“Show, don’t tell” is probably the most well-worn saw in teaching creative writing, supposedly originating with Aristophanes.  It’s not bad advice, of course.  The ability to dramatize action, characterization and relationships in scenes is essential to most engaging story telling.  Mastery of the well-crafted scene in which the reader is able both to experience the situation at hand, and also interpret it – “read” it for meaning and understand its implications and reverberations in the story as a whole –  is necessary if one is ever to be a successful writer.  So why is it then, that I have come to want to kick something (or someone) whenever I hear that particular phrase trotted out?    

I was discussing a novel-in-progress with a writer who had hired me to critique her draft, trying to make her understand that her book had too much “showing.” Her last teacher, she told me in self-defense, had told her to “show, don’t tell.”  It was all I could do to keep from lowering my head and beating it against the desk.  That bit of advice had resulted in over 500 pages of long, shapeless scenes with no sense of why they were included, except that some action or conversation had occurred and the author had essentially held a camera on it, “showing” but determined not to tell a thing – no background information, no context, no backstory, no facts – nothing to shape the material and help the reader “get” what he or she was supposed to be paying attention to.  It was all surface, action, vignettes, showing, but no sense that what was shown needed to be selected for a very specific reason, that it had to “do” something in the novel besides just create “mere verisimilitude.”  The advice to “show, don’t tell” was the equivalent of a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  It had left the writer with no sense of why she was showing or what the showing was supposed to accomplish, or even that you don’t have to “show” everything.  It was, to my mind, actually harmful, dangerous advice, a real disservice to the struggling, developing writer (aren’t we all) who was trying to learn to write.

A quick survey of some of the writing books on my shelf reveals a strong emphasis on the “show, don’t tell” dictum.  William Sloane, in The Craft of Writing, says, “Many unsuccessful writers have difficulty believing the simple point of showing, not telling.  They believe in a sort of Divine Right of Kings by which the fiction writer can choose whether he is going to show or to tell.  No such right exists.”  He goes on to say that he believes everything in fiction has to be conveyed to the reader by way of scene.  Needless to say I don’t agree with this! 

Bill Roorbach, in Writing Life Stories, comes on strong for the idea of showing: “A good scene replaces pages and pages of explaining, of expositional excess, of telling.  Instead of a passage about your family’s socioeconomic status, you show your dad pulling up in the brown Ford wagon, muffler dragging… Let the reader write the passage about class.”  This is basic stuff, good fundamental creative writing pedagogy, great to incorporate into one’s repertoire of writing techniques, but it does give the impression that simply mastering “showing” will make one a successful writer.  Roorbach, of course, knows it’s not that simple and he states his bias: “Certain writers (I’m like this) are made out of narrative – characters doing things, dialogue, action – that’s all they really know or care to do.”   He discusses exposition, and he acknowledges that to talk about scenes or pure narrative [showing], as he calls it, vs. pure exposition [telling] is “nutty…since the two forms can’t be so absolutely separated.” Right; they are often intertwined or should be.

Janet Burroway’s book Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft has a chapter entitled “Showing and Telling” which gets closer to what the developing writer needs.  “In order to move your reader, the standard advice runs, ‘Show, don’t tell.’ This dictum can be confusing, considering that all a writer has to work with is words.  What it means is that your job as a fiction writer is to focus attention not on the words, which are inert, nor on the thoughts these words produce, but through these to felt experience, where the vitality of understanding lies.”  How do you do this? She goes on to talk about “significant detail,” which combines the use of sensory detail that is concrete and appeals to the senses, with material that is selected to help shape [my emphasis] the narrative:   “A detail is concrete if it appeals to one of the five senses; it is significant if it also conveys an idea or a judgment or both.”  The selection of significant detail is what allows the reader to interpret the action, not just “see” it.   See in the sense of make sense of, not just view.  And both showing and telling can contain these kind of details. 

Burroway has a good discussion of scene and summary, describing them as methods of treating time in fiction.  “A summary covers a relatively long period of time in relatively short compass; a scene deals with a relatively short period of time in length. Summary is a useful and often necessary device: to give information, fill in a character’s background, let us understand a motive, alter pace, create a transition, leap moments or years.  Scene is always necessary to fiction [her emphasis].  A confrontation, a turning point, or a crisis occurs at given moments that take on significance as moments and cannot be summarized.”  She says that one of the most common errors beginning fiction writers make is to “summarize events rather than to realize them as moments.”  In such a story, the writer would probably find “show, don’t tell” written in the margin!  And rightly so. 

The problem is, some students of writing take the advice to “show, don’t tell” to mean that they should never “tell,” but only and always “show.”  And why shouldn’t they?  They’re undoubtedly confused or unsure about the use of exposition or summary, of “telling” – which they’ve been told represents bad writing.  So they turn everything into scene.  In my critiquing biz I’ve seen many pieces of fiction (and some memoir) in which the writer seems to believe that he or she can’t tell anything. Everything must be shown.  But just because something is “shown” doesn’t mean it’s good.  The struggling writer realizes that something is missing.  He or she realizes that the writing doesn’t seem like the writing one reads in magazines or books, but can’t figure out why or how it is failing.  There is a certain thin quality, a lack of density that the writer recognizes but is at a loss to fix.  The advice of “show, don’t tell,” which may have been helpful or appropriate at a beginning level, leaves him or her in the dark at this point, unable to make the leap to the next stage of writing sophistication.

Although the problem of getting stuck in “show, don’t tell” can apply to both memoir and fiction writers, let’s just talk about fiction writing for a moment.  And in particular, about stories written in the third person.  Nothing is more common, in my experience as a creative writing teacher, than to read a 3^rd person story by a student which begins in an entirely experiential, scenic mode.  There is nothing inherently wrong with this – many successful stories are launched scenically.  But we also need to get enough information at some point to “get” the scene …information that can be supplied and dispensed with quickly by a narrator.  If that information is specific and detailed and particular enough, we won’t even notice (unless we’re paying careful attention as writers, not just readers), that we’re being “told” anything.  We think we’re seeing it. It’s telling disguised as showing.    

So.  Stories are both told and shown.  Most stories are told, ultimately, by a narrator who knows the story and can select and shape the material, going into scenes where they are needed, and telling when that is right, rather than just presenting everything as if through a camera, with the unspoken expectation: “here, you make something of it!”  When we begin reading, in most successful stories, we begin hearing a story (being told).  The story is, in fact, being narrated, told, not just shown.  We are partaking, in modern form, of the ancient ritual of story telling, in which we draw round the fire and a voice takes up residence inside our imaginations, allowing us to live experiences not our own, but for the time being more real and engrossing than our own lives, which fall away when the story takes over. 

 Let’s look at the the opening to “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway’s story that makes brilliant use of a scenic opening:

     “The marvelous thing is that it’s painless,” he said.  “That’s how you know when it starts.”
     “Is it really?”
     “Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odor though.  That must bother you.”
     “Don’t!  Please don’t.”
     “Look at them,” he said.  “Now is it sight or is it scent that brings them like that?”

These first lines are so loaded with characterization, voice, situation, relationship, and drama, so functioning in terms of tone, selection, timing, so pitch perfect for capturing our complete attention, for making us want to read on, that they serve as a great model for “show, don’t tell.”  It may be, in fact, that Hemingway is responsible for the proliferation of that particular writing adage.

But soon enough – in the next line, actually – the voice of a narrator comes in, setting the scene for us and indeed, providing some perspective, the sense that the story is being ‘told,” before the narration slip into Harry’s head.  “The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and [here the point of view flows into Harry] as he looked out past the shade onto the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.”

Is the description “making quick-moving shadows as they passed” Harry’s perception or the narrator’s? They merge, of course, but I’d say it’s the narrator’s description.  The story continues in Harry’s point of view as he lies dying from the gangrene in his leg.  At the end, there is a section break and a shift to Helen’s point of view.  But despite how scenic the story appears, and is, it also has a definite narrator who comes in to provide information and give shape and language to the experience being dramatized.   

Here’s an example of the opening of a story that has a very strong narrator telling the story.  It doesn’t open in scene, but in summary, giving the reader a lot of information and texture that would take forever to be “shown,” if it even could be. 

     “For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy.  Retired now, he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines, tall and slender, and almost always he rode with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and in the winter he loved the smell of the cold.” 

This is the opening to a short story called “Pharmacy” from the inter-related stories in Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (an excellent collection, by the way). I don’t know about you but I love this opening. I love the last line “…and in the winter he loved the smell of cold.”  Isn’t that fine, how it awakens your own nostrils, makes them flair.  And wouldn’t you say this is telling?  We are being told about the character, we hear a narrator’s voice giving us all this information, and there is no scene: we are not in one particular time and place.  We’re in habitual time, summary, not scene.

