Category Archives: writing

Half Man: A study in brutal authenticity

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Your life is an accumulation of choices you make along the way, small to large. Some you sense will be impactful. Others you have no idea. And then some things are beyond your control and they set you along a particular course. These things could be curses or they could be blessings.

In a sense, your fate—where you end up—becomes determined (preordained?) by all these choices.

This idea is captured by the six-episode TV show Half Man.

Before I get into describing and dissecting Half Man, a quick detour. I started the first episode blind. I got about ten minutes in and I was like, what the hell am I watching. I had to stop and do a little digging. Half Man is written by and stars Richard Gadd. He’s the guy behind Baby Reindeer, which came out a few years ago. I’d never seen it. Baby Reindeer was a huge hit, and I knew it was autobiographical, so rather than continuing with Half Man, I switched over to Baby Reindeer. I needed to know who the hell this dude was.

Baby Reindeer, which Gadd also wrote and stars in, is based on his real-life experience with a stalker. It was strange and great. Having dealt with a stalker myself, it left me unsettled. Like Gadd, I’d blamed myself for her actions, even though I deserved no blame, and I pitied her, even though she didn’t deserve it. In Baby Reindeer, Gadd shows pure human messiness. When I finished it I went back to Half Man.

Half Man is the story of star-crossed step-brothers—Niall Kennedy and Ruben Pallister, whose mothers are lovers. The first three episodes focus on younger Niall and Ruben (Mitchell Robertson and Stuart Campbell), and the last three focus on them as adults (Jamie Bell and Richard Gadd). It follows Niall and Ruben from their teenage years to adulthood. Along the way, they become enmeshed and entangled, for better and for worse. Mostly worse. They have a genuine filial love for each other, but they’re also toxic due to Ruben’s control and Niall’s envy, and as their awful life choices compound, this toxicity turns to poison. Their fates catch up with them.

First, the acting. I can’t say who among the four is best. They’re all gripping, and the transition from younger to older is seamless. Jamie Bell and Richard Gadd are an interesting pairing. Bell, who plays Niall, is slight and disheveled while Gadd as Ruben is hulking and full of swagger. It’s jarring to see Gadd in this role following Baby Reindeer. It’s such a physical transformation, and it’s more than him just bulking up. I don’t understand how actors can pull that kind of transformation off.

I’ve watched Half Man twice now. The first go-around was brutal. Niall’s the main character. We walk through the story alongside him. We meet him at 15. His father died when he was a child and he lives with his mother, Laurie and her girlfriend Maura. Niall is nervous and frail and gets bullied. When he learns that Maura’s son, Ruben, is getting out of juvy and will be living with them, he panics.

Soon enough Ruben bursts on the scene. He is imposing and controlling and magnetic. Niall, who is just beginning to realize he might be gay, is drawn to Ruben, though not just physically. He’s terrified of Ruben, rightly, but enthralled by his bravado and presence. He craves Ruben’s attention. Ruben, in turn, becomes protective of Niall, though he insists everything be on his terms. This dynamic sets the course of their lives.

Niall is one of the more difficult protagonists I’ve seen in fiction. He’s needy, desperate, self-serving, and conniving. I don’t particularly like him. I can’t relate to him. But I can’t turn away from him. And Ruben is an asshole. He’s brutal, both physically and verbally. He’s so wounded that all he knows how to do is lash out.

What’s fascinating is their bond. On a surface level it can be read as homoerotic, especially since Niall, throughout the show, struggles to come to terms with his gayness. But their bond is deeper. They complete each other in a sense; each has what the other lacks. They know this on some level, which leads to a magnetic pull for closeness that’s ruined by envy and control.

Like Romeo and Juliet, Half Man is a tragedy. My first time watching it was all I could to to keep my heart rate down. The rewatch let me appreciate how Gadd cleverly constructs this story. For example, when Ruben first appears, he struts into Niall’s classroom. What is the teacher lecturing about? Romeo and Juliet, a foreshadow of what fate has in store for them.

Gadd leaves hints throughout the series. Early on, you know that something is very wrong with Ruben. I figured it was either one of two reasons: he’s either gay and in full repression mode, or he was molested. Turns out it was the latter. Gadd dropped these hints here and there, subtle but unmissable, so that when the reveal comes, it all feels earned. During some of Ruben’s violent outbursts, especially at the climax, you can even see Ruben perpetrate elements of his own abuse. Gadd makes it all feel real. And, strangely, he makes you feel some sympathy for Ruben.

Niall, too, is not without sympathy. Yes, he is so incredibly selfish that it’s hard to root for him. Either consciously or subconsciously, he deviously undermines Ruben. He’s self pitying. An eternal victim. At one point Ruben calls him King Rat. It fits. But Gadd also shows us how utterly alone and terrified Niall is. His mother Laurie is a textbook cold fish. While not cruel per se, she’s lacking in maternal instincts. Having that as a mother, having lost a father at a young age, and being bullied at school would naturally leave Niall at a severe deficit.

This ambivalence is a hallmark of Gadd’s writing, and maybe why I connect with it. Even in the relationship between Niall and Ruben, Gadd weaves the good with the bad. On one hand, Ruben threatens violence on Niall (and inflicts it). Niall schemes and lies to get back at him. But they also share a genuine closeness. On a school test, Niall cheats for Ruben so he won’t get sent back to reform school. Ruben teaches Niall how to box. Later on when Niall is down and out Ruben pays for his expenses, In another world, they could have been good for each other. But then Half Man wouldn’t have been half as compelling.

The writing consistently is terrific, and while I won’t go through all of it (watch it instead and see for yourself), I’ll cover the ending.

Even though you know they’re poisonous together, you want them to work things out (they come so heartbreakingly close). But with Ruben’s rage and Niall’s self-destructiveness, it can only end tragically. I can’t say the ending left me sad. No. Strike that. It did leave me sad. It didn’t have to be that way, but with the shitty hands they were dealt compounded by the shitty choices each of them made over several decades, Half Man could only end the way it did. Not every story earns a happy ending.

That calls back to the common thread I see in Gadd’s writing—he’s not afraid to portray ambivalence and ambiguity. People aren’t always 100 percent right or wrong. They’re complicated. Motivations, actions, impressions, all can be inconsistent. People and life can be messy and confusing. Gadd shows all of this. There are no easy answers and very few easy people.

Some of the press surrounding this show framed it as an examination of toxic masculinity. I hate that term. It’s a dismissive blanket statement, dismissive not just of men but of human experience. Yes, Half Man focuses on men and masculinity, but it’s a human story about how fucked-up people can end up fucking up other people, and each other. Sex/gender doesn’t matter. If Ruben had a better childhood, maybe he wouldn’t have been so brutal. If Niall could’ve been more self accepting, maybe he wouldn’t have been so destructive. To say that their toxicity is connected to their maleness doesn’t make sense, because they are males, so that’s the frame in which they can operate.

A final thing about Half Man. One of the themes Gadd touches on is loneliness. He gives us two boys who’ve suffered abuse and abandonment and are isolated. A lot of us have felt lonely in childhood and adolescence in one way or another. Both Ruben and Niall did, for different reasons. And like a lot of us, they struggled to fill that void of loneliness. Unfortunately for them, they each filled it with the worst possible person. Despite the tragic ending, I appreciate that Gadd was able to present this loneliness in such a relatable way.

The writer in me is impressed by what Gadd created in Half Man. The brutal honesty, the subtlety, the complexity, even the subject matter of a close and toxic relationship between two men. The viewer in me was drawn to a story about the need for connection, and how even if it all goes so horribly wrong, that doesn’t negate the need. Half Man is dark, it’s difficult, and it’s human.

Anatomy of a story: Sueños

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Where does artistic inspiration come from?

There’s one theory on this for writers. Writers either draw inspiration from their inner worlds, or from the world around them.

Why not both at the same time?

For my story, Sueños, which was published here in the journal Empyrean, I used my own experience, and the outside world, to create this story.

First, what’s it about? 

Dylan is a young soldier stationed in El Paso who has to drive across Texas for (…spoiler…)  the funeral of his brother. Along the way his pickup truck breaks down and he’s forced to detour to the small town of Sueños, where he’s brought to a strange house for the birthday party of an unnaturally alluring woman named Veronica. There, he’s given a tempting choice: abandon his grief forever. But, of course, there is a price.

