Link to the actual piece:
Where do you get your ideas from? ‘…at Ralphs…’
A friend asked me this question recently. I have no good answer other than to say, wherever it is, I wish they took refunds. See my thoughts on idea origins below.
The world seeping in.
I once lost two weeks to a dystopian future where all that remains are Gene Hackman clones. The story centred on a clone sent to burn the last open-plan kitchen. It was a ‘meditation’ on modern masculinity and architecture. At the time I was watching a lot of Grand Designs UK.
Personal experiences and relationships.
In the case of Self Portrait, it’s almost a true story. I was Christmas shopping in the Malvern Central shopping centre. A mother did point out the dolphins to her daughter on the ride. I did eat a bánh mì. But there were no hatchets, no blood. The story came to me when I thought, ‘I have literally nothing to offer this woman,’ but then, with great hope and excitement, I gazed down at the half-eaten bánh mì.
Analogical thinking, archetypes and symbols.
Fiction, to me, is not an attempt to document life but to understand it. And some truths are easier to grasp through analogy, archetypes, symbolism/representations:
Analogy: Joel was to the fictional Malvern shopping centre what I was to the real; Joel felt perceived by the mother the way I feel perceived by others; Fiction takes familiar dynamics/tensions and maps them on different environments.
Archetype: Joel cleanskin was the lonely, isolated individual. He was the man-child, the lost. The mother was nurturing, innocent, loving, pure… Of course, outside of this context they are more, but it doesn’t matter for the story.
Symbolism: the hatchet and blood represented society’s cause for perceiving Joel as unsavoury, undesired. The child demonstrated the woman’s love and purity; not in reality—don’t get upset—but as a symbolic function. Bánh mì = tastes good.
We all exist as a tapestry of archetypes and identities in a world of symbols and representations. We are the young forging their way, the old concerned with their relevance. We are the ambitious, the new parent, the divorced, the sister, the sick, the weak, the dumb. We are a mixture; we are a mess. We change. All around us, too, is layered meaning, meaning so innate we often understand without being aware that we do (see semiotics). These meanings, too, can change and differ between cultures. (Why does a politician wear a hard hat during an infrastructure announcement? It’s a signal. But what does the need to wear the hard hat also suggest? Something different—levels, levels…)
We cannot document life because we experience it on this interpretive level; so, we need a mediator. To create a clear melody from the noise of our lives, I present: fiction.
Other fiction.
‘The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.’ - Cormac McCarthy
Ideas are shaped by the culture, including fiction, that one consumes. (I once literally ate a copy of Tolstoy’s War & Peace—hard cover.)
Style and Synthesis.
Style: Fiction is also a craft, a puzzle and a game. It’s not enough to just ask ‘how can I touch on something true?’ One has to also do it in a beautiful and interesting way—your way, and then it must be crafted, whittled, born.
Synthesis: Taking competing or disparate ideas and crashing them together to create a new synthesis (like Hegel or Marx). So: Gene Hackman, my love of closed-plan houses, Fahrenheit 451, Grand Designs, and did I mention Gene Hackman?
Technical—Lucky Jim facial descriptions
Lucky Jim by Kinglsey Amis is often cited in Top-100-Novels-of-All-Time type lists, deservedly I believe. I took a lot from the book, but specifically for Self Portrait I stole the comic description of faces. Here is Amis describing a facial expression:
“Mentally, however, he was making a different face and promising himself he’d make it actually when next alone. He’d draw his lower lip in under his top teeth and by degrees retract his chin as far as possible, all this while dilating his eyes and nostrils. By these means he would, he was confident, cause a deep dangerous flush to suffuse his face.” (Lucky Jim, p 8.)
Jim Dixon’s expressions are a Looney Tunes response to awkwardness. I stole the technique and described Joel Cleanskin’s face as an exaggerated reaction to minor suffering. I went a step further and had the sight of his expression be what prompted the mother to make her daring escape. In life as in fiction, people over-reacting is a love of mine (people under-reacting too). Think: Frank Costanza.
Humour and withholding information
The comedic centre of the piece, I think, is the protagonist’s blindness to how is he perceived. In drafting, I identified this centre and built upon it in three ways.
I used exaggeration to create his character. Joel is not just frightening like I am, meaning physical size and muscular density. (Fighting me would be like fighting a metallic liger—not a typo.) He is a blood-soaked, hatchet-wielding, carcass-robbing, emotion-flipping mad man. I asked, ‘How could he be more intense?’
I withheld and revealed information for comedic effect. We know at the start that he feels people are afraid of him. Same. We all feel judged, it’s a hurtful part of life. But then I mention the hatchet and you go, ‘well…’, then the blood, and then the butchering…
I exploited a misunderstanding between his blindness and the woman’s perception. For example, when he mentions he needs the hatchet back to cook a roast with homeless men, the reader knows both sides. The reader understands he means for the charity while the woman believes he intends to eat the homeless men.
Favourite Line
My favourite line is the following:
‘If she looked closer, she might have seen his lonely, beating heart; any closer than that she would have found herself, for we are all one on some level, and the profound tragedy is that our shared beauty is so easily lost beneath our rough hides and personas–and, yes, the kidney blood.’
This is my favourite line because of the final five words, inspired by what Norm Macdonald says at 0:55 in the below clip: Nixon says ‘wigs’ that way to paint the WG scandal as silly. In my example, the narrator (me) is trying to paint the kidney blood as trivial in light of the depth of life, and thus make the woman seem overly dramatic.
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“the reader knows both sides. The reader understands he means for the charity while the woman “
Loved this. I felt so wronged on his behalf 🥲❤️
Admitting what you are saying is likely to be interpreted as a typo - because it is so insane - and being clear that it isn't a typo, is great. Love these post mortem.