Vienna Waits

Don't go changing to try to please me.

THE INSPIRATION

"But you know that when the truth is told that you can get what you want or you can just get old. You’re gonna kick off before you even get halfway through. When will you realize? Vienna waits for you."

—Billy Joel, “Vienna”

As a kid, I would go to my friend Shannon’s house, and her mom had lots of albums, bu the one I remember specifically is the vinyl of Billy Joel’s “The Stranger.” I remember looking at the cover, a black and white image of Billy on an unmade bed, staring down at a mask lying on the pillow next to him.

It was some years later, when I was in high school, that I bought the album myself and listened to it over, and over, and over again. I’m listening to it now as I write this, and it’s still a solid album. Fame and success may have warped Billy over the years, but “The Stranger” remains, to me, the best album ever made.

But the song that spoke to me back when I was sixteen, and the song that still speaks to me now, is “Vienna.”

Where's the fire, what's the hurry about?
You better cool it off before you burn it out
You got so much to do and only
So many hours in a day.

I have never had the patience to wait for what was coming. I raced toward my future, bored with where I was and busting at the seams to get to the Next Big Thing. Vienna, to me, is a shorthand term for all of the things I wanted to do or to be that I couldn’t wait to do or to be.

I don’t know if I believe in fate, or destiny. But the idea that Vienna waits for you, that what is yours will be yours when it’s time, and until then, burning rubber and smoking your tires reaching for an inevitable future that will show up only when it’s good and ready is just a waste of energy.

I still do it. I have no patience. Even now, in the back nine of middle age and staring at the first nine of flat-out old, I’m constantly leaning forward, anxious for the next thing. And sometimes, that means I miss out on what’s pretty great right now.

I don’t know if I’ll ever change. I don’t know if I can. But maybe, while I’m leaning forward into the next big adventure, I can look around a bit, too, and appreciate the now a bit more.

I’d settle for that.

THE FAT ORANGE CAT

Have a spider drop from the ceiling and land on your antagonist.

For extra fun: Give them a spider phobia.

The “Get Your Stuff” link will bring you to an item I selected specifically to accompany this post, but you do not have to buy that thing in order to support me. Just keep popping through Amazon and buy the stuff you were going to buy anyway.

THE TROPE

AS YOU KNOW, MARY

I’ve said pretty often that tropes are not bad in and of themselves. Just because something isn’t new doesn’t mean it doesn’t work great. Most tropes are absolutely value neutral, and the reason they get used so much is because they’re so effective.

But sometimes, a trope gets used a lot because it’s an easy if inelegant way for a writer to do something they need to do, and they’re either too inexperienced or… and pardon me for this whopping bit of judgment… too lazy to do it right.

As You Know, Mary (AYKM) is one of those tropes.

For those of you who don’t know, AYKM dialogue is when one character explains something out loud to another character even though that other character already knows everything the first character is talking about. This is done so that the author can convey this information to the reader.

AYKM is generally not great, but what if you could take a bad trope and turn it around? Is there a way for you to use AYKM dialogue for a story reason that doesn’t include the need to inform an audience—even an in-text audience? I mean, that’s the easy one, right? Your characters want someone to know something, and they know that someone is listening, so they do awkward AYKM dialogue to get the message across; that’s narratively legit, but I feel like there’s also a usage of AYKM that doesn’t just transpose the exposition from an extra-textual receiver (the reader) to an in-text receiver.

What do you think? Can AYKM be redeemed? How might you make that work?

THE QUESTION

This week, I’d like to take a moment and say thank you. I’ve gotten letters from some of you that weren’t questions at all, but appreciation for what I do here at Dear Writer, and I want to send that appreciation back to you.

I had a blog, about 11 years ago, in which I wrote like this. I was going through my first divorce. I was publicly vulnerable about it. I was living on the river in Ohio with my best friend at the time who was kind of a big deal in romance writing, and who had given me a soft place to fall. It was during that vulnerable time that the sociopath found me and groomed me, and… well.

You know.

But after that experience, every bit of which ended badly, I didn’t want to do this again. I started Dear Writer as a place where I would share what I knew, and more and more, it’s become a place where I also share what I don’t know.

I don’t think I can help it.

I grew up in a home where we pretended there wasn’t a pervading darkness present all the time. I was taught never to trust my own read on things, because at any moment, my read would conflict with my mother’s fantasy and I would pay for getting it wrong. I always needed someone else’s opinion, an objective third party who could point me to the place where reality was. That made me easy pickings for the sociopath; they make their meals of people who will allow them to shape reality into a pretty little prison.

There is something about being brutally honest about everything that, to me, I think feels like some kind of inoculation against falling into that trap again. I trust myself more now. I listen to that voice inside that tells me when something’s not right.

But.

Still.

Sharing everything with you all still feels like a balm, and a release. And when you take the time to tell me how this sharing helps you, too, it means a great deal.

Thank you.

THE PRACTICAL

I watched Netflix’s new Sandra Oh series, “The Chair,” and I really enjoyed it. It was fun, funny, touching and incredibly relatable. While I have yet to watch Sandra Oh in anything where I didn’t fucking love her, I also loved everyone else. Holland Taylor is 78 and bringing it. The Other Duplass is charming when he’s let out on his own. I have this thing about listening to people speak a foreign language; I find it so lovely to listen to human sounds when my brain isn’t occupied divining meaning. It’s like music. And Korean is one of my favorite languages to listen to, so in those scenes, I listened first without reading the subtitles, and then watched again and took in the context.

I work at a university, and while my school is not as steeped in the Old World as a liberal arts college English department may be, I recognized the very specific academic bent to the political machinations and the tendency for things to fall apart whenever anyone tries to do the right thing.

What I loved about it, though, was how fun the ordinary can be in stories. There was nothing supernatural, nothing hyperbolic about the story… aside from one highly improbable celebrity encounter. But aside from that, everything that happened in that show were the kinds of things that I’ve seen happen with colleagues and friends.

That’s the wonderful thing about stories. They can be fantastical, and they can make the ordinary fascinating.

Highly recommended.

Everything,

L