July 12, 2007
The Writing of...Empty Marquee
After I had finished The Lonely Season, I was anxious to start a new project. It was the winter of 1999. I was immersed in the theories of the Nouveau Roman, and was reading Robbe-Grillet's In the Labyrinth. I knew that my new work would not escape the influence of their ideas on the objective narrator, and I embraced the influence.
So, it seemed like a perfectly natural step, when considering the spirit of the Nouveau Roman, that I would use an image from a dream to begin the story. The details of the dream are unimportant, and probably less significant to the story then I would like them to be. Regardless, a stranger visited me in a dream, a man who stood out for no other reason other than his brown hat. He was a silent character, almost more of a presence than a participant, and his presence seem to stay with me for days, creeping into my conversations, and eventually I felt compelled to surrender to his stubborn insistence. He seemed to me to be a messenger for the new story, and since I was certainly eager for a message, I embraced the character.
It was the winter of 1999, and I was still occupying space in a dorm room at Ohio University, though I was no longer a practicing student, having just abandoned my academic life for the writing life. I was lucky to be able to participate in the University's meal plan until the middle of March, but after the winter quarter was completed, I moved into a garage loft apartment with Scott, my constant compatriot during these years. From that point on, and through the duration of Empty Marquee, my life was painted by poverty.
It is true that this poverty was a choice. I was content working my part-time job washing dishes. I had decided that if I was going to be a writer then writing needed to be my sole focus.
Hunger was ever-present. I even periodically gave plasma for extra money, and I was still barely eating. Looking back at that period from a more comfortable position, it is easy to say that it was a valuable experience, but living off of baked potatoes and ramen noodles for weeks at a time, it is hard to see value in the arrangement.
Ironically, for someone who could barely afford to eat, I remember, and my journals back up this memory, that I had a dalliance with drink at the time. I say a dalliance because I was too poor to afford anything other than a brief interlude with drinking. I remember that this was particularly true while I was working on the second part of Empty Marquee at the time--the bar scene--and it was natural to ask myself if my life was being influenced by my writing, or was my writing influencing my life.
As I read through my journals from the time, I was surprised at the jumps in the entry dates. Clearly, one of the reasons Empty Marquee took me so long to write was because I was so weak, physically and spiritually, and my future was so uncertain. What was I going to do? I had no money. I had a part-time job with the university, but it was a student position. What were they going to do when they discovered I wasn't actually a student anymore? Not to mention that the garage loft where I lived would be rented to someone else in June and I would have nowhere to live.
Meanwhile, I was trying to escape the bleakness of the garage loft at the university's coffee shop, where you could be a patron without purchase. I was writing scenes by hand to Empty Marquee--I didn't have a computer, or a typewriter--and I dreaded it. My journals constantly speak to the fear of the unwritten page. Unlike The Lonely Season, where I felt like my next step was always assured, I felt that I was flying blind in the world of Empty Marquee. Still, I had to keep writing. There didn't seem to be a choice. What else did I have? Writing was what I had chosen to do. Writing was what I had to do.
In late June of 1999, I moved in with my good friends John and Rob. They were both students and were nice enough to let me have a room in their rental house. Even though this house would eventually come to be known for its own disasters, there were a few months of peace and quiet where I was, with the help of my friend Joe's word processor, finally able to clean up my handwritten drafts of Empty Marquee. I completed it in late July.
Empty Marquee came together through my insistence to not give up on the project, even when my life was unable to buttress the focus a story needs to survive. I had written The Lonely Season in little more than a month. It came to me like a wave of secrets being constantly uncovered. The secrets that were hiding in Empty Marquee took serious time and effort to uncover, and a great deal of chaos to overcome.
As I reread the piece this week, I still believe that the time and effort was worth it. Even the poverty seems to act as an underlying metaphor throughout the piece. The fear and loneliness of uncertainty dangle from every paragraph.
It is not perfect. I was still learning the craft. Certainly, I would make different choices now. Some sentences are poorly drawn, and maybe even extraneous, but it hard to argue that a five thousand word piece is too long.
I have a deep, unwavering affection for Empty Marquee. The spirit of the Nouveau Roman is all over this story, and I believe that the objective narrator was put to good use in this piece. I referred to it in my journals as if it was a dream, and it still has that dream-like aura around it. It may be, when all is said and done, my personal favorite. Maybe it is still so dear to me because, during one of the most difficult times in my life, it was my touchstone, a fictional world that saved me from having to face the lucidity of reality.
Read the printer-friendly version