My initial reaction was “that isn’t suffering,” and I haven’t changed my mind, but after thinking it over for a while, I can see why she’d the question that way. Making the reader suffer is something we try to do all the time. Whether it’s suffering from a sad ending, or from edge-of-the-seat tension, or terror, a good book can make a reader suffer – in a sense.

That’s not what I’d consider suffering, though. So my answer is still no. Suffering would mean to be persecuted for their work, like Solzhenitsyn or Rushdie. Or to be so obsessed with the creative process that your life suffers. (I’m obsessive, but not to that extent.)

In the sense of “make the reader (/ viewer / whatever) suffer,” obviously, there are some great books and movies that do that. I doubt I’ll ever be able to watch “Paris, Texas” again. (Of all the emotionally-wrenching movies I’ve seen, that’s the one that always comes to mind.) The movie makes you identify with the protagonist, and you certainly feel the protagonist’s suffering, which is a deeply disturbing and upsetting experience. I just wouldn’t consider my own reaction to it as suffering.

And that is very similar to how I feel about my own characters. When I realized how much potential suffering the one change I made would cause my protagonist, it did upset me – in exactly the same way that it would upset me had I experienced this in someone else’s fiction. I certainly wouldn’t refrain from making the change because of it – quite the contrary. I’m always happy to make change that sadden me, because I think it has the potential to improve the story.

This particular change doesn’t even guarantee that things will be as bleak as I imagine, and that’s better still, since ambiguity is (almost) always good.

Having said all that – there’s a problem with identifying with my characters so closely. I can tell when making them suffer is an improvement, but I can’t know whether the story is as good as it seems to me. I’m sure that no-one is going to find the story has as much meaning to them as it does to me, because I’ve lived the idea for so long. It might be that if you can be more dispassionate about your characters, you can get a better feel for the overall success of the story.

(We decided – in her presence – that Pooks must be a sociopath for the way she can remain cool while tormenting her creations.)

Still, whether or not there are benefits to a dispassionate view, I’ll take my way of doing things. Then I know that a) at least one person gets to enjoy my writing, and b) the act of creating a story is at least as worthwhile as the act of reading someone else’s.

Actually, I say movies and books don’t make me suffer. That’s not really true – I have watched Battlefield Earth. If I ever find myself creating something of the caliber of that dismal piece of garbage, I hope that I will be able to do the honorable thing.

This last weekend has been tough, and in a way it isn’t over.

We returned from a couple of years in Seattle in 1987. My wife, Vicki, had been in a car wreck while up there, and was still in constant pain, having trouble thinking and driving. One day in late ‘87, she backed into the garage door and made a hole.

Into that gap, in the depths of winter, stole a tiny tabby cat. She’d probably been living in the relative warmth for quite some time when we discovered her, and of course we couldn’t turn her out then. So she became Mokey, a character from Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock – still one of my favorite series, and my all-time favorite children’s show. (Nothing else Jim Henson did – as brilliant as it was – came close to Fraggle Rock, in my opinion.)

Well, as soon as we decided to keep her, and before we had chance to get her to the vet, she ran back out and got pregnant. Cats tend to do that. The result was a gorgeous mixed litter of tabbies and what were obviously siamese-mix kittens.

We gave away all but one. The kitten we kept had siamese points, tabby stripes in seal-point colors, and bright blue eyes. He liked to lie on clothes in the laundry basket, so we called him Boober, after the Fraggle who loved laundry.

He was a menace, as kittens are. In the middle of the night, he’d sneak up between Vicki and me, then reach out and stick all of his claws into my back. Several nights he’d make me wake up yelling. I’ve no idea why he singled me out for this treatment, but I’d always find it funny – after I’d calmed down from the shock.

Our house in Flower Mound had a vaulted ceiling, and a brick fireplace, with an inside brick chimney that ran all the way up – probably to twelve feet or so. One day, Boober climbed up that vertical chimney, just by clawing the bare brick. He got to higher than I could reach – we have a photo of him somewhere – and I have no recollection of how we got him down.

