My Pedantic Dragon

“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.” Stephen King, On Writing

It is both exciting and daunting to experiment with writing fiction when one has spent many years teaching other humans to analyze and interpret it. There is a gulf between the gourmand and the chef, the critic and the playwright, the connoisseur and the musician. I tripped on the way across said gulf.

In addition, I have discovered that part of the pain of pandemic pedagogy has come from the collapse of the difference between the student and the consumer. Many contemporary students believe that, being "customers" who pay outrageous tuition for the “commodity of knowledge,” they are always right when evaluating their instructors, even if they have never taught a course or given a lecture or published a scholarly article or earned an advanced degree. It has been instructive to get a taste of the anguish that a painter must feel when someone who has never touched a brush to canvas savages her work online. I can analyze and interpret fiction with some skill, but writing my own has been both thrilling and humiliating. I think more of my colleagues should try to create what they so confidently critique.

Meditating on these matters moved me to write the short story “LEFT” and publish it on Vocal. It was my first such effort in many years—I did plenty of clumsy scribbling as a kid, but apart from some mediocre poetry designed to charm desirable humans, all of my writing in the last few decades has been in the academic mode. The fact that this story was a contribution to a contest that would be judged by the distinguished fantasy author Christopher Paolini was also important to me. I thought that being scorned or praised by such a writer would be edifying, if embarrassing. He passed over my humble offering in silence and I would argue that he was right to do so. I think I committed three dreadful sins and I am grateful for the knowledge that I have acquired from wincing at them in retrospect.

Firstly, I botched the first line. The mandate was clear, for this was supposed to be my first sentence: "There weren't always dragons in the Valley." This was the first sentence of my submission: "There is a strange sadness in a spent forest." Naively, I inferred that contestants had the liberty to improvise upon the prompt supplied as they saw fit. I was flat wrong. I was also something of a pretentious hypocrite in this case, as I am forever admonishing my students to pay careful attention to assignment guidelines and instructions. Nice work, nerd boy. I think my first sentence has some lyrical charm, but it is not what it was supposed to be. On that basis alone, the judge had good reason to turn to the next submission right away.

Secondly, I violated one of the holiest tenets of good narrative craftsmanship: instead of showing, I told. I derived some real pleasure from imagining my way into the hide of an ancient dragon, but I failed to shed my own habits and predilections in the process. My narrator/protagonist is a pedantic twit who can fly and breathe fire. Just look at this: "Most of the time, when your whelps make a sound, it is mouth-watering: they are always convinced that they are in distress, because they are not acquainted with genuine danger or pain, but under that constant complaint about everything failing to be the safe, salty insides of their mothers, there is always the gloating of growth. They know that, given time and food and rest, the drop will become the torrent, and the will that yields will become the will that commands. How they know this I do not know, but all throbbing things do. Even a tree knows it is closer to the sun than it used to be, and even something like you smells its pride before you get on with humbling it for the sake of yours. Vulgar vitality makes vivacious victuals. Your kind knows it as well as anything with teeth. You save the devouring, as a rule, for other things’ offspring. You think this is one of the things that makes you better than your food."

I suspect that most readers would find this, to borrow from Mark Twain, to be chloroform on paper. I wanted the tone to be imperious and misanthropic and I had themes of cruelty and fatuous self-delusion on the part of the humans who mistreated the infant represented in the story in mind. I think they are only dimly visible through the smoke of verbiage here. I have also learned to resist the lure of alliteration, for which I obviously have a stupid soft spot. I have discovered that it is easy to allow manner to eclipse matter when one is writing fiction. I think this has to do, in my odd case at least, with the stylistic habits of critics and scholars. They tend to unleash all sorts of elaborate, verbal pyrotechnics for their readers, as if it is important to show that they can perform linguistic tricks that ordinary mortals would never attempt, ala Heidegger or Derrida. I have been striving of late to get the words out of the way of the fictional world. Adverbs and adjectives, as the King line I cited above confirms, should be sparse. Ruthless editing is crucial.

Thirdly, it is clear to me now that I tried rather clumsily--adverb alert!--to put Shklovsky's theory of defamiliarization into practice in this story. Shklovsky and the other Russian Formalists argued persuasively that literature produces an effect that they identified as defamiliarization or astrane‐niye in their accustomed Russian. This seems quite plausible to me: what makes a poem or a novel different from a grocery list or a furtive text message is the fact that literary works make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. I was striving to make being a dragon familiar and ordinary things strange, simultaneously. Thus, "I nodded. Some of the twitching fools behind me thought that meant feeding was imminent and were all froth. I turned from the whelp and spoke another language to one of the trees. I convinced it to frighten the gaunt gaspers in the remains of the forest by trying to do what I was made to: contain fire. You’ve seen torches before. Panic is a fine condiment."

What I had in mind was a fresh, unfamiliar description of a dragon breathing fire at a tree. I think I produced something so cryptic and weird as to defy understanding. It is all well and good to spurn cliches and what Orwell deplored as "verbal false limbs," but merciful crap, it takes some ambitious parsing to find out what the fuck my dragon did to that tree.

I have only just begun to kick myself (I am as masochistic as the average, recovering Irish Catholic) but I think pointing out this trio of transgressions is sufficient to confirm that the judge was right to kill my pedantic dragon. I did enjoy this exercise in empathetic, imaginative projection, in spite of its failure. When you are aging and ill and tired of teaching bored humans who don't do the reading, imagining what it would be like to be a powerful monster who can set fire to a village with a sneeze is a good time. I do not think I shared enough of that sinister joy with my reader, though. I'll light you up next time, I promise.