So where did the external inspiration come from?

Some years ago a friend loaned me a book of essays by a Mexican writer named Juan Villoro. Essays aren’t my typical thing, but his were great. One in particular stood out, his recollection of him as a young soldier. While going home one weekend, he gets sidetracked and ends up at a strange party where he meets a beautiful girl. It’s a story of idealized love captured in a moment of time, a story of endless possibility without the messiness of reality.

The story captivated me. I HAD to do something with it. Revisit it. Rework it. Repurpose it. I saw in it  something hidden, something darker. Something supernatural, so I set about re-interpreting it through that lens. In the arts this is called interpolation, where an artist takes an existing work and fashions it into something new and different. Music does this a lot. If I was profiting off this story surely I’d be giving Señor Villoro a chunk of my earnings, but alas, zero divided by anything equals zero. (Don’t go into writing for the money.)

In terms of my interpretation, I added layers of menace and danger along with hints of vampirism. Who doesn’t love a good vampire tale? But I also chose to not be heavy handed.

What about my internal inspiration?

Ten years ago my father was killed in a plane crash. He piloted a small plane that failed upon take-off. Ironically, before he died I wrote a story available here about a guy who was left rich and rudderless after his parents died in a small plane crash. Obviously the worry was there in my mind before my father actually died. After his death I knew of course that this event would surface in my writing, but I never intentionally set out to write about it.

There was one strange thing that happened when my father died, and this is what I chose to focus on. At the time I was working in Manhattan. My mother gave me the call. I made it home to Jersey City and then got in my car to drive the 40 minutes to my parents house. On that drive it still wasn’t real to me. It was just a phone call. There was this great gulf of distance between me and the death, and my thinking was, as long as I am not at their house, it isn’t real. It didn’t even happen! I told myself that maybe I’d had some kind of psychotic break and made it all up (even though I knew that wasn’t true.) That distance gave me distance, which was exactly what I needed at the time.

It was all real, of course. Afterward came the usual stuff associated with a death in the family, the wakes and funeral mass and burial and the visitors and the paperwork and the concerns about the future and all of that. But for a 40-minute drive, none of it was real. I was living in a zone outside of time and life. That’s what I wanted to write about, that blessed denial you know isn’t true and won’t last. That’s where Dylan exists in Sueños, in a land of dreams, and whether he chooses to wake up or not, there will be a price. As one of my characters tells him, there’s always a price.

So my advice for writers out there is to study great writing and storytelling. Learn from it. Read, please. And don’t feel like you have to excavate the tragedies in your life, but don’t keep them buried either.

Anatomy of a Story: The History of Value Shopping in 21st-Century America

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I’m a fan of short titles. One word is the ideal for me. The reasoning is, if you can boil the essence of your story into as few letters as possible, you’ve got some skill on display. So what explains this story of mine, The History of Value Shopping in 12st-Century America, which is probably the longest title I’ve ever chosen? Is it unfocused? Does it suck?

Suckiness, for lack of a better word, is subjective, and apparently this insanely long titled story did not suck as per the folks at Monkeybicycle, who published it here.

What I think happened, regarding the title is this: sometimes you’ve got to let the story (and title) be whatever it is.

The History of Value Shopping in 21-st Century America is a deceptively simple story. Ellie Sears is a college student working on her thesis (hence the story’s title) by visiting dollar stores. She meets Lucinda, a clerk, a mysterious girl with a secret, and Lucinda brings Ellie along on an adventure. It’s a story of exploration and attraction (non-sexual) and escape. Hidden selves and alter egos. Maybe.

It’s also one of my shorter stories, clocking in at under 1600 words. It began life in a writing workshop as a power prompt, where you’re given two characters, a genre, a trope, a setting, and the POV/tense, and then you write a story. I came up with the bones of this one, and I thought I maybe had something, so I revisited it, and here we are.

