Click By Kristopher Young - Sept. 07

Hey all - I'd like to thank PGoutis01 for setting up this book discussion and everyone else in this community. You guys rock.

I've been asked to lead the discussion here, though I'm not really sure quite what that means. I don't want to just ask questions. I'm far more interested in your questions, thoughts, and opinions. Though this discussion officially ends after September, if you discover this thread after that feel free to post - I'll check back now and again.

If you haven't read Click yet, you may want to do so before reading too much further into this thread. Click is fairly spoiler-proof, but due to the nature of the narrative I think there is a definite value to reading it free of preconceptions.

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One of the major challenges that Click's narrator faces is in regards to his perception of both self and his environment. As events spiral out of his control, he becomes unable to accurately assess his own sanity. All he knows for sure is that what he is experiencing is far outside the bounds of normality. If he trusts in his own perception, he knows he's exhibiting textbook paranoid schizophrenia, but if he doesn't trust in his own perception he's no better off. There are no clear boundaries in Click's structure because I wanted readers' minds to process the same limited and potentially unreliable information that the narrator is operating on. The lines between reality, dream, and hallucination are heavily blurred in an attempt to engage both reader and narrator in the same psychological dilemma.

As readers will draw their own lines and come to their own conclusions, this effectively leaves much of Click up to interpretation. I do have my own interpretation (cough, instruction manual, cough), but I openly encourage alternate readings of the book. For example, while some readers believe the majority of events are actually happening to the narrator and that the glitches and loops are 'real', I've talked to others that believe most of the book to be the narrator's psychosis. Some read Click more as memoir than as fiction. The question I'm most often asked about Click is 'How much isn't fiction?'

So, to start off with a discussion question, I'd love to know your interpretation of the book. What's actually occurring to the narrator? What's not? What does the ending of Click mean to you? I've heard some really wonderful explanations - for example, that the entire novel was a single iteration of a loop, or that the entire novel occurred during a few seconds of thought in the first chapter ala An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Neither were my intention, but that does not make them incorrect.

What is your favorite chapter? Favorite line? Favorite dream/hallucination (and how did you interpret it)?

I was checking out some past discussions and think one of Steven Hall's questions in regards to his novel, The Raw Shark Texts, fits Click perfectly (in fact, I had a similar question already written, but I like Steven's wording better): "Symmetry, doubles and reflections crop up again and again in the story, any theories as to why? It’d be fun to see how many examples people can spot of these too." To start this off, I'll provide an easy one: early on, the narrator in Click catches someone sketching him. Later in the book, he begins to sketch the man he believes to be following him.

There's a lot more that could be discussed (for example, I've completely forgotten to mention his relationship), so please don't feel limited only to the ideas I brought up here. I'm actually very curious to see what all of you bring to the table. A lot of energy went into writing Click and everything in there is there for a reason - there's stuff buried in there that I'm not sure anyone but me will ever notice... but I look forward to the day someone surprises me.

Feel free to answer any of the questions above or ignore them entirely to ask your own. I'm also up for questions about the writing or publishing process (which isn't exactly standard, thanks to Another Sky Press).

And finally: have you ever experienced anything similar to a loop?

Thanks again, everyone!

-kristopher

The cover art is by a good friend of mine, Jesse Reno. He's insanely talented.

While he was reading Click, he kept asking me if I had any ideas for the cover - and my response was always no, but that I trusted he'd figure something out. Soon after he finished the book he gave me a call to tell me he finished the cover... and damn, did he nail it.

Check out more of his work at jessereno.com, you won't be disappointed.

Whatever interpretation of the novel you ascribe to (can the protag really control his world or is there something mental going on?) the use of doubling and repetition serve to, just at Tomstrong said, establish reference points to keep the unreliable narrator from drifting too far.
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On a completely different note, I'm on my third read through and came to a realization regarding the protag's romantic relationship that I want to toss out here. Originally, I didn't think much of the narrator's relationship with his on/off girlfriend. The woman appeared out of nowhere, the protag fell in love way too quickly, and was driven by a less-than-convincing obsession for this woman. But, I realized this morning that Click has a whole lot of heart, and this seemingly melodramatic love relationship is the core of this heart. Let me explain:

[INDENT]The woman appears out of nowhere. This makes sense when you think of this relationship as just another "click" in the protag's life. He doesn't anticipate most of the "altering events" (people getting hit by cars seems to be a common one). They come into his life, they bend to his will, then the event ends. Simple. This is just what happens with the woman. Additionally, he tries again and again to love this woman. Are these instances of "fucked up love" just the narrator's own second, third, fourth "clicks"? Think about it, the woman never seems to remember any of the crazy things the narrator does. What woman would put up with so much? The kind of woman who's really only put up with "so much" once, that's what kind.[/INDENT]

Thoughts?

