(concluded from here)

2004
Fall, Falling, Fallen, Fell

The story of a early-20s tomboy’s suicide attempt and the strange company she falls into in the ensuing therapy.

What was supposed to happen: our protagonist, jumping impulsively from the Hawthorne Bridge while shellshocked and panicked by the drunken car accident she’s just been in and which has killed her boyfriend, sets herself on a path through court-mandated therapy with a group of other attempted suicides. Falling in with an experimental therapy group led by an ambitious young psychologist, she examines her life and motivations while the varied stories and motivations of the other suiciders mix and mingle in weekly meetings. The group becomes more and more contentious, the psychologist’s grip on the direction of this niche community weakens, and the escalation of both romantic and antagonistic relationships among the group lead to serious problems and at least one subsequent suicide. And…well, honestly, I never got as far as figuring out where it would go.

What did happen: our girl jumped off the bridge (or, at least, fell from the bridge) and hit the water realizing she wasn’t ready to die yet, and managed to struggle to shore and pass out. Eventually, she woke up, and managed to sit and then stand despite exhaustion and some serious pain from the impact of the water and having smacked her mouth into her knee (shattering a couple teeth and biting her tongue pretty severely). She managed to stumble, dazed, through the early morning and continuing rainstorm, until she found the house of and old friend and cohort who she had in recent months (years?) fallen away from. She collapsed in tears on the friend’s doorstep, and friend and friend’s boyfriend took her in and cleaned her up and let her sleep on the couch. And, in the morning, she woke up in pain.

And that’s as far as the plot got. Between those story chapters I interjected with some first-person exposition from a variety of as-yet-unidentified characters, each talking in one way or another about a suicide attempt (generally their own). The clinically depressed girl who tried to dose on aspirin. The heroin-addled college professor who was too wasted to aim the gun right. The little old lady who accidentally! took far too many pills. The upset vanity-suicide broken-hearted high school girl.

My thinking about these anonymous expositions was that they were, perhaps, introductory stories by people who would, later in the book, be the crowd of suiciders at the group therapy meetings. Sort of a pre-emptive introduction, and the various stories interjected throught he beginning of the novel would server to establish the theme of suicide. Unfortunately, I never got as far as the therapy, or the psychologist organizing it, or the court-order that would land our protagonist in said therapy. These were ideas that I wasn’t sure how to get to, and I found myself describing the relationship of friend and friend’s boyfriend and the implications of the protagonists’s sudden intrusion into their lives. Which was catching my interest in its own way, but, well, I lost the will to take the energy and time to push on through.

Last year’s novel was a return to form: I put out something like 17,000 words and then just stopped halfway through the month, essentially a repeat of 2001 and 2002. A big part of that, I think, was based on fear of how to write the unknown. I was imagining a visit from the police, some time in a mental ward for suicide watch, a trial regarding the death of her boyfriend, the avoidance of prison with instead probation and therapy, etc, and all of that seemed very difficult to write because I had no idea how it would be accomplished. What do I know about the police? The courts? Criminal law? How could I possibly write that without either scads of research or embarrassingly bad assumptions?

Which, in retrospect, is ridiculous. Who cares? Why couldn’t I just close out that first run of plot — from the fall from the bridge to the inevitable visit from the cops — and then just do a heavy cut? She could have started the very next chapter at the first therapy meeting and only referred back to the interim events circumspectly. Skip it. Allude to it. Do the research and write that stuff in later, if it’s worth it. Alas, I didn’t. Maybe I was just looking for an excuse. Maybe my heart wasn’t in it. Work was in a pretty ugly state this time last year, layoffs and lots of worry. Poison in the well, perhaps.

Various little details

Among the every-other-chapter suicidal expositions was one stand-out entry: an angry rant by a bus-driver about jackass kids rushing out across intersections. The driver bitches about attention-starved fake-out teenager crybabies scratching at their wrists with razors because their allowance isn’t big enough, that sort of thing, and then basically wishes them a justly embarassing death by whatever means available. It came out of nowhere, almost — a much nicer bus driver expressed something more like matronly concern for jaywalkers when I was riding Trimet on the evening I wrote that passage — but it got me thinking: do I have an antagonist, here? Do I have a lynchpin character for the climax, an unbalanced bus driver who, in a fit of rage or depression or something, kidnaps his passengers as some freakout fight against the establishment or whatever the hell the bus driver is freaking out about? Bus-driver who happens to have a therapy group onboard? Bus-driver with a gun and an overdose of crazy? Do we end up seeing a group of suiciders put in the position of risking their lives to take down this psycho driver and save the rest? How’s that for a dramatic and ironic inversion, huh? I never really got as far as deciding whether that was too ridiculous to implement, though. For all it’s seeming silliness, it still makes more sense than some of the key plot elements in Johnny Psuedonym and the Noms de Plume.

The title, Fall, Falling, Fallen, Fell, was an expression of some lexical ideas I was playing with when taking notes last October. One theme I thought I’d explore in the book was whether she actually jumped from the bridge or merely climbed to the edge and, in a moment of indecision, fell. Was there a suicidal resolve in her panicked mind? Or did a gust of wind make her decision for her, perhaps even contradict her last-minute change of heart? That is to say, while she had certainly fallen to the water of the Willamette, is it accurate to say she fell from the bridge?

And that might have been the theme of a great deal of the book. All these suiciders, all these people who with varying degrees of sincerity and varying degrees of competence attempted to take their own lives — to what extent were they jumping, and to what extent simply falling?

(I also spent a lot of time thinking about regular and irregular verbs and the various conjugations of some of them. “Fall” is interesting because it has two distinct forms for past tense use: “He fell” vs. “He has fallen“. Compare to “jump”, which uses the same form in both cases: “He jumped“, “He has jumped“. Not that there’s anything terribly meaningful in this — I just spent a bit of time doodling with various verbs while I was brainstorming.)

And that was last year. Whether I have better tools or a better philosophy or even just a better sense of dedication this year, I don’t know. I’m going to try. I’d like to write something that I’ll be happy with in the end. And the only way that’s ever going to happen is if I keep writing. And this is a prime excuse to do just that.

Tuesday. Four days to go. I’m starting to feel nervous.