Reay Jespersen

“Hey,” Sheldon said as he met Louis at the door. “Come on in.” Sheldon walked back into the lab – formerly known as the family garage, having since been converted into a lab when his parents realized he was a genius back in grade 3. That was three years ago, and the lab had only become more densely packed with flonometers and gigascopes since then. Those probably weren’t the right words, Louis knew, but he had trouble keeping up with Sheldon’s thinking at the best of times, let alone remembering what anything in the lab did.
Baseball was Louis’s love. It was simple and beautiful, nothing like all the hard, mechanical, weird stuff here in the lab. He followed Sheldon through the maze of machinery.
“So what’s the big secret?” Louis asked as he walked by an apparatus of glass bottles and winding tubes, where something green boiled and steamed over a Bunsen burner, winding up red in a small beaker and smelling like a cross between used socks and old cheese.
“My biggest accomplishment yet,” Sheldon said. He was standing leaning an arm against a platform raised three feet off the ground. The platform was metal, a foot across, with wires running up the stand to its underside. There was a second one exactly like it a few feet away. Both were connected to a series of devices – including tunograms and primopeters, no doubt – which were all wired in to a desktop computer and a laptop computer, both of which had been stripped down and re-made, Frankenstein-like. The desktop computer was now cooled by tubes of liquid nitrogen. What generated the kind of heat that would require so much cooling power, Louis could only guess.
“Bigger than superrubber?” Louis asked. He remembered that well, seeing Sheldon create a rubber that could not only vastly extend the life of tires – basically revolutionizing the industry overnight – but even more importantly, that made amazing rubber balls.
“Bigger,” Sheldon smiled.
“Bigger than the bubblegum that never loses its flavour?” Louis asked. That had been a particular favourite of his, though until Sheldon perfected the sugar-free version, he wasn’t allowed to have it much.
“So much bigger,” Sheldon said.
“Well, spill it,” Louis was getting impatient. It still sometimes frustrated him the way Sheldon would do a dramatic tease leading up to his big reveal. It had been the same since how they’d first met: Louis was having trouble with his baseball pitching and Sheldon – who he didn’t know at the time other than as the small kid with glasses from that other class – approached him one recess and said that he could help.
Louis blew the offer off at first. But as the days passed and Louis’s pitching didn’t improve (in fact, got worse), he finally agreed. Sheldon pulled out a binder and flipped past pages of equations and theorems and bad sketches – Louis thought he saw what was supposed to be a fiery plane in the jaws of a dinosaur – and finally stopped at a page with a large, poor diagram of a baseball on it, and a small stick figure of what Louis guessed was supposed to be a pitcher. The images were surrounded by lots of math jargon, shapes, angles, numbers, and notes.
Louis wasn’t at all sure that any of it was even English.
He looked at Sheldon, who beamed with pride.
“What’s this?” Louis had asked.
“How to improve your throw,” Sheldon had said.
Louis looked back at the page. It made his head hurt.
Sheldon’s smile quickly faded. “You don’t get it?”
“Would anyone?” Louis arched an eyebrow.
Sheldon sighed. “This would really help you, though.”
“So show me,” Louis said.
“You sure you’re ready?” Sheldon smiled at him, squinting in the sunlight.
“Show me,” Louis said, now getting frustrated.
“Alright,” Sheldon finally relented. “Let me see how you normally hold your baseball…”

