An Analysis of my own Fiction. part 1
Such was the Epiphany of Theodore Beasley
When someone suggested I do a breakdown analysis of my own story, I said that would require cloning me. May we all praise the advancements of science and technology.
If you haven’t read the original, unbutchered version of Such was the Epiphany of Theodore Beasley, I highly recommend it, and the author’s a decent fella, too.
He broke the law by being angry.
Our interest is technique, but a little discussion of background and meaning seems appropriate. A few days before I began work on the story, my daughter told me about a law in our state. Open carry is legal as long as you’re not angry. Now, I can understand the reasoning behind the law, but on the face of it, it’s still funny.
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Now, let’s discuss: Theodore Beasley.
The law allowed Theodore Beasley to carry the gun—which was the only name he knew for the gun, except to believe it couldn’t be a revolver as it lacked any mechanism to revolve—allowed, as long as he carried it openly, which he supposed he’d achieved, with the brown leather holster attached to his snakeskin belt, and as long as he wasn’t angry, as if this weapon of deadly intent rendered every wielder a pacifist who came in peace with guns a blazing, killing you with joy. Smile, motherfucker. Smile.
I didn’t have a story in mind, just our amusement over the law. That gave me a first sentence. Then what? Time for truth in fiction: I don’t know much about guns, and the first sentence required this was going to be about a gun. Normally, that meant research, but I decided to write the truest sentence I know. I don’t know guns so neither does my character.
I went for a long second sentence. It’s not a cumulative sentence, I don’t think—once you get away from building with adjectival phrases, the distinctive appearance blurs a bit—but I did focus on the Landan’s advice that long sentences move in steps.
I cap it off with a diacope and a cuss word, and I don’t think you understand how uncomfortable a choice that was. The discomfort made it all that much more important.
As for the diacope, these figures of speech are surprisingly important because they sound right to us. They’re pre-existing forms that carry the weight of good writing. Part of me rebels at that idea, but if we avoid the forms but come kind of close, it reads like music that didn’t quite hit the note. Instead of making our writing more sophisticated by avoiding the patterns that were patterns back with Shakespeare used them—play with those patterns. Give your reader that recognizable handhold as they climb your mountain of text.
If only he could smile and hide the torrent of pain and humiliation throbbing within his ruined face and betraying his indignation at the dignity he’d been denied, not once but always. Always.
Indignation at the dignity is a polyptoton, a repetition of words from the same root. Once I tied that off with the alliteration of denied, it created a phrase that made my ears happy. Speaking of alliteration, maybe your high school teacher told you, like mine did, that it’s only alliteration if the words are side-by-side. I hope not, because that’s just not true, but even if it were, we’re not building a tongue twister. We want a sentence where the words sound like they belong together, creating musical phrases that are woven together within our little symphony. This particular phrase felt like it needed some punctuation at the end—and that punctuation was the repeated word. Always.
He could trace back life like a timeline, one infraction to the next, and anyone with such a view would see the same as he, the relentless apathy he’d engendered, the rejection of those who’d weighed his soul and found him wanting. Today he’d end the question, prove them right, and cut short his days in a blaze of ignominy, not of glory and of no surprise, for all who knew him would have seen this day coming.
Here begins the philosophical through point about how emotion lies to us and gives us a view of our lives as a series of emotionally similar events. I was living on the bayou in Mississippi when I had that particular revelation, and it helped me gain control over my thoughts instead of the other way around. Since my character is clearly giving into his thoughts, I went with every gut-wrenching insecurity that ever haunted me: relentless apathy.
That just hurts.
He stood his ground before the damned and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, and before he could understand why nothing happened, a uniform tackled him to the ground and held him there until the police arrived.
Where is all this taking place?
I can point to my essay on grounding the reader with the W questions and what’s necessary when you leave the reader temporarily ungrounded, but this wasn’t an intentional application. When I first wrote this, I simply didn’t know. Normally, once that’s figure out, you’d go back and ground the reader, but I decided to keep it unknown and only hint at the location later in the story.
For two sentences, we have action without place, until the reader is given the luxury of the backseat of the cop car as something to hold onto. It’s a dangerous move. I’ve had one reader point out the lack of location in the comments. If you do this, be warned.
