The call-for-requests post generated about seven emails all along the same line:
I’d really like to know how you wrote that Beatles story.
Okeydoke.
The story actually started out as something entirely different because I usually hate “what if John Lennon had lived” AU stories, for one simple reason: most of them are beatifically terrible. By which I mean that the common thread of these stories is that if only John Lennon hadn’t died, absolutely everything would have gone right forever. So the original story was a farce, originally intended to be the second in a series after “Scenes In An Alternate Universe Where Saved By The Bell, Rather Than Law and Order, Becamse The Dominant Television Franchise For A Generation.” The story at various points had Paul and John discovering the cure for AIDS, George singlehandedly bringing the Kosovo conflict to a peaceful end, and finished with Ringo being elected Pope.
There was a problem with the story, though: I didn’t like it. Usually after I write something for forty minutes or so, I know if I want to keep writing it. (This does not necessarily mean that it is good, but if I don’t want to keep writing it, it’s never going to be good.) And so I sat back and thought about Beatles AUs and why I hate a lot of them, and thought “what if John Lennon survived and it turned out that everything sucked anyway?” And I wrote that for about twenty minutes, but although it felt a little closer in message, it was even less fun to write. (Some people like writing that kind of story, and can make it really good to read. I am pretty sure I am not one of them.)
At this point I was about ready to give up on it, but then the magical little man who lives inside any writer’s head whispered in my ear.
“What if Ringo made a wish and it went all monkey’s paw on him?”
And that interested me. So I combined elements from the first two drafts blender-style and rewrote it. This time around it got closer to the feel of what I wanted: an alternate universe where John lived (at least for a while) but it wasn’t magical hunky-dory. Roy Orbison living and Michael Jackson and Jeff Lynne dying – they originate in this draft (the idea being that Ringo wishes for people to live and the wish, being a wish, turns right around and fucks other people over). In this draft, Ringo got what he wished for, but not what he wanted.
But it still didn’t feel right. Firstly, given the style I was using it was nearly impossible to explain the wish subtly without taking the reader out of the story. (I had to explain it to a couple of test readers, and both said that once they knew about the wish, it became obvious in retrospect. But I had to tell them. Problem.) And more importantly, there wasn’t really an ending to it: it just petered out. But I was tired at this point and was at the “aw, fuck it” stage, and scheduled it as a post and went to bed.
And then at about 4 AM I woke up and thought “what if it was time travel instead of a wish?” And I got up and rewrote for about half an hour and was finally satisfied with the damn thing. For those wondering, I was using the Marvel comics paradigm of time travel, wherein traveling back in time and altering the past creates a new timeline in which you are now trapped. So Ringo-Prime time travels, alerts Ringo-B, Ringo-B takes steps, alters timeline, but not enough to fix everything, and so goes back to warn Ringo-C… Not that it really matters, because you can use your time travel ruleset of preference. (I kept it vague for a number of reasons.)
The reason I like the story at this point might seem a bit strange given the reactions I’ve gotten to it, but I like the story because I think it’s ultimately a tragic one. Ringo/Ringos is/are attempting to fix the impossible. I mean, the point of the “new” deaths and Orbison living is the old “Sound of Thunder” problem – you can’t predict with any accuracy what changing the past will do to alter the future. People describing the alternate universe as “better” are just weird to me: I mean, yeah, I love the Beatles and The Muppet Show too, but come on – Michael Jackson? (I hold the minority opinion that Bad is actually a better album than Thriller.)
Here’s the sum total of what one gets in the alternate universe: four and a half more Beatles albums and seven seasons of The Muppet Show. George still dies. Linda still dies. John still gets shot. From a hardcount perspective, Ringo hasn’t really achieved much at all, which is proper because he shouldn’t be able to achieve much at all. If he goes back and tries to fix his fixes, he’ll just be throwing another stone in the pond and creating more ripples.
But the other thing I like about it is that I’m pretty sure he knows all this and he does it anyway. I’m a big fan of human defiance in the face of entropy and oblivion, of shouting “fuck you” to the void. Every once in a very long while, it makes a difference. And that’s why I think the story works.
