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In which Marie gets feedback and analyses it, her story and herself

Well, submitted the short story that I forced you all to read to the fiction writing class and they all seemed to like it quite well. As expected, most people interpreted it as a lovers' quarrel between a man and a woman. I had one vote for the possibility of it being a father-daughter relationship, and both my parents thought it sounded like two close female friends. Bill, of course, thought it was supposed to be him and me (because he assumes everything I write is about him) and seemed a little distressed because that would make him the second character (besides the narrator) which would be unflattering and also untrue to life as he has never made me cry and if one of us ever says snappy things that hurt the other it is me. 

I think my parents arrived at their impression of the story as two female friends because I read the story to them instead of them reading it for themselves, so they didn't really get to bring as much of their own baggage to the table as everyone else did. Nevertheless, they are the only people to get the same impression as me. When I started the story I had no set idea of who the characters were supposed to be. I was very nearly free-writing, just lacing the dialogue together in a way that sounded natural to me. By the time I had finished writing the final draft, however, I had decided that for me at least, the characters are two women, the narrator being somewhat younger than the other, and that their relationship is a very old, very close friendship. I never did get a very clear idea exactly what the argument was about, but I suspect one of them behaved "badly" (i.e. the perpetrator handled some situation or reacted to some event differently than the other thought they should have). Either the "smart-ass" was terrible and mean to someone that she thought deserved it but the narrator thought she was being inexcusably cruel, or the "tongue-tied saint" did just the opposite and was polite and deferential to someone who was in her face, and probably didn't deserve her manners, so the other woman thought she wasn't standing up for herself the way she should. The narrator always gives people the benefit of the doubt even when they blatantly hurt or take advantage pf her. Her friend never gives anyone the benefit of the doubt, is shamelessly terrifying to people even when they mean her no harm, and burns a lot of perfectly good bridges. 

Both characters talk a lot like me, so I'm not sure exactly who to say I based them on. The part where the second character says "I can practically smell the martyrdom coming off you" and "I always feel like I've killed a kitten after I've upset you" is based very heavily on how I feel after I've semi-un-intentionally upset Bill because he does the same thing as the narrator: goes all sad and forlorn and slips into a coma. He doesn't do this as much anymore when I do upset him, and I upset him a lot less now, too, than I used to, but I will never forget what it's like. It makes my antagonistic side want to upset him more just to prod him out of the coma, which I suspect is part of what made the fight in the story so hurtful. 

The argument I imagine (about bad behavior) is one I definitely could have had with the Cowgirl at one time. She certainly lectured me more than once about standing up to people and not always being so nice. But the Cowgirl--despite being probably my closest friend for about two and a half years-- was never as dear to me as, say Bill or my dad, and while I enjoyed her company and valued her advice, I always took everything she said with a grain of salt. The Cowgirl had a mercurial spirit that made her moods difficult to manage and she was apt to say anything given the chance. So her good opinion of me was less important to me than it could have been had she been a more steady individual. Also, she was not terribly quick-witted. She always had a reply, but a large number of them were neither clever, nor cutting but merely made her feelings on the matter known in a way that left little room for interpretation. I was the smart-ass one in the relationship, but I was always a bit in awe of the Cowgirl, and very careful of her feelings, so I only ever used my wit to make her laugh. I was, after all, the nice one. So the conversation is not based on me and the Cowgirl. I can say this with some conviction as the Cowgirl never made me cry, always excepting that last day when she suddenly went away with no explanation leaving me with one last hug and a promise she has yet to keep that she would come back and talk everything over later. That's best left for another short story entirely.

Anyway, I promised I would tell you all my impressions when I'd heard yours. So there they are.

It was good to be able to workshop the story with my class because I got a wide range of responses from very different people. It was productive to be able to know what other people liked and didn't like, what they noticed and what they misunderstood. I got a lot of rather un-insightful commentary, some great suggestions which I intend to implement, and some rather odd insights into the nature of the general public that I had not expected to get.

For one thing, several of the women in the class did not like the fact that the characters make up in the end. Of course, they were seeing it from the perspective of a lover's quarrel, and being women, they did not like that it was the narrator who called the second character, and they didn't like the casual way in which the second character seems to dismiss the fight. The second person's attitude probably fits better if you think about them as friends. Anyway, I got several comments about what a bastard the boyfriend seemed to be and how it was clearly an unhealthy relationship, etc. 