Handcuffed in the backseat of a cruiser, he watched them laugh among themselves, wiping tears from the corner of their eyes and glancing furtively in his direction, dedicating to memory all the details they’d tell at home and to their friends at parties for years to come, until their children rolled their eyes as well-rehearsed words tumbled out with premature laughter, asking, did I tell you about the gunman who couldn’t…
Couldn’t what? He couldn’t even say, still not understanding what went wrong, not with his moment nor with his gun, but he could say what went wrong with his life and count off the steps, one-by-one, not knowing that even in that, he was wrong.
Here we return to Theodore’s insecurity. This isn’t the viewpoint of an objective narrator. That’s Theodore’s paranoia speaking. We’re indirectly in his head, seeing the world as he sees it, and the importance is that it avoids the issues of flow that come with a shift into first-person thoughts.
We can make that shift, but you really need to watch how the sentences flow. Otherwise, it’s like tripping on mismatched blocks of sidewalk. Your reader may not fall, but a jarring break of flow will make them stumble.
He wouldn’t see he was wrong until his twelfth group session with skinny Mr. Rimsdale, the prison’s once-a-week counselor, and then Theodore would see it all, all at once, and break down weeping with tears and snot and trembling, which the others would see and tell—and for which he’d be beaten in the prison laundry and sent to the prison infirmary and from there to the hospital and the ICU, where for several days he’d hope he’d die.
Such was the epiphany of Theodore Beasley.
Someone suggested to me that these last two paragraphs were rushed, and while that’s intentional, it won’t work for everyone. I’m ripping through a preview of events. The reader doesn’t know what location he tried to shoot up, only that he was stopped and arrested, and then in a future-tense single sentence I outline Theodore’s half of the story. It’s an unusual structure, and I’m depending on a couple of things to maintain your interest. One, the sentences move. As long as I don’t lose you, this should read quickly. If so, maybe I’ve told you enough by the end of the section to make the mystery of the unknown worthwhile.
A writing instructor said that if you want to capture the human experience, you have to stick to chronological storytelling; people don’t know the future. I’m not one to take that well, by inclination, I often write nonlinear stories, and the human experience it captures is memory. That’s where I think fiction shines, sharing the strength and weaknesses of how we remember events.
I initially wrote the second half of the story non-chronologically as well. It was well received but the interpretations of the story’s ending demonstrated that I’d caused confusion. I decided that we had two important wings of the story. Theodore’s experience in prison is at some point in the future. Elizabeth’s story was of the day that led up to the big mystery event that pushed Theodore down his path, and once we entered fully into Elizabeth’s story, it would be chronological.
For Elizabeth’s story, I realized in the initial writing that the gun was key to setting the chronology. When the story opens, Theodore tries to use the gun. In the section that follows, Theodore has the gun, and it’s a new, dangerous addition to the home. So, when I picked up with what became the main thrust of Elizabeth’s story, I used the gun again to ground us in the chronology. She reports to their therapist that Theodore hasn’t joined them because he’s buying the gun.
Right now, that weapon is the only lynch pin we have on where we are in that part of the story. For Theodore’s section we have the prison outline already, so as his story progresses, we should always know where we are. If the reader remembers that his epiphany came during the twelfth session, that also becomes a counter, as we hit the tenth session and then the eleventh.
The suspense then comes in knowing what happens. It’s the dramatic irony of his week of feeling good about himself, when we know how that’s going to end. The general techniques there are the sense of contrast I learned from McCarthy, and the use of the known as a source of dread, which I learned from Stephen King’s Pet Semetary.
Theodore Beasley bought a gun. No, Elizabeth didn’t want to hold it. No, it wouldn’t solve her inability to sleep at night—nor the lingering certainty that safety was an illusion. Instead, it meant death had a place in their home, in the drawer of Theodore’s nightstand, beside the bed they shared and where she lay awake at night, staring into the ceiling and thinking not of this ceiling which was smooth and still but of her childhood bedroom and the popcorn ceiling that came alive in the interplay of shadows and the lights of cars passing with the hiss of freshly-fallen rain as dragons, knights, and princesses danced across her midnight canvas. Sometimes she was the princess, sometimes the knight, but often the dragon, and she wished she could be the dragon now: fierce, eternal, and unafraid.