But how rich it is in establishing a character and story.  How assured the writer is that she can take her time, that she knows her stuff, that she has a story to tell, which she will get to in her own good time! Look at these carefully observed details such as the wild raspberries, the sound of the tires, the sight of the bay and the smell of the pines. These sensory details engage us in the material, in the way sensory details in the real world engage us in life.  We are drawn in, and we imagine that we are “there” in some way, experiencing the story, not just being “told.”  But we are being told.  As the story progresses, the calm, precise, authoritative voice of the narrator continues telling us the story, condensing enormous amounts of interior characterization (“Inwardly, he suffered the quiet trepidations of a man who had witnessed twice in childhood the nervous breakdowns of a mother who had otherwise cared for him with a stridency.”). There is no way to “show” that, it has to be told, as part of establishing a dense characterization.  It takes a narrator to do that, to tell us.   

Now listen to the start of a story that begins scenically, but then gets a huge amount of information and backstory in by interspersing the “showing” with “telling.”  The “showing” in a sense buys the writer time to feather in the “telling”—so that we can get to the real story…the forward action…much more quickly and efficiently:

     “The McElroys really don’t care about seeing us anymore—aren’t you aware of that?” Jonathan Ferris rhetorically and somewhat drunkenly demands of his wife, Sarah Stein.
       Evenly she answers him, “Yes, I can see that.”
       But he stumbles on, insisting, “We’re low, very low, on their priority list.”
      “I know.
      Jonathan and Sarah are finishing dinner, and too much wine, on one of the hottest nights of August—in Hilton, a mid-Southern town, to which they moved (were relocated) six months ago; Jonathan works for a computer corporation.  They bought this new fake-Colonial house, out in some scrubby pinewoods, where now, in the sultry, sulfurous paralyzing twilight no needle stirs, and only mosquitoes give evidence of life, buzz-diving against the window screens.
     In New York, in their pretty Bleecker Street apartment, with its fern-shaded courtyard, Sarah would have taken Jonathan’s view of the recent McElroy behavior as an invitation to the sort of talk they both enjoyed: insights, analyses—and from Sarah, somewhat literary speculations.  Their five-year marriage has always included a great deal of talk, of just this sort.
     However, now [my emphasis to show you that here we returning to the scene, to “showing”],  as he looks across the stained blond maple table that came, inexorably, with the bargain-priced house, across plates of wilted food that they were too hot and tired to eat—as he focuses on her face Jonathan realizes [we’re now in his point of view] that Sarah, who never cries, is on the verge of tears; and also that he is too drunk to say anything that would radically revise what he has already said.”  And so on!

It would be worthwhile to note how much information we now know about Sarah and Jonathan!  Alice Adams, in this short story called “New Best Friends” just comes out and tells us a lot of stuff!  A lot of necessary information (relevant information) has been laid down by the time we get to the end of the first page!  But with great details: telling disguised as showing.  The story feels dense, textured, layered. 

And that is because she both shows AND tells.

First let’s define a few terms:

Journal – just that.  A collection of dated entries that gather force by accretion of experience, always chronological. Many people, myself included, keep private journals for their own amazement and amusement. Some journals, however, are meant from the start as public works (Sue Hubble’s A Country Year, Rick Bass’ Oil Notes, May Sarton’s At Seventy).  The preface of  Reeve Lindbergh’s No More Words, about her experience seeing her mother succumb to Alzheimer’s, reads thus: “These pages represent a kind of journal, with chapters taken from my own diary entries, written off and on between May 1999, the time my mother came to live with us in Vermont, and February 7, 2001, when she died.  I first began to keep a record of this period for myself alone, hoping to make some sense of my turbulent thoughts, feelings, and moods surrounding my mother’s presence and care…This is not, however, an exact reproduction of my diary…I found myself expanding upon the original entries as I typed them into the computer, adding a new thought here or an old memory there, as these thoughts and memories came to me.”  Journal material often finds its way into memoirs.   

Autobiography – from birth to “death”/fame; chronological, linear, factual narrative; purports to get the facts right; involves research and factual accuracy –“history” as opposed to how one remembers one’s own life.

Memoirs – as in “the general writes his…” Usually associated with famous people or people who want to capture their life stories because they feel they’re important or maybe just of interest to their families – usually not concerned with questions of truth, memory, imagination, literary style – sees things pretty straightforward; reminiscing. Patti Smith’s Just Kids, which won the National Book Award this year (2010), strikes me as her memoirs, rather than a memoir.  But these terms are not discreet necessarily. Smith’s book is not actually identified as a memoir on the cover.  It feels to me as if it draws heavily on journals from the period which she is writing about, the late sixties and seventies, and it recounts her early years with Robert Mapplethorpe, their development as artists, and the wide cast of characters, famous and otherwise, whom they met in New York.  It doesn’t seem to me to have the terms of a literary memoir, which is fine, because it has its own terms: it captures the time and place, and is of interest because of Smith and Mapplethorpe and their artistic world in New York at that time. 

Personal Essay: can be memoiristic and often is; Philip Lopate (the expert on the personal essay form) on essay: The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy – writer seems to be speaking directly to your ear – through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue – a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness, companionship.  A conversation with the reader, an informed mixture of personality, wisdom, facts, and storytelling.  Writers look for universal in individual experience – open as free verse. Some full-length books are extended personal essays, such as Great Plains by Ian Frazier.  Sometimes memoirs contain varying degrees of personal essay. 

Example of Jonathan Franzen’s “My Father’s Brain” – in How to be Alone – The piece starts with memory, but includes research on Alzheimer’s –

Creative non-fiction.  Umbrella term – could be travel writing, nature writing, food writing, crime writing like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, or reportage like Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm: A true Story of Men against the Sea, or Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.  Does not tend to originate in memoir, but in the current world.  Sometimes used to arch over memoir also. 

Literary memoir.  Originates in memory, in personal experience.  And the contract with the reader is that you’re telling the truth as you know it and have discovered it and believe it to be true.  Usually takes a portion of a life; childhood, for example, or deals with a specific theme or experience – and disregards the rest of the life. Examples: Angela’s Ashes about growing up impoverished in Limerick, Ireland; Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club about a childhood in oil country in Texas in a dysfunctional family; or a serious challenge one faces such as an illness, catastrophe, crisis – Mark  Doty’s Heaven’s Coast; Girl, Interrupted, Susana Kasen; death of a parent, Philip Roth’s Patrimony; Katherine Rich’s The Red Devil – to Hell with Cancer and Back.  Being Catholic and a spiritual quest, Virgin Time by Patricia Hampl.  Franzen’s and Reeve Lindbergh dealing with their parents’ Alzheimer’s.  Margaret Wurtele dealing with the death of her son; or a personal, cultural or racial exploration, such as Korean adoptee Jane Jeong Trenka trying to make sense of the dualities of being born Korean and raised in America, in MN, or Toi Derricot’s The Black Notebooks: an Interior Journey about being a light-skinned black woman who confronts what it means to be a black woman living in a racially divided world, or Carolyn Heilbrun’s The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. Or Somewhere Towards the End, by Diana Athill, written when she was 89, about being old.  They can also cover experiences in the natural world, or living in a different , perhaps exotic locale, like Isak Dinnesen’s Out of Africa (“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”)  or capture an undramatic trip down a river on a houseboat, like Nessa Rapoport’s House on the River, which is a meditation on memory, the past, the connection between generations.  Many memoirists place a personal story against a larger political or historical context – memoirist can become the voice of a whole culture or time – Autobiography of Malcolm X – Primo Levy writing about the Holocaust experience.

Memoir is about the writer’s experience even if it is “about” someone else. Example of The Suicide Index, by Joan Wickersham – about her father committing suicide, and exploring his life to figure out why, but it is her experience that she is recounting, what she experienced, thought, felt, what his death did to her and what she made of that.  We identify and relate to her struggle as the one who had the experience.  She uses an index as the structure, which is an interesting example of finding a form that lets her tell the story she wants to tell, to deal with the material in a way that is creative and functions well.   She probably had bits and pieces of the material and found a way to organize them via the index:  Here’s from the book’s index:

Suicide:

                        act of

                                    attempt to imagine, 1 – 4

                                    bare-bones account, 5-6

                                    immediate aftermath, 7 – 34

                        belief that change of scene might unlock emotion concerning, 44-47

                        day after

                                    brother’s appearance, 48-53

                                    etc.    

Memoir has narrative shape; story; has a subject and focus, involves reflection to some degree; generally, though not always, attention to language and style; many memoirs are written by writers who work in other genres like fiction or poetry, but can also be written by unknowns, people who have a story to tell.  Each person finds his or her own way to write their story – there’s no one way, and you get to write the book you want to write, the way you want to write it.  But it helps to connect with what readers find interesting, engaging, irresistible, compelling.  You eventually want to be able to write to some extent as if you’re not only the writer but also the reader – to be able to perceive as a reader how your writing is coming across.  The only way I know to do this is to read a lot. 

Memoir often is both story and essay – to the extent that it reflects – but degree of both can vary greatly.  We experience another mind on the page, musing; have the experience of intimacy with another person, a voice speaking truth – at least emotional and psychological truth.  “Memoir can present its story AND consider the meaning of the story.” (Patricia Hampl)  Hampl again: “True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world.  To write one’s life is to live it twice, and the second living is both spiritual and historical, for a memoir reaches deep within the personality as it seeks its narrative form and it also grasps the life-of-the-times as no political analysis can.” 

            We’re attracted to what really happened – experience unfiltered through fiction or fantasy – and also how someone else deals with life experience – with pain or loss or trauma or being gay or coming of age, or whatever.  We look for wisdom, understanding, not just the experience, but what the writer MAKES of it. HOW you say what happened to you, not just what happened.  Not only do I want to say it, but I want to say it well. 

We accept that imagination is involved, to the extent that the person is remembering and writing and re-creating experience – not doing an actual factual recording.  We understand the fallibility of memory – the unreliability of it – but our understanding is that the writer is doing his or her best to capture the truth of the matter.  Not to fabricate, not to make things out to be what they weren’t.  But we accept shaping and rearranging of time – example of Patricia Hampl making two pilgrimages to Italy, but compressed them into one story in Virgin Time. 

Memoirists often use of the tools of the novelist: scene, characters, drama, and dialogue, plot. 

The important distinction in memoir is the difference between reminiscence and revelation.  You’re not just remembering; you’re discovering something.

Vivian Gornick: “Good Writing has two characteristics…It’s alive on the page, and the reader is persuaded that the writer is on a voyage of discovery.” 

She goes on to pose these questions for the memoirist: “Is the narrator indulging in self-serving confessionalism here, or is the narrator honestly going to try to get to the bottom of the matter being presented, showing me the widest view and making the deepest sense of what happened…Do I believe this voice? Am I attracted by this tone? Am I drawn to this persona? And beyond that, Does the shape of the writing compel? Is the language expressive? Is the story being told through tone, language and shape?”

Voice Lessons

“Voice” is a term that gets bandied about in the writing world a lot, as in “He hasn’t found his voice,” or in reviews, such as: “She has created a unique, lovely and deceptively unsophisticated voice for her narrator.”  Sometimes readers will exclaim to a writer, “I love your voice!” or an editor will reject a piece because “the voice isn’t fresh or original enough.”  Voice seems to be a crucial yet elusive aspect of writing.  Is it simply personality in writing?  Like personality or style, don’t you either have it or not? Can it be developed, or learned?  What is it, really?

For starters, voice is the opposite of silence.  Voice is what allows us to say it, whatever “it” is.  It’s what allows the reader to hear the writing, instead of simply reading black marks on white paper.  Voice is the breath or spirit that animates the writing – the life in the writing, one might say.  It can also coalesce and synthesize all the many complex and mysterious elements that must work together to produce a successful piece of writing.

Just to complicate things, we can use voice to refer to the voice of the narrator in an individual poem, work of fiction or memoir; or we can use the term to describe the recognizable unique “signature” often associated with mature artists and found throughout much of their work.

In a review of Alice Adam’s collected stories, we have a good description of a mature writer’s signature voice: “Reading these stories over again, one is struck by their remarkable consistency of voice, recognizable through a wide spectrum of circumstance and character…It is this voice – direct, clear-sighted, indelibly marked by Freud and the women’s movement – that gives the stories their feeling of authenticity.”  Voice as it is used here is the external manifestation, in language, of the writer’s sensibility: how she sees the world; her values; what she is attracted to in terms of subject matter; her style as expressed through diction, syntax, tone.  Her expression and essence as an artist and person, really.

Then there’s the narrator’s voice in individual pieces.  In fiction, when writers adopt a first person narrator to tell the story, that character’s voice – the manner of speaking, the personality, the intelligence or lack thereof, the values and perspective – is as important to the success of the work as the plot itself.  In fact, it is impossible to separate the narrator from the plot, since character drives action, and action drives character.  Often finding the right narrator – and therefore the right voice – is the key to being able to tell (and therefore write) the story.  Two popular contemporary novels employ narrators whose voices are the perfect vehicles for rendering the authors’ material.  In The Lovely Bones, Alice Siebold uses the voice of a teenage girl who was raped and murdered, and who now narrates from Heaven:  “The odd thing about Earth was what we saw when we looked down.  Besides the initial view that you might suspect, the old ants-from-the-skyscraper phenomenon, there were souls leaving bodies all over the world.”  The use of this young, dead, heaven-inhabiting narrator, unusual to say the least, is arresting both in terms of perspective and poignancy.  Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything is Illuminated creates an irresistible narrator in a Ukranian translator whose command of English is hilariously off base: “My legal name is Alexander Perchov.  But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name.”  Alex’s voice expresses an exuberant personality and his flubbing of English keeps us entertained and alert.   It’s easy to imagine that finding these distinctive narrative voices is what allowed the writers to actually write their books.

In memoir, certainly the first person voice contains elements of the personality of the writer herself, as if she’s just speaking to us directly.  But in literary memoir, the author is shaping herself as a character, making critical choices regarding the narration of her own story and the presentation of self.  She has to access or develop the best voice that will let her tell the story she really wants to tell, in all its complexity and truth.  I recently heard a wonderful memoir writer, Laura Flynn, author of Swallow the Ocean, say to really write something you have to know the material so deeply and that takes a long time.

In The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, Vivian Gornick describes her own experience of finding a persona that would allow her to write her memoir Fierce Attachments:  “To tell that tale, I soon discovered, I had to find the right tone of voice; the one I habitually lived with wouldn’t do at all: it whined, it grated, it accused; above all, it accused. Then there was the matter of syntax: my own ordinary, everyday sentence—fragmented, interjecting, overriding—also wouldn’t do; it had to be altered, modified, brought under control… What I didn’t see and that for a long while, was that this point of view could only emerge from a narrator who was me and at the same time not me.”  Through a slow, painful process, Gornick “began to correct for myself.”  Eventually, through what I assume were trial and error attempts to get at “the right tone, syntax, and perspective,” she realizes that she has found the right voice.  “I had a narrator on the page strong enough to do battle for me….I saw what I had done: I had created a persona.”  This persona, Gornick explains, was not only a relief from her usual self, but also “the instrument of my illumination.”

In my memoir, Crossing the Moon, I was aware that I couldn’t just “express myself”; I couldn’t just be my usual boring old self!  To me the reader is always saying, But what have you done for me lately? I don’t take it for granted that anyone will necessarily read what I write.  I have to deliver.  It’s amazing, in a way, how much has to get accomplished in the opening pages of a memoir.  You have to give the reader some idea of who you are, where you are in time and place, and what the story is about; you also have to seduce, interest, entertain and hold the reader, infusing the writing with personality, style, candor, wit, drama or whatever it takes.  This is where voice comes in.  Only voice can pull it all together.  It’s hard to describe how one arrives at the right voice in memoir.  It is both you and not you.  It’s a kind of stylized or distilled you, a you in service to the story and the reader.

“Find” is the verb most often used in conjunction with “voice,” as in a reviewer describing a recent memoir: “…he has found in his own book a narrative voice that accommodates both parts of his temperament: an irreverent but meditative voice…”  Apparently the author didn’t just “have” this voice available: he had to “find” it.  It probably involved, as most searches do, plenty of false starts, dead ends and luck.   So are there any tips that might aid one in the search?

One place to start is with subject matter.  Obviously some people know their subject matter, their stories, from the start.  But for others it’s a matter of hit or miss.  The best description I know of what characterizes one’s true subject matter is in Sean O’Faolain’s On Writing the Short Story:  “What one searches for and what one enjoys in a short story [or poem, memoir, story or novel] is a special distillation of personality, a unique sensibility which has recognized and selected at once a subject that, above all other subjects, is of value to the writer’s temperament and to his [and hers] alone – his counterpart, his perfect opportunity to project himself.”

If we think of certain works, this pithy but somewhat abstract quote takes on body and meaning. Don’t we recognize intuitively in a Mary Oliver poem, for example, that she has found her “perfect opportunity to project herself” in writing about the natural world, or that Julie Hecht, in creating a narrator whose “tone of voice mocks her own narcissism” in her first novel The Unprofessionals, has found what is uniquely her own?

Sometimes teachers may help you identify what your best subject matter is. Sometimes what the writer wants to avoid is, in the end, the richest vein to tap.   Reading writers who have similar or simpatico backgrounds, locales, issues or styles can point one in the right direction. Finding the right subject matter takes experimentation, patience, and a lot of writing that doesn’t amount to much but which moves the writer along in ways that we don’t necessarily understand.  It means writing not what you think you should write, but what you actually want to write.  Sometimes it is a matter of maturing and developing one’s self.  Peter Elbow believes that the attainment of what he calls “real voice” is “a matter of growth and development rather than mere learning.”  Happily, writing itself feeds one’s knowledge of self, and knowledge of self feeds one’s writing.

