Wanoah

It should have been easy. I should keep remind­ing myself that that is a bad sign.

I’d been talk­ing with a friend, and I for­get all the details or how this came about, but there was a pub and there was a pub quiz involved. We got to the point where we were say­ing, “Yeah, and you’d prob­ably pull out a shot­gun and start killing people. Haha!” It struck me, then, that there was the germ of a story here: girl goes bal­listic at a pub quiz and starts shoot­ing people. I said, “This sounds like the begin­nings of a story here,” and that was it, I was com­mit­ted to it.

It seemed easy. The girl would be my friend: simple. The nar­rator would be a simple cut out of me plonked in the envir­on­ment to tell the story. Then there was one straight­for­ward ques­tion to answer: why does the girl go crazy and start killing people? I mean, it’s a wee bit unreas­on­able to be pro­voked into that level of viol­ence by just a pub quiz, even for the friend in ques­tion. The answer seemed obvi­ous: she was wait­ing for someone and they never showed, and maybe that someone had just dumped her over the phone. The nar­rator would also be wait­ing for someone and observing as he waits. Easy. Just bash out 2000 words and done.

Except it all star­ted to get a bit tricky. One way or another, I always write about people I know. Char­ac­ters are ver­sions of me and ver­sions of friends, blurred until they are unre­cog­nis­able. As soon as I star­ted try­ing to describe my friend, I real­ised that I really couldn’t write her as a char­ac­ter at all. I couldn’t even begin to describe her. Everything I wrote was wrong and made me squirm with embar­rass­ment at the idea of other people read­ing the descrip­tion: not least the per­son I was describ­ing her­self. I wrestled with it. I talked to someone about it. Then I talked to someone else about it. Then I talked some more.

It wasn’t just that I was attempt­ing to plonk someone I know straight into a piece of fic­tion. I real­ised that I had a more basic prob­lem: one of vocab­u­lary. I know lots of words, and I don’t even get to use most of them most of the time. That’s not it, really. What it is is that I lack the know­ledge when it comes to quite basic things like hair­styles, eye shapes, well, describ­ing facial fea­tures in gen­eral. It’s a whole area that I haven’t paid that much atten­tion to. I’ve spent the last 25 years look­ing at women and I can’t describe them. How shit is that?

So, I was attempt­ing to describe someone who would likely be read­ing the descrip­tion of them­selves while acutely aware that I’m not very good at writ­ing these descrip­tions. She had to go.

With the prot­ag­on­ist replaced by a more gen­eric female, I was free to write the story. I knew what was going to hap­pen and I have writ­ten most of it now. Except, and this is annoy­ing, I know there’s no real premise to the story. What am I try­ing to achieve? I respon­ded to a con­ver­sa­tion about an ima­gin­ary event and duly filled in the details. It’s kind of empty, though. It’s also over­long for the amount of stuff actu­ally tak­ing place.

Bot­tom line is that I’m frus­trated because what soun­ded like a great idea at first blush has turned to a pile of crap in my less than cap­able hands.