January 20th, 2020 - Visitor
Dear TNY,
It’s Monday once more and I wrapped up “Visitor”.
And I have to say, all the scene work was a nice change of pace. There was notable tension, both between the MC and the visitor and the MC and Joel. That was good to see as opposed to your normal, no-conflict, summary-driven, ass rain. Thanks.
I’d like to pay a compliment to the writer because of this line:
What no one tells you is that sometimes, even if you’ve figured yourself out, you’ll have no one around you to share what you’ve found.
That’s…fuck man. That’s what this life is about. Revelations that you never get to fucking share and/or no one cares. Christ is that the truth. I was watching Dave Chappelle’s acceptance speech of the Mark Twain Prize the other day, and he was talking about the truth. That he would fight anyone who said comedy wasn’t the truth. I think all Art is the truth. Not the bumf you usually publish, TNY. But real Art. That it has to be the truth, laid bare before us, so plain and simple that it cannot be anything other than the truth yet none of us realized it before. This sentence is just that. Thank you.
So I wasn’t really moved by this story. I read it pretty easily. I didn’t get mad. I was definitely paying attention. So those are all wins. But I think the major distraction from a deeper emotional attachment was that one detail wasn’t clear. So, the dad promised that he would see the lover before either of them died. Fact one. The lover had never been on a plane before. Fact two. The dad’s bags were packed near the door right before he died. Fact three. And the Asian man said the dad kept his promise, even if he never came back to the island. Fact four. Note here that I assume the first love’s name in the computer was this Asian dude’s name. That’s neither here nor there. So, we have the dad’s bags packed near his death, but the Asian never left the island before, so the dad must have gone to see him to keep the promise, but the Asian said that he didn’t come back to the island but still kept his promise…are we to believe that the dad was going to go but died before he could and that the Asian considers this a promise kept? Or that maybe they both met somewhere else that wasn’t on the island but the Asian had to take a boat to do? Or maybe they did GChat like old pros and that was good enough (but why bags?). So, TNY, you can see that the existence of this line of questioning creates a logistical problem in this reader’s head. That problem casts disbelief on the scenario. Which I’m thinking about more than the ending of the story. Which is bad, right guys? Because any time the “facts” don’t make sense, then the reader can’t reconcile the reality, and they are tossed out of the narrative. Meaning the narrative doesn’t work.
I also thought the first sentence was trash. It should have been “I almost didn’t answer because I knew it wasn’t my fuck buddy.” And that’s still a double negative. Maybe “I knew it wasn’t my fuck buddy, so when someone knocked on my door at X time, I hesitated to answer.” The way it’s written now seems like it could have been his fuck buddy, but unexpected. Which makes the reader think that maybe the person at the door is the MC’s fuck buddy. I hate this kind of shit because it’s basic. If you can’t construct a clear sentence, how can you expect to construct a complex narrative with real fucking characters in it?
Anyway, I’m kaput.
Nick