I suppose I should have seen this angle to the story but am ashamed to say that I did not. I live a very sheltered life and am lucky to have been surrounded for most of my life with people who were in very stable, good relationships. The obvious exception being the Captain and the Cowgirl, but they always remained something of an anomaly to me. I could never quite figure out what was wrong with them because there was nothing insurmountably wrong with either one of them alone. When I got engaged my friend Linda Gruber gave me a piece of advice that I have kept in mind since: (I paraphrase) Remember, there are three people in every marriage: a wife, a husband and a relationship. Take care of all three of them and your marriage will last. After their divorce, I came to believe that the problem in the Captain and the Cowgirl's marriage actually originated from all three members of the union.

My use of the term "union" has made me think of all kinds of amusing jokes I could make about succession which would be entirely inappropriate and also most irreverent when applied to the subject of two of my best friends getting divorced. Anyway I was talking about my class's response to the story and somehow ended up on The Divorce Thing again. I have the memory of that event and my resultant feelings firmly anchored somewhere in my frontal lobes, it seems.

Anyway, as I was saying before all that, most of the married people that I know well and observe more or less regularly are in good relationships that have stood the test of time. My own has only stood the test of three years, but I intend to stay married to Mr. Bill until I breathe my last breath, and if he has any different ideas he will find himself strapped to some heavy furniture ala Misery with a missing kneecap in reserve if he tries to escape. 

So, being my naive self, and loving happy endings as I do, it had not really occurred to me that the story could sound like a girl who is in a bad relationship and who still clings to the guy who makes her miserable, so much so that even when he really hurts her she is the one who calls to apologize. So that was good to know, I guess, though there's precious little I can do about it if I want to maintain the ambiguity I tried so hard to maintain in throughout the piece.

Another thing I hadn't expected was that most of the class got hung up on the word simulacrum. I know, in my mind, that I have a big vocabulary and know a lot of words that don't really see newsprint too often, but again because of the company I keep and people I read, I always feel a little under-educated and so I tend to unthinkingly assume that if I know a word it must be out there enough for a good-sized demographic to recognize it. I also would assume that even more people would understand its meaning simply out of context and perhaps a recognition of the rather obvious Latin root (from which we also derive "similar" and "similitude" the latter coming very close to having the same definition as simulacrum in modern use). Anyone who didn't understand the word, I expect the grab a dictionary. 

What surprised me first was that only one other person in the room was familiar with the term. Next, I was surprised that this person was not the teacher but a fellow student and that the teacher did not even seem to have a general idea of what the word meant. Finally, I was very surprised to find that many members of the class felt that this was a detractor to the story. They said it "brought them out of the flow" or something. 

However, the word stays because I don't see how they expect to ever find out what words mean if they never run into them in a story. Vocabulary builders are all fine and good, but they are superfluous for someone who reads a decent amount of almost anything provided it is fairly well written and not garbage like romance novels or cheezy sci-fi. Actually, I take that back. Both of those genres are just as likely to contain a word like simulacrum as any better-written sort of book. The authors of both romance novels and cheezy sci-fi seem to make a point of using over-the-top flowery language as if that made up for the fact that they share their main characters and plotlines with entire wall-full of other paperbacks. So really, anything will do.

I mean really! How do they think i ran into the word? It wasn't a vocabulary list. It was Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter which is very good and has a part that involves a simulacrum made of rose petals. I just found it funny that so many people objected to the use of words they didn't necessarily understand right off because everyone could not say enough about how much they loved the term l'esprit d'escalier and how cool it was that such a phrase existed. I got compliments from almost everyone in the class and several people thanked me for introducing it into their vocabulary. But for some reason they were less thrilled with simulacrum, probably because it wasn't defined within the text of the story. 

(The really embarrassing part is that I learned the meaning of l'esprit d'escalier from a Sandman comic and not from any kind of scholarly source at all. Neil Gaiman slips better vocabulary words into his comics and novels than any Classics teacher could ever hope to do)

Anyway...I could go on for pages about simulacra and how cool I think they are. I noticed that Merriam-Webster's does not give the definition I know for the word, but only gives its definition as it is most commonly used outside the sci-fi/fantasy genre. For those who do not know what it means in the story: a simulacrum in the classical sense, is the semblance of life created out of something inanimate. A good example is Blodeuedd, a woman constructed out of blossoms by Gwyddion and Math in Celtic legend. Simulacra tend to take on the qualities of whatever material was used to make them (sometimes in highly surprising ways) hence a woman made of flowers would be beautiful, while a soldier made of junkyard scrap (another comic-book device) is rather less attractive but much more difficult to decommission. 

Like I said I could go on for hours because I find the concept of a human being made out of something fairly base and natural quite fascinating and note that it parallels the Biblical creation of man quite nicely. But I shall stop myself here and only say that the Microsoft spell-check recognizes both the word and its plural so it can't be that out of use.

And with that....to bed!