Kristopher Young Speaks

[Caleb]

Following are some questions, garnered mostly from the Click book club discussions, that Kristopher Young was kind enough to answer for us.

If you haven't read the book yet, beware that there are spoilers below.

• First, some general writing related questions:

Regarding the issue of psychic distance maintained throughout Click, we're often "zoomed in" to full magnification to the character's thoughts and sensations, yet the novel doesn't feel exhausting, as is often the case with something so visceral; what were some of the difficulties with staying intimately inside one character’s head for an entire novel? Did the relative brevity of the novel help keep this task manageable?

Click's writing is essentially stream of consciousness that is later altered and rearranged. It was my hope to create a relatively cohesive narrative while keeping the rawness, heart, and self-truth tapped in the stream. Given that, the most difficult thing about writing Click was being the narrator, because for all intents and purposes that's who I was, and, to some extent, am. I knew I'd need to experience emotions that I didn't want to go through in order to finish the book. On the plus side, at least I've got something to show for it. And thankfully, there's also a lot of positivity and beauty and hope that is layered throughout the book.

The 'relative brevity' of Click was no help at all. I wrote far more than I ended up using. And the post-writing process was just as brutal - I re-read the entirety of Click every day for several months, smoothing it out, re-arranging, altering.

All that said, Click is ultimately meant to be uplifting. I went about that in a very different manner than many of the books I consider uplifting - The Little Prince, or Jonathan Livingston Seagull for example. Those books are beautiful, assuming you're in the right mindset to pick them up and read them in the first place. That's not meant as criticism, just an observation. But the thing is, we're not always ready to believe that we're ok, that we're getting better, that we have potential. It's easy to be uplifting when you're already happy. It's a little more difficult when you're having a hard time with everything around you - like Click's narrator, or me, for that matter. So much modern fiction is about the crash, the fall, the demise... and I didn't want to write something like that either. I've still got some hope mixed in with the demons.

Oxyfication.net features, among other things, a writing workshop wherein short fiction is critiqued by peers. Some of us are also involved with a yearly novel writing forum called Write Club (http://bucketweb.com/wc2007). Were you involved with any workshops or critique groups with Click? To what extent did outside criticism help develop Click?

I don't have a degree in lit, I've never been to a workshop, I've never been in a critique group. I'm not sure if I'm compatible with any of that. I'm quite guarded about my writing and I generally don't let anyone see it until I'm very far along in the process (post-writing, during editing/arrangement). I'm also happy with the voice I have, even if it is flawed at times. I fear the impact of education on creativity - education can be wonderful and empowering, but it can also be quite limiting - when we possess tools we begin to rely on them.

I do let a couple people read my work at late stages. Click was edited by Dayna Crozier, who let me know what she thought did and didn't work. It was extremely helpful. I've found that many writers (including myself) tend to become attached to our work - sometimes, for example, a sentence might spark an entire story, but by time we're finished, the story has become more important than the originating sentence. Yet we're so attached to that sentence that we can't see that it's no longer needed, that it in fact detracts from the story. It's the same as not being able to see our own typos. We often see what we meant, rather than what we wrote - and for that reason, I consider having someone go over my writing at a late stage vital.

One of the more talked about elements of Click is its perceived non-linearity. Reading various online posts regarding your novel you seem to embrace the individual reader as the divining rod for story. Was this a conscious decision from word one, or did it occur organically?

It was organic during writing, and conscious during editing/arrangement. As I build up structure, I can only work with the material I've written. Given the surreal nature of much of the source material I had when I began to arrange Click, stripping down the walls between reality, vision, hallucination came very naturally. Furthermore, this breakdown was very much in line with some of my own experiences and beliefs. And obviously, given the narrator's struggle to put everything together, it made sense to attempt to replicate that struggle for the reader. It's not all abstraction though; there's a lot in there meant to ground both narrator and reader.

Tell me something of the structure of Click. The chapters are brief, titled, and act more as a montage of vignettes than a traditional story. Why this decision, and did you experiment with anything else?

Some readers tell me they enjoy reading Click out of order. I know that if I ever had the chance to read Click for the first time, I'd read it sequentially. While it's definitely true that the majority of chapters in Click can be read stand-alone, they gain meaning in combination and sequence.

For example, Food (page 84) can easily be read as a short story. In context, however, it becomes dream or vision, giving quite a bit of insight into the narrator's current state of mind at that point in the novel, such as his insatiable desire (and complete inability) to find happiness or completion in anything he does.

Perhaps that's another answer to your question - short chapters allowed me to arrange and re-arrange, finding the balance of meaning that I wanted the narrative to have. I wanted to create a series of experiences that felt connected while simultaneously creating distance and dissonance. There are concepts repeated with slight differences, new meanings, barely recognizable themes re-explored under new circumstances. Everything is in its place for a reason.