I think at the time I was also in love with Bud Smith’s short story collection Double Bird. He’s great at detail and absurdity, so undoubtedly I was trying to incorporate some of his literary styles, play around with them, try them on, and while I would never consider myself an absurdist, I definitely like tossing in a drunken screaming circus clown now and again.

The moral of this post? I don’t know. Maybe it’s don’t insist on having every title be only one word. And let the story be whatever weirdness it insists on being, so it will find its place in the world.

Photo by Cam Ballard on Unsplash

Anatomy of a Story: Little Lamb

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Sometimes you need a little blood to make a story come alive. I’m not recommending you take out a razorblade and cut yourself, or someone else, but do it metaphorically.

I used this mindset in the crafting of my short story, Little Lamb, which was just published here by Epoque Press. The story follows Drew as he ventures to a very bizarre late night beach barbecue at the behest of his friend, Patrick, who in many ways is his Jungian shadow. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say there is definitely blood involved.

Let’s rewind first. Credit where credit’s due. As I’ve written here before, someone (Virginia Woolf?) once said books beget books. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway was a riff on James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’m a staunch proponent of writers having to READING fiction in order to truly be a great writer (many of them don’t). First, it gives you an insight into great writing and storytelling, and second, it inspires you.

For the past five years or so I’ve been giving myself my own MFA in the craft of the short story, so far covering writers like Flannery O’Connor, Hemingway, Carver, just to name a few. Reading them. Dissecting them. Hand-writing passages from their stories. Another one of these writers was Yukio Mishima.

Mishima, from Japan, was one of the most prominent mid-century writers. I haven’t done too deep a dive into his bio, but he was an interesting and complicated cat. A difficult human, but also one who put his soul into his writing. You can feel the man’s pulse when you read his work. One of his stories, Raisin Bread, jumped out to me. It resonated. It haunted me.

I knew I had to grapple with it. I wrote passages longhand, over and over, and then I examined the characters and the setting and the plot. I took it all apart in my mind, and then I wanted to reassemble it all into something new, something different—take his set-up and veer off in a wildly different direction.

And that is how Little Lamb came to be born.

It’s weird, this deep dive into the craft of the short story I’ve undertaken. I’ve come to get so attached to these long-dead writers: Flannery and Ernest and Yukio, and I want to show them what they’ve taught me. I can’t do that, but I can share it with the world.

Image source: Epoque Press

Anatomy of a Story: Time Turns Blood to Dust

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If you’re lucky, some stories come at you all of a sudden like an electric shock. The premise blazes in your brain. The bones of the architecture rise. All in a single moment.

This is what happened to me for my horror story, Time Turns Blood to Dust, just published here in the magazine Uncharted.

Not to say the story was an easy one to write. On the contrary. There was a puzzle I had to solve in crafting the narrative, and it took me what felt like forever to get it just right.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the beginning. Much like the four protagonists in my story, I was spending an aimless day wandering Manhattan when I saw this tiny nondescript bar. I decided to go in for a drink. The bartender was your average hipster white dude. I took a seat and got an IPA.

And then I went to the bathroom.

Right at the urinal someone had scribbled on the wall: DON’T LOOK UP.

Being both superstitious as hell and a not-quite-nonbeliever of things that go bump in the night, I definitely DID NOT look up. I left the men’s room, finished my beer, and went on with my life.

Of course I knew instantly what just happened: I’d been gifted with the premise of my next story. What if I had looked up? Was there some sort of monster up there waiting to consume me?

But premises are everywhere. Plots are harder to come across. My first question: what happens in the story?

My biggest clue was the graffiti. In my story it was a warning. I had to figure out WHO wrote it, and why. Early on I knew I’d be writing four different perspectives. I wanted the challenge of crafting four complete characters in a tight timeline. I also knew all four characters would be men, since another challenge I set for myself was to capture four different emotional experiences from a distinctly male viewpoint.

But which one would be the graffiti author? How does he do it and why? Where should he be in the order of the four?

Another puzzle was this: how to get to a resolution. The great thing about horror is that it opens up new imaginary worlds. The bad thing about horror is that there’s often no real story arc. I used the four stories within a single story to create a story arc, with the first story setting the tone, the second one amping up that tone, the third shifting, and the fourth going in a different direction, all the while giving the horror its due.