I’ve discussed this passage before, in an essay written while the story was still a work-in-progress. The long sentence has a freedom to follow thoughts in unexpected ways, and I love where this took us.
But she did hold the gun. It spoke to her in the sleepless dark, over the whisper of Theodore’s machine as it breathed against his apnea, in and out, like an old man dying of emphysema or an infant struggling to know a second day. She took the holster from the drawer and the gun from the holster and stood by the bed at Theodore’s side, not pointing the gun but feeling its weight and staring at the face hidden beneath straps and hose.
In my first incarnation as a writer, my work was called muscular, while a good friend’s writing was called symphonic. Muscular is good and has its place, but it bothered me that I didn’t know how to move from one to the other. The secret is in sentence length as the long sentence allows you to become the conductor.
Then I offer the sentagraph that turned Theodore into an adulterer, and I did it because I’d piled my insecurities into him, made him incompetent with a gun, and gave him my sleep apnea. All that worked together to create a pathetic character, and the time had come for a splash of contrast. Being an adulterer doesn’t make him less pathetic, but it did adjust how the audience perceived him. We have a bad tendency to group books and generalize their readers. This one is for litbros, and that’s incel literature. I worried about this character being written off as incel literature, and this contrasting fault challenges such an assumption while also confirming Theodore as the villain of the piece.
Once, long ago, dragons distracted from voices raised and doors slammed. Elizabeth had never been a shouter, was afraid to shout, afraid to scream, even when there were reasons to scream, so many reasons held under so much silence. Her whole life was a series of moments, each echoing the last like footsteps down a hall, footsteps in a prison hall, and she from her cell saw neither those to come nor those gone, but only the present prison guard, wearing a different face but the same clothes, the unchanging uniformity of life.
I love the first two sentences and the backstory and psychological present that they suggest. This is where I begin to connect with Elizabeth, and then its connected to the same pattern of thinking we saw with Theodore earlier. Her present emotional moment colors her entire life.
No one could be trusted, and she found herself alone, awake but dreaming of Theodore dead, air sucking through a mask splattered and intermingled with bone and meat, a few teeth dangling at the edges of his jaw.
Later on, I refer to this as the foreshortened timeline of our life that emotion presents, and in the moment, it’s very convincing. I also hint at the idea that Elizabeth is responsible for Theodore’s ruined face, which (along with the metaphor of prison guards on parade) makes for a good bridge into our next section.
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Skinny Mr. Rimsdale, the second-most-frightened man in prison, minced his way into their lives once a week. Theodore Beasley recognized his own kind. Neither man belonged here nor understood this world, but Mr. Rimsdale tried. In his best and most official capacity, he tried, and every session, about halfway through, something somebody said would distract him from his fears, connect him with his own thoughts; and he’d transform before them, the child becoming the man.
Theodore envied him that, and in his tenth group session, he told him so.
I attempt a Cormac McCarthy moment later, but I’m reminded of him here and his classic phrase: the child, the father of the man. What a powerful way to say that who he was as a child informed the man he became. My point is not so erudite, being only that his fear made him childlike but as inspiration took over, the fear melted away, revealing the man.
In the eleventh session, Mr. Rimsdale answered, begging Theodore not to take it wrong, that he would never say this to another living soul in any other situation, but in this case he thought it proper, if Theodore could accept the present his wounded face presented.
“You lived, and the strength it took to overcome, you’ve got no choice but to let the whole world see. The men look at you, and they know. What you’ve been through commands respect.”
Theodore slept on those words for a week, a pillow lighter than air and softer than down. He ate his meals without fear and walked the yard without flinching, such was the culmination of his life’s journey, bringing him to this moment—fierce, immortal, and unafraid.
This is what I meant earlier. If you remember that Theordore’s epiphany ruins everything in his 12th session, you’ll know more than the character. He feels invincible. You know his fragile mortality.
