April 27th, 2020 - Bedtime Story
Dear TNY,
Just cruised “Bedtime Story” and I’m glad that it’s over.
The story isn’t bad, per se. It’s just…not good. This is the kind of story I’d expect to see as a first year submission in sub-top-ten rated MFA workshop. It’s not done. There are good things in it (e.g. tension). But there are some major mechanical mistakes that require serious retooling.
So why is it in your magazine? Ah yes. Cronyism. Elitist, cliquish bullshittery. A lack of understanding of an artform you purport to publish. Your inability to tell an established author to go back to the drawing board.
All well covered in previous letters.
One of my biggest questions is…why is Ezra black? I don’t mean that in the sense of “why is anyone black”? No, why is that detail important? The author has a near infinite well of details to include and exclude, each for a purpose. So, the two times his race is brought up in this story, what are they adding? I count the two times as the explanation of his funding for school and when Meg didn’t do what white girls normally do (black via inductive reasoning). So, why? It wouldn’t be a stretch for any type of affluent-degree-wielding family to be skeptical of an art degree, so he could have been anyone. Colorless in that regard. Same effect. And with Meg, if you remove race from that interaction (which I did, by the way, because the references to race were so out of place in this that I chose to disregard them as they added nothing to the characterization and seemed like authorial intrusion), then one can see cliché pasts for any woman, not some shit that seems to be telling us, the reader, these things only happen to white women who fall for Ezra. Which is, you know, fucking inaccurate as all hell. In short, I don’t care what color anyone is in literature or life. But in literature, that color has to matter (add something) or it’s in the way. So pick one. Make it matter to the characterization or fucking get rid of it.
The other major issue in this story is the usage of ex post facto writing. Now, normally I’d say deus ex machina, but nothing is resolved here because it’s a typical TNY story where it’s meant to be “artistic” or…stupid. So I’m going with ex post facto, as in shit that was written after the fact to make it clear to the reader that the author didn’t want to or didn’t know how to solve a lack of understanding up above in the document, but felt such conviction on said section that they were adamant it go unchanged, so they explain the shit later and expect the reader to be fine with that.
The biggest one of these is the middle third of the story which transitions from third person limited to third person omniscient with no explanation or section break, but then later is casually explained as that’s how the main character imagined it happened, like that’s an okay thing to do in good narrative storytelling.
Another one is how she can’t remember the Julia Roberts event at the beginning of the story and it takes 6000 words to establish that might be because it was Meg.
Oh, and how about this tape that we are shown as the reader and have the very same questions about immediately, that later on the therapist also has, but we aren’t given the information why the main character knew upon the first second that it wasn’t art until the very end of the story?
It feels like the author intended the story to end exactly where it does. Which just contributes more to this idea that information was given in the wrong order to engineer that. Instead of coming full circle, we just keep falling into knew information which explains confusing shit from earlier in the story. So it’s not so much a sense of discovery, because the author already knew where we were going, as it is moments in which to catch our breath and reorient ourselves to the narrative, which is disjointed and awkward. Which, so that I’m clear, is bad storytelling.
Why not show the main character in the bedroom scene at the beginning going back (via memory) to making a sex tape (queued off by Ezra’s voice, as it happens so late in the story) and then go through a bunch of the garbage that was in the middle (sticking to one fucking POV this time) such that when the main character discovers the tape, and we, the reader, see its contents, we experience the horror along with her? Oh, because that would be literature. Storytelling. Art. And it would betray the ending the author engineered to happen as it did and would, instead, allow the story to tell itself. We wouldn’t want to do that, TNY, now would we? That would disrupt this whole “we’re fucking up literature and the literary audience, thereby depriving the world of much needed empathy” thing you have going.
Okay, done.
Man, not really. The shit about Christina at the beginning didn’t contribute anything to characterization because it was confusing as to who was whom, relationally, in a time/space sense, especially considering the Julia Roberts/loss of memory junk.
Last one, for reals. It’s rare to see a story that has so much sexual tension built in (especially three-way tension) squander it because of poor storytelling mechanics. It’s like a chef that has some of the rarest and most delicious ingredients available and they mix them with off-brand box mac and cheese and serve with a bag salad that’s been dressed with leftover generic ranch packets from the hot foods section at the grocery store.
Done.
Nick