Another way to develop voice is by learning to “hear” one’s own writing, in much the same way the reader does. In One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty talks about how from an early age, she always heard the sentences on the page in a voice “…saying it silently to me.  It isn’t my mother’s voice or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly I listen to it.  It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself…  I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers – to read as listeners – and with all writers, to write as listeners… My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books.  When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes.  I have always trusted this voice.”

Most successful writers, I’d wager, have developed the ability to “hear” their own writing in the way Welty describes. You have to be able not only to write — but also – at some point — to be able to hear the voice in the writing that the reader will hear and the voice of the piece itself.  I remember Grace Paley saying when she was a Loft Mentor that she writes with her ear, reading everything aloud as she goes.

In a fascinating example of letting the voice of the story take over, Dorothy Allison describes in her contributor’s note in The Best American Short Stories 2003 how she had worked on her story “Compassion” through many unsatisfactory drafts, but finally decided to just finish it to read for a large audience.  But at the reading, when she got to the last two pages of the story, they weren’t there.  She had brought the wrong draft.  “I let myself unfocus, opened my mouth, and spoke the story’s voice.  It took me up and carried me through, finished itself the only way it could.”  I don’t recommend trying this in front of an audience!  And I’m pretty sure that voice wouldn’t have taken over if Allison hadn’t done as much processing and writing of the story as she had.  But while discounting for a certain amount of natural storytelling bull, I do like to believe that that story knew what it wanted, and did indeed speak for itself.

One thing the writer who listens to his or her own writing will be listening for is tone.  Tone has to do with the writer’s attitude towards the material.  Tone is one of the cues that the reader picks up automatically as he gets his bearing and begins to grasp what is intended.  It is a large part of what he “hears” in the writing.  Tone is what happens when the writer feels the material, is in synch with the emotions behind the writing.  Tone doesn’t have to be one dimensional, either.  It can consist of a lot of notes, ranging up and down the scale, as long as there is a cohesive feel to the work, the overall key, we might say.

The writer Norman Podhoretz has said that “the poem, the story, the essay…is already there, much in the way that Socrates said mathematical knowledge was already there, before a word is ever put to paper, and that the act of writing is the act of finding the magical key that will unlock the floodgates and let the flow begin…. The key… is literally a key in that it is musical…it is the tone of voice, the only tone of voice in which this particular piece of writing will permit itself to be written.

It’s an appealing idea that if we just find the right tone, we can channel the whole thing onto paper effortlessly.  And sometimes it does work that way.  More often, however, the poem or story may be “there,” but getting it “here” is different matter.  Try as we might we can’t find that magical key.  What then?  The problem may be that we don’t know how we feel about the material, or there hasn’t been enough inner processing, which is often unconscious and certainly not amenable to our deadlines, to have a voice ready to speak.  I find just writing itself, piling up a huge mountain of words, may in fact be a way of both accessing and creating what is not immediately available.  Out of that effort and let’s face it, waste, a thread may appear, one you can pluck if you’re lucky to unwind the whole spool.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of reading other people’s good writing in the process of developing one’s own writing and voice.  People think writing comes from experience, and it does, but it also comes from reading.  At a literary conference I heard Billy Collins say that beginning writers sometimes think that by reading other writers, they will be too influenced and not develop their own unique voice, but that it’s just the opposite.  The more you read, the more likely you are to write with originality, and the less you read, the more likely it is you’ll write cliched or generic stuff.

Seeing what other writers have done opens up possibilities for us.  Here’s a passage I wrote about caring for my mother:  “I had arrived at the moment when I myself and no one else had to give my mother an enema.  It was called Fleet, a name I turned over and over in my mind, conjuring up the curious associations of speed or naval ships.  How did it get that name?  A family name?  Who would want enemas to bear the family name?  Not me.  I had slunk around like a criminal at the drugstore when I bought it.  It seemed childishly shameful, a dark secret, “excrement problems,” something so private I wished to be far far away.  But I was the only one around.  Life had brought me to this moment, which involved squirting a vial of liquid into my mother’s rectum as she lay curled on her left side of the bed.  I looked around for someone else to do this, to take over.  But no one else was there. It was one of those bald moments in life, the realization that no one else is going to do it, whatever it is.  You have to do it yourself.  And I did.”  I probably wouldn’t have written that passage if I hadn’t read Philip Roth’s description of cleaning up his father’s shit in Patrimony.

To achieve voice in writing – either in an individual piece or the singular voice of the mature artist – is usually a long process involving the three R’s: reading, writing and revision.  Though I’m sure there were glimmers of it from the start, I imagine that Alice Adam’s distinctive voice evolved over time, story by story, as she came to be – and trust – herself more and more as a writer and a person.  I imagine she listened for the voice on the page, the voice of the story itself.  Each successful line, paragraph and completion built her confidence – and confidence is no small thing, in writing and just about everything else.  It seems the only way to attain confidence is to hang in there, to keep on trucking, “screwing one’s courage to the sticking point,” coming closer each time to what is truly one’s own.

For starters, you’re going to be overwhelmed.  We might as well get that up front. Writing–or trying to write a book-length anything–is overwhelming.  I know, because I’ve written several, and it was hell.  And I’ve worked with a lot of other people who have written books, and I’ve never heard a one of them say, “Hey, that was easy.”  Or if I did, I fled the other way.  I did hear a few of them say it was good work, and certainly many of them said it was entirely worthwhile, possibly life-saving, and deeply satisfying.  In other words, worth it.  But still overwhelming, especially in the beginning (also in the middle, not to mention the end…).  So, okay.  Now you know.  You’re going to be overwhelmed. Other people have been overwhelmed and lived to tell about it. 

It’s hard for me to recollect how I wrote my memoir Crossing the Moon.  It was not exactly a straight-forward procedure!  First it was a long essay that was published in the New York Times Magazine.  That piece was mosaic-like, non-sequential sections that skipped around in time, trying to get at the dilemma I found myself in: almost 39, no child.  I had always wanted to be a writer, and coming of age in the 50s, I had been encouraged to be a virgin, wife, mother first and foremost.  In truth, I also had encouragement to be a writer, but I couldn’t see how I could be both a mother and a writer.  My own mother was a full-time mother, and I assumed that was the way motherhood should be.  I thought of writers as people—not women, really—who devoted themselves to their art, their “work” as we liked to call it in creative writing graduate school.  I had one foot in deeply conditioned domesticity and the other in the women’s movement, which was reinventing women’s lives so drastically it made my head hurt.  It made for a weird split.  I had thought I’d be a writer automatically, given that I had been fast off the blocks as a senior in college in 1969, winning a Book of the Month Club Fellowship ($3,000.  I bought a Chevy Nova with it) and Stegner Fellowship to Stanford.

So off I went to California to be a writer.  And that’s when the trouble began.  The trouble being I didn’t know anything much about writing.  Thus began the long, hard, struggle to learn to write, because my native talent could only take me so far—about as far as California, where I was plopped down in the creative writing seminar with older, more sophisticated folk who knew a lot more about writing, and life, than I did.  I had thought I’d publish my first book before I was twenty-five, then thirty, then thirty-five.  I was almost forty, I hadn’t published a book, and I was afraid if I changed focus to have a child, that would be the end of writing.  I would use motherhood as an excuse and an escape.  But I was about to miss out on having a daughter or son—even befuddled as I was I could see that was a huge life experience to forgo.  The piece in the Times Magazine traced the experiences and ambivalences that had landed me, ambivalent and desperate, in infertility treatment at that late point in my life.

I half-joked that maybe I should have stopped with that long essay on the subject.  But something pushed me on to write a book about it all; the truth was, I hadn’t really had my say. I hadn’t, in that one piece (which got brutally edited to shorten it), been able to express the complexity, richness, sorrow and blessings of being me.  I hadn’t been able to talk enough about growing up in South Carolina, my parents, my experiences in California as the world got shape-shifted by the sexual revolution and the women’s movement.  I hadn’t been able to talk enough about cats, my husband, writing, my sense of loss and continuity that this major life experience forced on me.  I felt like a mess, and I wanted to take control of my story. To tell it my way, to get to tell it all.  I wanted to make sense of my life, and be the one to define my own experience. I had made choices with consequences, and I had gained and lost.  I wanted to honor those gains and losses.   Maybe most memoirs are memorials in a way.

But it wasn’t a straight-forward or easy process to turn that short piece into a book.  A book is so LONG!  I had to find a structure, I had to figure out what to put in and what to leave out, and what order all the material should be in.  I had to get in backstory, which would give meaning to the present action story.  There was just so much material, from my background to deciding I would try to get pregnant, going through infertility treatment, publishing my first book, and finally coming to terms with not having a child.

