Stuff To Read
This introduction originally appeared in the Moreau Omnibus, August 2003
Twenty years ago I had the idea fora story. I wanted to write a hard-boiled detective yarn. Something very noir that would come across in sepia and shades of gray. It was a time of Reaganomics, cold war paranoia, and cyberpunk, which flowed rather seamlessly into the environment I was envisioning— dark, urban, and threatening. There would be twisted conspiracies, clients with mysterious motivations, crooked politicians, all the elements you need.
The problem was, the main character insisted on being a Bengal tiger, an eight-foot tall predator complete with fur, claws and tail. He also wanted to be a private investigator.
This was a bit of a departure for the genre. But Nohar didn’t want to go away. I had a tiger in my head that wanted to be Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. So I wrote about Nohar Rajahstahn on a creaky used Olivetti typewriter.
And, at first, the story didn’t work.
All through high-school I worked on various drafts, collecting carbon copies and rejection slips. The manuscript swelled from a short-story, to a novelette, to a novella. Editors wrote back little notes on how the background overwhelmed the story and how the plot overwhelmed the characters. All of which should have told me something.
However, at the time, I was too inexperienced to realize what it was telling me. What I thought it was telling me was that I had a stupid idea. I shelved Nohar and went on to try my hand at other things.
For another six years or so, I continued to write, and continued to remain unpublished. I kept writing short stories that kept getting rejected and, at some point during my extended undergraduate college career I made a pact with myself— I was going to publish something before I graduated, or I was going to give up on this whole writing idea. And, since I didn’t want to give up on the whole writing thing, I tried seriously analyze what it was I was doing wrong.
That was when I had the first major epiphany of my writing career: I wasn’t a short story writer.
It comes as a shock to some new writers that a short story is, in many ways, a more difficult form than a novel. It requires a disciplined focus similar to what’s required in poetry. Telling a complete story in four-thousand words is a feat worthy of respect and admiration, because it is a hard thing to do.
The reason that new writers come to short stories first is because they are short. The typing is done sooner, and the object of creation is easier to manage.
Novels seem so unwieldy by comparison. A marathon rather than a sprint.
But, some people are sprinters, and some aren’t. There are stories that can be told in the short form, and some that can’t. And if your creative diet, like mine, consists of novels rather than short stories, more likely than not the story ideas you produce will be novel ideas. And if you try to write a novel idea into a short story, it wont fit.
It was one failed novel later when I realized that was the case with Nohar’s story. It had kept getting longer because it wasn’t a short story. The background overwhelmed the story and the plot overwhelmed the characters because so much was shoved into such a small space that it left no room for the characters to breathe, much less think their own thoughts or have their own motives. What I had was a novel outline disguised as a very long short story.
I decided to try and do Nohar justice this time. I pulled out the yellowing carbons and started writing. On a computer this time.
I hadn’t really shelved the story though. It had been with me ever since I started, and I never even referred to the original draft. The image I had in my head was much better than what had made it to the page in that first attempt.
Much more made it into Nohar’s world this time. The wars that created the moreaus, his family history, a personal relationship, a pet cat. Other characters came out of nowhere, like Evi Isham and Angel, both of whom insisted on having their own books. The space allowed me to think a little more deeply about Nohar’s place in the moreaus’ world, and the moreaus’ place in ours.
People have said that I wrote an allegory about race relations, though I think what I did was considerably simpler— I imagined the average human being having to co-exist with an eight-foot tall intelligent anthropoid tiger with canines the size of his thumb. I imagined street gangs made up of fast breeding rodents that die of old age by eighteen. I imagined genetically-engineered weapons with human intelligence. The world that results in wasn’t allegory, it was just human nature.
Welcome to Nohar’s world. . .
S. Andrew Swann
February 2003
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