We had him declawed. I’ll never do that again to a cat, furniture notwithstanding, and I’ve always wished I had made that decision before we did it to Boober, because his claws were such a central part of his life.

After neutering, he got fat. He was never a huge cat, maybe fourteen pounds, but the pudgy flaps in front of his back legs would sway as he walked. So we called him “blubber” and plenty of other variants.

One day – we were living in Richardson at the time, so he’d probably have been about five – he followed Vicki out into the front yard. (We always keep our cats indoors, which is why we’d had him declawed.) There was a hawk on a telegraph pole.

Boober saw the hawk catch a squirrel, and was terrified. He slunk back into the house and hid.

Another time, he decided to try exploring our artificial Christmas tree. It couldn’t support his weight. The stand collapsed, showering the floor with ornaments, tinsel, and a very unhappy cat. He was quite disoriented. Eventually he staggered through to the bedroom and sat on the bed, still looking very dizzy.

Our siamese, Pepper, who was always a temperamental, jealous sort, started sniffing around and yowling at him. This is the only time I’ve ever seen Boober do anything of the kind, he’s always been such a gentle cat, but you could see the look in his eyes: “I’ve had enough of this shit.” He reached out a paw and smacked Pepper hard across the face. Bam.

He also earned the label “chicken”, though with his size we’d sometimes decide he was a turkey. He was terrified of thunderstorms. If there was one in the area, he’d find a hiding spot. Sometimes he’d bury himself under the blankets on the bed, and at other times he’d find a hiding place. We don’t even know where all of his hideouts were. He’d just vanish.

So we’d try to predict thunderstorms, and be sure he was penned up in our room if we heard one coming in. That way he’d make a nice warm furry footwarmer under the blankets.

He was our storm cat.

He hasn’t been bothered by thunderstorms in a few years. Maybe he’s gotten brave, or maybe deaf or lazy. I’d suspect lazy.

Ever since Pepper died, Boober has prowled the house at night yowling. There was never any real doubt about his siamese heritage, but the yowls are as clear evidence as any. He and Pepper never seemed especially close, but he started stalking around the house, apparently looking for her, and crying like only a Siamese can.

It’s been several years since Pepper made that final trip to the vet, but he’s never quit. Sometimes he yowls because he’s out of food or water, but mostly it seems to have no cause.

And that’s especially unfortunate, because he’s been yowling so much in the last few weeks, and I just ignored it. But this time I think he had something to cry about. We finally noticed last week how little he has been eating. By the weekend he wouldn’t touch his food at all. Vicki couldn’t even tempt him with cat treats, which until only a couple of weeks ago he would gobble up.

Last week he peed on the floor in the utility room. He’s always been picky about the litter box, but this time it was clean.

So on Saturday, I took him to the vet. He has a heart problem. It sounds quite serious. The vet opened a can of food, and he ate – but since then, he only took a couple of mouthfuls on Saturday, and none since. On Sunday the vet called with the results of lab work – his kidneys are failing.

It isn’t surprising. He’s a very old cat, now. Much older than Pepper was when her kidneys gave out. But, damn, he’s been part of the family so long. Elliot hadn’t turned four when we got him, and he’d have been eight, already middle-aged, when Simon was born. I’m not ready to let him go.

In a few weeks he’d turn nineteen, but right now I doubt he’ll make it until Vicki gets back from Oklahoma on Thursday.

This is the part I hate about having pets. I know that afterwards I’ll look back and feel that it was all worthwhile, and we’ve had a great nineteen years with him, but right now – I hate it. I’m fifty, and I keep crying over one silly old mog.

It didn’t help that on Saturday, after taking Boober to the vet, I watched the end of a truly tear-jerking anime. Yes, they do exist, and no, I wasn’t expecting this to be one, or there’s no way I’d have watched it then.

