WIWAW: Ice Cream

What I Wrote and Why - Ice Cream

Motivation

This brief essay is about my first Literotica story, Ice Cream. This short story received mixed reviews with several comments complaining about the use of recherché words. A word cloud of comments would probably have 'thesaurus' in the middle in a large font. Taking to one side the fact that some people have a wide vocabulary and don't need to refer to a thesaurus in order to express themselves, Ice Cream is undoubtedly overbrimming with less than mainstream words. The obvious question is, why?

To dismiss the most obvious explanation first, Ice Cream is not reflective of my normal writing style. I do indeed include polysyllables more frequently than many other Literotica authors, but this tendency was vastly exaggerated in Ice Cream. Another erroneous interpretation is that I was somehow unaware of the richness of the lexicon I employed, that I unintentionally used a lot of 'big words,' almost by mistake. An obvious rebuttal here is that if you are smart enough to accurately use recondite vocabulary, you are pretty likely to be aware of what you are doing.

A more interesting explanation - though still wrong - is that my narrator was a teacher of English Literature. Here I'd say he was a high school teacher, not a college professor, not that I am dismissing the erudition of high school teachers in any way. Some commenters extrapolated this idea to the author, claiming I was an academic in the field. If people knew my actual background, they might understand just how deliciously amusing this misconception was to me. As I accept may well be ably illustrated by the rest of this essay, I have no academic qualifications in English Literature. I just read a lot.

But I digress. A better question is maybe: why did I choose to write Ice Cream in a very exaggerated, highly stylized, somewhat arcane, and clearly (for many readers on Literotica at least) rather inaccessible manner? I'll answer this question by asking another one: what if F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote contemporary erotic literature, while retaining the 1920s sensibility of his most famous work, The Great Gatsby?

This is really the genesis of the style of Ice Cream. As to its actual plot, I had half an idea about someone meeting a younger woman who was an ice cream server. As often with authors, there was some real world DNA here, but nothing beyond a cute woman with a ponytail behind a dairy farm counter. Everything else in the story is a figment of my imagination.

So why Fitzgerald? Well why not? He is one of my favorite authors. I recently re-read Gatsby and - as always - marvelled at his command of language. But - again as they had been before - the differences between how someone expressed themselves when writing in the 1920s, as opposed to now in the 2020s, were very stark.

I set myself the challenge of writing a short story in a very shadowy reflection of the great author's, frankly, inimitable style. To reiterate, this was something I did for me, not for readers. Literotica is a free site. Readers don't pay for content, authors don't get paid for their work. So I write what I want to write, and don't target the peccadillos of any particular audience, or indeed level of reading proficiency.

So the language of Ice Cream was the way it was purely on an authorial whim, nothing more. I realized that my text would likely be exclusionary for some, and this was not a major factor in my decision-making process. I wasn't seeking high ratings, or high views, I was just experimenting, amusing myself if you will.

Stylistic Elements

In the following, I assume the reader has at least a passing acquaintance with The Great Gatsby and its characters; perhaps at least from one of the movies based on the book.

So, if I want to write a simulacrum of F. Scott Fitzgerald, it probably helps to list out some elements of his much-analyzed writing style. Well, as with all authors, Fitzgerald didn't exist in a vacuum. He himself acknowledged the influence of Joseph Conrad and John Keats on his work. I am less than familiar with Keats's output. While I enjoy Conrad, I'll not produce an exhaustive analysis of his oeuvre here. However, the Polish-British novelist's stories are noted for their blend of realism and - the contemporaneous artistic movement of - impressionism. He is also known for the density and complexity of his prose. I pick on these two aspects as both are also features of many of Fitzgerald's stories, including Gatsby.

It is well documented that Fitzgerald's style evolved over time, and that it varied considerably between his short stories and novels. In the rest of this section, I'll mostly focus on The Great Gatsby, a story generally seen as displaying Fitzgerald at the height of his manifold powers. Though some of what I cover applies to all of his later works.

At its finest, Fitzgerald's prose is lyrical, poetic almost. Laden with symbolism and deftly employing linguistic devices such as alliteration that could be lumpen in less masterful hands.

Gatsby's garden garnished and glistening

is beautiful without feeling forced. Indeed possibly one of the finest final sentences in literature employs the same device:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Fitzgerald frequently employs vivid colors from an extensive and varied palette in order to paint his prose pictures. And he often stacks his adjectives to reinforce a point:

supercilious, sturdily, straw-haired, hard-mouthed

constant, turbulent riot

grotesque, fantastic conceits

or sometimes - often with Daisy Buchanan - to highlight complexity, confusion, or contradictions:

beautiful, bright, and intensely sad

beautiful, charming, and shallow

Fitzgerald's refined narrative language is also often juxtaposed with the much rougher dialogue of his protagonists. This can suggest a disconnect between how characters might like things to be and how they actually are, a constant theme in the author's stories.

Fitzgerald often focuses on the inner world of both his narrator and his characters, and how these project onto reality. For example, in Gatsby, Tom Buchanan is not merely described as a cruel man, but his cruelty is reflected in his physical appearance (I would be remiss not to point out that physiognomy is pseudoscience, albeit still an effective literary tool). Whereas the internal compromises that Daisy Buchanan has made in her life are shown as dichotomies in both her behavior and wardrobe.

The author also frequently uses figurative imagery - like metaphors and similes - about physical objects to highlight the metaphysical attributes of characters. In Gatsby he describes Jay's residence in a way that emphasizes the fact that its owner is pretending to be something he's not by birth. This contrasts with him painting the Buchanan house as something older and more substantial. There is the tension between old and new money expressed in architecture. Of course this reflects Fitzgerald's own interloper status as a newly arrived Midwesterner navigating the often treacherous waters of wealthy East Coast society.

Fitzgerald also embraced highly original and often elaborate ways to describe people and things. For example, in his unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, he employs the frankly outlandish description:

Her hair was of the color and viscosity of drying blood.

Returning to Gatsby, a young movie star is described thus:

Gatsby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white-plum tree.

My final example of this technique could easily become high quality porn with just a little adaptation:

The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back.

Fitzgerald's sentences - just like the example directly above - are generally long and compound, consisting of multiple nested sub-clauses. Here is another such sentence. It's from the beginning of Gatsby and illustrates his customary approach well:

Most of the confidences were unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

Or consider this, from the very last page of the same work:

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Any of the last three examples would form a paragraph in my regular writing style.

My Pale Imitation

Given that Fitzgerald has been described as having "the best narrative gift of the [twentieth] century," and that I have not, I was never going to be able to write exactly like him, a humble pastiche was the most I could hope for, more a caricature maybe.

Nevertheless I took the following steps:

Adopting a rather old-fashioned, and maybe even stilted, tone in the narration (contrasting this with the modern dialogue)

Aping Fitzgerald's stacked adjectives; why use one when two - or three - will do?

Plumbing the [benthic?] depths of my, I believe extensive, vocabulary to find vivid and atypical descriptors or phrases

Letting loose my longtime love of alliteration ????

Embracing elliptical and parenthetical sentence syntax, wherein is included - as a matter of course - multiple sub-clauses; in effect skipping my typical editing task of splitting up the run-on sentences that customarily litter my first draft.

As might be deduced from the above, many of these are tendencies in my regular writing. But I either rein them in, or they end up on the 'cutting room floor.' With Ice Cream I gave full vent to all of these areas.

Of course these changes do not lead to a piece of prose that a reader would immediately recognize as Fitzgerald-like. If it was as simple as that, I'd be off writing the next 'Great American Novel.'

However, occasionally, something pleasing - at least to my eyes - emerged from the process, for example:

And the chilled beverages we had shared in convivial fraternity had birthed a proposition; one I felt both excited and tremorous to submit for Jordan's consideration.

This seems both very me and one of my better attempts to channel the master's infinitely better writing.

In any case, I felt that I needed to guide the reader to my true intentions and so left many clues and pointers to my artifice. The final section of this essay will cover these.

Clues Left for the Attentive Reader

Perhaps the most obvious of these is my username. The F in F. Scott Fitzgerald stands for Francis, but I didn't want to misgender myself.

Gatsby's narrator is of course Nick Carraway. While there is some dispute about its origins, most view Carraway as being derived from Anglo-Saxon, with its first part meaning 'triangular piece of land,' and 'way' meaning what it does in modern English, so 'street by the triangular piece of land.' Dreieck is German for 'triangle' and hence Ice Cream's narrator received his name.

In a more straightforward manner, Gatsby's Jordan Baker - Nick's love interest in the book - became Jordan Becker, a direct translation of her family name into German. Tom and Daisy's family name of Buchanan is Scottish in origin and means 'house of the canon' (as in religious minister). German 'Kanon' looked ugly to me, so I stuck with Daisy Canon. Ethan in Ice Cream has no Gatsby analogue, but Nick's friend George is meant to refer to Gatsby's George Wilson. Of course, none of my characters share any personality traits with their equivalents in Fitzgerald's work. The same as my plot is unconnected to Gatsby.

I thought that the combination of my user name and the first names of my characters made things pretty obvious, but I now see that I was erroneous in this assumption. The very fact that I had to write an explanatory essay about Ice Cream is strong evidence that my allusions were much too nebulous for the audience.

You live and learn, I guess.

F. S.