That isn’t to say it’s perfect. There are things I might change in another revision. Initially I explicitly wrote that John’s assassin had an extremely low IQ, sub-Forrest Gump levels. I took it out because I thought it was overselling it and the result was people thinking I was tossing in a cheap shot at conservatism when in fact I was trying to avoid that. (Mind you, the cheap shot at Sean Hannity was entirely intentional. My explanation for this is as follows: fuck that guy.) Someone also pointed out that I forgot to mention Billy Preston and they were right: he deserves mention in here somewhere. And I think Roy Orbison would still die, but John would take his place in the Wilburys. But for the most part I’m happy with it.
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20 users responded in this post
Pssshht. Who cares how you wrote that Beatles story?? That’s a stupid question.
Hey, I liked hearing the explanation. I loved the original story, even if it took me until the other readers’ comments to figure out what exactly was going on. The last scene with Ringo and Paul was heartbreaking. I like the cliche 4AM bolt of inspiration. And I love this:
“I’m a big fan of human defiance in the face of entropy and oblivion, of shouting “fuck you” to the void. Every once in a very long while, it makes a difference.”
Well done, you. (Now you’ve put it that way, I think learning about Nietzsche is going to be much less depressing.)
Amen to screaming Fuck You at the void. I’ve always preferred versions of Superman’s origin where Jor-El did not know that his son would wind up safe on a planet where he’d blend in and have superpowers. I think it works better if he’s just firing the rocket off at the last second and hoping it goes somewhere good. At that point, Jor-El’s inner monologue is “This probably won’t work, and even if it does, I’ve extended the life of my species by one lifespan, which barely counts. But on the other hand, fuck you, Death.”
but come on – Michael Jackson?
He loses a few albums, but doesn’t become a national joke involving pedophilia and plastic surgery turning his skin white. It’s a roughly even trade (but the whole Apple Records buying Michael’s work in a flip of the real world is a nice touch.)
I think the success of the story is because everyone loves Ringo.
Amen to screaming fuck you at Sean Hannity.
John still gets shot
Sure, but he gets an extra twenty years.
The interesting thing is that you’ve got Ringo (the more maligned Beatle of the seven (that’s if you include Pete Best, Stu Sutcliffe, and Billy Preston)) as the one making the temporal leaps.
The ending works particularly well: all of a sudden, it forces us to go back in the loop (the start of the story) and realize just where it was Ringo was acting so funny. His insisting on the SNL appearance, getting John out of New York for Dec. 1980, the depression Ringo gets over Michael Jackson’s death (the moment he probably realizes this alternate timeline is reacting against his manipulations: plus, was Ringo attempting to get his fellow Beatles to mentor Michael, help him get past his father’s abuse, so he could avoid his descent into his own Hell?), all the other points where the regular flow of history (the rise of Dubya, 9/11 still happening and the war in Iraq stirring John’s ire) imposes itself on the revised timeline… and then the final set, the last few days where Ringo-B prepares himself for the Leap… and the realization that Ringo, poor soul, is making another heroic attempt to save us all…
Beautiful story. Seriously should submit it to a publication that would run it (New Yorker comes to mind).
MGK, clearly you misunderstood. The question was how you wrote the story. Did you use a pen? A computer? What word processor? INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW.
You mentioned an early version where Ringo changes things, but it still all goes bad. I think that was a problem with Marvel’s What If series. There were too many stories like that. (Although I haven’t read very many. Maybe my sample was skewed.)
Is there a timeline where Ringo gets Paul to start eating meat again so he stops being such a dick about it to everyone?
“Well done, you. (Now you’ve put it that way, I think learning about Nietzsche is going to be much less depressing.)”
When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. So give it something to look at: yell, laugh, wave your arms, throw rocks, spit in its eye and piss all over it. Show that damn abyss who’s boss. –Friedrich Nietzsche (paraphrased)
Here’s what your aren’t understanding, Chris. People didn’t think it was a “good” future because certain albums did or didn’t get made or because certain people lived longer or because certain things stayed on TV. They thought it was a good future because you wrote about people so beloved and charismatic that any one of us automatically picture their smiling and grieving faces and you set them in (some of) our lifetimes, doing awesome yet believable things that we can directly relate to.
