Wading in the Velvet Sea

About 3 reading hours later, I am about done, and deliriously happy for having read it. Most of the advice is pretty straightforward and commonsensical, which is good for someone like me who needs to hear “Just bury yourself for a few hours a day, and tell the story, and eventually you’ll have it.” Of course, all this insistence on “being truthful” is dubious at best and completely, impossibly vague at worst (I just used two adverbs, Stephen would hate me.)

Truth-telling as a basis for conversation is something I have always been suspect of. It’s not that I am a vigorous liar (though can be when the situation calls for it, I don’t have nearly the prerequisite amount of thespian ability to pull it off for longer than 5 minute stretches) but rather than in my vast amounts of experience, people generally don’t want to hear the truth. They don’t want complete falsehoods, but they don’t want the cold, hard light of reality constantly shone into their eyes, either. For the most part, people are complicit in this---people are generally no longer blunt in their talk, at least when the object of said bluntness is three feet away with an Amstel Light in their hand.

Yet people often want to break the mold of their social conditioning. This is why a character like Estelle in “The Golden Girls” was so immensely popular---she got to stand in for a lot of people’s inner desire to tell someone exactly what’s on your mind. In Greek theatrical terms, she provided catharsis (now, find ANOTHER website that links Euripides and “The Golden Girls”, sucka), a purging of emotion by which we get near to the emotion, but don’t have to actually experience is for ourselves. There’s a double-edged sword there---we pity Oedipus for his plight, but we secretly delight that it is not us on the stage, blind and realizing that you did your Mom on the hood of the family chariot.

The same purgative quality exists in truth-telling as well. I mean, just look at most teen dramas---they always have that “call out” scene where someone gets his/her comeuppance in a usually extremely public way (the epic standard-bearer of this is "The Lunchroom Scene" near the end of “Can’t Buy Me Love”…you had it all: nerd helps cheerleader with Euclidian geometry, nerd almost gets a beatdown, Patrick Dempsey swoops in with the ‘broken ankle” saga…’scuse me while I get a Kleenex). People have a need to have someone else do the dirty work for them, to see this truth-telling occur (when it is absolutely necessary), and the triumphant power chords which ensue on the soundtrack only further the cathartic experience.

Now, this may seem contradictory---I don't advocate truth-telling, then I go on about in for a few paragraphs. Well, tough noogies, as Decartes once said. What i was referring to earlier are the little lies one tells everyday in order to maintain the harmony of the universe, which is largely built, so near as I can tell, on complicit ignorance. I mean, take a few of these gems for instance:

Falsehood: "Yes, I'm working on that spreadsheet."
Truth: "I'm downloading the new Nirvana song while checking my Hotmail account."

Falsehood: "No, everything's fine, why do you ask?"
Truth: "I could bury you where they couldn't find the body."

See? No one wants the truth. IT pretends you're now sucking up valuable server space, your roommate pretends you're not eyeing your bureau as a makeshift top rope, and your boyfriend pretends he can't see the flaming eye of Sauron beneath your furrowed brow.

So I have to now be “truthful” in this book. Of course, I am also constructing its fiction, so there’s an inherent paradox therein. At least to my uneducated novel-writing self. The good news is that I no longer feel bad for not having every plot point figured out by the time I start writing (3 days and counting). The bad news is that King also suggests not having anyone read the work-in-progress, which, when reading it, seems like a good idea. The guy’s track record sorta speaks for itself. So while 3 of you may bemoan this development, I am gonna stick with it for now.

I’ll leave you now with my favorite quote from the book so far:

“Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”