The End of Beautiful Pain

After an unknown incident happens, you read about the final moments of a character who took place in the unknown events and get an insight into his mind.

                 He was sitting with his back leaning against the cracked wall in that wreck of a house. “I push my fingers into my eyes. It’s the only thing that slowly stops the ache”. He looks at the mattress infested with mold and rot leaning halfway folded against the wall. The girl, just as filthy, lies with half her body on and the other half lying uncomfortably on the splintered wooden floor. Her arm lays out palm facing up, the rubber tube still loosely wrapped around her skinny bicep.  “She’s sticking needles in her skin. I turn with an ugly grin”. But his face is blank and emotionless. He is silent as death. But the pulse of the maggots rings in his ear. He is completely under the control of the violence, and the lust, and the disgust, and the love for pain that fills his head. Reaching into his pocket to pull out a cigarette and a lighter, he reflects not for the first time that he is insane. Well, at least to most people, he thinks to himself. “But I know that I’m not crazy and you aren’t crazy either”, he says aloud while he points to the girl. She acts as if she didn’t hear anything and continues her blank stare at the ceiling. But this doesn’t stop him as he continues,  saying “And all of us know that we aren’t insane, we had something filthy and painful and beautiful and just as quick as it came, it left.” He lifts the cigarette to his lips with one hand and uses his other to light it. He takes in a deep breath of smoke, enjoying the feeling of not being able to breathe, enjoying his body’s cries of alarm at the lack of oxygen and the burning smell filling his nose. The uncomfortable aspect is what makes the noise and the voice beautiful. He’s living. But it’s so little, and he knows what has to happen. The Negative One screams in his ears. It gives him the only thing he needs, the distraction. He throws the lighter at the girl and it misses, hitting the half of the mattress pushed against the wall. It falls down to land right next to her knee, which is caked with dirt and blood. Holding the cigarette in his lips, he reaches down to his right to pick up the thing that will help him bring his horrible, beautiful, terrifying experience in this house to its final end.  He pulls back the hammer with his thumb and presses the barrel against the side of his head. He looks at his left hand one final time to see the signature of his place in this world. The ring finger and pinkie nail completely gone, ripped off during the beginning. He sighs and his cigarette falls out of his mouth landing on his jeans, burning tip barely touching his naked stomach. The pain is a final gift from the vessel of feelings and experiences that he is. He looks at the girl one final time before squeezing the trigger. His head jerks violently to the left as the bullet splinters his skull and gets lodged in his brain, killing him instantly. Unlike when he always pictured it, he always thought it would go straight through. The force of the bullet causes his lifeless body to slowly lean, and then after what seems like an eternity, slide sideways so that it looks like he’s lying down on his side. The bullet hole in his head is dark with blood, almost black. The blood runs down his face and goes over his still open eyes. Once it starts running down the skin, you can see its true color, red. The flesh and hair around the wound is scorched by the gunpowder. From the other side of the broken down room, you can see the slight wisps of smoke rising from it, along with the smoke of the still lit cigarette. The girl continues her stare at the ceiling, unstirred by the gunshot, while the sloping floor causes the pool of blood to lazily edge its way towards her. Her unmoving outstretched hand is the first to make contact with it. The blood coats the knuckles and the back of her hand. She closes her eyes and clenches her hand into a fist. Very slowly, she brings it up to the front of her face so she can look at it. The blood drips onto her face but she doesn’t care, for her stare remains fixed on her two missing fingernails.

Author's Note

Please give any tips or critiques you can think of, I love hearing other peoples feedback!

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[JayG]

You’re going to hate me, I’m afraid. But…nothing I have to say has to do with your talent and potential as a writer. It’s that there are things that aren’t obvious about any profession when viewing its product. And in the case of writing, many of them are of the kind that make you say, “Why didn’t I see that for myself?” when they’re pointed out.

