John Woodington The official site for the author.

Fight ClubPosted by John Woodington on May 17th, 2010

I finished reading Fight Club not long ago, and thought I’d share a few brief words about it here.  I liked the style of the writing for the fact that I could read it very fast.  I flew through this book.  I didn’t like the writing style because I felt it lacked a certain depth.  The prose was strong (fierce, some would say) and the descriptions were overly vivid.  What really made me happy about this book was the little afterward chapter at the end, where Chuck talks about how he first wrote Fight Club as a short story while wallowing through a boring day at work.  He doe say something in this little afterward, however, that I don’t agree with.

“The whole idea of a fight club wasn’t important.  It was arbitrary.  But the eight rules had to apply to something, so why not a club where you could ask someone to fight?  The way you’d ask for a dance at a disco.  The fighting wasn’t the important part of the story.  What I needed were the rules….It could’ve been ‘Barn-Raising Club’ or ‘Golf Club’ and it would’ve probably sold a lot more books.” (emphasis is Palahniuk’s)

I think that’s a bunch of bull.  I know I wouldn’t have felt the deeper, animal attachment that I did to a fight club scenario if that scenario were changed to a barn-raising scenario.  Yes, the rules of fight club were important for Palahniuk in structuring the novel, but I think he would’ve lost a lot of emphasis within the narrative had he used a subject for his club other than fighting.  Part of the whole reading of the story is discovering the emasculation of the modern man, of which the main character is the culmination: he lives in an apartment completely furnished by IKEA, and his life is so boring that he can’t distinguish one day from the next, and develops insomnia to the point that his personality splits into himself while he is awake, and his alter ego, Tyler Durden, when he is asleep.

Tyler, of course, is the opposite.  Completely masculine, a fighting, screwing machine.  He is everything that the main character is not, and is therefore a perfect foil.  Hard to think of a perfect foil for the modern, emasculated male as someone who invents barn-raising club.  Fighting is a great subject for this novel because there really is no need to fight hand to hand anymore.  If someone punches you, you call the cops.  If you punch someone, they call the cops and you go to jail for assault.  But in Fight Club, two people agree to a fight, and they slug it out, and they get beat up, and they feel much better for it.  Every guy wonders how he’d do in a fist fight.  I’ve never been in one (that I recall) but I could see how this would be very revealing of your own character.  Would you give up easily?  Could you take a beating?  Could you dish out a beating?  Would you cry like a little girl?  We all like to think we could throw down if need be, but there never be a need, matey.  Not in the present day.  Building a society of underground fighting is the perfect way to convey this lost masculinity, and Palahniuk does it well.

The fighting’s the main ingredient for the subtext of the novel, I say.  The rules provide the bones, but the fighting provides all that bloody meat.  That’s what we’re left chewing on when we’re done reading Fight Club, not the bones, but the beat up, black and blue, hole-in-the-cheek, open wounds, missing teeth, wet-gum-sockets meat.

Does No TV Equal No Connection?Posted by John Woodington on May 14th, 2010

I haven’t watched a TV show in 13 days, and the lack of advertising bombardments and white noise and the extra time afforded to me has been wonderful.  I’ve read two books (Fight Club and The Lemur), worked on a short story culled from a section of my novel-in-progress Alien Nation, and overall have felt that my time has been better spent.  If I could pinpoint the one thing that I miss the most about TV, it would be some sort of ethereal connection with the rest of the country.

I haven’t given myself the stipulation that I can’t watch a DVD once in a while, and while I have a couple seasons of The Office on the shelf, I don’t get the same sense of satisfaction watching them on DVD as I do when watching them on TBS or NBC.  When I watch a show on DVD, I feel like a loser, isolated in his house, watching a TV show on DVD (which is what I am at that moment in time; at other times I am awesome).  When I watch The Office on TBS, however, I know I’m watching the same thing as a million other people, and it gives me the sense that I’m not alone in what I’m doing, even though I’m sitting on my couch in an otherwise empty living room.  There’s a feeling of something greater occurring, a collective decision being made by others across the country, hundreds of thousands of us, all tuning in to the same channel at the same time.  Even though we’re wasting our hours by watching TV and being as unproductive as possible, at least we’re doing it together, and that, in some strange way, feels good.  And that’s what I miss most about TV.

