When Necessary Fiction editor Steve Himmer graciously invited me to participate in this project, I figured it’d be a great opportunity to embarrass myself publicly. But what era of early writing to choose from? Should I go with the sad pastiches of Ray Carver stories I churned out during college where the only noticeable change was swapping out the Pacific Northwest for my hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania? Or maybe I could finally unleash the sad sack “novel” I wrote in high school unironically titled Twilight of the Heart? I sent that disaster out to fifteen agents and described it in the query letter as the timeless love story of two nerdy teenagers working at a mini golf course in Ocean City, New Jersey. I’m sure those agents will get back to me soon.
The decision of what to publish came while spending the holidays with my parents. I was digging around my childhood bedroom when I stumbled upon a red notebook filled with a ninety page handwritten retelling of Super Mario Bros. that I apparently composed at the tender age of six. I read a few pages and decided it would be cruel not to share this literary gem with the kind purveyors of Necessary Fiction. Marvel at such linguistic wonders like “What I just showed you was just a privew (sic) of all of my monsters,” and “Oh no, King Koopa must have put a scared spell on you.” I thumbed through the novella and was surprised by how many tics I recognized in my own writing even at age six. Even then I used dialogue as a crutch. Nobody has an interior moment in Super Mario Bros: The Whole Story, and every single character announces their intentions with a sadly earnest honesty. These are issues I still grapple with: cutting back dialogue and letting characters say things they don’t mean. Richard Yates wrote a draft of Revolutionary Road where protagonists Frank and April are honest with each other throughout the entire novel. He apparently reread it, thought it was awful, and rewrote the entire thing, only this time the characters lied. It’s a lesson I really took to heart and try to apply to my own work. And if you think juxtaposing Revolutionary Road and Super Mario Bros: The Whole Story is sacrilege, it’s cool. I do too. But it’s the day after Christmas as I’m writing this and I’m enjoying some whiskey and everything is going to be all right.
How about those red revision remarks, am I right? I’m a big reviser. It’s probably my favorite part of the entire writing process. First drafts are often ugly and terrible, and everybody’s had that experience of pumping out something they think is great only to recoil upon next morning’s reread. It’s fool’s gold. I can’t really imagine what prompted my six-year-old counterpart to go ham on Super Mario Bros: The Whole Story with a red pen, but I’m glad that masochistic discipline was evident even then.
I think it’s time to address the elephant in the room. In 1990, I decided it was a good idea, no, imperative that I adapt a Nintendo Entertainment System launch title into a handwritten novella. What does that say about my childhood? What does it say about me as a person? I mostly don’t want to think about it, but then I’m reminded that I started collecting NES games seven years ago and that as recently as this past weekend I dragged my girlfriend to an indoor flea market where I purchased an empty NES box from a cackling yokel for one whole dollar. I still write about Nintendo games all the time. Not the flashy, newer games — why are there so many buttons; why are there more than two dimensions to navigate — but the 2D games of my youth that rarely resembled whatever they were programmed to represent. Those 8-Bit artifacts required imagination. Arch Rivals did not resemble the NBA. Total Recall for NES had nothing to do with the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. I subscribe to the theory set forth by those manic geniuses Peter Smith and Charlie Hooey who produced the NES Great Gatsby hoax a few months back. “When we were little, NES games were like these weird, badly translated artifacts from another planet, often really surreal and mysterious with this oddball internal logic of their own… [T]he limited technology made everything so much weirder, so that a game felt more like a strange dream than a bad movie.” Have truer words ever been spoken? In my own writing I’m often trying to capture that sense of a “strange dream” from “another planet”. 2D Nintendo characters break through their television constraints and confront my characters directly. Characters are completely unable to deal with their emotions and instead choose to hide in the safety of alcohol and the nostalgic pleasures of simple games half-remembered from childhood. I’m after that tension between the childish and otherworldly, the nostalgic and bizarre. And if I learned anything from looking back on Super Mario Bros: The Whole Story — other than the unmistakable proof that I was a strange, goofy child — it’s that I’ve been trying to create that sensation through prose ever since I learned to read and write.
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