[Writingworkshop] Divine Comedy Comments

[Christopher Robichaud]

Hi All!

 

Wow! I took a few days off and what a conversation ensued. Thanks so much to
Antony and Sam for the theoretical discussion. I'm gonna chime in on that in
a bit, but for now there's just a few things I wanted to say about "Divine
Comedy" in light of some of the feedback.

 

I guess I just want to emphasize that Neb's goal is not to get rid of the
fever. It's more complicated than that. Part of him wants it gone and part
of him doesn't. I had hoped to have conveyed the latter part early on, with
the lines mentioning that he's not willing to go get dipped any more of his
own accord when he gets the fever, with the mention of the sadness he feels
when the fever's on its way out, and with his thought that he's not sure he
doesn't want the fever to come back. To put things in terms of goals, Neb's
is to reconcile himself to the fever, one way or the other. And it's
telling, or so I had hoped, that when he gets it, he chooses to keep it but
hide it, and when he doesn't have it, he tries to keep it away. That's what
I wanted to show as a man genuinely conflicted. And the punchline was that
there was absolutely no way for Neb to reconcile himself to the fever within
the community he was living in. He needed to be rejected by it for him to
find any chance of reconciliation.

 

With that in mind, here's the summary of Neb's actions as I see them. We
first meet him when he gets the fever. And what does he do? He goes out of
his way to hide it.  He tells us about going through the motions at work,
avoiding his wife's stare, and waiting for his family to go to sleep. Then
he goes downstairs to make cartoons. What's the reaction to his action? He's
paralyzed, kidnapped, and forced to undergo a chemical bath of sorts. Next,
Neb doesn't have the fever. And now he wants to keep it that way. What does
he do? He tries to scare himself into keeping it at bay. Does that work? Not
really. He ends up getting flustered by his confrontation with Bob. So then
what does he do? He tries to keep the fever away by delving into work. Does
that succeed? No, unfortunately, it comes back anyway. And then? Well, poor
fool tries to hide it again, and that only ends up getting him crucified.

 

So I don't see Neb as a passive character at all. What I do see is a man
pulled in several directions and a world surrounding him that's way out of
his control. Neb does need to be saved; he can't do it on his own. But
that's okay. That's true to the world and true to Neb's condition. But I
don't see him as not being an adequate protagonist.

 

There was also a concern that I don't explicitly convey what putting things
down is early on. I agree I don't. I feel okay with this decision for two
reasons. First, I do I provide a clue as to what it involves. Neb talks
about his wife catching him *scribbling* down his craziness. That was meant
to make it clear that it involved some kind of writing/drawing, which is all
I wanted the reader to know early on. But I feel that's enough. Second, I
think there's two kinds of "what's going on" questions that a reader can
ask. One's okay and one's not. The bad one is where the writing itself
doesn't make it clear what's happening. The good one is where the writing's
clear, but we just haven't been told enough yet. To me, this happens in the
genre all the time. I kinda love it. Now, if it's never resolved, that is,
if at the end of the story things are still terribly unclear, then that's a
problem. But I hope that's not the case with my story, and I point to
"Fondly Fahrenheit" and "All You Zombies" as but two examples-great ones, I
think-of stories that certainly have you asking "what the heck's going on"
as you read through them the first time, but in a good way, and by the end,
it's clear and cool.

 

Enough folks have complained about the ending to make it a priority of mine
to shorten it. Before submitting it with my application I did remove a whole
paragraph, but I think I can trim it down even more, and will do so before
sending it out.

 

Many thanks again for all the feedback and the great discussion that ensued!

 

-Chris

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