That, in turn, got me to thinking that maybe some sort of collective feeling of connectedness could be achieved through writing, or, more accurately, reading.  If hundreds of thousands of people across the country read the same thing at the same time, would they feel a sense of connectedness with the other hundreds of thousands?  Right now, Twitter folk are reading Neil Gaiman’s fascinating novel American Gods.  I’ve read it before, and have other reading plans at this time, so I won’t be participating.  But I’d be interested to hear from people who are participating, to see if they feel a connection with a greater populace of people, even if they never come into contact with those people.

In college, I read plenty of novels at the same time as my other classmates, though I didn’t feel a connection with those classmates until we actually discussed the novel together in class.  My hypothesis, therefore, is that this whole One Book One Twitter thing will not successfully achieve a feeling of unity among its participants unless they utilize Twitter (or some other form of communication, like talking face to face) to discuss their thoughts and experiences of the novel.  There’s plenty to talk about in American Gods, and I hope that those reading it continue to discuss it after they’ve finished reading it.  How many times do we read a book, close the back cover at the end, and never think of it again.  The books I value the most in my collection are the ones that I’ve discussed in depth with other people.  Those discussions have given me a much greater sense of appreciation for the texts themselves, as well as the authors who wrote them.

Turning off the TV has proven quite beneficial to me, but I know that if I don’t make up for that lost connection with other people, I’ll feel the pull of the TV trying to suck me back into hours of wasted semi-entertainment, not so that I can see Jim and Dwight on The Office, but so that I can feel a connection with a hundred thousand other people who laugh every time Jim pops Dwight’s fitness orb with a scissors.  Every fricken’ time.

A Novella Rejection and Still No TVPosted by John Woodington on May 11th, 2010

I mentioned not long ago a new publication that specializes in novellas called Short Sharp Shock.  I submitted my novella “Goodwill” to them and they asked for more and more of it, but in the end rejected it.  I thought I’d share their rejection here, as it was very nice and also helpful and enlightening for me as a writer trying to get stuff published:

Hi John,

Sorry, but we’re going to pass.

You can write. I’m sure you know that. Goodwill is smooth and the voice is clean and engaging. It’s a character study and a well done one at that. I think it would be a better fit for S3, though, if you took that same interesting character and put him in a plot-driven book. I have no idea if you wrote this before or after the appearance of the show Dexter. I think the success of that show – I haven’t read the books – comes from interweaving the character’s development with an unfolding plot.

A smaller, detail point: I still think the beginning would be stronger if you didn’t spill the beans right at the start. Let Gabe’s obsession reveal itself a little more slowly.

One person’s opinions.

Feel free to submit another manuscript whenever.

Best,
Eric

I really like what Eric et al are doing at their publication, ‘nough said.

I didn’t think that editors would be comparing the submissions they receive to television shows they watch, but I suppose it’s inevitable.  I’ve not personally watched the show Dexter at all, but I have seen the DVDs for the first season on sale at Target, and I believe they have blood on the cover, which I take as a good sign.

It’s also worth noting that I will not be watching any episodes of Dexter in the future, since my wife and I are giving up watching TV.  We officially removed the TV from our main family room, and I will try to post a picture of the beautiful vacant space it has left.  We are currently looking for new bookshelves to fill in said space.

It’s been 8 days since I’ve watched a TV show, and in that time, I’ve read all of Fight Club (brief review to come) and begun reading a novella called The Lemur, which looks to be a crime/mystery story, which is a new genre for me.  This is significant because I am a slow reader, and have not read an entire book in a single week since college.  My hypothesis that TV sucks up the best parts of your life is now further strengthened.

Super ProductivePosted by John Woodington on May 7th, 2010

I have not turned a TV on all week, and it is proving to be in my best interests of productivity to continue with this approach.  There are moments when I wish I could just turn on the TV and drop onto the couch and zone out for an hour.  There are far more moments, however, where I realize I’ve read half of Fight Club in two days, without really trying.  We’ve gotten our garden setup and planted and watered a few times (and maybe snowed on tonight; dumb), we’ve cleaned our house, we’ve done a ton of stuff, and I think we owe it all (mostly) to not watching TV all night.  This weekend, we officially unplug the TV and get it out of the family room.

Fight Club is pretty good.  The greatest book I’ve ever read?  No.  Better than the trash writing in Uncle Tom’s Cabin?  Hells yeah.  It feels so good to read modern writing and modern thoughts and modern characters after months and months of century-old and older Russian aristocrats.  Plus, this book makes me want to beat someone up.  Or maybe get beat up myself without putting up a fight.  Not sure that would be so fun, but I doubt I’ll have the chance to find out.

Where Ya Been?Posted by John Woodington on May 3rd, 2010

It’s time to move on.  Jasper Tilson has been published and the influx of blog readers has subsided, and now it’s back to business.  Already.  Kinda sad, really.  I worked on getting Jasper published for four years, and in two weeks, he’s out in the public sphere and lost to the interwebs.  Maybe he’ll reappear someday in a short story collection.  I’m not currently the kind of writer who moves their characters from one story to another, reusing them like fishing lures.  I get their stories down on paper and move on.  So now we move on.

I’ve finished reading through my current draft of AlieNation, my novel-in-progress about divorce, working in an office, and alien abductions.  I’m pretty pleased with it so far, mostly because I know it has the potential to be the best thing I’ve written in a long while if I stick with it and take the time necessary to flesh it out to its full potential.  Just used the word ‘potential’ twice in the same sentence, and I apologize for that right there.  The next steps I will take with this novel are to go through the many notes I’ve made while doing the read-through and rewrite, and to implement those notes into the story.  Some will take twenty seconds, and some will take twenty days, maybe more.  Once those are in, I’ll go through each chapter and optimize the wording, cutting and trimming and rewriting until the language is sharp and crisp and definite and ambiguous.  Sounds confusing, I know, just trust me.  After that, I’ll consider it pretty much done, and I’ll begin giving it to a couple of my trusted readers for their initial critiques.  After critiques I’ll do another rewrite, then start looking for a new literary agent.

And then I’ll be sixty-two years old.  Just kidding.  I’d like to get drafts out for reading by the end of the summer.  That’s the goal.  I’d also like to polish up a couple of short stories in that time, as well as edit out a short story from a couple sections of AlieNation that I believe would make for a very good short story.  Plus, if I can get a part of the novel published as a short story, that’ll possibly help me get the whole novel itself published.  At least, that’s how I imagine it.

So how will I do all of this in a scant four months?  Well, my wife and I are making a very personal, very deep commitment, and that commitment is to get rid of the TV in our living room.  I sit in front of that friggin’ box for 2-3 hours a night, and I’m sick of it.  We waste our lives watching waste on TV, and it’s time to eradicate the source of our brain-dead distraction.  We will still have a small TV in the bedroom for news in the morning, and a TV in the guest room, where we will watch a select few shows (Mad Men, mostly) and movies.  Other than that, for us it’s radio and books and writing and playing with our wieners.

Wiener dogs, that is.

So far, I haven’t felt any symptoms of withdrawal.  I figured the first omission of a rerun of The Officewould leave me writhing on the floor shivering and shrieking for Steve Carell.  Not so.  Not yet.  I will be strong in this endeavor, and I truly believe it can only lead to good things.  Or ultimate nervous breakdown.  On the immediate bright side of things, removing the hulking TV from the family room frees up a bunch more space for bookshelves, and, consequently, more books.  Right now I’m reading the ever-great Missouri Review, and then it’ll be on to Fight Club, about which I’ve heard mixed opinions.

Finally, thanks to everyone who donated to my wife’s and my team for the Animal Humane Society 2010 Walk for Animals.  We exceeded our personal goal ($1000), and saved the lives of many cute puppies, despite what the protesters at the beginning of the walk had to say (They made a big stink about a 45% kill rate, and I said, maybe if they donated more to my wife’s and my walking team, the AHS could afford to keep some of those animals alive for longer in order to find them loving homes.  Just sayin’.)