The Writing of...Narcissus Reflects

It was the winter of 2000, and I was going through a great period of creative expression. I was standing in a perfect storm of inspiration, and even though I am not sure if I was cognizant of the unique nature of such a gift, I can't say that I wasted it.

I was now living in a house with my friends Scott and Scott, a couple of guys who always forced me to exist in the creative sphere. Their presence, their ideas, and their conversation pushed me to question how and why I made art. Through them, I found new ways to see an artistic dilemma as an opportunity to prove that the life of the mind could offer solutions to any troubled project.

I always felt the intensity of life's drama--in often narcissistic ways-- when the Scotts were in my life, and this period was no different. Our friendship was the very definition of a friendly competition. We were creative competitors, but what made this one-up-manship so good-natured was that I rooted for their personal successes because I knew that those successes would only drive me to be a better artist. They made me think and work more efficiently. They made me a better artist.

Also, I was spending a great deal of time with my friends John and Beth. Their small basement apartment seemed to be my second home. They were just starting their life together, and probably would have liked more private time, but it was wonderful for me to share that time of their life. In retrospect, it seems like we were constantly working on something, independent of one another, but not independent from one another. There was always a conversation about art flowing between us, a conversation about producing art, or, if the conversation wasn't made implicit in words then an exchange took place within the art itself. Our lives and our work was a subtext to our perpetually artful back-and-forth.

Then there was Sarah. I had met Sarah in January of 2000 and we had scarcely been apart since. We were spending every available moment with one another. Sarah was extremely supportive of my writing, reading every word I wrote with genuine interest, being a constant source of warmth during periods of doubt, and a great source of inspiration to break me free of such doubts. We were in love, and it was already pretty clear as the winter progressed that we were going to be together for the long term. So, of course, this new love acted as its own surge to my creative output.

I remember working constantly during this period. I was busy writing poetry, working in the visual arts, and trying to write an ambitious work of fiction, Painting Godless Children. But I needed to have my hands in another story. I was drowning in Painting Godless Children. It just wasn't moving forward fast enough for me, and I felt that the project would suffer if I forced it.

So, I decided to try something new and, for me at least, a bit radical. I decided that I would start and finish a story in the course of a single weekend. I ended up doing this over the course of several months. These stories would be known as, The Weekend Stories--not terribly clever, I know. I would start a piece on a Saturday night and complete it by the end of the night that Sunday.

At first, I'm not sure if I saw these stories as anything other than an intense writing exercise, or if I believed that I would share the stories as completed works, but as I completed the first one, I realized that these stories were more than private exercises. These were stories I wanted to share.

The first weekend story was Narcissus Reflects, which was written on March 4th and 5th of 2000. In the story, the character of the writer is consciously playing a game with the reader. I guess, by default, I was also playing a game with the reader. I often think that writers, and artists in general, are constantly placing their best chess move in front of the viewer, hoping to awe them into silence, causing them to surrender their will to the artist. It is through this surrendering of will that an artist is really given the gift of your imagination, where you give the creator permission to decorate your mind with his dreams.

The author in Narcissus Reflects is doing what every writer tries to do: he is trying to coax you in for the ride. He doesn't have a story. He doesn't have anything interesting left to say. All he has is himself and a few writerly tricks up his sleeve, and if he can keep an audience with those tricks then he has been able to perpetuate that sense of power that a creator craves. The idea is that there is power in making your own world, or in this case, creating your own story, but--and here is the artist's dilemma--if no one experiences the world of your creation, then what was the point.

What I tried to do in Narcissus Reflects was to take a supposedly washed-up writer and use his anxieties to pique the readers interest long enough to satiate his own ego, validate that he can still wield that power, coax you into surrendering your will to him, and, ultimately, to give his creative world some much needed meaning.

As I looked at the piece this week, I thought the story was executed with a fair amount of success. I think you can see that I had started to develop my own style, moving away from those early echoes of the Nouveau Roman. Still, there are flaws in the writing. These flaws are mostly due to the fact that I wrote this story in two days, and also I was a writer who was still very much learning on the job. Some of the sentences were so badly written that they could have been composed by Yoda. A few sentences were so embarrassing that I had to reshape them. I hope that these subtle changes does not take the spirit out of the original concept of the weekend story. Certainly 98% of the piece has remained firmly in tact, and I am an proud of the story, as the writer in this story would be, assuming you come along for the ride.

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