that will in turn give it life.

The book, that’s the creature. Go James Whale or Mel Brooks or wherever you want with it, but this is not a golem, formed from seamless and smooth clay. It’s not a homunculus, generated spontaneously from the ingredients of midnight and nightmare. It’s a monster, a thing of shreds and patches that will, with luck, live.

I could take the metaphor further, of course. I could talk about what the book might be missing, whether it’s got no heart or no guts or whatever. I could discuss sneaking down to the literary graveyard and pillaging bits and pieces of other stories and other novel projects, cutting down the hanged man of a 50,000 word chunk of vampire novel and seeing if I could use any of the bits. But that would be silly, and overwrought, and frankly a little disgusting.

This is my third attempt at tackling this particular book, or more accurately the fourth. The first time it was fluff, a boogedy-boogedy monsterfest without enough monster, written with the underlying fear that since it was about video games, it would get me fired. So I wrote it soft and missed the point, and I understood that even as I was writing it. The best ghost stories, I find, involve the setting as character, and I’d lost that. It was just backdrop, the equivalent of an establishing shot at the beginning of a television episode, and it had lost its intrinsic importance to the real heart of what was going on.

The second time, it was jokey, a too-conscious attempt to distance it from its predecessor and to adopt the semantically null “edge” that people seem to think video games have, or have to have. The protagonist was, to be blunt, a jackass, and not someone either I nor the reader would have cared to spend time with.

The third time…let’s not even talk about that. There was a hotel room involved, and Canadian beer, and it was stillborn twelve thousand words in. Radical reconstructive surgery saved most of those, but they’re unrecognizable now, living under another name in another chapter. 

So now it’s take number four, and I’m ripping bleeding hunks out of the other three, performing surgery on the words to get them right and to make the seams invisible, and then seeing if it all hangs together.

I think it does now. I think I’ve got the target bracketed and have found the range. If nothing else, the speed of my work has picked up, usually a good sign. The distractions that tell me by their very existence that I’m barking up the wrong tree are less alluring. More, simply said, is getting done.

This may, of course, be another false alarm, another failed experiment to toss off the battlements or lock in the dungeon. But it feels different. It feels good. It feels like I’m getting there, at too-long last. As one slab of prose after another drops into place, it does so with the clang of finality, with the sense that it’s landing in the right place.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a plane to catch and a game to work on.

And most importantly, a book to write.

Finally.