I agree with you in that I think it's a choice to be made, and it's an artistic one.
The book probably does work without the change in initial caps, but that's not necessarily an arguement against it, in my opinion. Martinis work without the olives, but that doesn't have to mean throw them out.
Lots of people come down hard on this sort of thing, but those people are just looking for something negative about a book that's easily pointed out and that really has nothing to do with the narrative. Lots of people will criticize Cormac Mccarthy's lack of punctuation, and that bothers me because I can't imagine reading an entire Mccarthy book and all I would have to say is something about commas.
I think this sort of thing becomes more and more acceptable with new forms of communication like texting and emailing becoming popular. Even in blogs the emphasis on punctuation and capitalization seems reduced.

I don't have a degree in literature. I'm not even sure that I've ever heard the term 'literary doubling' before - my formal knowledge of it begins and ends with this fascinating (if a bit academic) essay on the subject that I found a half hour ago - http://facta.junis.ni.ac.yu/facta/lal/lal2000/lal2000-05.pdf.

This isn't to say there isn't doubling in Click, it's just that I didn't set out to use specific literary devices when I wrote Click.

I don't sit down to write anything specific - I just sit down and write, filling notebooks with scraps, phrases, paragraphs and sketches that I need to get out of my head. My words generally mirror my actual life - real events, real people, real occurrences, real dreams. If I'm heartbroken, so are my words - convert the pain into progress.

Eventually I start sorting everything, expanding, editing, deleting, combining. This line goes with that line. This page gets scrapped, but I might keep a sentence or two. For awhile, I had tons of pieces of paper, all cut up, arrows drawn this way and that, moving paragraphs to entirely different sections, mixing everything around. Most of the fiction seeps in as I glue everything together - I might flip who said or did what because it works better that way. I strongly believe all words are fiction (though all words are also very real and very powerful). We should write as if everything is fiction, but read as if everything is true.

Click didn't really exist as an entity until I had about half of it already written. As the voices became distinct, I began to recognize characters and scenes. As the groupings grew in size, I began to recognize chapters. As the chapters grew in number, I began to recognize plot arcs. Somewhere during this process, I recognized Click. It's during these stages that anything resembling doubling or symmetry really took form.

Case in point - There really was a guy on a subway that I caught drawing me, and I wrote about him while he did so. A month or two later, I wrote about the act of us sketching each other simultaneously. These pieces eventually splintered out into three separate parts in the book - the narrator being sketched (pg. 20), the narrator sketching another man he believes to be sketching him (pg. 57), and finally, the narrator endlessly sketching the man he believes to be following him (pg. 135).

There's quite a few different reasons for that trinity, and I'm amazed at the accuracy of the comments here. There's some other points too - the flow from passive (being drawn), to interactive (drawing each other), to control (drawing). Of course, the narrator tends to feel least sane when he's in control, hence the frenzied nature of the third part. I never thought of this as doubling (or tripling, grin) - it was more a sense of symmetry for me (III and II are both symmetrical), although I did seek to ground certain things through repetition.

Your quote is dead on:

Part of the goal with the symmetry of Click was to ground past events. Elements that may have seemed almost out of place or throwaway (ie, the man sketching him) slowly get fleshed out with future events, in an attempt to give all parts past and future more weight.

It's also worth noting that while with the example of the sketching, all three can be sourced to the same real-life event, there are other symmetries in Click that can't be. There are pieces written a year apart that found their meaning in each other - again and again, the dawning realization, 'so that's why I wrote that'.

Other reasons for symmetry worth considering:

-Psychological contagion - the narrator tends to pick up traits of people he meets.

-The possibility that events in the narrator's life echo both forward and backwards (note certain reflections on memory in Click).

Whew, that response was longer than intended...

-kristopher

I think that's a good way of looking at it. I definitely mapped certain things out in exactly that manner during final editing stages.