Of course, I took it that John got shot not because That’s The Way Things Are, but because John had the kind of outspoken, confrontational public personality that somebody’s eventually going to take a shot at.
I hadn’t thought to ask how the piece came to be, but I’m glad someone did. I always like a peek behind the curtain; I’m a fiend for director’s commentaries on DVD.
Though, for one thing, I think you’re underestimating how badly people would like to hear new Beatles albums. Forget Michael Jackson and Jeff Lynne in exchange for four-and-a-half albums, you tell a lot of people on the internet they could get *one* album but their grandmother dies, they’d think, “Well, Granny’s had a good long life, hasn’t she?”
For another thing, okay, Ringo doesn’t accomplish a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, no, and mucks it up a bit besides. I saw what you were doing with Jackson and Lynne (well, Jackson was like “Huh…” and Lynne was like “Ohhh…”) but, as noted, if nothing else John Lennon lives another twenty years, and Roy Orbison dies later as well. I think the appealing thing about this story is that Ringo’s plan KIND OF works (it would have to; if it didn’t, he wouldn’t try it again, would he?) And like you suggested, that roll-up-your-sleeves determinism does sit somewhere on the border of hopelessly tragic and upliftingly inspirational.
I think the story works, even stripped of the time-travel element, *because* it’s not all hunky dory, and that the good stuff still comes with the bad, because most Beatles alternative history *does* end up with the four of them living to be a hundred and eight after McCartney eradicates world hunger and Lennon konks the 9/11 hijackers on the head with a guitar. Any alternate-universe comeback scenarios I’ve ever envisioned (though admittedly not nearly as detailed as yours) usually involve the release of one new album that’s not very good and another breakup the following year, because I’ve the sneaky suspicion that how it really would have gone down.
PS – Does George Martin still produce the Universe B albums? Jeff Lynne presumably still works with them to some extent to be involved in the crash. I know Lennon had a few good things to say about ELO, but I can’t imagine he’d take well to Lynne’s meticulous production approach (“For God’s sakes, enough of this 2/4 snare thing! Let Ringo be Ringo!”)
I would not want to get close enough to Sean Hannity’s void to scream at it.
I liked the time travel aspect of it personally and feel it’s crucial to the entire story, because it gives that small amount of hope that Ringo might make it work *the next time*, and you get this version of Ringo that is *meddling*, because once you start to try and change things for the better you can’t just accept the things that go wrong anyway – an element that makes most good time travel stories *Good* is that the protagonist(s) are made into temporal Ahab, who can’t really live with the new present merely being better – it’s got to be perfect, because they know they can make it perfect the next time.
I actually thought you were being…somewhat less than tragic, let’s say…by killing off Jackson young. It seems to me that in some ways, he’d have been better off dying young and beloved than living through a nightmare of self-inflicted tabloid horror and becoming a drug-addicted, plastic-surgery scarred, walking pedophilia punchline. (Then dying anyway.)
Sure, but he gets an extra twenty years.
He gets to see his younger son grow up, and re-establishes a relationship with his older son. For a lot of us, part of the tragedy of Lennon’s death is that it came just at a point where he was finding balance and peace in his personal life.
Also, someone else above made the same point about Jackson I was going to make. Dying at that point preserves him as “eccentric genius,” and completely erases the PR and personal disasters that came later.
“Because how do you remember Elvis? You know how you remember Elvis.” –Denis Leary
The thing is, of all the Beatles… Ringo makes the only one who could be a Dr. Who.
And somehow, the entire story has that flavor. Not a copy, not a ripoff, but a perverse sense of british ‘well, you can’t have it perfectly, but maybe you can have some of it.’ charm, which both Who and Ringo share.
I think anyone interested in time travel/Beatles might also appreciate this “Day Tripper” excerpt from a science fiction novel by Chris Roberson:
http://www.chrisroberson.net/2009/09/free-fiction-day-tripper.html
thandrak: I cannot help but think that, especially given the overall tenor of the David Tennant run, that the Doctor’s arc is a tragedy.