brunwick.deviantart.com

By Bryce Peterson

I was nine years old when I became a hardened sinner. Grandpa wanted to teach me to fly fish, so we planned a weekend trip—just the two of us. I loved him, of course, but this particular grandparent was more intimidating than the meanest old-lady-substitute-Primary-teacher.

We rode up in Grandpa’s ancient diesel VW Vanagon—a vehicle never known for its stealth. Add the fact that, due to a childhood illness, Grandpa was deaf in his right ear, and it becomes clear why all our conversations sounded like shouting matches. But though these barriers to communication were high, they did not stop Grandpa from hollering a few jokes at me as we puttered north from Salt Lake. Jokes I would never repeat to my mother.

“What was the last thing to go through that bug’s brain?” he barked, pointing at a particularly large red-green splotch on his windshield.

“I don’t know,” I shouted. “What?”

“His anus.”

We got to the fishing hole before dark, time enough to pull in a few rainbows. Gramps did not have a pair of waders small enough for me. So I got to “Man up, kid.” Even in mid-summer, the water was icy and numbed my skinny legs quickly. Grandpa had attached a billy club to his waders. He used it to crush the fish’s head as he pulled it out of the water. As for billy-clubless me, I was just supposed to break the fish’s back with my bare hands.

Fishing was rapidly losing its allure.

Finally, the sun sank below the horizon, and I gratefully followed Grandpa to the van, shivering all the way. We drove to a parking lot, warmed up a nice dinner of pork and beans, and retired for the night. I knew that a full day of fishing awaited us tomorrow. A day full of fire and brimstone, damnation and hellfire, because God had me in his scope and was about to pull the trigger.

I woke as Gramps fried up some of the previous night’s catch. I still have no concept of his actual skill at cooking trout—I’ve never been able to bring myself to try trout again. I picked at my fish for some time while he worked at the stove, fiddling with a strange, tall pot with a transparent bubble on top. The clear bubble flashed brown occasionally. After a few minutes, Gramps finally poured me a mug of whatever it was.

Pushing the mug across the breakfast table, he muttered, “And here’s some sugar, if you want it.”

I was nine. Of course I wanted sugar! I wanted even more after I tried Grandpa’s new drink. Could he make nothing that tasted decent? A liberal dousing of sugar was the only thing that made the drink passable. I stopped pretending to eat the fish and nursed this new breakfast drink instead. I soon realized, however, that I had scrimped on the sugar. So I added more after every few sips and quickly found the sugar was not helping anymore. The drink became cold.

There I sat, longing for the pork and beans of the night before, picking at a mauled trout fillet, playing with a half cup of brown swill swimming over a bed of undissolved sugar, when Grandpa’s harsh voice scolded me:
“What, you’re gunna be a damn Mormon brat and not drink your coffee, either?”

Suddenly the reality of Grandpa’s bitter brown liquid became horribly clear. I sat dumbstruck, my mouth  glued shut. A flood of Primary lessons came rushing back to me. “The Lord has given us these bodies. They are holy temples. And cursed is he who defiles a temple of the Lord,” I could hear Sister X declaring, “How would you feel if someone spray-painted graffiti all over the Salt Lake Temple? Well, that’s how Heavenly Father feels when we don’t respect our bodies!”

And here I was pouring filth straight into my temple!

My mind was racing. “Coffee! How could you be so blind, Bryce? Maybe you wanted to be blind. You wanted to be led away in sin. You wanted to walk close to the edge. Well, you’ve done it now. You’ve walked up to the edge and jumped right off. I sure hope hell is nice this time of year. Hello, Brother Lucifer, long time no see.”

Plainly, I had become one of the vilest of sinners. However, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that my fallen, sinful, horrifying state should be kept from my family, especially my parents. The first few years of my deception turned out to be easier than I had feared. I wasn’t due for my next bishop’s interview until I was 12; and not having the priesthood meant no monthly PPI’s investigating my strict adherence to the Word of Wisdom.

The sacrament, however, was a challenge. My education in this area had been quite complete. You were not supposed to partake of the Sacrament if you were not worthy, unless you wanted to ensure your own damnation, of course. Woe unto him who eateth unworthily and whatnot. I knew that I had already bought my ticket to the underworld, but I didn’t need any more flight insurance.

So I developed a strategy to hide my shameful status as a sacrament non-partaker. When the bread was passed to me, I would pinch it between thumb and forefinger, bring it toward my mouth, and deftly palm the piece of bread. I could then slip it inconspicuously into a pocket while a bit of artful misdirection on my part—pretending to chew and swallow—completed the illusion. I was a David Copperfield in training. I could make anything disappear. That was the easy part. Smooth sailing to this point. The hard part came when the next tray arrived.

Water. It was just an ounce or so, but it was a liquid ounce. I could not simply palm and pocket this. Nor could I merely pass the tray untouched. The whole ward would obviously see that. Neither could I just press the cup to my lips, as Pops would surely notice. I had no choice but to allow the water to enter my mouth. Only then could I evade detection as the whited sepulcher that I had become. But once in my mouth, the water could not be allowed to proceed down my throat, lest it nourish the seed of damnation inside me.

I was a skinny, limber child who could easily double over on the pew. It seems only obvious that I would assume this reverent, contemplative pose after taking the water. Letting the water trickle out from my mouth onto my knee thus became child’s play. My father, who could detect whether or not water had been sipped from the small paper cup, would never notice the four-inch wet spot on my knee. Or, if all else failed, I could wait until the sacrament was over, go out into the foyer, run the drinking fountain, and place my lips into the stream of fresh, clean water. Only then would I allow the damning water to dribble out of my mouth and down the drain.

