November 11th, 2019 - The Flier

Dear TNY,

I’m in the mountains in Western Colorado and fuck is “The Flier” a disappointment compared to this sunrise or the Jackson Pollack that slipped out of me into the toilet bowl this morning.

I’ll get the good out of the way.  Something happens in this story.  Not only is there a character that flies, there is also a domestic violence situation that is resolved.  Yay!  Surface conflict!  Now, when I say that I don’t mean plot.  I mean just the basic building blocks of a story that create a little tension in the reader.  Things that happen keep the story moving forward so that the writer has the opportunity to develop the characters, which is the most important part of storytelling.  We don’t, as humans, naturally display empathy toward a plot or other story mechanics.  We do display empathy toward believable characters.  So it’s nice to see when there are basic storytelling devices in the writing. Exquisite examples of surface conflict leading to character development are “Greenleaf” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor. Breathtaking, especially the latter.

Oh, this story, “The Flier”, had a lot of scene as well.  That was good, too.  The amount.  Not the actual scenes.  They were bad.  Very, very, very fucking bad.

Now the bad.  I was going to count all the characters in this story.  I thought I had it in me.  In the first sentence we have four characters.  Then a few sentences later we pick up two more.  Then one more right after that.  And then it gets fucking bonkers with characters.  That would be difficult to handle as a writer from the standpoint that I mentioned above, that being that the characters should be fully developed such that empathy can occur.  I think any writer would struggle to do that with so many characters showing up so quickly.  But, not to worry here because none of the characters in this story developed anything close to lifelike realism and only existed to further the writer’s plan for this story.  This story wasn’t about any of these characters at all (I am pretty sure it was a DV agenda story, but even that was done poorly so I can’t really say), so I imagine it was easy for the writer to keep throwing characters in as there was never a plan to make them anything but cardboard. 

Just a quick note on that, TNY, as I am fully aware that you have lost your way with regard to storytelling.  It is not incumbent on the reader to just believe.  The writer has to do the work.  Just throwing people in the story, that doesn’t make them real.  It is not my job, as the reader, to make this story believable. The reader is not some dumb jackoff plebe, either. Don’t throw this shit at me and say, “It’s literature!” It’s not my job to make into something it’s not.  That is, in fact, your job TNY.  Imagine a world in which you read this and understood what is plain to the rest of the non-elitists out here, that this story is lackluster in almost every way, and you recognized those things, and then you asked the author to fix them or else you wouldn’t publish this work.

My other beef with this story is that it takes a perfectly good premise, that someone can suddenly fly in a world of none fliers, and makes that premise so fucking banal that it’s almost unfinishable.  Why did I finish?  Well, I like stories like this.  I think Murakami, who is very hit or miss IMHO, could have done great things with it.  George Saunders could have crushed it.  Or Coover.  That motherfucker would have blown it out of the water.  Barry Hannah.  Barthelme.  Padgett Powell.  Kafka.  Nabokov.  Dave Eggers.  Junot Diaz.  Fuck, he would have slayed it.  Not T.C. Boyle, though.  Or Karen Russel (Oh no, I just threw up in my mouth a little).  Annie Dillard or Jo Ann Beard could have make a wicked little story out of this.  See, all of these people (Russel excluded) understand this type of story.  Hell, this isn’t even an original idea.  I’ve had this fucking idea.  You know what my MC would have been?  A window washer.  Because he couldn’t handle the cold from flying at speeds and altitude and he couldn’t lift much while flying so saving people was out of the question. He would have been a middling window washer struggling to handle a bucket.  The story, instead, would have been about his substance abuse problems and his struggle with everyone knowing he could fly and making fun of him because he wasn’t a superhero.  There would be a real Boogie Nights vibe, like in that scene where Dirk is jerking off for money and then gets beat up and robbed.  Yeah, man.  That was my idea.  But that’s not really my kind of story.  So I didn’t write it.  Regardless, this piss-poor attempt at a superpower story is…oof.  It doesn’t know who it’s about.  It’s not about any of the characters…wait, I already said that.  Fuck.  What was I saying? Oh yeah. Squandered.  This was an opportunity squandered.  Maybe take the time to read The Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns.  Fuck, watch The Boys.  Get it through your thick skulls that there is a whole world of emotional turmoil that comes along with superpowers that is also shared with regular ass humans.  And that these powers are a great mirror for our own humanity and weaknesses.  And then the story should display those things through characterization.  FUCK I STARTED TALKING ABOUT CHARACTERS AGAIN. 

I’ll quit.  You aren’t listening anyway.

Nick

Hold up.  I’m not done.  I wanted to mention that the MC’s time jumps were totally fucking annoying, especially near the end during the poorly executed DV scene.  He’s all over the map.  There’s this idea of consistency.  I know, I know.  You never print anything fucking consistent, TNY.  The POV should stay constant and the place in the future in which the character is speaking back to us from should stay constant.  In the latter case, it seemed like the MC was just past the DV event, but he shifted around erratically in how data was given right in the middle of the police intervention.  What it felt like was poorly written, after-the-fact, information insertion that had not been edited to make it seem like…well, professional level writing. A story should be a fucking arrow straight for the reader’s heart. Not some meandering, unedited musing.  Now, did the author intentionally choose to do this?  What effect would it elicit in the reader?  Was it designed to sound horribly disjointed, making the scene seem more disjointed to the reader?  If so, I will go back to a statement I made a long time ago in a letter to you:  You cannot use intentionally poor writing to convey a message to the reader because the reader is just going to see poor writing. Bad writing isn’t a device. It’s just bad writing. The more fit the reader, the more they see through that shit. 

Okay, I’m really done.

Nick

Just kidding.  One more fuck you.

…Fuck you, TNY…

Nick