I’M BEING LEANED ON! By my own influences.

I was thinking over some of the imagery in “Getting Fired“–especially some of the imagery I came to more through intuition than through planning. Before I started drafting the piece, I sat down and wrote out about two pages of free association, just listing images that fit with two of the themes of the story. For example, the “This. Is. His. Face” girls were in one of those lists. The fly in the first scene, too, and the homeless guy. In general, I do plan out the imagery in my stories fairly rigorously. (It’s the plotting where I go all baggy.) But as “Getting Fired” progresses, it does what stories do: Its plot is going in places I didn’t anticipate when I planned out my imagery, and so I’m starting to operate much more on instinct, relying very little on the initial lists.

Usually, this is good. I like my image instincts. But “Getting Fired” is proving troublesome, and I think I know why.

The story is heavily influenced by ’30s genre movies–horror and hardboiled-newspaper-type flicks. And these movies, since they were written and directed by men, are soaked in male anxieties and guilts. Women typically appear as symbols, ciphers, or catalysts. When I write that male anxiety and female opacity, I think it comes across as… well… male-bashing. Really, the gendered imagery in “GF” is out of control, and I can’t believe I didn’t notice it until about this past Wednesday or so. Since a) that is not what I’m trying to say with this story and b) if there’s anyone in this piece I empathize with, it’s the (male) narrator, followed closely by Mr. Peeler (thus I don’t think there’s any subconscious man-hating going on, although I suppose by definition I wouldn’t know), I’m pretty sure this is a sign that I’ve insinuated more of the movies’ atmosphere into the story than I even realized!

That’s awesome in a lot of ways, but it does mean that I now have to yank on the reins a bit, and reshape the ending of the story to ensure that I have at least some semblance of control over what I’m saying here. Pretty sure I know how: You’re going to get more of Amy than I’d initially planned, and possibly more of Miss Mikveh and the three receptionists, too. The women in this story do have anxieties and guilts; showing a few flashes of their inner lives should get the story’s center of gravity back where I want it, away from the strong attractions of the ’30s.