Who knows how it came about (certainly not me), but finally I decided on a structure of starting the first chapter in the present, in present tense, as I go about my day, mulling over my situation of realizing time is running out to get pregnant, using the routine of the day (CAREFULLY selected moments and incidents ) to allow me to show what was on my mind, almost like the external events were scaffolding that allowed me to build the internal story of my ambivalence, mounting crisis, fear of making a mistake (big with me), desire to do and be what I had staked my life on for so long.  It had to appear natural, as if I were just going through the day, but be intentional, telling, and loaded.

Because my background was in fiction, I started out scenically, in action, “showing.”  This is not the only way to start or write a memoir. Many begin more expositionally, with a narrator (the author’s persona) telling the story, or at least setting it up.  But however you start, you have to find a voice that will let you do both: show and tell. 

Here is the opening of my memoir:  “It’s an unseasonably warm afternoon in April, 1986, and I’m sitting on a stone bench outside a Dairy Queen near our house in Minneapolis, considering the two mothers and three children who share my table.  I’m about to turn thirty-nine years old, which is why I’m so interested in mothers and children.”   I load the opening with information, and I hope I hit on both situation and the “story.”

Vivian Gornick makes the brilliant point that every work of literature has both a situation and a “story.” She’s not using story here in the way we usually do, as simply narrative. She means story as what the writer is emotionally concerned with.  “The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer.”  (See Gornick’s book, The Situation and the Story.)  She gives the example of a poem by Elizabeth Bishop describing herself at seven during the First World War, “sitting in a dentist’s office, turning the pages of National Geographic, listening to the muted cries of pain her timid aunt utters from within.  That’s the situation.  The story is the child’s first experience of isolation: her own, her aunt’s, and that of the world.”

Once I had established the forward action in the first chapter, some sense of “something is going to happen,” I could catch my breath in the second chapter, going back in time to fill in background. I used a question to frame the backstory: “So how was it, I wondered, that I had arrived at this point in my life: almost thirty-nine years old, no child? When I looked back, I could see why, and even when, I took a sharp turn away from motherhood.  I could also see why motherhood would catch up with me.”

That expository question and paragraph frame the material that is to come, which I treat somewhat scenically.  I’m shaping the material according to the situation and story established in the first chapter.  The situation is that I’m at a crisis point where I have to “do” something, try to get pregnant or not and grapple with what that will mean to my writing; the story is about my identity and self-definition—who am I and who will I become?

After the second chapter, I use a pattern of returning to the present action story (trying to have a child naturally, going into infertility treatment, etc.), in every other chapter (first, third, fifth), and using the even chapters to go back and tell the story of how I came to be in the present action fix.  Eventually when the past and present meet, from that point on the rest of the book is all present action.

This is not to say I wrote it exactly that way. That was the order and structure I finally (desperately, no doubt) lit upon, when I had complied a lot of material in a random kind of way. I knew things I wanted to be in the book – that HAD to be in book.  Not just because they happened (you definitely have to pick and choose, according to what the book is ABOUT), but because of their value and meaning to me.  Because of what they MEANT to me!  I had to figure out how to mesh everything together, to take the mess and mass I had on my hands, and lay it out in some order where readers could receive it. 

But enough about me!

All you really want to know is how to write the dang thing.

Let’s say that you’ve gotten some rough draft down.  You’ve written some scenes, not that you know where they’ll come in the book necessarily, you’ve described some of the main players, you’ve captured some key moments, you’ve fooled around with some backstory, wondering what to put in and what to leave out. Maybe you’ve started at the beginning, whatever that is, and run out of gas.  Well, never mind.  Good!  You’ve gotten some words down on paper.  I want to try to tell you what to do next.

I like to garden, and I have hardly ever met a flower I didn’t like and didn’t want to grow. This passion has led to a lot of different plants showing up in my garden, some of which have thrived, and many of which have straggled, or downright died.  But at some point I paid good money to have a landscape designer come in and do an actual garden design. It looked so beautiful on paper!  The garden has never looked as good as the design on paper, with its colored pastel drawings of various size circles representing plants, and then there was the hardscape.  I had never heard the term hardscape, and now I’m its biggest fan.  I love hardscape because it won’t die on you, or get leggy.  It’s the foundation of the garden, the brick paths and in our case, a pergola.  It’s things made out of brick, stone, concrete, and wood.  Not plants – they must be the softscape, though I haven’t heard that word used.  At any rate, Julie, our landscape designer, started with the hardscape and got a kind of geometric pattern down. She cut down our ugly concrete patio to a perfect square, and made a brick path in from the garage into a straight line intersecting with one side of the concrete patio, and resumed the straight line brick walk on the other side leading to the backdoor.  Geometric!  Then she filled in the whole backyard with swirling circles of beautiful plants (at least on paper) – which, I suddenly saw – would not have worked without the hardscape, to give definition and form and shape to the green things. 

            At a certain point, just writing is a little like gardening without a plan. You may indeed create a beautiful garden by planting things here or there, but you may also sense an underlying lack of order and form.  You may actually waste time and effort at a certain point.  Maybe if you were a little more patient–which I am not–you might sit down and consider things before just rushing to the garden center and buying whatever is in bloom and strikes your fancy, planting it wherever you can squeeze it into the yard. 

Bear with me here.  You will get to plant – and write – eventually.  But first let’s just think about the overall garden – the overall book you want to write, now that you’ve had some experience growing plants and words.  So where to start?  How to start, that is the better question.  I’m speaking here about the stage where you’ve generated some material, made contact, as it were, with some of the material of the book  Now, you’re ready to try a complete draft.

  It’s human nature to want to start at the beginning, but what is the beginning?  Where to begin?  And how?   

Now is the time to pause, and think about the Big Picture, to try to grasp the gestalt of your book as it has been forming somewhere deep in your mind. You want to try to bring this information more to consciousness, and doing some writing on the side, conceptually, is a good way to do that.

Write the answers to these questions to get a firmer grasp on the project as a whole.

First, consider your intentions and audience. 

Why do you want to write this? 

There are any number of reasons, but what are yours?  To create a text?  To give meaning and coherent to your life? To honor or preserve something, as in creating a memorial? To understand your own experience? To take control of your experience by ordering it and representing it?  To be praised, admired, loved?

To get back at the bastards is probably not a good reason; same with I’ll show those bastards.  At the very least the reader will expect you to have arrived at some earned understanding and wisdom that doesn’t include pure revenge. 

Who is the audience for this work? 

It’s helpful to be clear on this, because it influences what and how you write.  So take some time to write about your intended audience.  Get clear on who you’re writing for, and why. 

If it’s just for yourself, your standards are different (perhaps) than if you hope to publish it publically.

If it’s for family and friends only, they may not need as much context since they know you.

But if you’re aiming for readers, people out there who don’t know you or your story, you have to step up your act.  You have to be in the ballpark of what readers want.  So you might stop a moment and ask yourself what makes a memoir interesting to me?

            Is it because of a likeable or appealing protagonist?

            Is it because of the story itself?  You want to know about this particular subject matter or experience—becoming a widow, or hiking the Pacific Crest Trail alone.  Or you want to know how the author got through this childhood, or crisis, and what they discovered over the course of the journey.  You want to know what another has made of things, of life.  You want the particulars, this individual’s story, and you want the universals that it represents: love, loss, longing, courage, strength, human nature, anger, pain, resilience…

            Is it the craft? Do you value the style or language, or the unique voice and vision?

            Do you love self-deprecating humor?

            Do you want to be moved to tears?

            Do you enjoy the originality?  The depth perhaps?  The creation of a vivid, fully realized time and place? 

            It’s worth thinking about these in terms of your own memoir.  What do you want a reader to respond to in your book? What will make someone want to read it?  What will they “get” from it?

            Just accept that you can’t please all the people all the time.  Don’t even bother!  But think of that reader out there in reader-land who really is interested in the story you have to tell, who is simpatico, who is waiting for you to tell him or her your story. Write to that person; write with that listener/reader firmly in mind.  Speak to him; tell her. 

            And while you’re at it, think about what you dislike in memoir: self-pity, victimization, revenge, bathos. The feeling that the author hasn’t “made” anything of his or her experience.  Had the experience but missed the meaning…

Next, take some time to write everything you “know” about this book.  You might want to do this over several writing sessions. 

            What will be in it?

            What will it cover?

            What is it ABOUT?

            What will make it compelling to you and others?

            How long might it be?

            What time period might it cover?

            Where does it take place?

            When might you finish it?

            What do you want it to do for you?

            What do you want it to do for readers?

            Who is the audience for this book?

Write everything you KNOW about this book at this point.  Don’t think too much about it, just free-write and let come out things you know, even if you don’t know you know them until you write them.

