Lack of Vision

Oh great, he’s coming back.

I wish he could actually see me when he opens that computer, because if he could he would see the biggest, most sarcastic eyeroll he has ever seen. But even if he could see it, the moron wouldn’t know how to describe it. He would just sit there for twenty minutes trying to come up with some new catchy way to describe a look of contempt.

Three weeks ago he started working on me. Three weeks, and so far I’m not much farther along than when he first sat down and began sketching me out. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been quite a few different variations of myself. But every time it seems like he and I are getting somewhere, he changes his mind and back to the drawing board we go.

Just to give you some context, I’m not the first victim of this guy’s inability to see something through. I heard that last year he spent a month and a half trying to come up with something revolving around a Civil War soldier. First, the guy was a Confederate. But apparently writer-boy over there couldn’t wrap his sensibilities around creating a solid character that believed in the cause of secession, so he decided to make it a Union soldier instead. He decided to stick Private John D. Montgomery, as he came to be known, into some obscure battle in Tennessee sometime during the middle of the war. This guy literally spent five whole days poring over each and every battle fought in Tennessee during the Civil War to try to find the battle that “felt right”. He then proceeded to write some rambling narrative about Private Montgomery being wounded and losing a leg. Montgomery makes the choice not to go back home, but to live out his days in Nashville instead, where he plays banjo on the street for money and eventually redeems himself by becoming one of the founding acts on the Grand Ol’ Opry.

Now I’m no literary critic, but I think that Private Montgomery had the makings of a good character. But after reading back over the piece five or six different times, wannabe-Faulkner here found Montgomery to be “flat”, and sent him off to the recycling bin. It was just an awful waste, and I felt so bad for Montgomery. He really thought he was heading somewhere.

Then there was the case of the “old church”. After reading Daniel Mason’s North Woods, this guy got it in his head that he wanted to write a story with the main character being a white clapboard chapel that sat next to a creek in this small village in Maryland. The story was supposed to revolve around what the little church had seen from the time that it was built by colonial settlers, up until it was destroyed in the 1970s. Again, a great concept! But just like Private Montgomery, he just couldn’t find a way to be satisfied. This time, it was the demise of the church that really messed things up. He wrote an ending where the church caught fire and burned to the ground. He wrote an ending where a tornado blew the thing to smithereens. He wrote an ending where developers bulldozed the church down to build a subdivision. He even wrote an ending that veered into the absurd, where the devil opened up a chasm at the base of the church and swallowed it into the fiery pits of hell. I don’t want to spread rumors, but it’s possible that he may have been drinking when he came up with that one. Either way, the little white church met the same fate as Private Montgomery. Trashed. Erased. Deleted.

Do you see how he’s sitting at his desk right now? How he’s slumped down in his chair, chewing on his lower lip, hair all frazzled and four days worth of stubble? You can almost feel the desperation and complete lack of direction radiating out of his face, can’t you? That is the same exact look that he’s had any other time he’s decided to ditch a character. And if that’s the case, then it’s bad news for me.

You see, when he first sat down and started working on me, he had this rough idea that I would be the main character in a story based around this great aunt that he remembers from when he was a kid. From what I can gather, she was quite the lady! A child of the depression, she escaped the family farm, became a nurse, and married a small-town boy that went to Europe to fight the Nazis. They had a son after the young man made it home, she became very well respected in her field, and ended up teaching nursing for many years at the community college in their little town. She was so well thought of that when she passed at a ripe old age, she was mourned by most everyone in their community. I may be biased, but it seems to me like there is plenty there to work with! But apparently Mr. Hemingway Jr here thinks that she (or I) need a little bit more pizazz to be seen as “interesting”.

See, that is exactly what this guy’s problem is. He doesn’t understand that not everyone has to be some over-the-top figure who rides in on the back of an elephant or something. There is plenty to find intriguing and dramatic in the everyday world, in the everyday life. He just needs to open his eyes to it! I could be the kind of character that scores of people flock to. I could be a reminder of the good ol’ days, of the smiling faces of their childhoods. Let me live, man!

Wait, did you see that? How he bolted upright in his chair and clapped his hands together? That typically means an idea or tweak is coming. Yep…yep, he’s coming toward the keyboard, and with a quickness! I’m up, maybe today is the day he gets his head out of his ass and makes a legitimate character of me!

********

Well, I knew I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.

He completely changed me into someone else! Great aunt so-and-so, the incredible nurse with the amazing life story just wasn’t good enough for that Dr. Frankenstein idiot. He threw her out and made me into a showgirl in a 1980’s New York strip club that falls in love with a hit-man for the Gambino crime family! He’s currently working up some harebrained plot where the mobster and I stumble upon a couple Russian guys in a late-night diner after my shift, things go sideways and my new mobster boyfriend does away with the Russians in a huge shootout. As we make our getaway, we snag a briefcase one of the guys was carrying that ends up having a bunch of Soviet secrets inside, and mobster Romeo and I find ourselves racing the KGB through the streets of New York to get the secrets to the Feds in exchange for a start at a new life outside the mafia.

You’ve got to be kidding me. I was literally a ready-made Wendell Berry protagonist, and now I’m a third-rate Tom Clancy floozy. The only saving grace to the whole situation is that I know that this won’t last. He will get a week or two into this little escapade and end up either rewriting me again, or ditching me for something completely different. I even heard him muttering to himself an hour or two ago that he thinks that possibly he should take up poetry instead of fiction.

Yeah, because that’s going to work out a lot better. If he can’t describe an eyeroll in prose, I sure as hell don’t think verse will help.