Capsule One: March 2009

sanstodo

Alright, I finally got some time and finished an edit of Capsule One. I think it will give you more context for Capsule Two (sorry for the weird order, Capsule Two was giving me headaches).

I hope you enjoy it!

Spoiler:

Capsule One: March 2009

It is 7:00 AM. A motorcycle is roaring. The air smells of wheatgrass and cinnamon and he can see the tip of the sun rising across the plain. Thirteen miles vanish as he blinks; he opens his mouth to yell and thirteen more disappear. The roaring is growing louder, painful, and he grips the handles harder. Then he stands, staggers across the room, and runs a finger across the face of his iPhone. The roaring stops with a click.

Chilled, he rubs his pale arms and looks back at his lover still lying in bed. She is asleep, her hair pooled like a sea of blood, undisturbed by the sound or his dreams. He wonders when she is going to leave him.

He opens the bedroom door and pads across the hall into the bathroom. The tiles are cold so he shuffles onto the bathmat and turns on the shower. Water sighs dejectedly and he waits. He looks in the mirror, runs a hand through black hair still stiff from yesterday’s gel, and puffs out his stomach like he used to as a child. Back then, he pretended to be a starving child with either a concave or convex belly. Now, try as he might, he’s stuck with convex.

Steam covers the mirror’s face so he steps into the shower. He sighs, not noticing his sighing, and fires snot out of his nostrils. His breath comes easier now and the muscles in his back unclench. He wants to sit on the tub’s floor, open his mouth, and drown like a turkey. He spits the water out and grabs his shampoo. It is cheap and feels like dish cleaner but it smells like vanilla, like a woman who left him years ago.

Thoughts bubble up and he wonders if the Dead Sea will be empty in fifteen years. Glacier National Park should be renamed National Park so it stands to reason that the Dead Sea might die in his lifetime. This doesn’t bother him but he doesn’t notice. War and famine and disease and tragedy in a dozen countries whose names he collects like stamps flit through his consciousness and he suddenly craves Doritos but he has cut high fructose corn syrup out of his diet so he hopes the urge goes away before work ends and he passes the grocery store. The Taliban is approaching the capital of Pakistan and he’s not sure if the US should intervene or let the Pakistanis handle it themselves. They haven’t shown the backbone so far and things don’t look good.

He becomes aware that he is ejaculating because of the familiar twist of his hand to point his stream toward the drain. He watches his semen drift down to mix with the snot, piss, and semen of yesterday. The tip of his penis is sticky but a small amount of soap remedies that. His body is clean and the shower should be over but he stands for a minute longer with his eyes closed and warm water pouring into his open mouth. His tongue stops it from flowing down his throat so it reaches his lips and tumbles onto his chest like the miniature waterfall in the yard of his childhood home that he stopped up with snow and sticks in the fourth grade. He spits, turns the shower off, steps out, and grabs a towel.

The mirror is fogged and he doesn’t bother to wipe it off. The air is pleasantly humid, like South Carolina years ago, so he stands naked and shaves. He is new to it, recently trading electric razors for real blades, so he cuts himself a few times and still feels it. The styptic burns as it stops the bleeding but he expects it and doesn’t gasp anymore. Orange flavored tooth paste that no one likes and an unknown person bought fills his mouth so he spits again and flosses despite the fact that he cannot afford the dentist but knows he has a cavity but it doesn’t hurt yet so it will have to wait.

Before he leaves, he sticks his head into the bedroom and says goodbye to his sleeping lover. She mumbles something in dream-tongue and rolls over so the sheets cocoon her. He grabs his headphones and sticks them in his ears. He puts on his coat with the too-tight mandarin collar that he pretends will one day fit because of promises to lose weight he will never lose. Before the door closes, he glances at the clock. It is 8 AM. He has to go thirteen miles. He blinks but he is still there. He opens his mouth to yell but he is still there.

Muncie

The first three sentences do absolutely nothing for me.

The sentence that kept me reading was: He wonders when she is going to leave him.

The biggest problem is you're starting a story with a person waking up and doing a morning routine, and not a particularly interesting one. When you start a story with a character waking up they don't exist anywhere outside of where your story starts. It immediately cripples your ability to make the character seem alive and real.

Here is one of my favorite openings:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Why does this sentence work so well?

1. It establishes that there is already a history and now you're in the middle of it. There was all this stuff going on before the story started.
2. It establishes a character, we know something about him, he is a Colonel, he is facing death, and it is making him think of more idyllic times.
3. It establishes conflict, right off the bat. We don't know much about the Colonel but now we have an emotional attachment to him, he is in peril, and we are worried for him.

Dream sequences feel like a cheat. Later they can be used for thematic purposes but opening up with one is not going to make the reader more likely to trust you. The first thing you've done to them is present an illusion and then rip it away.

I don't like extremely logical, lucid dream sequences. Dreams are nonsense (except in myth where they can play other roles, like foreshadowing or cementing themes). When people wake up and then tell their bored-to-tears significant other about their dreams they are interpreting the nonsense into a narrative. Be careful with dreams in fiction. In this place I don't feel it adds anything to the story. Perhaps with the complete story it would. That's up to you. Hang a note on it though: "What does this achieve? Is it believable or is is a trope?"

The mundanity of "getting ready for work" sequences eventually caused you to fall into "he did this, he did that, he jerked off in the shower" kind of stage direction. None of this shit is important, and secondly, I am sick as hell of reading about dudes jerking off in the shower. American Beauty already put the point on that particular bit of symbolism. Write it at the top of a piece of paper: "WHY DID MAN CHARACTER JERK OFF IN THE SHOWER?" and see what kind of answers you come up with. Why is it essential to your story?

This goes for all of it. Why is not wiping the fog from the mirror significant?

I see that you are trying to show your character as some kind of ultra-loser. Fine, but there are more finesse ways to go about it.

Ultimately though, this isn't a story. You're writing is fine when you're not dicking around with insignificant things for half a paragraph but I have no idea how good of a storyteller you are. Write the story then worry about it 400 words at a time.

Competent writers can be shitty storytellers. Don't assume if you have the first part the second just comes naturally.

Raziel

Muncie's on point here. 500 words describing waking up - something that everyone does on a daily basis - isn't cutting it for me. More tension, please.

sanstodo

Btw, that is one of my favorite opening lines as well. I read started reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" after I dropped off my friends for a seven hour long pre-marriage Catholic couples counseling session and had to wait for them to finish. I didn't stop reading until they were banging on the driver's side window.

I will never be that good a writer Then again, I don't feel bad because pretty much no one is (with a few exceptions).

Your criticism is well-taken and I will revise. A few thoughts, though:

Re not wiping the fog off the mirror: He's shaving. Have you ever tried to shave with a fogged mirror, especially when you're new at it? It's a terrible idea. This is part of the characterization, perhaps sloppily done, of his laziness and assocation/disassociation with his body (cognizant of its faults and how it used to be, ignorant of how it feels and how to maintain it). Regardless, I'll go through each action and consider its necessity.

I'm finding that it's difficult to explain the idea of Capsules (or the flow of it) by posting the capsules separately. It's probably not the right format for these boards (as I am discovering from the comments on each one) since the narrative isn't really found in any of the capsules themselves but in the sum total of the moments they describe, like the way our memories and dreams are relatively incoherent as parts but can be coherent when pasted all together. There are references in here to later capsules (ones that occur chronologically before and after this one) that are only noticeable upon deep reading or re-reading.

I can't expect that kind of commitment from people on a forum board. I'll try posting a more "traditional" form of fiction once I can figure out how to smoothly integrate footnotes into a post......