            Now, write a Prologue or Preface.  This time, speak directly to this interested, sympathetic reader who wants to but doesn’t know anything about you or your book.  Tell how the book came about; explain what you want to do in the book, and why.  Say what you want the reader to “get” from the book.

            Next, write a description of the situation as if you’re describing it objectively.  Do a synopsis of the situation.  For example, with Crossing, “a woman ambivalent about motherhood because of her writing ambitions waits until almost 40 to try to get pregnant, goes through a series of infertility treatments, has a failed pregnancy, and has to come to terms with stopping and accepting that she won’t bear children.”  Doesn’t have to be long. Just a capsule description of the situation of the book. 

            Now write what the STORY is.  Story in Vivien Gornick’s sense.  What is the book ABOUT?  My book is ABOUT choices and consequences; about ambivalence about women’s roles; about the desire to be a writer; about a woman’s identity and self-definition.

            Gornick has said that the subject of autobiography is always self-definition (and she adds, “but it cannot be self-definition in the void.  The memoirist, like the poet and novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s wisdom that counts.”)  In what way is your memoir a work of self-definition?  In what way does it engage with the world? 

            Now try some clustering.  Pick a word that is central to your idea of your memoir.  It can be a subject word, or a place, or a person or anything that serves as shorthand to you for your memoir. 

            Write this word in the center of the page and draw a circle around it.  Then just brainstorm everything that comes to mind when you think of that word, and write those words anywhere around the circled word, drawing lines to connect and letting the new words spawn more words/images/ideas and connect them to the secondary word or to other words on the cluster.  You will have a central word in a circle and a whole page (hopefully) of words connected to that word, each other, or new words.  Just let anything come to you that the words you’re jotting down on the cluster conjure up.  Nothing is right or wrong, just brainstorm and put down as much as you can, as fast as you can.  You’re pre-writing, doing a pre-writing exercise to generate material, so that you don’t have to face the blank page before you’ve tanked up with some ideas, images, energy.

            If during the course of the clustering, a voice that gives you a first sentence or paragraph starts up in your head, write that down.  Keep going if you can. 

            Now try writing some key words, words that seem to you key to your memoir.  You might think of these words as the stars in a constellation, and somehow your memoir will be linking them.  But right now, you’re just writing down the stars. For example, in my memoir, key words would be the past, the future, ambivalence, writing, children, mistakes, cats, death, identity.  They don’t have to mean anything to anyone else, but they mean something to you.  You understand that they will be important words and concepts in your memoir.

Next, as we continue doing some pre-writing, some preparation for the memoir, working on the hardscape, let’s think about Time and Place. 

            What period of time does this memoir cover?  You don’t have to know for sure, but you probably have a pretty good idea.  And you need to be able to see what point in time you’re going to get to, because life goes on (and on) but a memoir stops at some point in time.  You have to cut it off. 

            Draw a time line that is linear and chronological, and mark major events or moments on it pertaining to your memoir.  Where does the situation start and end?   It won’t necessarily be written in that chronological, linear order, but it is helpful to grasp that in your mind.

            Place.  Place is so evocative of feelings that you want to make sure your memoir is firmly grounded somewhere.  Eudora Welty says, “Being shown how to locate, to place, any account is what does most towards making us believe it…the moment the place in which the novel [or memoir] happens is accepted as true, through it will begin to glow, in a kind of recognizable glory, the feeling and thought that inhabited the novel [memoir] in the author’s head and animated the whole of his [her] work.” (from Welty’s marvelous article “Place in Fiction,” in The Eye of the Story.)

            Write a short passage that describes a place of importance to your memoir.  Sometimes starting with place will jumpstart you into the story itself.  It will put you in touch with the felt-sense of the story.

            Narrative Structure is something that won’t come until you’ve gotten a good deal of draft material and pre-writing done.  So don’t worry about it. You will eventually find the order of the material and how to structure things.  Each writer has to find what works for his or her memoir, because form is so intrinsic to the author’s overall vision.

            Here are two possible narrative forms for you to consider.  One is the classic narrative arc, which a lot of short stories and novels employ, and the other is a more modular form.

 The short story writer Alice Adams had a schema for the narrative arc that goes ABDCE.  A= action; B=background; D=development; C=climax; E=ending.  Janet Burroway, in Writing Fiction, does a good job of explaining narrative arc, using Cinderella as an example. There is the initial conflict: Cinderella and the stepmother; complications, which go back and force between the protagonist, Cinderella, and her adversaries or difficulties; the crisis (the slipper fits) and the resolution of the wedding and happily ever after. 

            You will notice in many memoirs and novels you read, if you look for the backbone, that the story starts with a situation, A-action; contains B, background which is feathered in, not necessarily delivered in a big chunk; moves into D, development, the proverbial plot thickens, in which complications to the original situation occur over the course of a certain length of time; then there is a C, crisis, in which things have to go one way or another; and then a falling away of the tension as things are somewhat resolved, in the E, ending. 

            My memoir Crossing contains a narrative arc: I start with A, the situation of being 39 and no child.  Then I move into B, background, and get some of that in, then I go on to D, development, as I enter infertility treatment, continuing to filter in B, background, up until I’m just tracing present A, reaching a C, climax, when I have a miscarriage, and have to face starting again with more infertility treatment. There is another C, climax, when I visit a psychic who helps release me from keeping on with what seems a pretty doomed effort, so that I can move to E, ending, coming to terms with not being able to get pregnant, not adopting, and making peace with being childless.  That’s the narrative arc, the structure more or less.

            Just to try it out, draw a narrative arc, like a big upside down checkmark, with a long swooping line leading up to a peak, and then a shorter line falling off to the other side from the crisis or climax.  Write at the beginning of the arc a moment when the story seems to really be underway.  You are looking for when things have reached a certain point where there is some forward momentum (if it is that kind of story, and not all are, by any means).  You can then track the forward progression of the action on the arc, the major events or moments, and also see where you might bring in backstory and development. This is very crude, but it’s just trying to stimulate you to see the story as an arc, perhaps.  It may help you see the material as a book, with a beginning, middle and end.  It isn’t just a mass of material, but something that tells a story from one point in time to another, with some sort of shape or progression. 

            The other form you can experiment with (and this is not to suggest that these are the only two forms; any form that works for you is a fine form!) is a modular or mosaic form.  In this form, you work in blocks or sections, which can be moved around.  It isn’t linear but rather you assemble a design out of smaller, component parts.  An example of this is the essay I mentioned which I wrote that was in the Times, in which I had sections that were not in chronological order, but were ways of getting at the theme and subject in a heightened, short-hand way.  Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments has a modular structure, at least at the beginning.  Often a book will start with a modular structure and then settle into a more traditional narrative arc, as does Fierce Attachments.  You can combine these two forms, for sure.

            Eventually you’ll be faced with needing to write an opening for your memoir.  The beginning is the hardest usually (though not always; sometimes it is just “there.”).  You may need to spend a lot of time trying out various openings.  You are looking for the voice that will let you tell/show your story, that takes authoritative command of the story.  You want to strike the right “key note,” an opening that suggests the tone of your memoir, that plunges us into something that will capture our attention, that introduces the key elements, and that contains, however obliquely, the situation AND the story, in Gornick’s terms. 

            It’s really helpful to look at openings of memoirs and see what they’re doing, and how.  Read them not just as consumers, but as writers.  How are they introducing situation and story?  What is the voice and tone of the memoir?  Do you “hear” the voice?  How is the protagonist introduced?  What is the problem here?  Where and when is the story taking place?  How are you convinced that what you’re reading is really real, happening, or that it did happen?  Is the author showing or telling or a combination of both?  How and when is backstory introduced?

            Try a couple of openings:

            Begin scenically.  Choose a point in time to dramatize your story.  Try present tense, as if it’s happening “now,” even if it happened long ago.  You’re reliving it in the writing. 

            Listen to Eva Hoffman’s opening lines to Lost in Translation, her memoir of emigrating to Canada from Cracow when she was thirteen:

            “It is April, 1959, I’m standing at the railing of the Batory’s upper deck, and I feel that my life is ending.  I’m looking out at the crowd that, all of a sudden, is irrevocably on the other side—and I want to break out, run back, run toward the familiar excitement, the waving hands, the exclamations.  We can’t be leaving all this behind—but we are. I am thirteen years old, and we are emigrating.  It’s a notion of such crushing, definitive finality that to me it might as well mean the end of the world.” 

            Notice that she starts in present tense, and how immediate that makes the scene and emotions. We’re with her, feeling what she feels at thirteen as the ship pulls away from the dock in Poland, and all she has known.

            But also notice that the language and expression of those emotions comes from the adult narrator looking back – and who is able to TELL us information. The narrative voice combines both showing and telling beautifully, and the adult narrator, who KNOWS the meaning of this monumental experience for the protagonist, her young self in this passage, is able to express what the thirteen year old self could never put in words.  It is WRITING, not REMEMBERING!

