Letter Demanding a Towtruck, Stat.

Dear Kirk, Nan, and Peter,

This is a letter about my fucked up story, once known to my vast readership as The Pure of Heart, but now stripped of title and lying in a gutter like so much used kleenex (TM). I am writing this letter without regard for your feelings, only mine. This is an act of faith, and, as is true of all such rash absurdities in my life, I am doing it not because I want to, but because I am desperate. And because Anne Lamott, whom I adore, in Bird By Bird told me to write this. Me personally. I was reading that great book again because I want to be a good writer and it's the best book I know on the topic, and I opened the book at random, which is a form of divination all of us ex-Mormons can understand, and there it was: what I needed to know: if you're stuck in the way I am stuck, in slick mud driving a story that is no more capable than a Saturn sedan, the thing you --I mean I-- need to do is write a letter to somebody with a towtruck. I have this informal writing group I belong to of which its other members are happily unaware, and all three of you are idling your big towtrucks and this is my plea for help.

Help. Please.

This story started as the most natural thing I've ever written, almost. The generative idea was that I could say something useful about religion, or leaving a religion --let's say for the sake of conversation that the religion is a weird, provincial, American one that looks suspiciously like a for-profit corporation-- by simply strangemaking the idea of purity. Instead of repentance and sacrament, these cats'd take lots of broad-spectrum antibiotics, and subscribe to a doctrine that equates biological corruption with spiritual corruption. Fine. I find that weird and funny, and one of my hopes is that my readers will find it weird and funny, too, and have a sudden sense of having stepped into the void religion-wise. Or, a little less grandly: that my readers will see, even for a moment, how strange religion really is. The central weird conceit of the story, I like to think, may be able to waken readers for a moment from the sleep of habit, in which religion is rarely seen as fundamentally psychological, desperate, and nightmarish, like Fuselli's horse with its glaucus eyes right there in the bedroom.

However. I am now on major re-write #4 and the story gets farther and farther from what felt natural and right when I first jotted down a draft late last summer. THat first draft had all the reassuring spontaneity and organic gushing-forth that for me indicate a good idea. No struggle. No weeping and wailing. Hardly any effort. Just an indecent gushing. But this time the editing process has been tortuous. I am long into the self-loathing phase at this point. Maybe six months of that. And I'm nowhere near line-editing yet. And every time I revise I start with a feeling that I'm heading in the right direction and end up with the feeling that the story is less interesting and engaging than it was a few hours earlier. I am once again experiencing what I have so many times before: that I write characters and places and things with great alacrity; that I tend to procrastinate big structural decisions, plot, and drama way too long; and that I often get miles into a story before I realize that there is little in the way of central event or logical narrative drive.

To be specific: in this story, there are two fulcra: the first is Yeshua being abandoned in the Outer Darkness when the church fails. The second is meeting June and having a new life open up. I like both of these. But I don't know if they're enough. Or, as Kirk has rightly observed: maybe they're enough but too late in the story. As I originally pictured it, the birth scene, right up front, would be strange and deeply disorienting for the reader. The reader would have the sense of stepping into a place that is full of familiar objects but where everything is driven by repellant, or maybe just bizarre, doctrines. My original hope was that a reader would find this simultaneously distressing and disorienting and fascinating. The language would be a semi-familiar mash-up of modern American vernacular and Old-Testament pseudo-scripturese. The cultic certainties, the hints of persecution delusion, the dogmatism, and the isolating chosenness of the Pure, behind their wall and their Protections would show religion as something maybe scary and coercive and unacceptable. [? Here I'm on thin ice, I think...] Anyway, when I read version 4, which you haven't seen yet, I think I'm farther from that unsettling glimpse of the weirdness of religion than ever. Given tribal human nature and the fragility of minds, we should find cults terrifying, and we should, I think, vastly expand our conception of cult to include any mass movement that hears voices and yearns for something beyond death. But we find all this terribly mundane. uh. uh. uh. and so: THIS STORY NEEDS TO GET MORE AND MORE SAVAGE WITH EVERY REVISION, not more and more polished. And, when Yeshua chooses normalcy, if that's what he eventually chooses, it needs to stretch out into his future in ghastly banality. I think. At least it does for me. The future, I mean. Stretch out into ghastly banality with a vanishing point out on a blank horizon.

[Digression: this is what Don Gately sees at the end of Infinite Jest, BTW. He has his one life, and it is constrained by his isolation in individual experience so that there is no sustained experience of the One possible, there is just "and when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out." We invent God to avoid non-endings like that. He's dessert. A resolving chord. But we're good moderns now, and can dispense with all that.]

Yeah but so:let's say for a moment that Anne Lamott was right in telling me to write this letter. It is an act of faith, and the miracle that succeeds it is my moment of clarity up there in ALL CAPS^^^. This story needs to be more savage. What does that mean? It means it CANNOT END WITH GOD OR WITH ANYTHING GOD-LIKE: there is no dessert, no moment of resolution, no gloriously concordant unity of the orchestra, no moral conclusion, no happily ever after. The tide must be way out. Let's say Yeshua chooses June. He must be choosing her because he likes her more than he likes some other way forward, not because she is some kind of Romantic culmination. He has to face the blank horizon just like the rest of us mortals: without the magical ability to prophesy. Without assurances. With the same existential uncertainties we all face. Of course. Duh. Yeshua is in his life. His past is lost. His present is complicated and distracted. His future is unknown. He meets a girl he likes. He chooses to go with her because that is all a person can ever do: try to walk the long walk with people you really love and try not to be waylaid by promises of something else. There are but three limnae: learning, love, and death, yeah? Beware the merely liminoid: drugs, entertainment, religious chosenness, stuff like that. Does Yeshua have a great moment of insight? Does he suddenly understand that his church was nothing but a projector sending an image of God at the blank horizon? Does he commit to a life of radical modern no-bullshit realism? Does this insight creep up on him and remain inarticulate, so that he simply walks forward into his life with [and, someday, without] June on an inarticulate hunch that it's the best path he can be on? I think this is what I mean my keeping the story "savage": it doesn't allow false comforts, just the journey and the learning, love, and death that happen along the way.

ok. That's all for now. I am committed to doing this well. I don't really know how, so I opened Bird By Bird and it told me to write this letter, which I did with little sense that I would figure anything out, but with some faith. And what I think I learned along tha way is that the story needs to be unsparing and that Yeshua must be directed by warmth. Thoughts?
Many thanks,
V.