And on Friday, of course, I found that twist to the story I’ve been working on that gives the potential for a tragic interpretation of events. When the story demands that your characters suffer, and it usually does, you let them suffer, but at the same time you’ve grown close to them, and their pain is upsetting.

So much so that it has been very hard to make revisions this weekend.

With those three things, but most especially the decline of our once fun-loving cat, this has been a very long and upsetting weekend, and the prospects for the rest of the week don’t look much better.

I know even less about what’s needed to make a story work. When it comes to structure, and the naming of the roles of each character, I’ve got a long way to go. Mostly, I think that what works is what works, and that I can tell what’s working in my writing because I know what works in other books I read. Maybe that’s not going to be enough to get published, but I can’t be worrying about it now.

Pretty much everything I do know about writing technique either is what I’ve learned by reading, or came from an excellent teacher (hi, Pooks!).

Anyway, that’s background for the fact that I don’t really have a lot of training in the craft of writing, which leaves me, I think, open to some surprises.

Lately I’ve been spending most of my time working on a short story. One of the surprises is how radically different it is creating a short compared to writing a novel. Not that this is the first short story I’ve written, but it is the first I’ve approached so seriously after spending so much time with The Book.

Where I’m fine with rattling off a page or two for The Book, and I can tell if it’s adequate, I’m examining pretty much every word of the short story for its effect. Sometimes I’ve spent hours just trying to rewrite a single line. A few days ago a friend commented about a stodgy paragraph – it was one that had been nagging at me, too – and fixing it required me to use a word that I’d used in near proximity (“survive”), which led to me reorganizing and finally rewriting about a page. Just to fix one typo and clean up a slightly clumsy paragraph.

What’s really surprised me, though, is how little I understand what I write. Not the mechanics, but the content.

This short story began life as an idea based on another story I’ve read that I don’t think was handled as well as it could be. There was an element of tragedy in the original that the writer glossed over, I felt, and I thought that there would be an interesting story in what he’d left out.

That was then. Although I remember the source, what I’ve written has so little to do with it, that I’m not even sure what my idea was. As I was watching TV and idly musing on the possibility of writing the story, an idea came to me that made the story rewrite itself. It owes so little to its origins that, as I say, I’ve lost track of what I was thinking. The conceptual rewrite took about three seconds flat; after that, it was just a matter of finding the words.

As with a lot of science fiction, this is a story that you can only really understand in hindsight. As I was writing it, though, I wasn’t consciously trying to make it work for multiple readings, yet now that I go back to review it, I see that I’ve phrased many parts in a way that can make sense with different preconceived ideas of what story I’m telling.

So I had a tale that I liked; one where I could see everything from those first three seconds crystallized into something that I’d like to try to publish.

And then I blew it.

It was another of those deceptively simple changes. I didn’t like one phrase. I’d repeated it for emphasis, and I didn’t like what it had done, but I needed something to strengthen the idea. So I came up with something just subtly different – and suddenly realized that it has such huge implications to the earlier part of the story that I no longer am certain what’s happening. I have to make the change, because it makes for a better, more ambiguous and potentially more poignant tale, but it’s no longer the story that I’d planned. Or, at least, that is only one possible interpretation, now. Another one is quite disturbing.

Some movies, or some of the anime series I watch, have endings where there’s a strong implication that one thing happens, but the ambiguity makes it much more powerful. And there’s an ending that you want to have happened, and can believe happened, but it’s not certain. I know what I want for my protagonist from this story, but I can no longer be certain that she gets it.

And I find that completely amazing, that something so simple could have taken my writing and given it a possibility that I hadn’t remotely considered.

Likely experienced writers see effects like that all the time. I’ve definitely had the first version of The Book spin out of control before now, as characters developed themselves, but never yet have I seen such a simple and unlooked-for change have such a fascinating effect.

It remains to be seen whether the story is publishable, of course, but I’m certain that it became much more so by the change of one line.