Waiting for her Wings Postmortem · 2:46am Sep 16th, 2014
This week, I am going to take a look at my most downvoted story on the site and the only complete tale so far that I will never submit to Twilight's Library. The story is simple enough: Scootaloo is listening to the radio, she rolls off the couch, answers the door, and returns to the couch. However, along the way we find 43 upvotes of bonnafide Scootasad with a kicker of drugs and instant grass (just add water). There was a method to the madness. For the story behind the story, you have only to read on...
What started this devilry?
This started as a comedy. In fact, it still is a comedy of sorts, but the joke isn't funny when the comedy tag gets involved. Like I'm Not a Firefly, it was played too straight for me to feel right laughing at it. Some time ago, someone off-site got into a huff about the excessive amounts of Scootasad going through the feature box at the time. Of course, I came away with the wrong idea: I must make the Scootasaddest story. A story so Scoot and so sad that no one would be able to take it seriously.
Scootaloo's defining trait has always been her enthusiasm, so it was not hard to choose my target. Of course, in her canon state I would have a lot of explaining to do in regards to why everyone else in Scoots' life was not there to cheer her up. This thought eventually drove me to age her up. With age comes independence, and independence means you are old enough for everyone else to leave you be. Then I just had to push her over the edge -- bye Rainbow Dash. Not the most original idea in the world, but in a sense it had to happen for the desired effect. Cheap, yes, but I am not ashamed.
With my circumstances in hand, I needed a starting place. A character with nothing had to live in nothing. I immediately borrowed the universal bare-bulbed room. You cannot get much more nothing than that. With that most excellent foundation, it was time to find all the ways I could add more "nothing" to Scoots' life. The radio is repaired with bottle caps. Her only furniture is a disgusting second-hand couch and a folding table, both covered with ramen-cup-like instant grass (which I am certain would not work that way -- so much the better). In theory, I was adding elements to the scene, but each one only serves to emphasize the absence of so much more. Even the radio broadcast evokes the silence: when we open, it is the only sound in the room. Its smooth, uninterrupted, monolog is the only thing going on in Scoots' life.
As you can tell, the whole exercise was far too much fun to be healthy.
One cannot make a story out of inert nothing. This is the singular mistake that most sadfic and comedy stories make: they go in wanting the emotion they are trying to evoke, so they go right to the things that are supposed to evoke the emotion and have no idea what to do with themselves for the next 950 words save to repeat that idea for another 2000 words. That is how one-note stories happen. But if doing what we intend does not get us what we want, what are we do do?
Scoots does not want to be sad. She does not want to have her problems. I had to imagine all the ways she might try to be anything but sad and alone. She had to test the bars, so to speak. Of course, I am the author, so I get to choose the most interesting attempt for my purposes, but the important bit is that I had to give Scoots enough leeway to explore her circumstances with her own motives. In this case, I supposed she might try to fly away from her problems, which of course goes as well as one would expect. She winds up demonstrating her powerlessness and ends up broken on the floor, which was exactly where the story needed to go. However, she put herself there, not I, and that is what is important.
At this point, I had recently seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and I supposed we could not have a sadfic without the trusty alcoholisms, so in they went. I will fully admit I borrowed the whole "drink 'til you get the click" business from Brick, but Scoots' subjective experience in getting to that click was something I explored my way to on my own. Again, the nothingness in her life is on full display: the bottles are cracked and sealed with second hand caps backed with flypaper. Genuine backalley unregulated moonshine.
And here was were I earned my downvotes: the bottles were so sketchy, I decided they could not not be tainted. And then I got to write drug-o-vision. Having missed out on that particular part of the high school and college experience, I could only fall back on my limited knowledge from psych class and pray that few enough readers were regular users that no one would call me on it. The drugs were undefined for a reason -- the less info you give, the harder it is to nitpick.
However, drugs are not some magical substance that can make any surreal experience happen willy-nilly. Random for random's sake is noise. Interesting surreal stuff needs some kind of underlying driving force that, while it may not make much sense on the surface, ends up "feeling" right. The idea that stuck out to me most from psych class was a few drugs that "crossed the wires" so to speak. I supposed this unknown drug might end up mixing parts of her awareness -- memory, gut reactions, senses, etc -- and then the mind would try to make sense of it all, leading to some mental state where things were whatever the composite of all these snippets ended up being.
This had the bonus of avoiding the other trap of surrealism: symbolism for no reason other than the author wanting to say things with hidden pictures that most of us cannot be bothered to look for in the first place. If the drugs are messing with your head, it only makes sense that what they are mixing around is, for lack of a better word, organic. Not symbolic. They are property of the character and what they are currently experiencing rather than puzzle pieces for the author to try being clever with. If I was going to mix in an idea, I made sure to evoke it from Scootaloo's experience of her environment, and I tried not to write any feeling that I could not recall having in some form. Most were repurposed -- the eye, for instance, is that pinprick of dread on my back from knowing my alarm clock has one minute left before it rings -- but the dim memory of the raw feeling helped both to keep me grounded and give me more to play with.
Unfortunately, I had already established my narration as third-person limited with Scoots as a viewpoint, and the last thing that turns up in a trip is any explanation of what is going on. I believe the way I set things up was true to the circumstances of the story, but it lead to...
