I learned something today.
That makes it an off day, since usually I learn more than one thing. I might be lying: I didn’t actually do an inventory of all that I learned this day. Some of the learning was too prosaic. I learned, again, second kick of the mule, to double check settings when working with capricious software. I learned, again, to think twice and count to ten before going off half cocked. I understand that old men don’t have much tolerance for truth. Is there any truth in “Finnegans Wake?” Is there? Have you read it? Have you tried to? I think Joyce gets the respect he gets because he wrote unreadable books that smell like teen spirit. Or like Irish leather. Or something. Who reads it? Next to no one. So let’s set old men aside and take a look at “what’s charting,” as the music business ‘how-tos’ once suggested.
Well, on the cynical side is “Hunger Games,” with its heroine Katniss. I was chortling over the Harvard Lampoon parody of the same, “Hunger Pains,” with its heroine ‘Kantkiss Neverclean.’ Del called from Texas to say she bought “Hunger Games” at the airport. I had told her that everyone from Stephen King to THE INTERN said ‘you couldn’t put it down.’ THE INTERN charted its alternation of dialogue, internal conflict, external conflict, action, and internal narrative:
[2 sentences establishing Katniss’ present position in a treetop]
[1 line dialogue Katniss overhears from treetop]
[2 sentences describing what Katniss sees.]
[internal conflict: Katniss questions Peeta’s motives/integrity]
[action based on internal conflict: Katniss decides not to trust Peeta]
[action: Peeta moves out of earshot, Careers discuss him]
[2 lines overheard dialogue]
[3 short sentences showing Katniss’ internal reaction to said dialogue]
[a little more dialogue]
[action: Peeta returning]
[3 sentences dialogue]
[action: Careers moves away, Katniss changes her position in tree.]
[internal conflict: if Peeta really is on the “bad” side, why hasn’t he told the Careers about Katniss’ secret skill?]
[action: birds fall silent and hovercraft appears to take away dead body.]
etc.
From this, I can think you can imagine the very slender difference between the parody and the million selling product. We are not scoffing. We admire both parodist and instigator. We wonder if we could cop it. We’re not saying we can’t. We want to. Katpiss needs to learn to make riveting narrative, and Katpiss doesn’t care what it takes (or who has to be studied) to do it. We’re rejecting anyone who has not sold a million copies.
But there is another notion swirling around in the writer-in-training brain. The idea is that it’s next to impossible to get anything published in the New Yorker unless you’re Alice Munroe or Woody Allen. Woody Allen needs a retool. Woody, I loved you for your ‘acres of wheat, cream of wheat’ (“Love and Death”) but, let’s face it, ‘you have a dead shark on your hands.’ (But Scarlett on your set, so WTF?) Alice Munroe… hmm. What did he/she write that I remember? Dunno. Anyway, the New Yorker has been publishing fiction by the “20 under 40.” (Twenty writers under age forty that they think are clever enough, convoluted enough, literary enough, infra-dig enough, monomaniacal enough, revolutionary enough, profligate, insouciant, eccentric, ethnic, exotic, esoteric enough to have their shit published in the magazine, making them famous for life… unless of course they come unglued. Unglued can happen in a New Yorker pick. Check your literary history. Dorothy, Dorothy, can you hear me, Dorothy?
Yet they published in the current (March 19th) issue a story by Rivka Galchen (one of the 20 under 40) that thumbs its nose at the rules of story writing. How so? Well, the writer sites will tell you to mind ‘p’s and ‘q’s. Get your dialogue properly formatted within quotes with the commas within those. Many maddening rules apply. They do not apply to Galchen.
Also, and more basically, the idea of what story telling is, and how it’s done, are bent for Galchen. She does not ‘show, but not tell.’ She makes a point of telling much of the time. She’s performing an analytical accountancy, more or less in the style of a Wall Street Journal article, about her relations with her mother. That’s the high concept, and I wish I’d thought of it.
It would be far easier, and far more lucrative, to come up with Katniss (or even, Kantkiss). Easier and lucrative. Note that well, my friends. Note that well. I might do a bit of literary slumming. One does need an agent, after all. To get an agent, one needs to have sold at least something. But the idea that one can be as breezy as Collins is not that hard to imagine. All it takes is a good idea. I’m not likely to do YA. I’m more likely to do what Konrath does: apocalyptic, dystopian, extrapolative malarky. Huzzah!
On the other side of that, however, I like the Rivka Golchen rule bending license. Once selling in the millions, as Stephen King has learned, it’s still hard to crack the New Yorker. I would be surprised, given the self-revelatory income trajectory that Rivka portrays in her little financial thriller, if Rivka would object so much to selling like the formulaic Collins. Rivka? You out there? Yo, I’m talking to you with your missing dialogue quotes. You wanna make some money? Take a look at the Collins craft (or the parody, if you prefer), and start crankin’ ’em out! (Me first, however.)