Your first problem, one you share with everyone in your classes: You believe they’re teaching you to write. They are, but not as a publisher and writing pro view that.

Remember, the goal of your schooldays education is to make you useful to future employers, who want fact-based and author-centric narration that will inform clearly and concisely. But do we read fiction to be informed? Or do we want to be entertained. That matters, because different objectives require different techniques and approaches. And it explains why teachers assign mostly mostly reports and essays, rather than stories.

The problem is that when you try to apply the nonfiction techniques you’ve been given to fiction you end up with something that reads like either a written report or the transcription of a verbal report. Neither work. If you write it as a report—a chronicle of events—it reads like a history book, and who reads history books for fun? And, you can’t transcribe yourself telling the story, because our medium reproduces neither sound nor picture, which means the reader “hears” a monotone as they read.

When you read the story it works, of course, because you use the tricks of speech to provide emotional content. You place emotion into your voice as you would when telling it in person. You use changes in cadence, intensity and dozens more tricks. And in parallel with that, you illustrate emotion with facial expression, nuance of eye movement and more, plus the gestures you visually punctuate with, plus body language. How much of that does the reader get? None. Have your computer read the story aloud and you’ll hear what the reader does as they read. And you’ll know why you cannot “tell” the story on the page.

Added to that, you know who “he” is, and what the place looks like, so as you read the words, “He was sitting with his back leaning against the cracked wall in that wreck of a house,” you call up the image that generated the words. But the one you wrote this for doesn’t know who they are, where in time and space they are, or what’s going on. So can they have a mental picture based on what was said? No. Do they know him? No. By “he” you could mean a “he” who’s twenty, any other age. He could be human or any other creature. Your intent doesn’t make it to the page, so unless you provide it, the reader has no context and no reason to care. And if they don’t care, why would they turn to page two?

The bottom line? To entertain a reader takes more than the writing skills your teachers are giving you (though since they learned to write in the same classrooms, unless they’re successful writers they’re not aware of the problem either).

So how do you fix the problem? That’s easy, though not quick. You learn the tricks of writing fiction for the page and add them to your toolkit, just like you’d learn any other profession. Instead of writing fact-based you switch to writing emotion-based prose. Instead of an author-centric approach you write in a character centric way. Instead of talking in overview, narrow the focus to real-time, and tell the story from within the moment your protagonist calls now.

What matters to you—your view of the situation, is irrelevant. It’s not your story, after all, it’s the protagonist’s. As an outside observer you’ll report what matters to you. So you’ll talk about “Story.” He’s focused on what matters to him enough to react to. He lives in a cause and effect world that he has to respond to moment-by-moment. You can take a break for a nap. He can’t. He has to live the events in real-time. From a reader’s viewpoint, what would you rather do, live the situation with him as an avatar, or hear about it second hand from someone you can neither her nor see?

I wish my news was better, but we’re talking about a profession, one that is just as loaded with specialized knowledge and craft as any other.

For a kind of overview of the issues, you might want to take a look at the writing articles in my blog. But in the end, a trip to the free library’s fiction writing section (not the school’s library) is a great idea. It’s filled with information from the people who make their living through their writing, or teaching, or publishing skills. And when you’re there, I’d suggest looking for the names, “Dwight Swain, Jack Bickham, or Debra Dixon on the cover of a book on writing. They’re gold.

Some general things to look at.

• Don’t you like paragraphs? A monolithic block of text is unreadable because the paragraphing, among other things, provides markers on the page that help the reader keep their place.

• When using quote marks the final punctuation goes inside the close quote mark.

• Avoid indeterminate words like “some, slowly, often, etc, because what’s slow to one is quick to another. Why say, “slowly stops the ache?” The reader can’t tell if that means an hour or a day. What matters is that the ache stops.

• As someone who was once a three pack a day smoker I can tell you that taking a drag on the smoke it doesn’t make you feel like you can’t breathe

Sorry my news isn’t better. Still, hang in there, and keep on writing.