Hey! you rock, glad to see you here. For everyone else - Pure Doxyk and I started talking after she emailed me about Click. She ended up interviewing for her website (which features all sorts of cool ruminations as well as a lot of incredibly cool info on polyphasic sleep that I find terribly interesting despite the fact that I'm an accomplished insomniac). Anyway, the interview is more about the principles of Another Sky Press than Click - you can check it out here (and check out the rest of the site too!)

From pg. 7 of Click
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[INDENT]i watch as the car smashes her. it isn’t the movies, it’s smacking a rag doll across the room, all broken bones as her face skids against asphalt, grinding into gore.

and then, just as suddenly, it’s gone. the crumpled body, the pooling blood, the trail of pulped skin, the car. all gone, and there she is again, stepping out between the two cars. and i watch as the car smashes her, and it isn’t the movies, it’s smacking a rag doll across the room, all broken bones as her face skids against asphalt, grinding into gore.

and there she is again, stepping out between the two cars. and i watch in revulsion again, again, never ending, i watch and i want to scream but i’m locked in the same repetition as everything else.

and she’s stepping out, only this time she must have caught a glimpse of the car out of the corner of her eye because she jumps back with this tiny little chirp of a scream as the car races past, oblivious to the future lost. the click was almost deafening to me, but no one else seemed to notice.[/INDENT]
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It was a definite fear of mine during certain stages of the writing process that Click would be so abstracted that it wouldn't make a lick of sense to anyone but me. I feared that it wouldn't have a cohesive narrative ("all ambition and no direction", pg. 105). Fortunately, those fears proved unfounded, as at this point it's clear to me that Click does resonate with many readers (for which I'm very thankful). Point is, I definitely tried to anchor events in many different ways to, as you put it, establish reference points.

The passage quoted above is also the first loop presented to the reader as a loop. It's a secret little hope of mine that the passage will cause a moment of cognitive dissonance in readers, and that people will go back and reread the initial sentence, eyes flitting back and forth to compare the two to see if they are identical - and thus 'looping' the reader in a very tangible way and echoing the narrator's loop that's being read.

The actual first loop of the book is, depending on interpretation, within the first chapter - although at that point there is no way for the narrator or reader to know that as the narrator just thinks he beat the odds.

That's definitely a valid interpretation - he certainly fixes (or breaks) other things, often unknowingly.

As for appearing out of nowhere - he believes her to be the woman he saw almost hit by a car, but that doesn't make it so. One reader asked me if they were really a series of different women in his life, though that certainly would be evidence of a severe psychosis on his part if true.

Flipping it around, it's also possible she's suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder). This would also possibly explain her memory loss and mood swings.

(This is getting very strange, trying to discuss numerous possibilities at once without ever really identifying my own - perhaps at the end of this month I'll lay out my own personal interpretation...)

-kristopher

I just received word that another interview of me was just posted online today - this one was primarily about Click.

It didn't start out as an interview - it started out with a guy named Mike Daily emailing me about Click. We started talking, and he eventually turned the virtual recorder on and made it into a full on interview. He's posted everything, starting with my reply to his initial 'hello' email. This correspondence took place almost a year ago.

He asked a lot of fantastic questions, so if you're interested you should check it out. We get into a lot of stuff - the book read as a junkie love story (gun as needle), cool trivia like other potential names for Click, chapters in Click viewed as 'tracks', insights into what the cover means to me, some rambling about zombies, and more.

Feel free to bring up anything in the interview here on this board.

Mike Grady is also Mick O'Grady - check them out here. Check out the track Major Fiction and then go from there. And you should also check out his novel + 2cd project Alarm. Here's the link for it at the independent music distributor CD Baby, but you can also find it at Powell's and on Amazon, etc.

Here's the full interview.

I'm also going to repost one part of the interview here, because I think it's important since I've been referring to the protagonist as 'narrator' so often and it relates to some of what we've been discussing.

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Mike Daily: You used present tense to tell the story of Click. Tell me why you chose present over past, or future tense.

Kristopher:
The simple answer is that I used present tense for the narrator's voice because everything else rang false.

The more complex answer:

Click is in present tense because the narrator isn't reflecting, he's experiencing. To that end, Click is almost more of a thought pattern than it is a narration.

Narration implies filtering. We choose what to tell. We reflect, we edit ourselves. We become, in narration, what we want to be, or what we think we already are. I didn't want that. I wanted it raw, without the benefits of hindsight. Everything we experience affects us - not just the day to day, but dreams and hallucinations and random thoughts. The glimpses of unreal out of the corner of our eyes.

