(I wonder if there’s some old Latin term for tl;dr.)
This post concerns this vignette, in a clear but indirect way: https://zombiesintelligently.com/vignettes/the-refrigerator-of-a-man-whos-about-to-kill-himself/
This post will be about the kinds of things I write and how I strive to write things that aren’t shock-full of upsetting imagery and ideas. Even this paragraph will contain upsetting imagery. It … will probably also be rather scattered. If you don’t know what a trigger is, when speaking of Words on the Internet, the basic explanation is: something that triggers a bad, involuntary response in people’s brains. So when I talk about … cutting off people’s tongues with rusty scissors, this might catch someone off-guard. Someone who had that happen to them, or who was threatened with that, or someone who just has a vivid imagination.
Right.
The stuff I write is often upsetting. I write a disturbing amount of stories about ponderments of ending oneself. In my fiction there is violence, rape, murder, emotional abuse, and various other horrible things. They’re just there to be horrible. In my romance there is death, in my science fiction there are dialogue lines like “do what you want with her”. My fantasy is mostly just long quests leading to suicide.
There are some bad things inside my skullbone. I try to write the horrible stuff out of my head, and that’s what happens. One day, I would like to write a story where no-one dies or gets traumatized – I hear those stories are actually possible to write. Like my head could be filled with only petty things and nice feelings and therefore bad things don’t happen to the fictional people I create. Maybe they narrowly avoid the apocalypse and save everybody in the end. Maybe someone breaks their heart and that’s that. Maybe the betrayal alters the outcome of a war fought five lightyears away, in space, with robots.
I know death is common in fiction. That’s okay. We’re used to death in our books and so. Sometimes I do feel the horrible things fit, too. I would like to not write them with so much frequency. If you go to the archive of my drabble blog (link at the bottom of this post), you can see how many more posts nowadays start with ‘Trigger Warning‘. And this is with me not allowing myself to post all of them, for fear of scaring away readers, or falling into a rut. It takes a lot more effort to write something intriguing or emotive that doesn’t involve … you know … awfulness.
It would be nice to post a month without using any of the words noose, blood, or bullet. I feel, probably wrongly, that my old work was a lot more evocative than my new work. Somehow, I’ve lost the spark. Now the death has reached my eyeballs and I can only see bad things. I feel like I’m resorting to cheap tricks when I write something horrible, because it gets responses more easily than something more subtle.
I think I might be alright with writing horrible things that don’t really happen to people. Things that you can’t relate to very easily. I would like to submit my readers to new horribleness instead of making them relive the past’s horribleness. Aren’t I noble?
(You find a button that lets you remove all the things you regret from your life and you push it. You go about your life knowing that you pushed that button, and that it didn’t do a thing. A part of you dies.)
~
Hmm.
Well. What happens here then? I literally haven’t the faintest clue right now. Okay, now I have the faintest clue: let’s meet their boss. They talk to the boss and the boss says… what? The boss has no point in this story. Away with them!
So what would this pair of oddball policepeople do once they’ve been to the crime scene? Paperwork. Donuts. Conspiracy theories. Interviewing suspects. Consulting the machine of death. Talking to the coroner. Putting up ads in the local newspaper. Talking to psychics.
I want them to consult the machine, but not just yet. Maybe if we switch to other characters?
It is difficult to carry plot through dialogue.
Also, Brook should totally be a workaholic. Wait, no she shouldn’t. BAM, framestory. Or maybe she should, and she’s trying not to be, but that’s not how you set up framestories. Screw it. It’ll become apparent after a few lines of this thing anyway.
~
And that’s when I lost interest in this script, my dear friends. Not to worry, not to worry: I will simply think of something else. Maybe a comic book script works better for the sort of things I have in mind. This particular script just didn’t have any soul. No main conflict. I figured out a way to make the frame story nice – by having it be a first date, which would end with a kiss for poor Brook, or something – but that just turned ridiculous. Part of the problem may be a complete lack, on my end, of ability to introduce scenes with only sounds. The friendly note of ‘SOUND: DRIPPING‘ would probably have evoked sewers rather than … the nondescript room I was imagining.
At least I wrote the greatest thing I ever have written:
BROOK:
Give me one of those air fresheners.
(sniffs it deeply)
Do you always carry these things around?
VINCENTE:
I don’t believe in deodorant. Usually it’s just one, but you know. Special circumstances.
Oh yeah.
I thought I’d post the notes I’m making to myself as I’m writing this thing. Perhaps someone will find it entertaining. Well. That’s enough ado.
~
Needs more cowbell. Also more hinting at what the devil will happen later in the thing. Currently only one ‘hook’, which is far too little to be reliable. Can’t tenter anyone with that shit.
Well okay. What can the hook be? What the fuck actually happened there? The way it is in my head right now is someone stored up lots of blood in a freezer until it was time to set the Plan in motion. But if the blood was refrigerated, then the smell thing is not right, because the stench would be there before the blood had all thawed. Wunderbaums, wunderbaums everywhere.
Okay, so, disregarding the idea of air fresheners, perhaps most of the blood is actually still frozen; they just didn’t notice. Which begs the question how did they not see the blood floes?, and begging the question is a fallacy. So, no.
Well, this is problematic. I have no idea what actually happened. I like the idea of someone faking this so they can escape something. But no, this is all wrong. I seem to have set up something impossible. Crud. What do I do now?
[ten minute pause to think]
Okay, I fixed it. Wunderbaumen it is. “I don’t believe in deodorant,” says Vincent.
As of right exactly this now, there are 15 minutes to go until Script Frenzy starts. If you don’t know what that is, follow the link down at the bottom of the page, educate yourself.
I will be writing a Machine of Death audioplay. (Again, if you don’t know what that is, there is a link.)
I will also be trying to update the blog during the time. And I will continue to write drabbles. I will busy myself; I will do this. I might post the script on the blog. That sounds like an okay thing to do, as I won’t be doing anything else with it.
Now there are ten minutes to go. I wrote 15, but ten. I think the rule is to write them with letters up until 13, where you switch over to writing with numbers. This makes it consistent, not with itself but with a rule. Conisistency is important. There are now seven minutes left.
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Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost 