Unit Alias #1: "The Flow of Water Breaks the Dame!"

The beginning of what I hope to be a long running superhero team series! The first issue centers around the future leader of Unit Alias: Leonardo Crews.

As the bullets whizzed passed my head, only one thought stood out from all the noise and panic around me: I know I should have eaten toast instead of that bagel this morning. It’s just, I get so tired of the same old whole wheat toast and almond butter; it’s not my fault the fabric of reality starts to fold in on itself everytime I choose something new for breakfast. After another twenty seconds of some mindless brutes trying to turn my apartment into a modern artist’s tribute to swiss cheese, a voice of remote reason finally speaks up:

“Leonardo Crews, please step away from the bean bag chair”.

I can’t help but roll my eyes. It’s her: Sharon Winstead. The woman who would surely be my handler if the US government had their way and I became a secret agent or lab rat or whatever the heck they’d want me to do with these powers. I stand up and make a couple steps to the right as I put my hands on my head. At least the government sent a nice pair of legs to yell at me.  

One of the armed boneheads she brought with her speaks up, ‘Why would you hide behind a froggy bean bag chair?”

“Cause who the hell would ever shoot a froggy bean bag chair?” I challenge him and the two other armored doofuses.

They all mumble and meet eyes until one of them sheepishly says: “he’s right…” 

Sharon, the not so love-able stick in the mud that she is, won’t let me have fun for too long. “Your work here is done unit Alias. Go downstairs and do the usual routine with the landlord; come back, as I planned, when you’re done”. 

A couple ‘yes ma’ams’ and military mumbo jumbo is thrown around as they leave. I can’t help but feel sorry for guys who would willingly join an organization that has the loyalty of a teenage boy after a positive pregnancy test. 

“Real smart fellas you have there.”

Sharon looks at me, I guess with a hint of disappointment. “You know as well as I that if they were going for the kill, you’d be dead”. 

“Along with a couple billion realtites and, knowing how much the universe seems to adore me, time itself. And what’s up with ‘your plan’ anyway? The military never came in guns blazing before. Don’t you geniuses know how important I am?” 

“Are you threatening us now Leonardo?”

I relax my arms at my side as I walk into the pantry. The universe is on my team, as always, when I see one of the only undamaged things is what I’m looking for. I walk out in a sufficiently better mood with my packet of poptarts. “I’m just asking questions that pertain to the continuation of existence itself”. 

Sharon scoffs and continues on: “Do you understand the magnitude of such threats, Leonardo?”

 I wave her off with my free hand after opening my second breakfast. “ What threats? And please, it’s Leo; I’m not an award winning actor, just a potential destroyer of the timestream” I see the red emerge in her face and can’t help but chuckle. It's a mystery to me how she was able to secure one of the most secretive and ‘important’ jobs in the world with such a short fuse. Despite the fact that she is totally unlikable, the babe has grown on me over the years so I give her restless mind a break: “Y’know I’m not gonna go awol, especially when you pay for all my streaming service. And, uh, time wouldn’t be destroyed, just altered in some terrible heinous way. Such as your occupation being changed to stripper.” 

She gives me one more uneasy look before moving on. “You have a place I can sit?” 

“You mean a place you geniuses haven’t shot up yet? Don’t make me say it.”

“The frog chair?” She groans.

“I do believe it's pronounced froggy bean bag chair.” 

She gives her eyes another roll as she sits down in the thing. “Can you sit with me?” 

Sharon likes to remind me that in some ways I’m still a normal human. An example of 

this being a woman with a face and a body like hers asking me to sit down with a voice like hers using a tone like that,  regardless of if she is a facist pig or not, I’m probably gonna sit with her. 

“What’s the prob Bob?” I sit criss-cross applesauce a yard or so across from her. 

To my disappointment, not exactly my surprise, she grows serious as soon as I sit down. 

“We can’t keep doing this dance Leonardo.” 

“Doing what dance?” I let out the question with a bit of playful innocence.

“That.” She takes a moment to think before she begins her spill. “The U.W.O is not going to remain patient. The fate of existence potentially depends on what you have for lunch and you refuse to follow the guidelines that we give you. You probably can’t count how many times you’ve been told this, but you’re an anomaly. The only thing we have to go off of is my father’s theories: the regular flow of time is completely dependent on you. Every decision you make can drastically change our world’s past and half the time we can’t even detect those changes. Not to mention, if certain parts of that theory are true, the effects you can be having on our future. Leo, history is a book that you can rip up on an unknowing whim and the future is more uncertain that it has any right to be”. 

“And yet we keep dancing…”

“Excuse me?” 

I look at her for a second thinking that she for sures knows where I’m going, but it becomes clear to me she doesn’t. “You’re coming here to warn me. The U.W.O  knows that you’re the only person I can stand getting yelled at by so they send you here every time I decide to live my life so you can flutter your eyes and tell me not to. How many times have you been here this month? I admit the whole shoot-em-up bit is new, but other than that this is the same old routine we’ve done for the past year. The  only difference is I’ve been doing it my whole goddamn life and you’ve been doing it for a fraction of yours”. 

The woman actually cracks a smile as she comprehends what I’m saying. I don’t know if it’s mocking or understanding me, but, seeing as I have nothing else to do, I let her spill. “You call this living Leo? I don’t know what you do to mess up the timestream, but, judging by the hours of footage that features you exclusively watching ‘He-man’ reruns, I sure as hell know it’s not living. What, you played a new video game? Flushed the toilet too fast? You’re not living; the life you’re leading is not worth risking history for”. The sarcasm and aggression starts to leave her eyes as she looks at my face. I begin to open my mouth in defense when she shushes me with a new, almost maternal, attitude. “But I didn’t come here to play our twisted game of house. I’ve been in contact with my father”.

The news strikes a rare chord of hope in me. Sharon’s father was the closest thing I had to a dad when I grew up in the compound. He was also the one who convinced the board of directors to let me out when I turned eighteen. “Let out” is an odd way of saying letting me live in a heavily guarded cell that just happens to be in an apartment building. He ended up deciding he didn’t want to be a mindless puppet and left the U.W.O along with all his research. Last I heard, which was a very long time ago, he was up to a more scholarly pursuit. “How is he?”

She smiles as she thinks of her father. “He’s getting philosophical in his old age. After he left, he started living like a hermit in some remote island in the Atlantic. A place they’d have trouble finding if they ever were to look; he’s getting into some rebellious stuff there Leo. He wants you to leave and come see him. He wants to end this dance.”

“By ‘rebellious’, do you mean some dooms-day s**t?” the words come out as the hope comes out of me. “We don’t know what the reaction will be if I get in a boat or plane. We barely know what’s gonna happen if I leave this building again. Make fun of me all you want, but, you basically said it yourself, 80s tv is the only life I can safely lead”.

“He told me to trust him. If he’s wrong, the situation will be no worse than it was before”. I could easily read the doubt in her face. “Or at least to him.”

“So what? The world ending is the same as the world not ending? Existence is all a lie and it doesn’t matter anyway? Don’t tell me he’s become some quasi-intellectual pothead who posts on psychedelic-themed online forums.” 

She rolls her eyes in response to my joke. “He’s disillusioned with our current world authority. He lived his whole thinking a plantery world order would be a good thing, so much so he helped to achieve it. Apparently after all those years and work, he thinks their practices are going to end us all. The way he sees it, the world may just end tomorrow; it’s any day now to him. In a certain manner of words, he’s desperate.”   

“And you?” 

She gives me another genuine look. “I trust my father as a leader and I care about you. He believes it's the right thing to do and you can’t keep up like this. Some of the things I’ve had to do this past year is enough for me to give up on doing the right thing through the government. Your problem is a problem that we might be able to fix on our own and trying is a lot better than you just rotting here waiting to die. Any ‘director’ who doesn’t like that can screw off.”

I let my eyes widen. “No one’s in on this? Why’d you bring the unit with you? Surely the bigwigs wire you up before you take their dogs for a walk?” 

“Watch your words; dogs we are no more, unit Alias, at least, is on this. No wires or strings attached. The general consensus is the current plan of keeping the world safe from you is eventually going to collapse without change; I can’t say they have the personal stake that my father has with the way he views us as siblings”.   

“Can’t really blame them for being worried or not particularly liking me, but they’re not here because of  what happened because of my bagel?” 

“What?”

“You came here to break me out, not to punish me for eating a bagel instead of toast?”

Sharon pulls a phone out of her pocket and scrolls through. “Oh…”

“What?”

“The ephilfel tower was built in Germany”. 

Reviews

[JayG]

Well, you’re trying hard, I’ll have to give you that. But though I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, you’re making lots and lots of new writer mistakes. It’s not a matter of talent and potential, or even how well you write. It’s that you’re trying to use the book-report writing skills we’re given in school, and they don’t, and can’t be made to work on the page.

Sure, the story works when you read it. But when you read the first word you already know who we are, where we are in time and space, and, what’s going on. And more than that, you know what led to the situation in progress, you know the protagonist’s backstory, and that of everyone else. You know why he’s there and what he’s trying to accomplish. You have full context, and know your intent for how the words are to be taken by the reader.

The reader? Not a clue. They have only the context you provide, and the meaning that the words suggest to THEM, based on THEIR background, not your intent.

And...for the reader, it’s not a matter of reading the paragraph and then saying “Yeah, I get it.” If they don’t have full context as-they-read, they stop, and never get to the end of of the paragraph. To see what I mean, let’s look at the opening as a reader must:

• As the bullets whizzed passed my head, only one thought stood out from all the noise and panic around me:

“My head? Who’s speaking? And how can there be “The bullets,” when we don’t even know that they’re being shot, or by what, or why?

And "panic" around this unknown person, in this unknown place? That says there are other people who are feeling panic. But we read on and it’s just him, being shot at for unknown reasons by people we know nothing about.

So we lack even the smallest bit of context to make the words meaningful. You, on the other hand, have a mental picture of what’s going on. You know his mood and thoughts, so for you it works. But here is where an acquiring editor would stop reading, because only you have the knowledge to provide context. And your intent for the meaning never makes it to the page.

• I know I should have eaten toast instead of that bagel this morning

You, knowing that there’s a line coming that talks about what happens when this person chooses a different breakfast, so it makes sense. But the reader doesn’t. And since you can’t retroactively remove a reader’s confusion, or make a second, first-impression, this is another, “Huh?” point.

Your characters talk to each other about things meaningful to you, and them, but for which you’ve given the reader no context. And fair if fair. It's written for that reader, so they should know.

So, here’s the deal:

First, the goal of fiction, as E. L. Doctorow put it, “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” In other words, our goal is to make the reader feel, not lecture them. So, in terms of that, you’re giving the weather report. But it’s not your fault. It’s inherent in the methodology you’ve been trained in: nonfiction writing. Why? Because it's the kind of writing most employers want from us: Letters, reports, and essays. Since only fiction writers need the special knowledge and techniques of the profession, like any other profession, they're acquired IN ADDITION to the set of general skills we're given in school.

Remember, they offer degrees Commercial Fiction-Writing it at the university. Surely in those four years of study at least some of what they learn is necessary. Right? And we no more learn to write fiction by reading it than eating makes a chef of us. In fact. Every book you’ve read was published, which means that it was written with the skills the pros take for granted. In a paragraph you'll know if a piece of writing was created with those skills. More to the point, your reader will know—which is the best argument I know of for spending time acquiring your writer’s education.

Think back Over 90% of your writing assignments have been for reports or essays. And the few stories you were assigned were graded by someone who has not a clue of what a publisher—or a reader in the bookstore—is seeking.

Did even one teacher talk about the three issues we need to address quickly on entering a scene, so as to provide context? How many mentioned the inciting incident, the black moment, scene and sequel, why scenes end in disaster, or why a scene on the page is so different from one on stage?

For that matter, did any of them explain the structure of a scene, and how to manage the elements that make it up? Because if they didn’t, how can you write a scene if you don't know what it is?

And of more importance, did even one teacher mention that there is an entire set of writing skills devoted to fiction? Because as Mark Twain put it: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

The fix? Absolute simplicity. Learn those skills, practice them till they’re as natural to use as the nonfiction skills you use now, and you’re good to go.

Will that be easy? Hell no. It’s a profession. But if you’re meant to write you’ll find the learning fun. And the practice is writing better and better stories. So what’s not to love?

The best way to begin? The library’s fiction-writing section (but not the school’s). You work at your own pace, there are no tests, and, no pressure.

As for what to look for to start, my personal suggestion is to see if they have Debra Dixon’s, GMC: Goal Motivation & Conflict. It’s a super first book, and a warm easy read.

If they don’t have it, and you’re feeling brave, the best book I’ve found to date—the one that got me my first publishing contract—is available free at the address just below. It’s an older book, and the author was a noted professor, so it’s not an easy book. But it is the best. Copy/paste it to the URL window of any Internet page and hit return reach the site.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

For an overview of the issues covered, the articles in my WordPress writing blog are mostly based on the teachings in that book. (link at the bottom)

And for what it may be worth: There's a kind of story called a wish-dream story. Many early writers trying to write superhero stories fall into the trap. Our hero is faced by a problem, and he wins. Then comes another problem, and he wins again, and again, and again. That’s boring. So be sure you’re not headed there.

So…I’m pretty certain you weren’t hoping for a disaster like this when you posted the story—especially since it works well when you read it. But…you’ll never fix the problem you don’t see as being one, and you can’t use the tool you don’t know exists. And since you were in that situation—like most hopeful writers—I thought you’d want to know.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/