This continued for three years.

As I neared my twelfth birthday, I realized what would soon bring my house of cards crashing down around me: the required interview with the bishop prior to my ordination to the priesthood. I had the Articles of Faith down pat, but I had no idea what questions the bishop would ask me nor what the consequences would be for failing to answer one correctly. Public humiliation? Denial of the priesthood? I didn’t know, but my conscience was not completely seared by my wicked past. I resolved that I would not tell a lie to the bishop. I knew I was already in deep enough.

The bulk of the interview passed without note—my worries were for naught—until that last question. The one designed to catch sinners like me.

Yes, there were things in my life that would keep me from receiving the Priesthood.

Lower lip quivering, my mouth opened. And though the powers of hell conspired against me, making the walls close in around me, my throat dry up, and my stomach clench, I confessed.

I can still hear the bishop laughing.

(First published in issue 152 of Sunstone.)

I believed in the Writer Genius for many years. He was this special, misunderstood person whose waters ran very deep. He was someone who had amazing novels and short stories swimming inside him like fish, just waiting to be caught and hauled up into the light of day. All he had to do was sit at the computer, cast the fishing line into his deepest depths, and type.

Oh, sure. He had to work to get those stories out, but it was his genius that created them. That genius was every bit as much a part of him as the color of his eyes, the shape of his hands, or the sound of his voice. That genius meant that story was something he didn’t have to worry about. All he had to do was find the words to embody that story.

And the really great thing was, in all possibility, I could be that writer genius. How many were the days that I sat down at my computer with an idea that seemed so full of potential? How many were the drafts I pumped out? How many were the critics who said, “Yeah, it’s fine.”

Fine? Obviously you don’t grasp what I’m doing here. Don’t you see the nuances? Can’t you catch the symbolism? Isn’t the story’s soul blindingly apparent?

I spent quite a few years trying to be the Writer Genius. Finally, I had to give up because it was evident to me that I had no natural storytelling talent. I was about as far from being the Writer Genius as it was possible to be. But I’m a stubborn cuss. I wanted to be a writer anyway, so I enrolled in a creative writing M.F.A. program.

I learned something during that time that opened an entirely new world to me, a world that made it possible for me to be a writer. That something is a single principle. And I’m going to give it to you free of charge, just because you’re you.

It is simply this: There is a craft to storytelling, just as there is a craft to engine design, or architecture, or artificial sweetener formulation.

This idea excited me so much that I spent the next five years studying it. The main text I used was Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. It may seem odd to focus on a screenwriting book when one wants to learn story craft, but, as I found out, screenplays are story skeletons. They’re the bones that the cast and crew hang flesh upon. You don’t have to cut through flowery language or extended metaphors or languorous description. You’re just looking at the beams and bones that make sure a building or body can stand. And there are ways to know if they will hold up, or if the art direction, costumes, actors, soundtrack and cinematography are just makeup on a cadaver.

Though I was obsessed with understanding the components that made a good story, it took me a while to learn to apply them. I look back on my M.F.A. thesis and cringe. Why in the world did they let me graduate?

But eventually, my work started to pay off. I could tell because the first time I submitted a screenplay to a film festival, they took my $20 entrance fee and never spoke to me again. The next time around, I revised that screenplay and won third place. The kicker was, I could tell what the problems with my screenplay were, and I could fix them. It was like fixing a toaster.

After that I got published and won writing contests on a regular basis. But it wasn’t because the Writer Genius in me had finally woken up, it was because I knew how stories work, just like an architect knows how buildings work, or an engine designer knows how engines work.

Learning the craft of storytelling has been great for my career. I can actually make a living with words. However, sharing my knowledge has proved to be very difficult.

As I think back on the majority of the fiction I have read, it all has one thing in common. It lacks story. Yes, those pieces of fiction may have lovely language, they may have sympathetic characters, they may have interesting ideas, but they don’t go anywhere.

I’ve written a lot of critiques to fiction writers focusing on their story’s structure, and with almost no exception I receive this response, “What in the world are you talking about? This is how the story GOES!”

That, gentle reader, is the voice of one who is under the thrall of the Writer Genius myth. It’s the voice of someone who believes that storytelling is an innate power they have. Like me many years ago, they don’t realize that there is a craft to storytelling.

As Robert McKee writes, “The novice plunges ahead, counting solely on experience, thinking that that life he’s lived and the films he’s seen give him something to say and the way to say it … What the novice mistakes for craft is simply his unconscious absorption of story elements from every novel, film, or plays he’s ever encountered. As he writes, he matches his work by trial and error against a model built up from accumulated reading and watching. The unschooled writer calls this “instinct,” but it’s merely habit and it’s rigidly limiting. He either imitates his mental prototype or imagines himself in the avant-garde and rebels against it. But the haphazard groping toward or revolt against the sum of unconsciously ingrained repetitions is not, in any sense, technique, and leads to screenplays clogged with clichés of either the commercial or the art house variety” (15-16).

Lack of story craft is the bane of Mormon fiction. In fact, I believe it is the main barrier that keeps Mormon writing from gaining the strength to compete in the national and international markets. Too many potential Mormon writers think that there’s a Writer Genius inside of them just waiting to get out. I figure that a Writer Genius pops up only once for every million people born. Possibly less often. But the Writer Genius myth is so powerful that a great many people who could be good writers, if only they learned the craft, spend their lives waiting for a fish that never bites.