The Cliff and this Bitch.

I am in the process of writing a short story for one of my workshop classes. I have been getting a lot of (very polite) blowback lately from numerous sources that all seems to indicate that I have sort of plateaued in my writing as of late. There are all sorts of very complicated ways to explain this, I could tell you what Proust said about such things and maybe break it down the way Derrida might, but really it just boils down to this: I have gotten pretty good at what I do and so now need to do some other stuff.

See how clearly and succinctly I articulated that?

Recently I met with a professor I respect (who is a writer herself) and she said that I need to “jump off the cliff” but she talks that way and I’m not exactly sure what that means. Though she was nice enough to shrug when I said that I desperately want to publish a novel. She shrugged and said, “You’re good enough now to publish a novel” and then went on to explain that I should be less concerned about that and more concerned with attending to the growth of my writing.

In an attempt to attend to the growth of my writing I have gone back to this idea I had a long time ago for a story about D.B. Cooper (the 1970s skyjacker) which I have never written because I didn’t know how to write it. I’d envisioned a sort of screenplay in the style of the third act of the movie Clue wherein nothing is really sorted out but many possibilities are imagined. Well I have started writing that as a kind of short story which doesn’t even care who the dude was, but rather revels in the possibilities and plays with the mythology of Cooper. And let me tell you, IT HAS BEEN REALLY HARD! I assume that if it is hard then I must be growing as a writer, or something. That’s how it works, right? That’s why the gym is so unpleasant to go to; because we have to do unpleasant things to make ourselves get better.

Anyway, I have been working my ass off on this story in a way I am not accustomed to. For the first draft I am writing it as an enumerated list story (I may remove that artifice later, but let’s just get through the first draft, shall we?). Below are a few of the first few sections that I have written so far. When this bitch is done I will post the whole thing here.

.
.
.

Vector 23 (Excerpt).

1.The man who bought a one-way ticket with cash at Portland Airport on the afternoon of 24 November 1971 - who was the 36th passenger to board Flight 305 to Seattle-Tacoma Airport, who sat in seat 18C, who carried with him only a black attache case, and whose FBI file is now more than sixty volumes long - most certainly existed. 

He gave his name at the Northwest Orient Airlines counter as Dan Cooper.

Clyde Jabin, a young reporter rushing to file his story with United Press International that night spoke hastily on the phone with a records agent at the FBI.

“D. Cooper,” the agent had said.

“Is that ‘D’ as in dog? Or ‘B’ as in boy?” Jabin asked.

“Yeah, that’s right,” the agent said back in a hurry. “Look, I gotta go Clyde. Lots going on here tonight.” 

Jabin’s story identified the hijacker as D. B. Cooper. This was an unfortunate coincidence for a petty Portland Oregon criminal actually named D. B. Cooper who was visited by FBI agents Thanksgiving morning.

At about 8:13pm on the night of the 24th the nonexistent D. B. Cooper of Jabin’s story leapt from the aft stairway of the Boeing 727 as it passed over the Lewis River in southwestern Washington. He disappeared. Which is no small feat for a man who didn’t exist in the first place.

2.Everything presented here as fact is actually fact. Except for the things which aren’t.

3. The man who would be DB might have been born in 1926 in Vancouver Canada. His father could have been a fisherman, tall with thick arms, and a big beard that hung from his otherwise thin face. DB could have stood at the end of the dock each time his dad’s sixty-foot salmon trawler put out in the direction of Vancouver Island. DB might have waited there every time watching as the boat disappeared around a bend in the channel on its way out to the sea; such a very small boat when compared to the vastness of such a dark sea. As a little Canadian boy he could have read the Belgian comic book Les Aventures de Dan Cooper about the adventures of a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot named Dan Cooper. The comic was never sold in the United States.  

.
.
.