Cut lines

Before Christmas I began working on a short story – which turned out to be not so short – built around a number of different horror/creepy/crime prompts and gestated perhaps a bit too long. I was experimenting with the idea of writing in something of a stream-of-consciousness style, although I ended up adding a fair amount of punctuation during editing. I was also experimenting with a different editing process. I guess I’ll only know how well it worked based on when and if the finished story finds publication!

I often cut a lot of lines and full paragraphs when editing my work. Here are some of the sequences that I cut out of the story “F/13” that I’m currently sending around to magazines – and some of the images that I found while researching it’s milieu and trying to develop mood.

The horror story follows a “self-made man” in Hollywood (prompt one) as he meets a younger man who he sees as something of a doppelganger near a mid-century diner (prompt two) and fights mental illness in an animal form (prompt three) while a crime (or two?) takes place (prompt four.)

It’s a bit of a mash and I had more fun collecting ideas, writing random “bits” and researching than I did writing together the plot, I struggled with getting a plot to coalesce at all, but I got it done! Often when I’m editing I feel like I have to take out the neatest bits in order to let the plot work with pace. This is, I believe, what is called “killing your darlings!”

I’ve never put together a “mood board” for a story in any formal way, but the rest of this post might be close!

A sketch pad before you were a photographer before you were an assistant camera man making motion pictures living the dream you tried to draw what you saw it was the only way pencil lines ink lines down on scrap paper try to trace the cracks so they could also see always the ink bled and coarsened blurred the edges the meetings between could not be seen made instead clumsy river of the fine at restaurants when he could he ordered Bananas Foster not for the taste for the flame.

The house was too quiet now had Marta left without saying goodbye snuck off surely he would have seen her leaving unless she went out the back should he go to see if she had if she had remembered to lock the gate on the way out if you didn’t people could get in a neighbouring child fall into the pool it happened more often than you would think children were so stupid they had so much to learn were trying to learn everything test everything taste everything see feel everything they never could he would never learn.

He wasn’t interested in creating tricks with the camera, not interested in distorting reality he was trying to capture the distortions in reality that he knew was there tendrils if you looked at the right moment in the right light with the left eye.
The eye might be the key, seeing what the camera, cold mechanical glass rubber and steel, could not. He wasn’t sure, he needed to keep trying, it was the only tool that came close to being what he needed. Everything else, all the other work, it was for the ability to do this work, this searching often in the dark always in the shadows sometimes they were as bright as noonday

This boy with the green eyes he understood a little. Later his wife might ask why did you tell them your name you could have given some other name just used your first name called yourself John they wouldn’t have been able to find you again if you hadn’t given them your name. But he needed the boy with green eyes to know his name he needed to be true with him he needed. He shouldn’t have been surprised he knew miles were not a distance to count on he signed his early work “The Resurrected Man,” but he wasn’t. It was here.