The Abattoir (A short story) + an experiment and a showcase on editing.
I want to try something a bit different today. I’ve started writing a story, but cut it short before it reached the point where “story” has emerged.
While I don’t plan to make a habit of sharing first drafts, when I found myself wrestling with this one I thought it might be an interesting opportunity to share an open book insight into the editing process and the strange nature of how “story” emerges. That is the ethos of The Sudden Walk after all.
The fragment that follows was a language led burst of inspiration. Strangely enough inspired after going out to lunch a Michelin Star restaurant, St John if anyone’s interested. A place that’s hosted famous faces such as Anthony Bourdain and Action Bronson. Men from different worlds, yet the same world in ways that aren’t immediately obvious if you look at them side by side.
If you’re up for a tangent:
Here’s Bordain’s visit. Here’s Bronson’s.
St John is a nose to tail restaurant. Organ meat, bone marrow, all varieties of stomach matter to line your stomach. While ordering, we struck a charmingly unprofessional waiter who went into an ill advised rant about the markets and slaughterhouses that used to make up the part of London where the restaurant lies. While his talk of blood being broomed down stormwater drains wasn’t the best set up for the Terrine sitting on my plate, it did get my cogs going, thinking about the killing house on the farm back home and the disconnect between life, death, meat and meals.
What came out of this experience was something closer to a lyrical essay than a story, musing but never quite taking off. If I were to whip this one into short story form, my typical process is to take the skeleton structure that ended up on the page first time around and scan it for the details that could be pulled out and expanded to find the story. This is an approach largely inherited from booker prize winner George Saunders (not sure why I’m name dropping so much today), but one I find is more effective than it has any business being.
While there is some fancy word play in the fragment that follows, to my eye it lacks an intangible element. While reading it back, my mind wants it to close in on an immediate scene. Readers can bear a certain amount of description but there’s a threshold where attention drifts and your patience rebels. “Okay great. You’ve set it up. Well done. Now get to the point.”
Typically when I’ve got my editing hat on I’ll read a piece like this until I notice the first indication of lag in my own attention then stop, identify what, why, how its falling short and start rewriting. Either splicing in some variation in tone or language to spike interest or wind back a few sentences and take things down a more interesting or less predictable route.
I know I haven’t provided you with the most enticing entry point here. But have a go. Read these stacked sentences and try it for yourself. Identify the point where lyrical writing outstays its welcome and plot, character, something solid needs to be introduced.
One reader’s idea of where this point lies will likely be different to the next. But there is a line. An objective, unfortunately invisible, line.
As writer, all I’ve got is my own taste to define where that line lies as closely as I possibly can. In some ways it’s an author’s taste that readers gravitate towards first. Everything else comes downstream of this.
But I’m rambling, here’s the piece. See if you can find that mark. Where does your mind start getting bored with description and lyric and begin feening for story?
The Abattoir (first draft of a short story)
Concrete hosed down of blood. Carcasses hauled on shoulders, up onto hooks, skinned, stored, aged, carved, wrapped and hauled again.
A day. Every day. Every city. Filling bellies, feeding mouths that talk about death, benefit from death, yet never touch it. Not like they touch it here.
The killing house stands sombre as its tributes are delivered. No talk. No opinions. Reality baked into the stone floors and down the sides of the drain at its centre.
You might imagine screams, but few cry out. This isn’t murder. It’s the cycle. The chased and the capturerer have already run their race before they make it here.
It only smells when there’s been a lag in the killing. The heavy door bolted shut, hot sun wrapping the concrete. Stale heat melting the hardened lard, souring it. The eggs of any stowaway flies choose this time to hatch. An opportunity to live, to writhe, to feed. No hand to turn the tap, no cleansing breeze, no fresh sacrifice to appease the old ghosts. The killing house only smells when there’s been a lag in the killing.
Prayers are whispered at the abattoir but not every time. Depends who’s holding the knife. It’s a strange kind of kindness that colours the killing kind. It’s a callus character carved out of respect for life. No man can stand this close without connecting to it.
You can’t know the texture of this respect until you’ve personally snuffed out a life, gone back to the world, marvelled at the beauty of movement, youth, personality, only to snuff out more life. You’re a taker, but don’t assume it doesn’t take pieces of you. If you didn’t notice it the first time, the next day will make sure you do. You pick up that blade, but it carves an equal sized portion out from a part of you.