We also keep the ruined face in the forefront of the story. It’s the third time and pretty much guarantees its importance. Plotters don’t understand this aspect of the pantser’s mind. This foreshadowing was in the first draft, and I understood it as foreshadowing. I simply didn’t know what role his ruined face would play. Let me say that again. I didn’t have an ending in mind, but as I wrote about his face, it took the shape of foreshadowing and so gave me hints of what the ending would have to include.
Elizabeth waited. Their therapist waited.
“He said he’d be here,” Elizabeth said. “He said he was buying a gun, but he said he’d be here.”
“Theodore’s buying a gun?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Is this something the two of you discussed?”
“It’s the first I’ve heard him say.”
“So you don’t know why he wants a gun?”
“Well, I don’t know. Last night, he was saying he’d protect me.”
“Do you need protecting?”
“It doesn’t matter. I said that to him. I said, it doesn’t matter.”
“Why doesn’t it matter?”
“Because he’s all talk and always has been. He said he’d be here.”
I’ve written about this section as well, and it’s a simple passage of dialogue that pleases me greatly. As I sat down to it, I sensed the challenge ahead. We really didn’t know Elizabeth yet. Latching onto a few rules for this passage, gave it a form that overcame all those unknowns.
Even though there’d been little dialogue in the story thus far, this section would be little else.
The therapist would echo dialogue, allowing the focus to be fully on Elizabeth.
Elizabeth’s lines would revolve around the word said.
Alone, Elizabeth exited into the waiting room where the damned lingered before the gates of hell. The uniform lifted his eyes. Spurred by an unthinking reflex, Elizabeth looked away.
Should I give away the importance of this paragraph? Yes, I think I should:
It echoes a couple of words from the beginning of the story: damned and uniform. In so doing, it answers that ungrounded question of where the attempted shooting took place.
On the street, Theodore texted his apologies, and a light dusting of pristine snow met with sullied mounds, remnants of the season’s final storm. The sun was shining, and earlier, temperatures had peaked above freezing. Elizabeth considered taking the bus, even though Theodore was on his way. Across the street, spring’s first green trolley jollied along the tracks in no great rush and going nowhere important. She watched it pass, full of nostalgia for a time no one remembered, but the trolley couldn’t take you anywhere useful, only from shopping to shopping, commerce to commerce. The bus could take her home, but she’d had enough of the bus and slipped into the little cafe where she and Theodore always treated themselves and decompressed after a couple’s session, a routine their therapist recommended.
This paragraph introduces the green trolley, the first hint of Elizabeth’s day shopping, which is to me the heart of the piece. This is where we get to know her and witness her growth until she’s able to find her voice and escape a life she never really chose for herself.
Elizabeth chose the cafe because the tables and chairs were delicate and petite, declaring this a space that didn’t make you feel protected but where protection wasn’t necessary. Dangerous men wouldn’t rob a place so girly, the very act being a threat to their manhood and contaminating their gain.
The section will find its flavor in its contrast with Theodore’s story, but I wanted the connection between the two to be clear. She likes this girlie space because it’s a protective barrier against dangerous men, and at this point, we know something about her husband she doesn’t know. We know his will to violence–even if he lacks the talent for it.
She remembered when Theodore seemed little more than a boy—cute, delicate, and untarnished by smut—or so she’d assumed. Maybe she’d been naive. The Washington Post ran that piece about the pervasiveness of perversion. The Internet had claimed the childhood of nearly every adult her age, but she refused to believe it. The fallen always held that the world was in their hole. It wasn’t, or Elizabeth didn’t want it to be. Her cake tasted lonely.
I believe this to be more revealing of Elizabeth than Theodore. She connects his adultery to pornography–the pervasiveness of perversion. I give her an idealism that slouches towards the judgmental, giving her another (former) side of me, and as I’m building these characters, I begin with characters of myself. To become something more, they’ll have to grow their own spines and be their own thing.
End Part 1
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—Thaddeus Thomas
I've had this idea boiling for three weeks, especially after someone had a very divergent and novel interpretation on the end of my story My Name is My Name, and I've been beaten to it. Well played.
Another great one. You should do it live. Not literally, but more like a diary, where we could follow your thinking as it happens. Your thoughts killing each other. Maybe Nabokov kills McCarthy. Then maybe a protagonist comes back to life and takes over and fights you out of your own story. We all want to see that.