From the opening paragraph of the short story Kill All Your Darlings, it’s quite evident that Tracie McBride has administered a sound literary beatdown on Kenneth Hoffman’s Up in Smoke – on stylistic grounds, if for no other reason.
But alas, there are quite a number of other good, solid reasons to prefer McBride’s tale over Hoffman’s.
Let’s start with the style. Up in Smoke opens with a considerable lack of sizzle. From the get-go, the writer introduces us to an apparently greedy prick of a step-brother who is noted as “droning” on about the money he feels he should have gotten from his deceased father’s will – “something about opening a business with other people’s money and having the bank foreclose on some recalcitrant properties.” You know – the kinds of things that you’d imagine greedy, pricky step-brothers “droning” on about once Pop is put in the ground and the will is unfurled for study.
Stylistically speaking, that’s pretty much how it proceeds for the rest of the trek through Up in Smoke. Early on, you’re given to understand that, though the deceased step-father was kind of coy about including his step-daughter in the will, the love between them was evidenced by their “wonderful talks” – you know, the kinds of wonderful talks that you’d imagine a loving step-father would have with his step-daughter.
And how exactly do we know early on – at least before he burns down the family homestead in an effort to collect on the fire insurance – that the step-brother is an evil, greedy prick? Because the author informs us as to how “his smile turn[s] into a smirk as he offer[s] his opinion on what [his step-sister] could do with the furniture,” and his “brow furrow{s]with annoyance as he rant[s] on about the missing stock portfolio belonging to her dad.” You get the picture – a bona fide smirking, brow-furrowed, ranting prick.
The problem here is that the author has repeatedly violated one of the cardinal rules of good story-telling:
Show, Don’t Tell
By contrast, Tracie McBride not only seems to understand that rule, she has quite literally appropriated it – along with other cardinal literary rules – in service of her style in Kill All Your Darlings. As the tale proceeds, each mini sequence is in fact prefaced and underlined with a Cardinal Rule of Writing, the first of which is: Write What You Know.
And what McBride clearly knows how to do is to write – in a professional, polished, well-edited, and, yes, stylistic manner.
From the get-go, McBride introduces us to a Creative Writing tutor who appears to be somewhat uptight, affected, with perhaps a cucumber up his ass. How do we know this? Not because McBride writes things like, “The tutor entered the classroom with a cucumber up his ass.” Instead, she writes, “The tutor enters the room like a bantam rooster, taking small, quick, fastidious steps” – you know, as if he had a cucumber up his ass. And that, my dear readers, is style.
Here, McBride does not merely tell us that a female character is morbidly obese. Instead, she offers us the main protagonist’s point of view of a classmate sitting directly in front of her, whose ample buttocks look “like two different women spliced together,” “tracksuit-clad” and “spill[ing] out over the sides of her chair.” It’s Woman (or perhaps Two-Womens’-Worth) Versus Chair – and you’re left to wonder how long before that chair suddenly collapses under the heft of all that sweat-shop cotton and Taco Bell corn-fed flesh.
But not really – because that’s not really what Kill All Your Darlings is about. Style aside, I think it’s about an uppity, arrogant Creative Writing tutor who gets his comeuppance in more ways than one. Dramatically speaking, the comeuppance was a mite too tepid for my tastes, however.
The problem is that, in the race to impregnate this story with a fresh style, imbued with random amusing observations here and there about some of the protagonist’s classmates, the dramatic through-line is somewhat too thin to truly satisfy.
Yes, the tutor gets shot by a jealous lover, and there’s a court case, and condolence flowers are gathered (for the hospitalized tutor) and then ultimately given (by the protagonist) to the shooter’s defense lawyer. But in light of the stylistic choices made, along with the relatively short length of the piece, is this really the most effective way in which to dramatize that this arrogant prick of a tutor deserves whatever comeuppance he’s had?
Dramatically speaking, it would have been better if the “action” would have gradually unfolded solely within the confines of the classroom, over the course of a number of days perhaps. Rather than serving as mere palettes for the protagonist’s quirky observations, the other classmates might have also been weaved in as crucial agents in the tutor’s ultimate comeuppance.
Instead, McBride loses dramatic focus by taking us abruptly out of the classroom, making a poorly defined “jealous lover” as part of the thread, whose court case is a dramatic let-down because she is so abruptly grafted into the narrative.
In the end, though style in this instance carries McBride to an undeniable victory against Hoffman, what if one day Hoffman were to parry with a new dramatically focused tale about, say, “a woman whose multiple body piercings accidentally get magnetized, and she spends several days stuck to her fridge before someone rescues her”?
Now, that’s a tale with a clear, focused dramatic through-line – one that could potentially threaten to kill the bout standings of Kill All Your Darlings.
Fortunately for McBride, it also happens to be the tale formulated by one of the Creative Writing classmates in Kill All Your Darlings.
All of which means that McBride’s tale here is relatively safe from challenge so long as one of its fictional characters doesn’t suddenly decide to get himself a PatronQuo account and upload that Woman On Fridge story.
I, for one, would love to see how it all ends…
