I recently watched Spalding Gray’s “Monster in a Box”, the late, great monologist’s story of his attempt to write a novel. The manuscript ended up being a real monster, about nineteen hundred page of a man unable to take a vacation after his mother kills herself when he goes on his first one. The monologue was very good, funny, irreverent, and at times oddly poignant. But the film really concerns Mr. Gray’s procrastination with writing the novel, which is what I've found most writers write about when they write about writing. It is also the thing that I generally identify most with when I read about writers.
While watching the film, though, I realized that I too have a monster. Admittedly it is nowhere near as long as Mr. Gray’s. It is a small monster, occupying a virtual folder, and taking up only 70 kilobytes of space. It is 25 pages, 16, 305 words, and 78, 636 characters without spaces. Perhaps it would now behoove you to know it began life as a five-page short story for my 10th grade English class. As it stands now, I’m not sure it is appropriate for a college class. It is not a greatly artistic or even coherent work, as I began writing it when I began reading David Forster Wallace and James Joyce, so it is written in a heavily footnoted, steam of consciousness style, which translates to loooooong footnotes and sentences that are remarkable in just how much they run-on. It was to center on four characters, a late night TV host (Kyle Morrison), an older actor (the academy darling), a bizarre Avant-garde director, and the new actor. It ended up being about them, and a surreal artist, a foolish writer, the interrogation of a girl by a nameless authority, and a race of creatures who heads are cameras, and who convey their emotions with the images they capture. It is really quite a terrible story, but it is one I am still occasionally tempted to work on. Thankfully, I usually have much more important things to do, like
To show the tremendous problems of this story, I’ll provide two examples the first of which is the opening paragraph (it’s relatively short):
“And so the image builds, grows, becomes a complete and distinct and above all variable creation of itself and by extension, the world it inhabits. An image is everyday is ordinary. It is in the hands of us to make it extraordinary. Our image of ourselves, define who we are as a person, so our image of the world defines it to us. And before hand we must…”
And now, from later (this is an example of the run-on sentences I “perfected”):
“Kyle brought the horse home to pull the simplest and perhaps dumbest of his little escapades involving the dancing on the graves of fallen comrades, holding a party to which he even invited Chloe, and the academy darling, and the director who didn’t show, and severed them all burgers and stakes, at the very height of the party climbing onto an oak table and screaming to the room at large, that the meat was from the aforementioned, bet winning Citizen Kane, and there was an almost spontaneous and instant gagging reflex as the people there flocked to the nearest washable surface, and were sick all over them in one huge heave of human exuberant, violent upheaval, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on a scale of 1:10, repeated two hundred times. Kyle, on top of the table, his boots planted far apart, his shoes shinning with a luster and demeanor built from shear sweat oh polishing, reflecting in black and glistening leather the thin and surprisingly marked face of the great late night host of self affirmation and glorification, Kyle Morrison, laughing as he managed to both double over and remain completely upright, narcissistic personality disorder revved up to a high gear of disgusted worship, and he tells them the horse is outside, and they’ve just wasted prime buffalo meat, and he laughs more, an uneasily desperate giggle rising from the crowded mass”.
See the monster of enormous size? It’s a headache inducing little thing. I can hardly believe it’s something I wrote, something I took semi-seriously. It is disgusting to think that indeed it was something I took seriously. I spent about three months working on it, adding bits and pieces to it when I felt “inspired” (read demented). But in the end, I didn’t even manage to complete the story. It was to end with a kind of battle of the grotesques, with the TV late night host egging the three others on. I am barely half way to that point. Even with heavy editing, I really don’t think there is anything there but a silly, pretentious little story. And, really, I’m sorry for wasting you time with the tale of my own little monster.
Although, on a side note, you should go out right now and rent "Monster in a Box", as it is exceptionally good at exploring the fine art of procrastination and, more than that, is a tremendously entertaining 90 minutes.
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