But in the dream, no one would believe me. I’d describe how I was seeing whatever it was out of the corner of my eye. I’d see it, turn . . . and it wouldn’t be there.
Finally, in the logic of the dream, there was one—or possibly more—person I was trying to convince of my sanity, and I did this by standing under a street light in the middle of a sidewalk, screaming at them that I would show them!
And then, in the dream, I turned my back on my friend(s) and took a step.
Into Death.
It was Death who had been stalking me. Him I’d seen out of the corner of my eye.
It was a horrific dream. Probably the worst nightmare I’ve had in recent memory.
But what I remembered more than just the dream was that when I woke up, I wasn’t screaming. I didn’t yell. I didn’t cry out. I didn’t do any of that.
I whimpered.
One, terrified whimper as I stepped into the chill of Death incarnate.
Now, being a budding writer, my first thought after reassuring myself that I was, in point of fact, not dead was, “This would make a great story.” I jotted down as much of the dream as I could remember.
I didn’t write the story right then, though. No, I wanted the story to be as perfect as possible, and the only way it could remain perfect was for me never to write it.
Logic. It’s a bitch.
I overcame that, eventually. After listening to an episode of the I Should Be Writing podcast (hosted by the multi-talented Mur Lafferty) in which Mur talked about having finally written her ‘inspired by a dream’ story that she had put off writing to make sure she never sullied it by actually trying to write it, I sat down and, in one sitting, wrote about 3000 words of the story. I had several false starts. What POV should I use? Where does the story start? How do I make that whimper scary? I eventually realized that to make it truly horrifying I needed to tell it from another POV than the protagonist. Enter the friend.
I wrote it, workshopped it past the Fountain Pen group, and then set it aside for a while.
Recently, I picked it back up, intent on making it better. So I edited it, making the dialog cleaner, cutting out unnecessary words, etc.
I ran it past the Lawrenceville Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers group (seriously, guys, we need a shorter name), and got a lot of very helpful commentary.
Part of that commentary was that the ending I had written just didn’t work for several people. I’d heard the same thing from the Fountain Pen group as well, but I was convinced I could force it to work.
During the critique, one or two people offered some ideas on how the ending could work better. And I really liked a couple of those.
Over the last couple of weeks, those have been percolating through my head. And last night while driving to the Fountain Pen meeting from work, a gruesome, horrible ending popped into my head—poing!—based on one that someone else had given me during their critique.
I think I finally have something that could work. That I could . . . submit?
All I have to do, now, is write it. Heh.
Now, what does this have to do with the title of this post?
Way back in 1916, a British author and literary critic named Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch published a book called On the Art of Writing. It was a collection of his lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge in 1913-1914. The twelfth and final lecture is called “On Style.” In it, he talks about first what style is not, and gives an example. Then he says the following:
Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. [emphasis his]
We still quote this, today, although it’s often erroneously attributed to other writers. I hear it all the time.
The way it’s usually used is when an author has written a particularly clever turn of phrase or bon mot or whatever, they often will try to keep it during the editing/rewriting process because they like it and not because it serves the story. This ultimately hurts their writing.
So, “Murder your darlings.”
My darling in this story that I’ve preserved through all the edits has been that the protagonist turns and walks into Death with a whimper, and disappears. The guys in the Lawrenceville Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers (Pen-acles? The Write Stuff? Wordniks?) made me finally confront this, and I’m going to murder my darling.
<sharpens axe> Heeeere, darling! Come to papa! He has a present for youuuuu! <insert evil chuckle here>
I found this to be an easy read. The story kept me entertained, turning pages to find out what was going to happen next. I enjoyed the Bitchun Society, and how seamlessly Doctorow blended both the high-tech narrative and the deep Disneymania into the story in a supportive way. The plot depended on it, but didn’t get overwhelmed by it. So the exposition was handled well, I thought.
Setting the story as a conflict between two teams of hereditary Disney employees bent on making the park a better experience for all involved made the story simultaneously more approachable and more obscure. By setting the action against a backdrop that is essentially the same in whatever far-flung future Doctorow has imagined as it is today, it gives him a familiar anchor point to highlight how different things are. At the same time, however, for those of us who haven’t been to Disney in a long time or who are unfamiliar with the various rides featured in the story (I have never seen the Hall of Presidents or the Haunted Mansion because both have always been closed for maintenance during my visits to both Disneyworld and Disneyland.), it is more than a little frustrating.
The problem I had with the book at the beginning was that nothing was really at stake. For anyone. The park was not going anywhere (as in “static”), and all the changes being made were done to preserve the experience for the visiting public. So no matter how it came out, nothing would truly change. Sure, maybe some of the characters would be inconvenienced, but it would be just that–an inconvenience.
Julius, the main character, goes on and on at some length about how death–even his own murder–is not that big a deal. Serious, debilitating health problems–such as, say, murder–are easily fixable: just clone a new body, make a backup, and restore into the new body, better than the previous one. With multiple lifetimes to live, humans tend to lose the urgency that makes every minute of our lives precious, and this is nicely portrayed throughout.
When Julius loses all of that about halfway through the book, this is when it “picked up” for me. Now we have a character who genuinely has something to lose. His every moment becomes precious because he can’t back up, so if he renews, he’ll lose a large chunk of his life, including the last year of the life of one of his best friends. This underlying story was what kept me turning the page, wondering how it was going to be resolved.
I didn’t really expect the revelation at the end (the Whodunnit), but it made sense within the framework of the story, and didn’t betray the characters’ personalities. I thought Doctorow handled it well.
The reason I gave this three stars instead of four (I did really enjoy it while I was reading it) is that the ending…just sort of petered out. Again, nothing was really at stake. Once Julius agreed to be restored if anything happened to him and forgave his murderers, there just wasn’t any reason to care anymore what happened to him. Which may be exactly what Doctorow had in mind. Julius moved on, Disneyworld went back to whatever passes for “normal” in the Bitchun Society, and the story ends. What eventually happens to everyone other than Julius is left unrevealed, and as a reader, that didn’t bother me.
Because nothing is at stake for any of them.
My main dilemma right now is trying to decide whether this story was Utopian or dystopian. I could go either way.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow