Freakification

A modest proposal that may be totally wrong for you.

In earlier posts, I’ve mentioned this idea I call “freakification.” I thought I’d try to discuss this idea today, just to exploratorily put this idea on the table, to see what you all make of it.

But beware, or be wary - it’s not for everyone.

For many of us, the first assumption we make about fiction is that it is a representation of the world as we’ve found it, basically to scale (reasonable, realistic), the point of which is to somehow show what we believe or know: to represent a position that we are sure of before we began, or to put forth some theme, or stake out some position.

But what if, instead, the idea was to make, well…something, in prose, but we don’t know what it is.  Something whose purpose is to compel and surprise and delight the reader and ourselves in the process, that may, in fact, say something about life and our feelings about life – but almost incidentally; something that, until we’d written the piece, we didn’t know, something that is not easily reducible? 

That is: what if the purpose of the piece is exploratory, not expositional?.  We are trying to compel the reader through it, by trying to be – well, let’s not say what, exactly, we are trying to be.  We are trying to compel the reader through the piece by a method we ourselves must pioneer, tailored to our precise set of skills, whatever they turn out to be.

What if the idea behind editing was to eliminate the habitual shadings and inclusions that make a swath of prose sound more like other pieces of fiction and, in that way, leave behind a more jarring, percussive, but original surface?

What if we understood “editing” not to be “correcting” but “revealing” – revealing a new voice.  And not a voice that we are “aiming for” or that “sounds like us,” in which we “tell our truths,” but just one that is more interesting?  Harder to ignore? And maybe, seeing it on the page for the first time, this voice might perplex or trouble us because it is so much not like us (that is, not like that voice we were “trying to do” or aspired to do or thought we should do) but was its own, a whole new, inexplicable thing?

What if – and here’s where I want to tread lightly – but what if we were writing intentionally in such a way that would get our prose noticed?  And that was it?  What if we were trying to make our prose so distinctive (freaky) that it couldn’t be ignored.  In this mode, we’re showing off, making a bit of a scene, purposely departing from the normative, in order to get some damn attention.

Here, let me interrupt this stirring speech to say that this idea of freakification is exactly wrong, antithetical, nauseating, anathema to some writers.  It will speak to and appeal to a subset of you.  Many great writers…don’t do it. They don’t think this way at all.  They might find it gross, shallow, needy.

And other writers, whose main move is to make their prose freaky, make prose that is only freaky. 

But for some small subset of us, in which I’d include myself, the way to go deep is to try to get noticed.

Some of this “freakification” happens in the departures I allow a story to have from the quotidian or the real.  But this is all tied in with the language; often, the strangeness of the world has come directly from my desire to write unusual sentences. 

If you start a story, as I once did (“The Wavemaker Falters,” from my first book) with this: “Halfway up the mountain it’s the Center for Wayward Nuns, full of sisters and other religious personnel who’ve become doubtful”….you’ve already made a world, or suggested one, via the syntax.  It’s as if you’ve already doled out some essential DNA that the rest of the story (in its language) is going to have to honor. 

Opening sentences like these are dares that I throw down for myself: “OK, smart guy: make a world in which this sentence feels at home.” 

But, as far as I can recall my state of mind back then (circa 1990), I was mostly longing to write sentences that didn’t sound like anyone else’s.  I was….well, I was bent on freakifying my prose so that, when the editor of one of the small journals I was sending to back then started reading the story, she wouldn’t be able to stop reading.  And this wasn’t necessarily because she was saying, “Oh, this is so good.”  Maybe she kept reading because she was wondering, “What the hell is this crap?”

But, in my approach at that time, there was no sense of trying to write truthfully about some place or describe something I’d lived through. The task was to make a sentence that seemed new and then honor whatever “world” that sentence had started to create, with another freaky/unusual sentence, and so on. 

And once I had a few sentences like that in place, I found that my usual approach to extending a narrative also got messed with. “The writer is that person who, embarking on her task, has no idea what to do,” wrote Donald Barthelme in his wonderful essay,“Not Knowing” and, after a few freaky sentences, I had no idea what to do – no idea how to proceed. 

Which was a good thing, for me.

And actually, in that mode, the only “outline” I had was: make things worse for the first-person narrator. So those stories in CivilWarLand were, basically, a series of sentences that aspired to be freaky, and that made a pattern of “things are getting worse.”  And as those stories piled up, what distinguished one from the next was simply the way the main character responded once he or she had hit bottom.

