(continued from here)

2002
Everybody Dies (working title)

A series of vingettes of several major characters — a pyromaniac, an incestous set of fraternal twin lawyers, a burnt-out rock guitarist, a young lawyer having herself an identity crisis, an increasingly fed-up stay-at-home mother, her precocious twelve year-old son, a mysterious homeless soothesayer — who, in every fractured chapter in the non-linear and poly-temporal storyline, end up dying.

What was supposed to happen: The central character (whose name I’m embarrassed to admit I can’t recall) dies in a series of contradictory circumstances, cementing the premise (not to say gimmick) of the book: these are glimpses of the possible deaths of this character, of these various characters; and in the moments leading up to death, these are the possible lives they might lead. As the reader sees ten, twenty, thirty different views of the different last moments of the characters, they develop a strong sense of character for these various misfits and self-seekers. Then, in the end, a redeeming chapter ends the cycle of deaths when a firefighter (our awkward young pyro, grown up and pursuing a tenuous compromise of self-control and impulse-satisfaction) saves the lives of several of the other characters in a nightclub fire.

What actually happened: the main character died a few times. Several other characters died, some of them more than once. And, frankly, I got sick of killing these folks off.

The first few chapters weren’t too hard. I had some specific ideas for the central character, the pyromaniac, and managed to portray an early experiment with fire that lead to the accidental death of his schoolmate, his death during the for-kicks burning down of a warehouse, ditto burning down the school gym after having his heart broken at a dance happening therein, and so on. And there were other characters, invented as I wrote them in for the first time, who died in ways and in circumstances that set the tone for future appearances.

But at some point I got to writing about a ten year old boy who found a dead cat on the way home. And I started liking this kid almost immediately (smart as a whip, great sense of humor, not a little bastard at all), and I liked his mom too. From the short slice of their life I wrote, they seemed to have a really great relationship with each other. And then, later in that chapter, while the mom discussed this feline discovery with a neighbor friend, the kid choked to death on a candy bar, and the chapter ended with the mom holding him in her lap and screaming.

That sucked. Ruined my whole day. And I think that was just about when the novel started to die on me. I wrote a fair chunk more — that couldn’t have been more than halfway to the 15,000 words I ended up at — but that kid just stuck around in my head. It was hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, hard to see the redeeming solution to all this death I was waging. Cheerless, cruel murders of character after character, instance after instance.

I don’t think I ever clearly established the parallel-dimension “possible lives” theme in what I’d written, which made the march of death all the more dreary and pointless.

I still like the idea, however. If it ever occurs to me how to actually accomplish the germ of the story, how to give it a structure that will make it writable and readable, I might just try it again.