You’ll mourn this new absence in turn. Not by choice. By the cycle. Some of them find prayers, all find respect. In turn. If the lines on their face don’t show it, they’ve buried it. Further sign of the pieces the taken lives have taken back.
The end
Did you find it?
To be honest, I didn’t. This is where editing requires an awareness of the angles available to you. I thought the issue that was irking me about this piece was on the language level. But on second reading (for me at least) it maintained its steam most of the way through.
For a moment I reconsidered whether I’d continue this experiment as originally stated. This curve ball has shown the imperfections of my editing method.
But this is what the process looks like. You start with an idea of what your approach is going to be, but when you walk that path you’ll often find the work feeds back something completely different.
Of course my initial instincts were still correct, it’s not a story yet. If I leave it as it is, it’s nothing special. Just some pseudo poetic musings. But I no longer think the improvement required here involves cutting and switching as I first suspected.
In its current form this story is heavy on abstracts, light on character. Strong in voice, but lacking a “why” behind it all. Ambient, atmospheric, but all score music and opening credits no protagonist to cling to, no antagonist to hate.
It needs a framing device. A speaker and a subject—a reason for this monologue.
Who is speaking? Why is the killing house/Abattoir the subject of discussion today?
I don’t know the answer to the above questions. Though I’ve got an educated suspicion these are the elements that are holding this story back from realising its potential (according to my taste).
But there is an advantage to not knowing.
It means the voice isn’t a predictable one. It’s not one where I can just sit down and brainstorm answers to these questions (well I could, but to do so would be to write something dead in the water).
Experience tells me this is one to sit on and let percolate in the background. Its the salami that needs to be cured in salt, the Wagyu that needs another forty or so days to age.
To give this story a pulse I need to go out and live life, catch scraps of conversation in public and trust it will come to me. Not as some gift from providence, but a gift of observation. By maintaining an open question in the back of my head, my mind will seek out all the pieces that look like they might vaguely fit. Once I’ve got an armful of these “partial matches,” I can take them back and match them against the fragment you’ve just read. Likely the perfect piece will be a wholly unrelated line that connects this half-story to its new, elevating direction, I just need to wait for it.
I would have loved it if this article had followed my initial plan down to the detail. How good would it have been if I could have stacked this raw first draft next to a revised one and shown the “mastery” of my editing process? But stories don’t tend to obey in such a linear way. Not my ones anyway. Certain sparks need to be fed a portion of active, passive work then left in the oven for an undefined stretch of time.
The above approach of story fragment + waiting has resulted in some of the best short stories I’ve come up with.
It allows for varied textures in voice. Different life circumstances make for different writing styles. So if one section is written now and the next is written two years from now, the resulting story will be closer to a collaboration between two different writers than an effort from a single mind.
Alright. That’s all. I hope this was interesting if not useful. You can look forward to seeing where this story fragment ends up who knows how far down the line.
PS.
Here’s another ad that goes against all the rules of thumb for writing an ad.
In short I’m asking you to Buy Me a Coffee.
In long…
When I get on the overground I tap my Revolut card basically without thinking. Sometimes when I look at my bill, I’ve spent around £15 in a day. That’s more than $30 NZD gone without a beat of consideration before it’s spent. Sometimes it was to get to a place I didn’t want to go in the first place. The mind fuck in all this is I never deliberate over the cost of public transport like I would on an actual purchase for myself. Take renting a movie on Amazon or something. Go fuck yourself, I’ll never fork out that $5 to watch Dune Two. Even though I’ve been wanting to see that movie for a while. I’ll wait till I’m on an international flight where I can squint at a tiny screen with bad sound quality and lose the entire cinematic experience that made me want to see the thing in the first place. What’s the difference between these two things? One has a mental barrier, the other doesn’t. To spend money on things that have been normalised to spend money on is easier than it is to spend money on novel types of purchase. With Amazon the barrier is part logic part complete illogic. Of course it costs less to rent Dune Two than to tap onto the Piccadilly line, but if you’re already subscribed to Amazon’s streaming services and they then have the audacity to ask you to fork out more money? It just gets your heckles up doesn’t it? How much do you need to squeeze out of me? Which leads me to the Buy Me A Coffee tab here. Obviously what this company is trying to do beneath the surface is reframe a donation in terms that people are already comfortable spending money on. You wouldn’t blink at spending this amount on an espresso or three every single day before noon has rolled around. So why not part with the same amount for Hamish who’s spent way too long on this diatribe about sales psychology. Why? I don’t know. But there’s a link here. Do with it whatever you want.