For example, there's a somewhat obscured symmetry that includes Food. In that chapter, almost everyone he sees around him is dead (well, living dead). Later, on page 117, he once again experiences this in his waking life while the loops have overwhelmed him: "i watch everything go wrong. people die by the thousands, littering their corpses in my path almost as fast as i can blink them away". Centering this symmetry is his nuclear dream on page 103. Once again everyone around him is dead, once again he is alone, but note the differences as well:

As zombie, he was empowered but damned and fated, unable to change his behavior or save anyone (and in fact, responsible for their deaths). In a nuclear holocaust he was absolutely powerless yet he found this oddly calming. During the endless looping he is empowered once again... but finds only madness, unable to cope with his newfound freedom and control.

Trinities (or at least, usually trinities) like this exist throughout, though the meanings behind them differ. These trinities also arose organically; they were written at different points in time without regard for each other; it was only during the late stages of arrangement that I worked these things into the greater whole, sometimes amplifying their interconnectivity, but more often amazed at how tightly knit they already were. Another symmetry exists in regards to the woman who haunts his dreams, starting with Rhythmic Static on page 8 (which also happens to be the first clear dream/vision sequence within the book). This woman hides throughout the story, a secondary (and technically non-existent) character - but her story arc is quite important (at least, to me) in regards to understanding the narrator's state of mind. Hers is the second love story in Click.

Getting back to Food, short chapters also allowed me to step in and out of real/dream/hallucination/vision without ever clearly defining when or where. Here's the thing - to the narrator, everything is real. Everything. He might be able to recognize something as dream after the fact, and he's forever wondering what to dismiss as delusion, but he's never quite sure of anything while anything is happening. The structure of Click is meant to transfer that condition to the reader.

Food begins with him waking up. It's only at some point later that the reader realizes it's a dream, and only some point after that the reader will realize what the dream is about (I always wonder when it dawns (cough) on the reader that he's a zombie). In the following chapter, Disobedient Child, he wakes up... only to discover he's still dreaming. It's only after that, in Cold and Narrow, that he (and the reader) are actually finally awake... but now his actions are even more nightmarish than in his dreams - he's cutting something out of himself, reflecting the scalpel of the chapter before ("discovering the alien within"), the emptiness of Food, and, of course, the "weasel faced messiah" and his mysterious alien implants found in Similar Scars (pg. 21).

So no, to answer that part of the question, I never experimented with anything else, nor gave any consideration to other formats. Click birthed itself in such a way that it was always going to interweave order and chaos, chaos and order.

It's also worth noting that all the titles are phrases found within the chapter itself. The phrase had to stand out to me, and often describes some major aspect of the chapter. The repetition of the chapter name in the scraps of paper that I made also sometimes gives way to new meanings - 'he was' becomes a question, 'was he?', or, one of my favorites, 'fix his eyes' becomes 'his eyes fix' which references forward to the resolution of the entire novel. I'm not sure if that qualifies as foreshadowing; I'm not really sure what it is, I just know it's there.

• Now for some (very) specific questions. I know you take pride in the story’s malleability, so these questions may incriminate you, but think of yourself as just another reader if you will; how do you perceive the following?

What is the true purpose of the mentor character? As a writer, I feel his inclusion is used mostly to push the story forward in a climax-building way, however as a character he seems more a way for the narrator to rationalize his “powers.” What is your take on the mentor?

I consider the introduction of the mentor (Like Me, page 104) to be the 'center' of the story, despite the fact he actually resides a little closer to the end.

As to his purpose. Hmm. I'm going to come at this from a few angles at once, some contradictory.

He meets the mentor immediately after his most direct attempt at suicide (pg. 102) during which he pulls the trigger all six times... yet still manages to somehow survive. That event represents the elimination of all self-doubt to his own ability - it's no longer possible his survival is simply a statistical improbability. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the nuclear dream immediately following (pg. 103), he still feels absolutely powerless. He's sure something is happening, but he doesn't know what.

...and that's where the Mentor steps in. Or is summoned. Or is imagined.

Note that he meets him at a coffee shop immediately after dreaming about a coffee shop. Coincidence? Delusion? Precognition? Prophesy? Also note that a mantra of his can be found on page 78 - "when i open my eyes, i will see him". And so, it could be that when he finally does open his eyes to his own ability (pg. 102) he does see him (the mentor, pg. 105). He's no longer stuck in his own head. Instead, he finds a new mantra, "there are others out there like me". Then again, in the original dream when he opens his eyes he actually only sees himself.