            Now listen to Natalie Kusz open Road Song, her memoir of moving with her family to Alaska when she was six, of being mauled by sled dogs, losing her eye, and the effects on Natalie and the family of that event. 

            “Our first months in Alaska, that one long summertime before I was hurt, were hard—in the way, I think, that all immigrants’ lives must be hard—but they were also very grand, full of wood fires and campgrounds, full of people and the stories they told at night when we ate all together, full of clean dust that we washed from our bodies with water carried home from cold springs.  My family—Mom and Dad and we four children—had driven up from Los Angeles in a green Rambler station wagon, our clothes and plants and water jugs packed and pulled behind us in a twelve-foot travel trailer with two beds. We were going for an adventure, Mom and Dad told us, to a place where we could play as loud as we wanted to, where neighbors were far away and everyone minded their own kinds of business.  During the 1968 recession, my father had been laid off from his computer job….”

            This is not a scenic opening, though the details—that green Rambler station wagon!—stimulate our visual sense of the story, so that it isn’t dull expository prose.  It’s in past tense, with the author looking back from the perspective of a lot of time having passed, and she tells us immediately what is important, what will come in the book—that she will get hurt—but there is more to the story than that.  It is going to be a story of that Alaska adventure that started out so hopefully, a story of a family starting over.  The tone is nostalgic and affectionate towards her own experience, as if she has long sense come to terms with it. 

            Now here’s Philip Roth in Patrimony, the story of his father’s brain tumor and death:

 “My father had lost most of the sight in his right eye by the time he’d reached eighty-six, but otherwise he seemed in phenomenal health for a man his age when he came down with what the Florida doctor diagnosed, incorrectly, as Bell’s palsy, a viral infection that causes paralysis, usually temporary, to one side of the face.” 

            He is telling you the story here, not showing it scenically.  He is the authoritative narrator and he isn’t trying to draw you in and make you live the story so much as just receive it.  Hear it.  There will definitely be scenes, but the set-up is expository.  He lays the ground work for the story that is to flow from this opening, of his father developing a facial paralysis which will turn out to be a brain tumor that will cause his death.

            Try modeling one of these openings, or one of your own choosing. Study the way the writer begins, and then try to use your own material in a similar opening. Maybe you’ll begin scenically, like Hoffman, or expositionally, like Roth.  Try to find a voice, a moment, an incident, that will in some essential way launch your book. 

             You may want at this point to sketch out a bit of an outline for the book, in chapters.  It will help you organize the material, and not feel overwhelmed if you can see that it can be broken into parts that are not the whole thing.  You can also see the flow of the book this way.  You might jot down notes for each chapter, the material that you think will come in in that chapter.  Nothing is cast in concrete, but the outline and notes will help you see the whole without having to write it all in one sitting!  As if you could…

            Now, just start working on the chapters.  Do the best you can, and make it your goal to write a whole draft.  It will be a first draft, and you should feel inordinately proud for getting the whole thing down!

            And now let a little time pass, maybe get some feedback from some good readers, and really begin to write your book.

            Good luck!

How to Read  Short Stories like a Writer

Perhaps the best and maybe only advice one can give someone trying to learn to write short stories is to read a lot of them.  Eventually, if you read enough of them, you begin to get the picture.  You begin to get a felt-sense for what a short story is like, what the form can do, what other people are accomplishing.  But getting beyond admiration or intimidation, to see why and how good stories work, and even better, to learn from them, is not something most people have a lot of instruction in.  They read as consumers, not as writers. But reading as a writer is a different deal.  It’s the kind of analytical reading that can move one along in terms of developing one’s own skills and talent.  I’m not talking academic reading here.  You don’t need to write a term paper.  But as a writer, it does help to know what to look for in stories, to see how certain common denominators are handled.  Then hopefully you absorb those elements to the point where you don’t have to think about them (at least not until revision time).  They’re available to you, integrated into the self out of which you write.  But first you have to be aware of them. 

In Writing Fiction, a Guide to Narrative Craft, Janet Burroway compares the form of the short story to a human face, which “has necessary features in a necessary harmony.”  It’s a good analogy, because, as she points out, while there is great variety and individuality in human faces, they do have common denominators: “…two eyes, a nose between them, a mouth below, a forehead, two cheeks, and a jaw.”  Likewise, each short story can “look” like a human face in the sense that it has some common denominators and yet be as individual as the face of someone you love.  In some cases, the story form can be distorted or fractured in ways that bring to mind Picasso’s cubist faces, where while we recognize an eye here and there, and a triangle that is surely a nose, it isn’t a face we recognize in the same way we do realistic human faces.  The story seeks to take the expected common denominators and make you see or experience them in new and maybe unsettling way.

Burroway goes on to say that the necessary features of the story form are conflict, crisis, and resolution – all helpful elements to study.  But when I read a story as a writer, and when I try to help developing writers learn to read as writers, I look at a lot of things in the story to see what the writer is doing and how he or she is doing it. In the end, a story is always more than the sum of its parts.  Looking at the parts can never capture the soul of the story, if you will.  That comes from something that can never be pinned down, analyzed, taught, really.  Call it inspiration, call it luck, call it talent or experience or a combination of those – whatever it is, it can’t be put together piece by piece.  But knowing the pieces, being aware of them, having absorbed them into your writing self via many stories, can stand you in good stead when you sit down to write your own stories.  You forget about what you’ve learned while you’re writing; then, when you begin to revise, you have some tools available to help you craft the story. 

So what are some of the things we look at in stories when we read as writers?

First, you have to read just as a consumer.  That’s the way the story is meant to be read – you’re meant to get on board and go for the ride.  A good story makes you lose your own sense of time and place as you’re transported into the story’s reality.  You shift into another way of being as the words on the page become more real than your own living room or the number 28 bus you’re riding to town.  Fine.  Enjoy the story.  During this first reading, you’re not trying to figure anything out.  You’re just having the experience.  You’ll know automatically at the end if it’s been a good experience, the kind that makes you feel richer for having had it; or whether you feel somewhat ripped off: you spent thirty minutes reading this story and what have you got to show for it?  You feel no more entertained or enlivened than you did when you started and you may even feel aggravated, frustrated, because the writer let you down.  Most of us won’t want to analyze any further the “bad” story – though that can be useful.  But let’s just assume that the story you just read is one you admire and as a writer, wouldn’t mind emulating or learning from.  Where do you start?

Start with your “reading” of the story.  By this I mean your overall take on the story.  First, how did it make you feel?  What do you make of it?  How would you describe the story in your own words.  Not just what happened – the plot – but the experience of the story.  What do you come away with?  It’s a good idea to do this in writing, so that you access your deeper experience of the story.  Getting down a sense of your reading of the story will help you grasp that readers out there will be having some sort of experience when they read your stories.  And that you’re responsible for delivering some kind of experience.  It’s important to know, at some point, what kind of experience you want the reader to have.  It doesn’t have to be absolutely spelled out in your mind; in fact, if it is it might be too simple or formulaic.  But it helps to know that you do want the reader to experience something:  to be moved; to enter into a certain experience of life at a deeper level; to feel life in a certain time and place so thoroughly that the person is shocked to come back to what they normally think of as reality; to laugh out loud; to be captivated by language.  You begin to develop a sense of this by seeing what it was about other stories that got to you. 

At this point you need to go back and reread the story.  This time, you’re reading it not as a consumer, but as a writer, to begin to see into the inner workings of the story.  You will have had the initial experience of the story, and now you’re shifting to a much more analytical experience of looking not so much at the story as a whole, but as a series of choices, decisions, technical devices and skills that you as a writer can learn from.

After you’ve read the story a second time, write down what happens in the story.  This is simply a plot synopsis.  It may feel too obvious to do, but it’s actually a useful exercise, because you get to see the narrative arc of story.  It’s useful to see that the story did move; we started in one place and came out at another.  And things are different at the end of the story.  It’s amazing how few people can actually tell the plot of a story they’ve read.  But the plot is like the spine; you need to be able to see the actual action of the story.  And seeing what happens in a number of stories will eventually seep in, so that you have a better sense that something has to happen in your stories. 

Generally short stories consist of both situation – what is going on right now, when the story opens – and backstory – everything that has led up to what is going on when the story opens.  The situation will become forward motion – the actual forward progression of action in the story, the “what happens,” the plot summary of above.  The backstory is everything that we need to understand the importance and meaning of the  situation.  For example, in Eudora Welty’s famous story, “Why I Live at the P.O.,” the situation is that sister Stella Rondo has moved back home with her supposedly adopted daughter, thereby suddenly displacing the first person unreliable narrator from her position in the family. The forward action will be what happens now that Stella Rondo has returned: the protagonist will get into various fights with other family members which she will see as them ganging up on her until she moves out of the house to the P.O.  The backstory is everything relevant that has gone on prior to the present situation: Sister Rondo left town with the narrator’s boyfriend and had a possibly out of wedlock child; the narrator herself is high strung and unstrung to a large extent, a blowup just waiting to happen. Most stories consist of situation and backstory, and the story writer’s job is to manage these in such a way that they work together in a harmonious and integrated way, not too much or too little of either one.

