creepy voices
These have been an exciting couple of mornings. I set aside the short stories to work a little bit with my bridge-story manuscript. When I left it last time, I was frustrated in my exploration of the darkest elements — terrible things were happening to my characters and I knew why, but I couldn’t connect with the personality behind those things. I didn’t know my bad guy.
Then I got a terrific new book, Killer Year (a collection of short stories, edited by Lee Child). About three words into the first story (”Perfect Gentleman,” by Brett Battles), I figured out how to solve my problem: I needed to let my bad guy talk. Battles’ story starts in the way that always thrills me — a character talking directly to me:
You won’t like me.
Whatever. I’ve stopped caring.
I’m not a bad guy, but you’re not going to believe that. People like you never do.“Perfect Gentleman” by Brett Battles in Killer Year, edited by Lee Child
It’s always a bit of a thrill to figure out a story problem, especially when the answer seems to be the same every time: let them talk. I’ve got an ear for dialog so the best stuff happens when I get out of the way and let the people talk. I’d been trying to describe an unlikable guy and was getting absolutely nowhere; when I turned it around and let him talk directly to me, things started to happen.
I watch you watching me. I know where you are and what you look at and how long you stay. I’m pretty benign in my counter-surveillance, almost never go clicking back on you to see your old results, the annual reports to contributors, the half-marathon you ran or the job you mysteriously lost or the house you never sold or the son who pursued the career you always wanted. It doesn’t bother me that you leave only the tiniest crumble of a trace, nothing more than a whisper from a distant borough that expires almost immediately, that I can’t see your face; it’s enough to know where you are and that you can’t resist me. Now and again you will wonder; the very idea that I might know fills you with a sinking dread. I’ve seen it. I know when you quit, when you tried to stay away, and when you came back. I know your dirty little secret.
This direct first-person attack is an alternative to a passage that sounds something like this:
People don’t realize how much they leave behind, that’s best for me. Let’s just say it: nobody is anonymous. Somebody checks me out, I catch ‘em looking. At a tournament, waiting to go through security, riding some stinking shuttle to the rental car place, or out there on the Information Superhighway, doesn’t much matter. If they’re looking at me, I’m looking back. They get more of me than I get of them, it’s true, but I don’t need all that much to go on; that somebody is lookin’ at me tells me everything I need to know. Knew a guy once who’d say he had a woman “at hello,” and that’s exactly what I’m saying now…
It’s nearly impossible, I find, to be as immediately creepy as when the words out of the bad guy’s mouth are directed right at me. And after this week I’ll tell you one (benign) secret: it’s more fun than I thought, connecting with my inner bad guy.
January 26th, 2008 at 1:24 am
can’t wait.