The next time he sees his mentor after their meeting is on page 134, as a face on television, victim of a federal manhunt. At this point though, the narrator is barely sane, so the man on television might not even be the mentor. Also note that as with the coffee shop, this incarnation of the mentor also immediately follows a dream in which he's searching for a decapitated head ('it's a mystery, and i can't figure out who did it', page 132) and finds it on a television screen. So if the mentor is actually on television the next day, it might once again represent some sort of precognition or prophesy. Taking this a step further, it may also mean the death of the mentor was his fault - that he somehow willed it in a larger loop he doesn't recognize, dreamed it and made it reality. If that's the case, then when he falsely proclaims his own guilt in the dream, he was actually correct without realizing it.

As for the sudden appearance of the Mentor... well, I already talked about the timing in regards to the narrator's state of being. But beyond that, doesn't everything and everyone that comes into our life 'suddenly appear'? Those people who make a significant impact on our life were just the right (or wrong) person at just the right time - otherwise, they would have been lost in the shuffle.

A lot of this revolves around the concept of time, something central to Click that hasn't really been touched on yet - the concept of Now, present vs. past, memory vs. past, perception vs. now, prophesy, etc. as well as questions such as whether a prophet sees the future or creates the future
- or in the narrator's case, sees the now or creates the now.

On page 54 there is a passage which references bullet holes in the walls (“there are a lot of bullet holes in the wall…revolver jammed in my mouth”). Is this implying that the narrator actually fires bullets, hence “kills” himself often?

Yes. His survival is the clearest evidence of his actual ability to loop. As he himself wonders, how else could he survive so often? Statistically, he should be dead within a week, yet he survives indefinitely. This is why he doesn't even trust himself - he fires into the wall afterwards to make sure he actually put a bullet in the gun. Up until he meets the mentor, it's the most (and possibly only) tangible proof he has that he's sane. It's rather unfortunate that this proof requires him to play Russian Roulette repeatedly, thus crushing any hope that he actually is sane.

But the narrator's ability evolves throughout the book, and he's usually not aware of where he's at in this evolution at any given time. We know from page 147 that he can in fact survive a gunshot to the head - so it's quite possible he kills himself on a regular basis, loops it, and survives without knowing it.

In fact, this might just be what happens in Chapter 1 - before he or the reader could possibly know about loops at all. This would also explain the domination of the sixes - they are endless to him because he is looping while holding the gun in his mouth. He's repeating six six six six (16.666% repeating) in his head, but he's fallen into a loop, therefore he's subjected to them for a practical eternity, etching the string of numbers permanently into his soul/mind.

Taking it a step further, it could be this very act which triggers (cough) his ability in the first place, some sort of a latent survival mechanism. Once awoken, it begins to pop up more and more in his everyday life, plaguing an already troubled mind.

Did the narrator actually kill his girlfriend? Is her “rebirth” another figment of his imagination?

Technically, she killed herself, though as always the narrator blames himself (and in this case, rightfully so). If he's psychotic, I'd say she's still dead. If he's not, I'd say she's alive again.

What's with the sixes? Unless I missed it, I never saw a reason for this particular affectation, though I was guessing it had something to do with the probability factor of the bullet being in the chamber when the narrator fired the gun, or maybe the number of chambers, but was there also a white noise component to it? Like the sound of the ocean? I liked the fact that the narrator drew them on the walls, and surmised that they acted as a kind of invisible wall of probabilities as it were-- as if the math of his survival, of his life, was a barrier that once penetrated opened things up to a new dimension (he mentions "seeing through the sixes" I believe) where the old order becomes obsolete; perhaps they are merely the compulsion of a sick mind.

As I'm sure you noticed, some of this is discussed in regards to the previous question.

The sixes originate with probability. There's a one in six chance he's going to blow his brains out every time he pulls the trigger. He fixates on this percentage, 16.666 repeating. Survival, beating those odds, gives him some sort of reason to live: "...instead i'm alive and it's no longer a curse" (pg.3). Later, as he begins to do it more often, the number begins to drive him insane instead - because while it's probable he can survive a few such incidents, he quickly reaches a state of improbability in repetition that he has no reasonable explanation for.

Very, very nice catch on "I can see through the sixes" on page 166 and
their role as both visible and invisible wall.

**********

Kristopher Young: Some responses to the wonderful discussion in your thread:

Jason Kane wrote, "Maybe this story is about fighting the invisible horror that a mind is capable of inflicting on itself-- creating pain, sadness and misery of its own volition, when there is no reason for it to be that way." and later, "The narrator mentions eyes as protectors near the end of the story; I think this too is a delusional response, in that in order to fortify himself against what he perceives to be the tragic reality of the world-- loneliness, war (the mushroom cloud imagery), sadness-- he turns the tables so that his eyes are not victims, but protectors. Delusion accommodates need."

This is definitely a spot on interpretation of one of the intended readings within the book. He copes with his insanity by taking ownership of it. I love how you go on to develop this later in the thread, that he's trying on new delusions for size until one 'takes'... much like his girlfriend trying on new outfits on page 41.