Now, years later and back in the lab, Sheldon was still teasing. And Louis was once again getting ready to throttle him.
“I’ve created teleportation,” Sheldon said, as casually as if he’d mentioned that he just had a hotdog for lunch.
“Teleportation,” Louis echoed.
Sheldon nodded, smile widening.
Louis took a longer look at each of the two platforms, and again at the super-cooled computer, then back to Sheldon. “Does it work?”
“Of course it works,” Sheldon said, a touch offended. “I teleported an apple this morning.” He gestured to a plate on a nearby counter. It had apple sauce on it. Louis looked from it to Sheldon. “Yeah, I know,” Sheldon granted. “But I’ve got it now. I know what happened.”
“Me too,” Louis said.
“No,” Sheldon said, waving it off. “I mean, I know how it happened. It’s already fixed. I’d just forgotten to carry a one.”
Louis looked sidelong at the apple sauce, unconvinced. For all of Sheldon’s brilliance, a lot of what he made had something wrong with it in the initial one or two attempts. Before the superrubber was perfected, it liquified in sunlight. Before the everlasting bubblegum made its public debut, it got scalding hot when it came in contact with saliva. Louis had learned over his years of friendship with Sheldon that genius is sometimes a process.
“Look,” Sheldon said, turning around and reaching into a container. “To show you how confident I am that it’s fixed,” he turned back to Louis, holding an upright rat in his hands, “I’m sending Captain Whiskers through the teleporter next.”
Louis looked at Captain Whiskers.
Captain Whiskers looked at Louis. There may have been a hint of desperation in those beady black eyes; a primal awareness that something, somewhere was wrong, and that he was at the centre of it.
Louis had a soft spot for animals. Furry ones in particular. He felt obliged to say something. “I don’t think-”
“It’ll be fine,” Sheldon cut him off, placing Captain Whiskers on the platform he’d been leaning against. “But in case anything goes wrong,” he fished something out of his pocket and presented it to Louis on an open palm. “I made him this.”
It was a rat-sized crash helmet.
“Yeah, that should do the trick,” Louis rolled his eyes.
Sheldon ignored him and strapped it onto Captain Whiskers, who now struck Louis as an interesting mix of cute and ridiculous.
“Ok, stand back,” Sheldon gestured with his hands until Louis had backed up past the computers, which Sheldon began madly typing on. First the laptop, then the desktop. Then he tweaked a knob on a tunogram, flipped some switches on a vermaspec, checked the primopeters to ensure everything was on the up and up, and held a finger over the Enter key on his desktop computer. He looked at Louis, smiling widely. “Oh,” he said, remembering something. He went to a box on a shelf and pulled out a pair of sunglasses, which he handed to Louis.
“Cool,” Louis acknowledged, taking them as Sheldon put on his own pair.
“Yes, they are,” Sheldon said. “But also practical. Teleportation involves folding space, and opening a wormhole between the two nodes tends to show momentary glimpses into other dimensions, which could drive humans insane. These glasses have been designed to off-set those glimpses. They’re filtered to our reality.”
Louis held his gaze.
“Kind of like how looking through a red filter will remove the red from what you see,” Sheldon said, “only with beings that make your brain turn to goo.” He made a quick check to ensure Captain Whiskers hadn’t escaped from the platform. “Of course, there’s a small chance they won’t work.”
Louis’s face dropped. “How small?”
“Oh, less than ten percent, for sure,” Sheldon said, hitting the Enter button to execute the program.
A rising whine of machinery and the hiss of flowing nitrogen, and with the small pop of a sudden vacuum, Captain Whiskers disappeared in a blink of light.
Sheldon and Louis turned their heads slightly to look at the second platform.
And kept looking at it.
“Just checking,” Louis finally said. “Should teleportation be faster than walking the same distance?”
“Something’s wrong,” Sheldon confirmed. He typed on his laptop keyboard. Then on the desktop. Line after line of programming code scrolled by. Seconds passed. And then more. With nothing to do and unable to make sense of anything around him, Louis was getting bored. “There,” Sheldon finally stopped the scrolling and pointed to something on the screen.
“Forget to carry another one?” Louis asked.
“No,” Sheldon said. “Gah, so stupid! This is supposed to be pi divided by infinity, not infinity divided by pi.” He began typing to correct the problem. “Rookie mistake.”
“So… where’s Captain Whiskers?” Louis asked.
“This changes everything,” Sheldon said as he typed. “It’ll be a challenge, but I’m very confident I can get him back safe and sound.”

And so he did. Until then, however, in negative space just beyond the edge of theoretical reality, Captain Whiskers drifted in his crash helmet. He had, as a result of the teleportation glitch, been given the intelligence of an average human teenager, and was painfully aware of what had just happened.
“Crap,” he said.

I was reading a book this morning - Never The Bride by Paul Magrs - and at a moment in one of the short stories, just when I was getting into it, I read a paragraph that made me mentally step back and analyze what had been done in the writing in order to achieve a certain effect. And it occurred to me that on the one hand, having that happen is a compliment to the writer, but on the other hand is frustrating for me.

I’ve been writing stories on and off all my life, and have explored various different formats over the years. I’ve learned from books on honing writing skills and have attended seminars relevant to my work; studying, in short, how to be a better writer. A big part of that studying, of course, is reading.

When you read, you learn how to construct sentences, paragraphs, and stories. You learn structures, nuances, and styles. You learn what works and what doesn’t (and more importantly, why it does or doesn’t). And even if you don’t deconstruct what you read - consciously tear it apart to see how and why it works - reading gradually influences how, and the quality with which, you write.

However, as the saying goes, you can’t unlearn something. Once you’ve read up on, say, techniques to help make a scary scene more scary, it’s all too easy to find yourself reading scary scenes and mentally ticking off techniques that have been used rather than being swept away in the story itself.

It doesn’t happen to me all the time, of course. There are writers - Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, George RR Martin, Terry Pratchett, Elmore Leonard, and James Ellroy, to name a few off the top of my head - whose work is so well written and engrossing that it’s only when I put their books down between readings that I pull back from the tales they weave to consider how they managed to do what they do (invariably with envy).

Which brings me to the conundrum: is it possible for writers to at least mute their writer-ness long enough to enjoy anything at all that they read to avoid this intermitent, disruptive studying of the material, or is it only personally preferred writers and (types of) stories that we can look forward to enjoying purely as its intended entertainment?

So I’d be interested to hear: if you’re a writer, do you have this same problem with some of what you read? Which authors don’t you have this problem with? Whose work do you find yourself blissfully engrossed within, be it for particular stories or again and again? Might we be able to learn from them? Is just being a good writer enough to potentially be this distractingly engaging to other writers, or can we learn specific lessons from the masters about how to be this engaging?

What are your thoughts?