And that was my book.

But running through it, from the first story to the last (written seven years or so later) was this desire to somehow carve out a new space for myself via the sound of the sentences.  I didn’t care if they were conventionally beautiful (they weren’t) – I just wanted for them to call attention to themselves.  That was my benchmark: is there anything new/jarring/undeniable happening at the sentence level?

What I’m calling “freakification” is, maybe, just a wild-ass cousin of regular old editing.  When we chisel a sentence down to its essence – that can be a form of freakification. 

Our earlier exercise, in which we were “allowed” fifty words to write a 200-word story was essentially a freakification exercise, as was the cutting exercise.  Both of these are designed to interrupt us in our habitual swerve to the type of sentences that we normally write – to disrupt our default voice, we might say.  (If nothing else, these exercises make us aware that we do, in fact, have a default voice – an expectation of how we’re supposed to sound that arises in the moment before we put something down on paper. It’s always floating there over our heads: our current notion of what literary writing sounds like.)

Before I stumbled on this freakification practice, I felt that to do something like this (to “write weird,” i.e., in a non-Hemingwayeseque or non-serious or distortive/exaggerative mode) would mean that I was giving up on meaning – that I was just goofing around/showing off.  (I also had a bit of a “young old man” bias against things that were too current or pop-culturish, and so tended not to read writers who were, you know, still alive.) 

But what I found, finally, was that, for me, the goofing around/showing off was the only way to mean something; it allowed me to move away from a certain somber, stolid, overdetermined quality that I, as a working-class kid, had always associated with Literature.  It brought me (and still does) into that state of “not knowing” that Barthelme wrote about. 

It is, really, a form of self-befuddlement…a way to shake off my too-conventional first thoughts and plans for stories, to allow my subconscious to get into the story and push aside the merely rational and throw a little joy around the place – a way of reminding myself that fun leads to literature, and that (for me, anyway) writing that is not fun (not necessarily FUN!!, but done, at least, in a playful spirit) is never going to become anything like literature.

We might also see freakification as a very intense imposition, on the sentence or phrase in question, of certain of our views on prose. And here, I don’t mean our public-facing views on prose – the things we might genially say in a writing group, the positions we hold on style, and so on.  I mean the things that get on our nerves about other people’s prose.  Or, of course, the things that light us up about other people’s prose.  I mean…those small, indefensible pet peeves we might feel about language, or the secret thrills we get at moments in a piece of writing, those little pulse-quickeners that are happening for reasons we can’t quite name.

We might, in this spirit, see “acquiring a style” as exactly equal to “radically doing what we like” or “being very proactive about allowing our unjustifiable likes and dislikes to shape our prose.”

Many writers I know - most, actually - are thoughtful and considerate and even deferential to the views and wishes of other people. All good traits, in a human being. But in this one zone of our lives (the artistic zone) we’re allowed to be wildly and indefensibly opinionated and self-indulgent (which is also called “having a style.”)

Sometimes finding our style involves honoring the little aversions we feel even if (especially if) we can’t rationalize or explain these.  We’ve done a version of this exercise here before but let me offer it again, with a little twist.

So:

Find a literary journal or anthology that has at least five stories in it.

Read the first page of each.

Rank these, with Best/Favorite being #1 and Worst/Least Favorite being #5.

Now…explain why you ranked them that way.  Be frank.  See if you can go back and track where the story first started to lose you (or attract you).  See if you can relate this to individual sentences, even phrases.

What does all of this tell you about your “quiet’ or “secret” preferences vis-à-vis prose style?

And now, the twist (or, we might call it, the activator):

Take the piece you ranked #5 (the Worst) and rewrite it – freakify it – in any way that would have caused you to move it up in your rankings.  Don’t give this a lot of thought – just mark that baby up.   Then retype it and keep working with it – subtract, add, do whatever you want.  Don’t worry about honoring the spirit of the original or anything like that.  Just make it sing, make it strange, make it so that any editor would have to at least pause and ask, “What the hell is this?”

One thing I might ask is that, when Commenting on this exercise, don’t mention the published stories or authors by name – we don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. 

But do Comment on how the process struck you.  That’s the interesting part – what, if anything, it taught you about your (quiet/private) relation to prose – about your “radical preferences.”

ALSO: some of you have asked if there’s a way to give a gift subscription to Story Club as a holiday gift - apparently, there is: