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THIRD PLACE - ENTRY FEE DIVISION - $20 PRIZE - 2009 FFW ANNUAL ESSAY
CONTEST
My Two Eds
By Flo Stanton
“In two minutes, you will forget me.” So promises the narrator of Edgar
Rice Burroughs’s The Land That Time Forgot before he presents a manuscript
he found in a bottle. And, as Stephen King reminds us in his foreword to
Night Shift, “it’s a pledge that Burroughs makes good on.” That’s what
I’m after, as an author. I want my reader to be so absorbed in the story
he forgets about me completely, couldn’t care less who the author is.
It’s only after he’s finished it that he looks again at the name under
the title because the story was such a good ride he simply must remember
who wrote it. I introduced the tale and stepped gracefully off the page.
I say this, but I don’t mean it. I want the reader to be aware of me. I
want him to be very conscious of the Great and Wonderful Author behind
the curtain. I want him to ooh and ahh at the clever plot, the unique
characters, all those well-turned phrases.
I’m not Burroughs’s disappearing narrator. I’m more like Ed Begley, Jr.
in “Son of the Invisible Man,” a short sketch in the kitschy classic
“Amazon Women on the Moon.” A very visible Begley runs naked around a
crowded English pub convinced no one can see him. The patrons tolerate
the giggling, misguided scientist as he moves pieces on a checkerboard
and floats a dart into a bull’s eye. He’s completely dumbfounded when
a troop of bobbies picks him up and carts him off to the booby hatch.
(I pray my self-delusions never reach that point.)
The real writer puts herself out there, and that’s the one thing I’m
afraid to do. I hide behind smug narrators and characters the reader
can feel superior to. I rely on sentimental zings and trick endings.
I fool myself that having my characters deal with issues eerily similar
to my own adds heart-rending realism and humanity to my fiction.
I think I’ve disappeared into my stories but I’m still front and center,
waving my arms behind the backs of all the people in them. “Woo hoo!
You can’t see me! I’m invisible!” I claim, until my First Reader gently
points out I’ve succeeded only in exposing my own ego. Then I face the
uncomfortable task of asking myself, “Is there a story here that demands
to be told or do I just want the spotlight on me?” And the manuscript is
promptly shoved into a shoebox.
But once in awhile I manage to get out of my own way and make that giant
leap into true emotional honesty, action that proceeds from character,
and a fitting narration. “Story is something happening to someone you
have been led to care about,” writes John D. MacDonald in his introduction
to that same King anthology. Then he adds, “Without author intrusion.”
Sometimes, just sometimes, I get lucky and the story takes over. I have
become invisible.
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