The reaction
There was... some confusion. Quite a bit of confusion, in fact. 8 downvotes of confusion. That's as many as 2% of the current 400 views. And that's terrible. It did not help that the description was vague on the content or that the plot does not directly resolve. As previously mentioned, this is the story of Scoots getting off the couch, tripping on tainted booze, going to the door, and then going back to the couch. She fights all the way there, but there is nothing explicitly tying everything together. Things happen. They are connected, but only if one thinks about them, and the actual resolution is a choice that Scootaloo makes without the story indicating there were things to choose or a choice being made. It is about as obtuse as one can go. Looking back, even I find myself scratching my head at some of it.
However, the upvotes are there as well: 43 of them at time of writing. Hovering just above the 10% upvote/view threshold is actually more than I would expect from something like this. It skirts the line of inaccessibly different. However, as the parasprite's comment pointed out, that does not mean different is a bad thing. I think I hit the sweet spot of "inaccessible with hope" -- it is just interesting enough and gives just enough info to tempt the reader into piecing things together for themselves, and I think there is an audience for that kind of story on this site. Granted, the 5:1 upvotes/downvotes ratio tells me that this story was probably right on the edge of what should be risked.
In the end, this is a niche story. I was embarrassed by its obtuseness for some time, but on second read through, I think I was too hard on myself. For what it was, it was as clear as it had any business being: clear as mud, but you could still feel some of the bottom if you tried. Granted, this story is the far wall beyond which I should never try to venture again. At least, not on purpose. I need to throw the readers more of a bone and make everything more concrete to avoid going off the deep end.
Props and slops
Props to our drunken Scootaloo "steadying the couch." To be drunk is not to stumble around being drunk, but rather to attempt to operate as normally as possible with the alcohol weighing you down. Scootaloo as the viewpoint character is so convinced of her own sobriety that if the room is spinning, the room must have the problem, and she needs to stop it. Very fun to write.
Slops to the vagueness of it all. A big problem I suffer from is my habit of letting my stories happen rather than taking it upon myself to make a story. Looking back at the description, I am baffled as to what a reader could even expect from... whatever this is. It is a curiosity, perhaps even an "experience," but beyond that, what would anyone have to tell a friend about?
Dear Princess Celestia...
So long as a story is constructed with care, it is ok if it is obtuse. However, one must come to terms with the fact that it will go on the front page, people will be confused, and that is not their fault. The worst possible pretension is to write something like this and then get mad when everyone else has other interpretations or cannot make heads or tails of it, but that is no reason not to write obtuse in the first place. Obtuseness makes a story into a toy, and some people enjoy finding toys in their horsewords.
Once again, literature has an audio quality, and we find here an excellent set of examples. This story made great use of explicit sound from the radio to the thump and raps. Perfect amount of context to convey what they were supposed to be while not rendering them redundant with cluttery expository info.
To fully explore the circumstances of your story, you must challenge yourself in the very words that you write. If at first you succeed at once, complicate things until you must personally fight to include your theme in your story. Your characters cannot be sad until they have struggled with every drop of their being to be happy and still find no means to be so.
The lure of the surreal is to be found not in irrationality, but in the emotional logic beneath a seemingly random surface. The trick is to throw your reader enough bones to give them a little slice of the experience that they can get more of by digging deeper. One can simply shut off the brain and enjoy the weirdness, but there should also be something waiting when you start to think about it.
If I could do it again, I would probably write the same story. It is what it is, it was fun to write, and it works well enough. However, it is not very accessible to a wider audience, so I do not find myself that eager to promote it or even copy its style in the future. If I were to write another story, I would try to write more plainly, lay off the drugs, and make sure the reader does not have to brave the rabbit hole to get the full experience.
Unfortunately, I did not happen to learn that lesson in time for my next story: Three Left Turns, which I will be covering next week.
Your thoughts on surrealism and symbolism are exactly why i tend to find most dream sequences incredibly boring. If there's more than one sentence spent on describing a dream, it's usually because the author wants a simple (read: lazy) way to include some 'symbolism' or flashback. It's just a little too... direct most of the time.
I will say that I considered reading this story, but didn't. I don't like feeling sad, and I was pretty certain I would. That's probably a compliment, although it's not founded on much. :P
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Looking back, I would say it is more stark and empty than sad, but as with any of the reaction-based tags, your mileage will vary.
To be honest, I have never seen the appeal of symbolism outside of times when the symbols arise naturally from characters finding common meaning in their shared experience. When the author starts throwing their hidden signs in there, I am always left asking what the point of it all is. Every so often, it can be fun if the symbols hint at the correct interpretation of an ambiguous ending, but for the most part it reminds me of the decoder ring from A Christmas Story: do a whole bunch of thinking to decode my author tract on the nature of existence, which is supported only with evidence is from my carefully controlled story world
2458692 Whelp, I'm definitely not reading it, then. I have enough trouble with depression, without feeding it stark and empty words.
Probably the way I like symbolism best is when it actually means something to the characters in the story, or hints at unseen plot elements. Like the origami in Blade Runner, or the top in Inception. Those things, at least, are less directly author-to-audience, although maybe they fall more under 'foreshadowing' than pure symbolism.
I'm not judging you for what you wrote, although I believe I probably should.