Back Story: The Empties by Matthew Muilenburg
I write at night. I write during the day, too, but not as well as I do when the sun has left the Midwest for locales more exotic than the Westside of Wichita. The night I wrote “The Empties”– and I stress the night, since it is the only work of mine that I’ve spent less than three hours composing– was one to which many graduate students, and GTAs in particular, can relate. I was editing my thesis project, a beast of novel that had ballooned to 499 pages, and as I tried to get it down to 250 – which I eventually did a few days later – I happened to glance up to the television. Now, when I write, I prefer to do so with loud music leaping from my earphones and bludgeoning my ear canals; there, the music tunes out that little fella thrashing about my brain who loves to tell me that everything I write is as sub as subpar can be. Therefore, although the TV was on, I couldn’t hear anything but Tom Petty casting away Mary Jane; the image on the screen, however, was one that I had seen a thousand times and never thought it weird before: Barbie-breasted chucklebots running their fingers up and down a throbbing 800 number.
So there I am, working on a novel that is centered in my off-kilter Catholic community, when the idea strikes me: why would anyone, in this day of free sex chat rooms and internet pornography, still pay fifteen dollars a minute to fulfill their sexual needs?
It was a question that led me to this story, but the story became something all together different. Yes, there is still a forlorn, envious, bitter old man calling an 800 number, but he doesn’t punch up the digits for the erotic thrill one typically assumes a man of his person would.
Oscar Well, father to an award-winning novelist who is far more accomplished as a writer than he ever was, is looking to reconnect with his daughter, even though he has no conscious desire to do so. His yearning is subconscious.
When my wife read this story, her first question went like this: Is Vary really there?
The inquiry, to me, was curious. I had every intention of making Vary a real person, but, like Oscar, my own subconscious was at play here, and it decided that the best way for Vary to be an active participant in the story was for her to be a figment, a specter there to haunt the man who wouldn’t admit that he could be frightened.
For the most part, I’d rarely been a fan of writers who write stories about writers. I certainly had planned on never composing one of my own, but Oscar, to me, needed to be a writer; after all, he’s basically an amalgamation of several writers I’ve met, mixed in with some sad, tired faces I’ve seen around other corners.
He’s had success, publishing six novels, but his daughter, who slipped out of his chromosomal pool dragging along stories that Oscar could never compose himself, has had more. He is jealous and loathes himself for not being more proud. His subconscious begs him to be proud, manifesting the image of Vary as real (and don't most of our best characters come from our subconscious?)
I set the story at the millennium to signify inevitable change, the passing of the guard that comes when fathers give way to the immovable force that is youth’s enviable progression.
Although I am, right now, less successful than many of the other writers who have been published by Rose and Thorn Journal, I would like to share this thought: write when you are tired, when you cannot possibly think of another metaphor. Like I mentioned earlier, your internal editor has gone to sleep and is too tired of being right to toss up a stop sign. Work with your subconscious at the point when it is so close to taking over your dreams that it spins magic and pushes those weird, surreal images into your stories. I doubt that this is an original thought, but it works for me.
And Vary.
Matthew Muilenburg is a graduate of Wichita State University’s Master of Fine Arts program. A sports journalist by trade, Matthew is the former editor of Wichita State’s two literary journals, Mikrokosmos and MOJO, the latter of which he and his staff founded during the 2010-11 school year. His creative work has most recently appeared in ScissorTale Review. Matthew currently resides in central Illinois with his wife and two young sons. Read “The Empties” in the summer 2011 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal.
Comments