With less than seven hours until I had to hand out copies of my writing assignment to everyone in class, my main characters were once again being incredibly boring:
I am here,"" said Susan.
""Yes, I see that,"" said Dave. ""I am walking now.""
""Yes, Dave,"" replied Susan. ""You are walking to work.""
Almost everything I had ever been told about the creative process throughout years of writing, art, music and drama classes had stressed the importance of just letting things happen. Like erosion or childbirth, making art was a natural process, not to be forced or tampered with.
The class I was currently taking was titled ""Beginning Fiction Workshop,"" but the biographies of the great writers we analyzed used words that would have seemed more appropriate to archaeology or particle physics. The artists described within ""made discoveries,"" ""formed hypotheses"" and even ""advanced theories.""
My understanding was that artists spent their time tuned in to the fascinating people, abstract shapes or disembodied voices that came and went through their minds, documenting the proceedings with the diligence of a stenographer and then searching for a gallery or publishing house.
After eight hours of discovery, this approach had left me with Dave and Susan, the two most boring protagonists in all the English language. No matter how hard I tried to envision them as dynamic, plot-driving individuals, in my mind they still resembled the kind of blank-faced Fisher Price people I had played with almost two decades earlier. Now, as then, Dave and Susan displayed a complete lack of interesting, bohemian life philosophies or sexual chemistry. Without the large plastic parking structure they had once toiled in, the two proved to be of no interest whatsoever. On paper, they could barely fill up a haiku, much less the 10-15 pages I had been instructed to shoot for.
In a writing workshop, a dozen students are sequestered in a windowless room around a single, large table, like the members of a criminal jury.
Though forbidden to discuss the proceedings with the outside world, the group's deliberations are usually polite and constructive, and no one is ever found guilty. Still, people tended to become nervous when taking something they had become emotionally invested in and putting it up for the judgment of others, whether the issues in the work were personal or grammatical.
While Dave and Susan continued to loiter around uselessly in my imagination, I concluded that students were right to be self-conscious. Even if the subject of a story was obviously fantastical, I was likely to read into the author's personality based on their work, which sometimes meant trying to attach hidden psychological motivations to stories about time travel, playing Nintendo or getting high. Assuming that everyone else did the same, I was fearful that my non-existent plot and emotionally neutered characters would have me branded as a sociopath.
My greater worry was that my god-awful story, with its leaden characters and comatose action, could only be the offspring of an equally dull and vacuous mind. If that was true, then I had to find some way to disguise the fact.
Thinking that my inner-eye might need a sharper focus, I went to brew a pot of coffee, noticing that it was now about 3:30 a.m. In between bathroom breaks, I continued to check in on Dave and Susan, who now seemed more jittery than I remembered them being but were otherwise unchanged. The coffee had sharpened my focus, but with the result that the profound boringness of the characters now stood out much more clearly than before.
""I am still here,"" said Susan.
""Yes, I see that you remain there,"" said Dave.
Panicking, I tried to reverse this adjustment with a stiff drink, but found that after a couple of scotches my interest in completing the assignment began to waver dangerously.
With precious little time remaining, and my patience exhausted by caffeine, alcohol, dehydration and lack of sleep, I took one last glance at my intractably dull protagonists and decided that I would handle them just as I had dealt with their Fisher Price doppelgangers decades earlier:
""Fuck you guys,"" I said. ""I'm gonna write about dinosaurs.""
Are you a publisher looking for a good dinosaur murder-mystery? E-mail Matt at hunziker@wisc.edu.