And then came the last challenge. What to name it? Don’t Look Up was the obvious title but there was a movie (that I never saw) with that same name. I thought about Obsidian. I love one-word titles but it left me flat. Then, while reading a Flannery O’Connor novella I came across the phrase “time turns blood to dust.” Bingo. It has the word blood in it (always a plus for horror), it captures one of the themes of my story, and it’s slightly pretentious. Everyone should try and be a little pretentious now and then.

Anatomy of a Story: Skeet

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I tend to write stories in groups, as in I have specific themes I want to convey, or things I want to say, and it takes me a bit of prose to work it all out. These past several months I’ve been working on three stories, three very different characters in three very different circumstances dealing with things suppressed. I suppose all writers (or at least those with some level of self-awareness) do this. Our selves come through in our stories–what we like, what we don’t like, what we’re screaming to tell the world.

My story, Skeet, just published here by Virgo Venus Press, is one of those stories. I remember when I wrote it, roughly, and it was around the same time I wrote another story (which, ironically enough, was also just published). Both stories were similar in the sense that I was interested in exploring how men specifically deal with emotional despair, trauma, and plain old adversity. Men, just men. That was the main genesis for Skeet.

In brief, Skeet is about Mason and Colby and their afternoon of skeet shooting. Mason’s got some very recent grief he’s working through. Colby’s got his issues, too. Instead of emoting, the men talk around their pain, and in doing so, they share and they connect.

The second inspiration was more left-brained. I really appreciate when a writer shares some technical info about a hobby they enjoy. For instance, I love snowboarding, and I wrote a short story about that. I also like skeet shooting (though I’ve only done it about a dozen times). I wanted to write about it, so I did.

Skeet shooting, or clay pigeons, is a blast, in every sense. Using a shotgun, you shoot orange discs as they fly across the sky. I love that pure moment of focus when the disc is soaring and you have to aim and steady and fire. The world falls away. Past, gone. Future, irrelevant. In Skeet, these two men inhabit that space as they navigate their pain.

There was another inspiration behind this story. I was at a dinner party and ended up talking to a classical musician named Erich Barganier. I looked up his YouTube channel and clicked on one of the videos, one called Flyover Country. It’s a book of poems by John McCarthy read aloud and accompanied by an orchestra. (I assume Erich composed the music, and that John is the guy reading the poems.) I’m not particularly a fan of classical music or poetry, but something about the combo hooked me. The music is jarring. The poetry is powerful and visual. I must have listened to the hourlong piece twenty times.

One specific passage stuck in my mind: the author loses a tooth and plants it in a field expecting flowers to grow. (He’s much more visual and poetic than what I just wrote there.) I thought, what if something else grew instead? Something sinister? Or at least, what if my character believed that? This became the heart of my story.

Funny thing is I didn’t think Skeet would ever find a home. It’s strange and it’s subtle, more pensive than plot-oriented. But it stuck with me. Even to this day.

Power Prompts: Episode 6

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The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: Madonna and a mafia boss

Genre: Coming of age

Setting: CIA headquarters

Trope: Broken-down vehicle

POV/tense: Second/present

And the result:

Like a Virgin

The only thing you ever wanted to be was a CIA spook, just like your father. But here you are, a month shy of 20, on an internship at CIA Headquarters, but instead of sitting in some cushy office with the AC blasting going over dental records from some serial killer’s victims, you’re in the hot and sweaty bowels of the building. Not just bowels as in depth, but also bowels as in it stinks, like someone’s been stuffing bodies in the wall and not even prepping them with lye.

Mister Sunshine is making you clean out an old busted Chevy Malibu that’s sitting in a parking bay. Why there’s a parking bay all the way down here, and how the car even got here in the first place, is one of those mysteries of life that you’ll never solve.

“How’d it get here?” you ask stupidly.

“It fell off a truck,” he says, then laughs and goes back to chomping his cigar. He likes to use lame mafia jokes, maybe because he is a lame mafia joke, an ex mob boss who got a sweetheart deal from the government in exchange for becoming one of them.

