There are many things I expected to research while writing a gothic dark comedy set in 1890.
If you're imagining my researching rituals, folklore, funeral customs, and superstitions by candlelight, I'm sorry to disappoint.
Oh, I have books on those subjects. But no candles. Cat and all.
What I didn't expect was to spend as much time thinking about bad punctuation as I did. My punctuation skills are very poor but I'll often run it through a checker to make sure I'm doing okay.
And yet, here we are.
Ambrose is one of the main characters in the story. He's a man of many convictions. He's convinced he's misunderstood. He is convinced his romantic suffering is so profound that supernatural forces ought to take an interest.
If it were modern day I'd say he was a person who discovered philosophy behind a three cent gas station by a red neck tweaker who gets abducted and probed by aliens every other weekend. Of course the only thing worse than being abducted by aliens is being rejected by aliens.
What no one tells you is how hard it is to do bad writing. I need to make Ambrose ridiculous but not too ridiculous. If I make him too polished then his terrible poetry starts sounding competent.
Ambrose needs to write badly in a very specific way.
His poetry had to sound like something written by a man who is absolutely certain he has created a masterpiece.
That distinction is important.
His punctuation became one of the easiest ways to show this.
Let's think about:
My beloved, cruel angel, why, have you forsaken me.
Somewhere, a schoolteacher wakes abruptly from a sound sleep without knowing why.
There is an entire emotional journey happening there. Unfortunately, most of it belongs to the commas.
The Dark Mother, after being subjected to this sort of thing repeatedly, has opinions.
The comma has done nothing to deserve this.
And really, she has a point.
The hard part is making this feel consistent with Ambrose rather than simply throwing random grammatical errors onto the pages.
His bad writing comes from his personality. He's melodramatic, he greatly overestimates his intelligence, and he mistakes intensity for meaning.
He is especially fond of words like eternal, forsaken, betrayal, destiny, darkness, soul, and anything else that suggests he has experienced suffering unknown to ordinary mortals.
If one adjective will work, Ambrose believes three is better.
If one exclamation point conveys emotion, then four will convey genius.
And if a sentence can survive without a comma, he considers that a missed opportunity.
This means I occasionally have to write something badly and then stop myself from fixing it.
That is much harder than it sounds.
Ambrose put that there.
Ambrose is proud of that comma.
Leave it alone.
There is something strangely painful about intentionally preserving a grammatical disaster.
I imagine this is how the Dark Mother feels.
She has witnessed wars.
She has watched kings rise and fall.
She has stood at the boundary between life and death.
And now she has been summoned into a rented attic room because Ambrose would like her opinion on a poem titled something along the lines of:
The Dark Mother’s Vengance Upon the Unfaithfull Bride
Yes.
“Vengeance” is misspelled.
No.
Ambrose does not notice.
The Dark Mother does.
Of course she does.
She notices everything.
This is where some of my favorite humor in the story comes from, because the Dark Mother never needs to become silly herself.
Ambrose is doing more than enough work for both of them.
She can remain ancient, ominous, and genuinely powerful while privately observing that the mortal standing before her appears to have declared war on the English language.
I also suspect that somewhere along the way, the Dark Mother develops a particular dread of hearing paper unfold.
There are sounds that become associated with danger.
A branch breaking in the woods.
Footsteps behind you on an empty road.
A door creaking open in the middle of the night.
For the Dark Mother, it is Ambrose clearing his throat and smoothing out a sheet of paper.
She knows what is coming.
The veil has already been crossed.
There is no escape now.
He begins.
O Darkest Mother, ancient, terrible, queen—
She closes her eyes.
Another comma.
The Dark Mother has endured much.
But there are limits.
And the comma, frankly, has suffered enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment