Third Person, Singular, Masculine. Present Tense. Unnamed. Destroyed by the world that is his maze. Or, my odd writing habit...

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Summary: In my own writings, I tend to drift to unnamed male protagonists. I have to fight the urge.

BLOT: (24 Apr 2013 - 04:20:28 PM)

Third Person, Singular, Masculine. Present Tense. Unnamed. Destroyed by the world that is his maze. Or, my odd writing habit...

He no longer cares about such things as distance measurements, not in the same way you do, but he once did.

That's a quote from near the beginning of my nearly-horror story, "He once...". About a man in a small white room that keeps him alive no matter what, but it also deprives him from the outside world. He lives in a bubble of perfect, geometric security, and is not even allowed to go insane because he knows the room is fixing him and putting him back to right, at least right enough, every time he falls asleep. In the whole thing, he is known as "he", and it all told in the present tense, though it might be set over hours or over days. The reader has no more clues than he does.

It was written as the opening of a trilogy of stories about the way geometry and architecture can be used in horror. This nameless guy is trapped in a single room, a room that updates when he closes his eyes. In another, a nameless guy tries to deliver a package to the seventeenth floor of an office building, but every corner leads to new hallways, and he eventually becomes hopelessly trapped down this infinite maze devoid of others. The third was about a guy who gets into an elevator, and it ends up going down an impossible distance, and hours later he hears noises and sounds creeping around outside, and then the door opens and the man has to decide if he risks the outside, or if he stays inside and potentially dies. The elevator connects it to the story about the office floor, and the bright white light he sees at the end is a reference to the nameless room, so that all three men might be the same man seen from different angles, differences in fate notwithstanding.

There is probably something to be said about a compulsion to write stories in the present tense with unnamed male protagonists referred to merely as "he" with a constant stream of diversions and shout-outs to the past and potential future, as they are ground under what generally would be thought of as every day rooms and hallways. At the time I was writing them, I thought "geometric" horror would be my thing, but I think I am mostly done with it for now. I still find myself, though, wanting to write about those unnamed HEs, running around in the now, always too far inside the maze to even realize they are running inside of one.

When I recently went to write a story about a man who keeps nearly being hit by cars, and this man ends up confronting something that seems horrible but not evil, otherworldly but not malicious [though destructive], my first draft of the first few paragraphs turned him into another "he". I forced myself to name him and to talk about him outside of his own head. It was weird how weird that felt. And is he also in a maze? Sort of, though in his case it's about where the angles of things don't quite add up.

Even my brief, gonzo storyline "True Confessions of a Nighttime Librarian" didn't name the protag. He was assumed to be me, mostly, because that was half the joke (that they were me telling stories of things that really happened, stories with zombies and cultists and otherworldly portals attacking a library). At least, in general, there was never a maze. Just, you know, stacks and stacks of books that had to be meandered. And one of my favorite stories, about a man whose absence was more pleasing to his friends than his presence, finds himself so absent from his friend that his absence has no presents, well, it names people. Though, well, it was a weird one.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: April 2013


Written by Doug Bolden

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