Killing For Money... Or Candy

For various reasons I've been thinking a bit about my very young career as a writer of fiction. I try to consider myself a mature person and wouldn't be stretching to say I've got a deep understanding of many areas of the world. I like to think that I could be writing those books and stories that smart people read and then discuss afterwards, but all I find myself writing about is assassins and junk.

To write about something you have to know about something, and I know a lot about a lot, but it seems what I know the most about is the life and times of imaginary hitmen.

I'm not singular in this. There are lots of novels about assassins, in fact I own several of them, and while I enjoy them I don't really consider them "literature" as much as I consider them episodes of the show Alias in book form. They're entertaining, but not very deep.

But then consider the last book I read, No Country For Old Men, a very popular, well-received novel that was turned into last year's best-picture Oscar winner. This book (and the movie) features a very very ruthless hitman as a central character but somehow manages to elevate itself to the level of literature.

I'm trying to find the distinction, of course so I can emulate it, and failing. I thought it might be level of detail, as most corny ooh-rah Tom Clancy-style novels that come off as immature seem to go overboard explaining the specific make and model of gun on every page. No Country For Old Men is pretty explicit about these things, though.

Another theory I had for the distinction between mature books about hitmen and giddy fodder for maladjusted teenagers is just the amount of reveling in violence. Writers like Ludlum seem to just gloss over the violence of some events, while a story put together by a writer with mommy issues would tend to go nuts with the gory details.

NCFOM is just as violent as you could imagine a novel being without it seeming ridiculous. It's cold and at times depressing, but it's still one of the best novels written in the last decade.

The solution, I think, is a style of writing I call "bore and metaphor." Despite the body count and intrigue in No Country For Old Men, it is at times a stunningly boring book in ways I continually fail to render into words. Also, everything drips of metaphor. Metaphors can be great, like a summer breeze, or they can be overwrought and laborious, like the last twelve Matrix movies. It's like when you're in one of those haunted houses that pop up around Halloween inside abandoned grocery stores and rec centers where you pay $15 to walk through a 1-sum maze of particleboard walls knowing that around every corner will either be a staff member dressed up as a scary clown or some elaborate prop that shoots smoke and looks scary in the dark. Instead of knowing something abrupt-posing-as-scary will be around every corner, you know that around every corner will be something that's a metaphor for something less interesting.

The key, then, for me to graduate into a better writer while still writing about the world's second-oldest profession, is for me to learn to remove elements of interest from my stories and make everything into a metaphor. Then I'll be golden.

So, in my own interest, I'd like to announce to those that have read my to-eventually-be-published novel Mind + Body, that the "milk" is a metaphor for Chris's sexual frustration and Chris buys those eyeglasses so he can look through them into his own past, instead of the other thing.

Also, the .45 Caliber H&K USP semiautomatic is a metaphor for life. Do yourself a favor, go through the story again and count the number of time he fires the gun. The number is the answer to everything.