Bullshit

The only sport I pay much attention to is baseball. Baseball, I think, attracts nerds like me because a) a lot of baseball players (more so when I was a kid than today) look like they don’t work out much, and it creates this illusion that anyone can play baseball, and b) the stats. Other sports are much more physical, much more fast-paced, and you can blame a lot on the sheer magical physical capability of the athletes. In baseball you can crunch the numbers. If you think about it, baseball stats are basically Failure Stats. The best hitters in the game fail to get on base 60% of the time. The best pitchers in the game lose one-third of their games.

Baseball is beautiful. But it is a game of suffering.

So is writing fiction, babies. As a matter of fact, I sometimes think my own personal batting average for successful stories is worse than a batting average. The sheer number of failed novels in my desk drawers and on my hard drives is kind of amazing, and are so numerous they can actually be categorized:

1. The Rejected: Novels I wrote, polished, submitted to someone, and was told, gently, to bury as deeply as possible. Sometimes to deny having written in the first place.
2. The Single Drafted: Novels I wrote and immediately regretted, like a burrito ordered and consumed after you spent the day drinking bourbon in a dive bar with Sean Ferrell.
3. The Juvenilia: There are several novels written in my formative years when I actually thought my shocking and ballsy attitudes and opinions would scandalize the world! In other words, I was an asshole, and these are novels written by an asshole.

Hell, if you did the simple math and divided every novel I wrote by every novel I would actually show to you, my success rate is pretty abysmal. This is nothing new, of course. I maybe have more completed novels in my files than some, but possibly fewer than others. Writing a novel ain’t easy to begin with. Writing one people can read without shooting themselves in the head is a whole other level of difficult. And writing one that people would pay to read, well, that’s nearly impossible.

And then it hits you: Writing is a goddamn World of Fail.

Even successful stories go through a hell of revision and feedback where people point out everything you did wrong, or didn’t do well enough.  I have a feeling that if I ever wrote a book that sailed through all beta readings and the entire publishing process without any Fail, I’d have something like The Entertainment from Infinite Jest, or Monty Python’s Funniest Joke in the World. Which would be great. Because I would totally leverage that into world domination. I imagine some outfit like Halliburton would be at my door the next day with an 18-wheeler filled with diamonds and a 500-page contract for exclusive use of the novel in warfare.

Of course, when you’re living in a World of Fail, such fantasies are all you have.

The worst part is the Dan Browning: Even if you’re a successful writer who sells scads of books, you still get to Fail, and often, through the fact that all the hipster doofuses start complaining about your lack of lietrary merit or your tendency to lose control over POV throughout the story. Or that your story makes no sense even after you’ve huffed an entire tube of airplane glue in an old Taco Bell bag. You might think that doesn’t hurt our feelings, but it does. In other words, even when a writer Wins, they Fail.

And you wonder why we drink.

Everyone likes a good end-of-the-world scenario. Ever notice how many SF stories have this as a component – either as the main crux of the story, or as a historical backdrop? Disease comes along, destroys the world, except for our main characters. War comes along, destroys the world, except for our main characters. Zombies come along … vampires come along … superintelligent lizards … you get the idea.

Part of the appeal of such stories is people’s tendency, when imagining such scenarios, to imagine that they themselves will be the main character. In other words, we all seem to assume that when a disaster wipes out 99.9% of the world, we will somehow survive. Because we’re special.

Of course, the stipulation that there would be survivors at all is kind of dubious, albeit admittedly necessary for narrative purposes unless you’re going to Watership Down your apocalyptic story. I mean, vampires come and devour the earth until nothing’s left, how in the world would a few spunky folks escape doom? Part of it is that we all like to imagine we’re smart/lucky/special enough to be survivors, so it just makes sense to us. This is the same appeal that Doomsday Cults have, the belief that you are special enough to witness the end of the world. Forget it, bub: You will witness everything get incrementally worse, just like your ancestors and just like your descendants. No one is special enough to preside over the end of everything.

To be fair, of course, many of these sorts of films could be showing us the final moment of the most resilient survivors – in short, the end of the end. In other words, not a story about some Very Special People who are somehow spared by the universe, but rather the final moments of people who are just as unlucky as the rest of us.

Usually, though, it’s pretty clear the characters in these stories are meant to be Special, and it appeals to us, because we all think that just because The Rapture has failed to happen to for thousands of years, it’s no reason to think WE aren’t important and special enough to be alive when it actually happens. When, in fact, the chances are pretty frickin’ slim. But that’s the appeal: Imagining yourself in that scenario, comparing your theories on how to survive with what the author serves up. I’ve actually imagined myself in Zombie Apocalypses, and wondered what the best strategy would be. In real life, of course, I’d probably be discovered crouching in my crawlspace, slathered in barbecue sauce via a series of events so improbable you wouldn’t believe them even if I explained them in detail, and there would be much Zombie feasting and rejoicing. But it’s fun to imagine what if I was a Type-A personality who reacted well to crisis and apocalypse. I so would not make the mistakes people make in movies. I’d make different, equally disastrous mistakes, yes, but … still.

This is one reason I have an unreasoning affection for the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead: There is a pretty strong implication that the characters in the film are, in fact, the last people alive in the world, or at least their hemisphere. The doom that the credits sequence spells out for them elevates the movie from mediocre horror movie to something I still watch when it pops up on cable – the idea that after all their struggles, these characters are doomed, and none of their efforts will count for anything is a powerful ending, and one that feels a lot more real. Real for a Zombie Apocalypse, that is.

I myself am convinced of my own fleeting meaninglessness in life, and know that if the world ended tomorrow it would more than likely happen so fast and completely I wouldn’t even be aware of it. one second I’d be eating french fries and humming to myself, the next I’d be dissolved into my component molecules, no survival skilz needed.

Sometimes it’s restful to acknowledge your insignificance.