Reading the book Exterminator by William S. Burroughs, which is really a very small little book, especially the paperback version I have (almost looks like one of those pocket Bibles) changed my life, 100 percent, as a writer, and the reason it changed my writing life is because Exterminator exposed me to something I had never seen before, as I have hiked my way through the literary trails of the 19th and 20th, and now of course our own, centuries: It showed me , once and for all, something I had always suspected: a good story does not need to be 400 pages long. In fact, it does not even have to be so much as a full page long.
Many might think this would come as common sense...and as I have often written now, it is perhaps the case that, once upon a time, it did come as common sense to people, especially to writers. Alas, in the glorious modern age of Barnes and Noble and 1200 page books that get turned into television shows that go on for 10 years, or of books like the Hobbit that get turned into 3 films, it can be difficult to remember that, in the world of writing, there once existed something known as a sketch, and that sometimes, like in the case of Exterminator, sketches were actually allowed to be published, adored and fawned over in their own right.
Reading Exterminator from a 21st century lens is, I think, and especially would be for most modern readers out there, an incredibly strange experience , not necessarily because of the stories in it and their contents, but rather, again, just because of how quickly they tend to start and then end. From a modern perspective, one looks at the tales , especially the ones that do not even reach beyond a half a page, and one cannot help but wonder: but why was this even published? For is this not an incomplete work? What is this? It's only two paragraphs ! And he is calling it a short story "How dare he!" the modern reader shouts .... "Take this back to the factory and FINISH IT!"
What I find so strange about this perception , however, is that it is not at all, you'll notice, very much applied to literally a single other artistic medium. Fans of music love demo tapes, fans of film often love vehind the scenes features and bloopers, and of course when it comes to painting & drawing, fans obsess to no end over sketches ....and many would probably consider sketches to be- why not?- a complete work, even in their own right. Yet when it comes to the modern age of literature, many writers are sitting at their typewriters...excuse me, keyboards...and they are convinced of this idea that, for a writer, it is literally all or nothing. One either has a completed novel or short story on their hands , that is all sorts of neat and organized, or one has nothing at all. There are no longer sketches in the world of writing. There are no longer short ideas or scribblings. There are only these enormous completed "works".
Indeed, Writers, for some reason, seem to be unusually obsessed with the idea of "completion" -- as well as hiding their tracks and burning their sketches --- in a way that literally no other artists in any other medium seem to be. I suppose many of them think this is a positive thing. As you can imagine, considering how much I enjoyed Exterminator, I do not. If anything, I find the modern writers obsession with completing everything he begins to be despicable. I do not understand it. I do not know from where it has arisen. I also of course cannot fathom why it has only poisoned the writer and none of the other artists.
Thinking of it now however, one imagines that a large part of the writers obsession with perfection and completion perhaps stems very muh from the fact that, in comparison to other artists, writers are often, believe it or not, the least outcasted of them all. I know, I know - what am I talking about ...writers are often the biggest outcasts many say, they're very weird, and that's true ...but they're often not outcasts in the way that musicians or painters or actors are. Those artists all tend to work their lives daily with a very visible difference in some way or other that sets them apart from others -- they wear their artistry on their sleeve---and this perhaps makes them feel extra comfortable with being "disorganized" and "incomplete". Writers are instead often silent outcasts of a sort. We are very much like spies, you might say. We will wear the clothes of the masses ; and we can also, this should never cease to be stressed, speak the tongue of the masses to a formalized tee; but we never really think like the masses. We are able to "pass" for normal oftentimes---and this of course, I feel, leaves us , at times, wanting to conform to normal -- since we often have no real life experience with being viewed as strange (like the other artists do).
Hence, as a result of this, we have a centuries long obsession now with wrapping our weird stories in the most formal packaging we can possibly wrap it in. There is something strange inside the book-- but we want to make it seem as polite and refined as possible. So we make it extra long now and we tie up every end and leave no real confusion or disorder , in order to always make it seem like its a posh history book of some kind, rather than ...well, the mind, perhaps, of a madman (or mad woman). We are, you see, trying to clean the pollution and the madness out of our strange stories, and I think doing this has very much ...I suppose you could say, sterilized them. One reads through book after book from many modern artist and one never gets to really visit with the artist themselves. One never sees the hand of the artist anymore. One never sees the squiggly line that went wrong, or the merely half formed idea. Itd all been burned out . It's all been cleaned and edited to the point where you almost think a computer wrote the thing rather than a human...
For the real irony of the half a page story in the Exterminator text is that, since I discovered that such a thing could exist as a merely half a page tale that, yes, feels complete in its own way, I have also, in the years since first reading it, discovered that my daily word count and my ideas seem to almost be never ending. Exterminator actually freed me from a prison that I was in as a writer , for a very long time, where I was convinced that I simply could not dare touch the keyboard to begin writing unless I had a fully formed idea and plan of what I was going to do. Exterminator freed me from the horrifying thing that often occurred repeatedly in my 17-21 years, when I would begin a tale and only get 4 pages in...and then , what? Delete it in a rage a morning later, because "i can't write further and what are 4 pages worth!?"
I am now beyond this you see. I have now entered another glorious realm -- a higher realm I feel -- of the writing guild . I am now not a bit ashamed but absolutrly proud to be a sketch artist or a mere scribbler on the days when that is all I feel like doing. I am now no longer at all ashamed to take three hours and do nothing but one page sketches of countless ideas and sentences I never would have allowed myself to type before Exterminator ....since before it I always thought of completion and never the journey...
So there you have it I guess. Vaffancul editors. Vaffancul....
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