I don't consider the narrator to be simply psychotic. I don't mind that reading (it's a valid for a reason) but it's far too limiting for me. I usually take a more literal approach to interpreting Click. I think he can loop, that he can control the world around him. To dismiss everything he learns within the book as psychosis (or even as fiction, for that matter) dis-empowers the individual in our world in a way I'm not comfortable with. That's not to say he's stable, or even that he he's sane - but his mental state isn't meant to cancel out his evolutionary path.


As Caleb states in the thread:
"Whether the narrator can bend reality or not, he believes he can and I think when given that kind of gift it would be irrational to not want to find that single element that brings everything into focus." and later, "Personally, I like to believe that the narrator is truly controlling the universe. Given this type of power I think a person would likely question his sanity. Deities aren't always omniscient superheros with absolute confidence in their powers. Maybe sometimes they don't have minds strong enough to grasp/control these powers."

Caleb goes on to add:
"1) This constant backtracking, changing, revising would ultimately lead to that one element, or "magic bullet" that unites everything. A true Big Bang, if you will, which leads me to...2) Click can almost be read as a God: The Younger Years parable. The narrator has these innate abilities to change the world, yet he struggles to grasp their true power, ultimately maturing to the realization of his divinity. Just an interesting thought."

This is an excellent reading of the book. I do want to bring a few things up though:

It's worth considering that this is also an unwanted divinity. He does not want power. It unsettles him. At the height of his power he not only wants, but believes, everyone to be divine... that everyone has this beautiful ability inside of them to control the Now.

Perhaps he's simply one of the first to evolve. So let's assume he does achieve some sort of godhood, some ability to create a perfect (by his definition) world around him. Could that world truly be perfect with him in it as some sort of god-emperor? Perhaps a proper god would need to
completely remove itself from its creation. What if that click at the very end is a gunshot ("harsh and loud and true"), the birth and death of a god in a single instant. A "true Big Bang" as you called it.

Just something to consider.

Jason Kane: "If he is truly Divine, I'm not sure where the story has led us, as he seems to have no further cause to fear, no rival, nothing to be at odds with."

But would he find peace? He will always be at odds with himself. He doesn't want power. "i should be happy that i’m making a difference but the more i fix things, the more broken i am. i fear i’m doing the wrong thing. i’m a factory, corruptive, corrosive, carelessly encroaching on the future no matter how softly i tread. i feel wrong wanting anything more than what is, that i’m polluting the now with my will. i don’t want motives, intentions, agenda, i just want to be." (pg. 123) One of the only times he truly embraces his power is to eliminate a 'rival'... but note that he never really views that individual as a rival to himself so much as a rival to humanity's own 'blossoming divinity' (as you refer to it). I think, perhaps, that he would consider himself a rival to his greater goals were he to become too powerful.

On a complete side note:
It's also worth considering the narrator as author, and Click being about is own creation. I'm not saying this is the definitive interpretation by any means (because it's not mine), but there is a sub (meta?) text throughout. "do it, motherfucker", "i have my new beginning", "castrated frankenstein", "all ambition and no direction", the need to find the right words, and plenty more. I tried hard to ensure all of this was deeply buried in narrative context so as not to be obvious, but I figure if you've read this far you might be interested.

[JasonKane]

I want to thank Kristopher for his generous input into our discussion.

I never had any delusions that there was not an awful lot of hope at work in this story; the narrator is sympathetic, and his desire to "fix" things while submerging himself in a flood of doubt and horror is probably one of the most darkly hopeful scenes I could imagine-- walking down the street as everyone is dying in various ways before his eyes, playing through the loops and ultimately choosing the altruistic one. Dare I say, there's something comedic there? I don't think it's a stretch: walking down the street, doing good deeds, in the midst of slaughter.

As a side note, believe it or not, I knew that the chapter "Food" was going to be a zombie chapter after getting a handle on the tone of the first few chapters of the book. As is my ritual, when the chapters are named, I read them all first and try to guess the story. Maybe it was a lucky guess, but even at the beginning, as he has a desire to go digging through the garbage he passes, I suspected-- difficult to say why.

Interesting insights on the matter of the "visions;" the way tthat they are described here, they seem less delusions than literally dreams in which there is significance to be had-- the matter of control vs. helplessness and whether there is any joy in either, for example, in the mushroom cloud scene, the zombie scene, etc.-- I was never of the opinion that the visions were unrelated to the themes within; just that they were somehow detached from the precept that the loops were real events.

I think the only thing that truly moves to bury the idea of this being a novel of delusions is that the narrator never seems to be "on board" with them; he is always fighting them, struggling against them, questioning, running. I wonder if the truly lost mind ever questions its own sanity as he often does, or if it simply plays along, fully absorbed?