You climb in the backseat with a bucket full of fabuloso and scrub what looks to be animal entrails from the carpet. After about an hour of this all you want to do is take the hottest shower ever when you hear a tap on the window. You ignore it. The taps get more frantic.

“Jeez, don Corleone, I’m fist deep in gristle. Gimme a break why don’t you.”

“Excuse me?” a lady’s voice says.

It pings something familiar in you. When you turn you see a tiny blonde woman. Her face looks overstuffed and pulled but her body is sick. You stare at her. She meets your gaze and does not smile and then it hits you.

“Holy shit, you look like that old lady, Madonna.”

“Old???” she says in a low voice that sounds like murder.

“No, I mean…”

She sighs. “Yes, I am her, and no, she is not old. Next question.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Good. Then keep your mouth shut and listen to me very carefully. I want this car cleaned by end of day. And when I say cleaned I mean pristine. Like clean enough for a woman to give birth to a baby in it. Get me?”

You run your hand over fragments of bone. “Seriously?”

“Yes.” She twists a gold pendant that hangs in her cleavage. “Stop staring. It’s rude.”

“Wait, what are you doing here?” You ask.

She rolls her eyes. “I work here. What do you think, you dolt?”

“Madonna’s in the CIA?”

“Madonna’s in the CIA,” she mimics in a high pitched voice.

“I don’t talk like that.”

She smirks. “You’re new here, aren’t you.” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “I need that car tonight. Spotless. It’s a gibbous moon and the sacrifice must go off without a hitch or else we’re in a world of trouble. And by world I mean world. Our world. The whole world.”

“What are you going to do with this car?”

She flings her hands in the air. “I just told you. It has to be clean enough for a birth. The baby, that’s all that matters.”

“And the mother?”

She shoots you a withering look. “That’s not for you to know. Any other questions, smart boy?”

“No ma’am.

“Don’t you ma’am me.”

Just like she orders, you finish scrubbing. And when you go home, tired and sour, you vow that you will never set foot in that cursed place again. So much for becoming a spook.

Power Prompts: Episode 5

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The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: Pretty little devil and Stephen King

Genre: Alternate history

Setting: A boxing ring

Trope: Devil in my ear

POV/tense: Third/present

And the result:

Underground

“You know you want to do this, don’t you, Stevie boy?” she says as she strolls among the tubes and flasks in the workshop.

He wipes the sweat from his eyes. He’s burning up like never before. It must be some kind of fever, he tells himself. “Come on, Carrie, don’t be like this.”

She reaches him and she dances her fingers along the back of his neck. “Like what?”

“Like trying to get me to do something that, I don’t know, maybe I’m not totally sure I want to do.”

Carrie stretches her long legs out and Stephen stares at them, wondering how someone could be so damned beautiful. She catches him looking and she smiles, red ruby lips, black hair parted in the middle that falls past her shoulder. “Yes you do. Now say it after me.” She arches her back. “Say it, Stevie. Yes. I. Do.”

He feels the flush of heat all around him and he says, “If hell was like this I don’t think I’d ever want to leave.”

Her eyes flash. “Then say it.”

“It wasn’t enough that I left my wife and kid for you? It wasn’t enough that I left my career for you.”

She laughs. “What career? A schoolteacher?”

He sputters. “No. I was gonna be a writer. A good one, too.”

She gets on the floor and crawls toward him. She stops at his feet and looks up. “You know you want this. You know this is what you were really called to do, don’t you, Stephen?”

He swallows hard. He wants to look away but he can’t. He’s never felt passion like he does with her. He knows he can’t give that up. He knows he’ll never surrender. He knows it’s worth whatever price he has to pay. “Yeah, I do. I know it all too well, baby.”

Carrie climbs onto his lap. She straddles him and wraps her arms around him. She smells like sweat and sugar. She smells wrong and dirty and amazing and inescapable. “Promise me you will,” she whispers in his ear.

“Yes,” he tells her. “Anything you want me to do, I’ll do it.”

After an hour of heaven on the floor of the workshop, Stephen King, the Weather Underground’s latest recruit, goes to the Las Vegas Convention center where Muhammad Ali fights Ron Lyle and he plants a bomb beside the ring. Thirty four people are killed in the blast. Including Ali. Including King.