As such, that's my goal for the reader as well - to experience. I wanted the reader to be an active participant, not an observer.

With Click, the narrator is suffering from a severe disassociation from what most people might consider 'real'. His very sense of self is in question, and that abstracted sense of self is only being aggravated by the glitches he's experiencing. He's not sure what's real, and he recognizes the central issue at hand: if he believes in what he's experiencing, he'd be diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. But he also recognizes that if he doesn't believe in what he's experiencing, then he's not even himself, let alone sane.

There's an endless discussion in regards to art about the conflict between artistic vision and audience interpretation. I sought to remove that conflict - I fully acknowledge that Click only exists where author and audience meet; that my intentions and motivations only go so far, that the individual reader's interpretation of Click trumps my own.

It was my goal to have the reader experience the same questions the narrator is - as a participant, not an observer. And Click is a completely different book based on how the individual reader chooses to answer them.

Hello----I was on ANOTHER SKY PRESS web site and read about this book club.I hope to join in the discussion very soon.

You know, I had the hardest time reading Hunter S. Thompson because the voice in his writing reminded me so much of my dad. It's not like I'm horribly bitter towards my dad, but it was distracting in a way because every other sentence was like, "Christ, that sounds like something Dad would say."
Sometimes those familiar voices can be hard to deal with.

Hey Kristopher,

Thanks for the mail, a book swap would be cool. I'll pm you addresses and stuff.
Wanted to post on here though because this thread is already touching some of the stuff I'm really interested in. Would it be okay with you to sit in?

Can't wait to check out the book.

S

i just ordered my copy. i'm already impressed by another sky press and the donation system. More media publishing houses need to start thinking this way.

Morey - aw, shucks.

Wickerkat - Jesse's a rad cat, but I can't promise any discounts. It definitely wouldn't hurt to mention that you discovered him via Click and talking to me, but no guarantees it will get you anywhere.

Steven - Of course you can sit in; I wish I knew about your thread when it was going on - The Raw Sharks Texts sounds brilliant.

Amden - Thanks for the kind words. I wasn't familiar with Patti Smith's song Piss Factory, but I just read the lyrics -- it's powerful as hell. I'm glad that Click's narrator felt real and honest to you - there's a lot of real and honest stuff in there. Sometimes it feels awkward to hide a lot of it under the banner of fiction.

One of my favorite lines and I'm sure to have more as well.

"shouldn't being who i am come easily? why do i feel like it's a constant struggle?"

I'm wondering what role everyone things interchangability is playing in Click. The first time reading it, I noticed the interchangability of women -- how there seems like many, at times, and at other times, like they're all the same woman, but in any case her features shift and blur until there doesn't seem like much difference either way. It almost seems to be referring to Woman, as an archetype, at least in the narrator's mind, more so than a particular woman or string of women.

This time through, I'm noticing the interchangability of neuroses -- the gun, the notebooks, the narcolepsy and lost time, the hallucinations -- with the possible exception of the "clicks", they seem to all mean the same thing, or be the same thing, or maybe to be Neurosis as an archetype again.

If the author is using these blurring, interchangeable characteristics of things as a way to refer to their archetypes on one level while still keeping the details a relevant part of the story, well, I'm impressed at the mechanic and I think it works pretty well, all told. But that may not be what's going on at all. Maybe all that's supposed to be indicated by the shifting details that near-anonymize the women, the streets, and the mental quirks of the narrator is to underline his instability, or the world's. In which case it also works.

Maybe it's just a cheap trick to get us all to read too much into the story...! ;)

PD

The initial caps debate - i like them, in this novel. Usually they'd annoy me though. In Click i feel they keep with the flowing present tense first person stream of consciousness way of writing it. They seem to make the book a tenser and quicker read, you feel the possible outcomes before every click are as fast as the text on the page, and vice versa. It just fits.

It was strange, the first third of the novel or so i found it slightly difficult to fully embrace where it was headed, and had this slight feeling of being isolated from the character - who in a lot of regards reminds me of myself - which climaxed with the pages on hunting for the food and gorging on the children (pages 84-91). I didnt so much get that bit, although as an episode for the protaganist it did make sense i guess. After that however, for the rest of the novel i felt at one with the narrator and understood him much better. Infact, i was unable to put the book down from then until i'd finished it.

Throughout most the novel i wanted to believe that the Clicks were happening and the narrator wasnt deluded. However, when he meets the mentor i felt this was just one in a series of possibilities, the one his mind - not reality - had chosen to tell him, to explain his behaviour to the more rational side of him.

In fleeing the killers hunting him down i was beginning to feel more on his side again, that i believed his episodes to be the truth. Then with the motel scene with the news bulletin where he hears he's been framed for the murder (page 146) - that of the unnamed female love interest - i became sure he was in the grip of his psychosis and he was lying to himself about the reasons for fleeing what would infact be a crime scene.

Then, just to confuse things (and here's the point i'm sure i read too much into the book and lose the plot) he escapes the police and hitches a ride convieniently in a passing car which doesnt normally pick up hitchers (page 148). Too handy, too easy - it made me think that, just saying it wasnt his psychosis and what was happening to him with the clicks was reality, then i choose to see the driver as perhaps another of those who had the gift - a renegade on the opposite side to those hunting down the gifted, perhaps there was an opposing army, who looked out for each other, that moment just a click in his own mind to bring the protagonist to safety. The comment that the driver reminded him of his grandfather (page 148) too, could the talent be genetic and could his own grandfather be saving him with a very well executed click slicing time barriers?

After all, as our protagonist begins to rewind time further towards the end of the novel (page 159), it becomes concievable that more talented people with the gift could be effective saviours of others in their elite club. As i say, i think i read too much into that bit.

More onto a trivia aspect, i noticed the words "another sky" appear together (page 157) - is this deliberate, a nod to Another Sky Press? Just curious?

Aside from all my above conjecture, i'd like to congratulate and thank Kristopher for writing such a fascinating novel and the time he's spending discussing it on here. Cheers man, i'll be sure to check out your future work, and i'm already planning to order a couple more copies of Click - with donations for inscriptions - in the near future. It's a great and noble thing you're doing selling the novel as you are, and perhaps it's the way forward for lesser established authors. I'd like to think so at least.

Simon

There's definitely a theme of interchangeability within Click, and I think you're right in thinking that it's true of everything, not just women. It makes sense that you saw it first with women - after all, chapters such as 'litany of changes' (pg. 33) and 'too strong' (pg. 40) begin to establish the theme, referencing interchangeable people (faces) and interchangeable individuality (clothing). [Tangent - there's also an early appearance of the mentor archetype in 'Litany of Changes'...]

Everything is always washing away from the narrator and there's nothing he can hold on to. Places ('illusion of destination', pg. 143), days, memories, who said what, even what is said versus what is thought all become interchangeable within the novel. Even the loops themselves mirror this as they evolve from repetition (which is, in a way, grounding) to an near infinity of possibility: "i see so much that i'm losing track of what's actually happening, lost in possibilities. my memory, gorged on countless nows, is ceasing to be able to distinguish between any of them..." (pg. 121)

In that regard, Click is partially about identity, especially in regards to how our sense of identity correlates to our perceived environment (and vice versa). In Click, without anything to hold on to, the narrator can never clearly identify himself. He discusses this early on, referring to a nagging tooth pain as a way in which he's able to recognize himself: "no matter where i am or what’s become of me, i’ll still have that dull ache. it’s a constant, letting everything else i experience define itself as now." (pg. 56) At this point, he's so broken that he identifies (at least, philosophically) as little more than a cracked tooth. Considering pulling his own teeth out on page 93 might then be considered almost suicidal (representing an irreclaimable loss of identity), a response to his inability/failure to actually kill himself playing Russian Roulette. Of course, he doesn't actually go through with it, just as he never lets himself die (assuming he can control it).

-kristopher

I finally had time to sit down and finish Click today. School...

Anyway - my initial impression was a little off. I found that I got used to the whole no caps and also the stream of conscious (for lack of a better term) writing.

I also had trouble with the dreams mixing reality. But I guess it was a way to draw us [the reader] into the narrator's world.

I really dug the last - I'd say - 40 pages or so. When the whole thing came about where they were trying to stop him and he was like a super hero with his powers. That really made the story worth it and it satisfied me. While reading the beginning - I think that was one of my problems. I was saying to myself, "This is good writing - but where is this ever going to go?" I thought it was cool though.

Now I guess we are supposed to figure out if it all was in his head or if it really was happening?
Forgive me - I did not go through yet and read all the other post. I will try to do that tomorrow or the next day when I have a little more time.