Alice Adams, a wonderful short story writer, had a little schema for writing – and in our case here, reading – short stories.  A = action; b = background; d = development; c = climax; e = ending.  She didn’t mean that these elements should be put in in big clumsy blocks.  No one was better than Adams in feathering in background amidst forward going action. You can track these elements in her stories and in many many stories – identifying in the margins with letters (a, b, d, c, e) when you’re seeing action, when background, when development (the plot thickens), when climax and ending.  Obviously a story has to get off the blocks with action, but then before too long, if we’re to retain and build our interest in the situation, we have to know what has come before, background that will inform us about why to care about what is happening now.  One of the most useful things one can do when reading as a writer is to study exactly when we have action and where we’re getting backstory or background and to become aware that most writers are working with both these elements as they establish their stories. 

Vivien Gornick says that every work of literature has both a situation and a story.  I have found this to be very useful in studying stories and writing them.  By “situation”  she means what we have been referring to above, the “what happens” part of a story.  But she uses the word “story” differently than we normally think of it.  By story Gornick means what the story is about: “the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer.”

“Story” as Gornick uses it is often what gives a story power, resonance, impact.  It’s what gives the story depth.  “Story” here has to do with meaning or theme, perhaps, though I’m not crazy about those terms.  In a story of mine called “Legacies,” I write about a character named Miriam, who is essentially me, going to her grandmother’s apartment at a time when her grandmother was beginning to lose her memory and Miriam’s mother was contemplating moving her to a nursing home.  On the day the story takes place, Miriam rolls her grandmother’s hair in the oppressive heat of a South Carolina afternoon, and later when Miriam’s mother comes over, as they’re taking the curlers out of the grandmother’s hair, the grandmother remembers a long hair fall she had cut off when she was young, and they find it in the bottom dresser drawer.  Miriam’s mother has Miriam sit on the dresser bench and she places the hairpiece on Miriam’s head to see if she might wear it.  That’s what happens in the story.  What the story is about is what gets passed down, from generation to generation, whether you want it or not.  The Miriam of the story is ambivalent about her Southern Baptist grandmother, and indeed about her family, hardly able to wait until a plane will lift her away from them, and at the same time, hardly able to bear leaving. When the grandmother and mother give her the hairpiece, she doesn’t really want it – “It strikes her as some unwanted pet for which she will now be responsible.”  But it is hers now, both bestowed and forced on her. 

Thinking about what a given story is “about” will begin to open up how the story works in many cases.  The writer is working on both a surface “situation” level; and a thematic, meaning, “about” level at the same time.  When these two are working in harmony, the story is richer, denser, more layered for it.  To begin to see how stories are metaphoric – how their surfaces are really speaking about something – is to begin to understand how to write stories. 

 

Here are other common denominators to study in short stories:

 

Point of View:  Beyond first vs. third person, point of view involves authorial distance and control.  It’s a way of seeing the material, shaping it so that the reader can “get” the way the author sees the story.  Often people think (wrongly) that you have to “show” everything.  But if you really study short stories, you will see that most 3^rd person stories have a very strong, authoritative narrative voice or narrator that is “telling” the story as well as showing it.  The telling is disguised as showing, with vivid, precise details.  Showing alone would be too diluted.  Most stories are so dense that they need that narrator to shape, give information, move things along, tell more than the character can say him or herself, in better language.  It’s really helpful to look for this narrative voice when you study how a short story is launched. 

            As for first person, there is a wide range there but the most important thing is to make sure your narrator is either clearly reliable or clearly unreliable.  Trouble lies in the middle ground, when the reader (and maybe author) isn’t sure. 

Voice:  The voice of the author and the voice of the individual piece.  Voice of the author has to do with personality, sensibility, a way of feeling/vision about the world, distillation of author’s essence into language. It is what binds the whole story together. It’s the way the author sees the story.   Voice of the piece might be more particular, such as jocular, sardonic, elegiac, searching, etc.  Sometimes it’s the voice of the character, in first person and sometimes third person, or it is the voice of the omniscient narrator. 

Tone: Related to voice — tone is the author’s attitude towards the material — and clues the reader in as to how to “read” the story — tone comes through many subtle clues of language, style, detail, approach.  Readers “hear” a story, the voice and tone of the story when they read. 

Language:  Language is related to tone and voice, in that it gives us those things.  The language tells us a lot about how to “read” the story — what the author has in mind — not language for language’s sake (“Look, Ma, I’m writing!”), but as a functioning part of the story.  Also important in establishing whether this is a writer we want to read.  How sophisticated or authoritative is the use of language?  What sort of language is used and do we trust that it is “working” or just haphazard or lazy or general?

 

Time:  Organization of time is always important — so that we feel real time is happening, passing.  Look for how time is handled in a story: does it take place over a period of time and if so, how long?  When in time does the story start?  What is present time and what is past time in the story?  Why does the story start when it does — on a particular day?  Is it told retrospectively, from a distance of time? 

Place: Place is the largest context of the physical world that the story occupies; the environment of the story; a fully imagined, realized world , textured and real to us. Eudora Welty said something about if she can believe the place of a story, she can believe the people.  Often it’s good to just name where the story is taking place, or get it established early on, so the reader doesn’t spend reading energy wondering and trying to figure it out. Look for how place is named or handled – or not pointed to at all – in stories.  Importance of place can vary greatly story to story. 

Setting: the actual stage settings for various scenes and events in the story — more specific than place, which permeates the settings.  Place is the forest, settings are the trees, fleshed out. 

Characterization:  Huge.  Physical characteristics; “get a life” aspects (job, family, effects such as home, relationships, texture of overall life); interaction with other characters in the story – usually one major relationship explored but not always;  Characterization can’t be neutral.  It’s what the author wants us to see or feel about the character — some idea or position on the character that is communicated by every aspect of characterization, so that we can “read” the character; character changed or “moved” by end of story usually; something has happened that makes a difference from now on.   

Description: Importance of creating real, believable world but never description for sake of verisimilitude; Never “mere verisimilitude” please!  Description must function — as part of overall conception of story, what it is “about.” 

Detail: as in “telling.”  Useful in characterization and story interpretation.   Helpful if it functions; not merely alert, original and precise, but metaphoric if possible. 

Scene and summary: scenes are action and summary is usually backstory or maybe just summarizes something in the present that is not significant enough to be done in a scene.  Scenes should always be dynamic, something changing in the story, not just giving information or passing time.  Always notice when you’re in scene (and why) and when in summary.  Notice how absorbing and effective scenes are (dramatic moments) — you get to “see” for yourself.  Voice in a story controls scene and summary and allows the author to move in and out of these smoothly.  It integrates these two necessary aspects of story-telling.  It is a mistake to treat scenically non-dramatic material, which slows down the story and becomes boring. 

Dialogue: Elizabeth Bowen says dialogue is what characters do to one another.  Dialogue is an essential part of characterization and showing what is between characters.  Notice in scenes the use of dialogue and what it is “doing.”  People aren’t talking just to have a conversation.  Notice that good writers tend not to get stuck in long, drawn-out dialogue marathons.  It’s usually more pithy than that. 

Openings:  First sentence and first paragraph establish a great deal: situation, main characters, what we’re going to be reading “for,” authority, point of view, tone, voice.  It’s always interesting to see what terms the author establishes; whether the voice draws you in; what key notes are hit; how much of the overall story is suggested/expressed in the opening.  Focus.  A sense that the author knows the whole story already and the best way to convey it.  How and when are time and place established?  Where are you “hooked” and why? 

Endings: The author’s final comment on story.  Endings can open up story or close it by “finishing” the experience.  A key moment in terms of “reading” the story, interpreting it, getting the full experience of it. 

Form or structure:  Overall shape of the story — how it is constructed.  Where it begins and ends and how that holds it together – is there a narrative arc or is the structure more modular?  Do you sense the underlying skeleton of the story, backbone that supports everything? 

Vision:  Hard to express but we sense it — what the author is really saying, exploring, commenting on, expressing.  The biggest picture of the story, even beyond them – a view of life/human nature/human experience. 

Here are my readings of two short stories: 

 

“Proper Library” by Carolyn Ferrell

My reading of the story: Lorrie is a young black homosexual living in a rather chaotic household.  His mother is trying to help him get ahead in the world by encouraging him to stay in school and increase his vocabulary by studying words from the dictionary.  Lorrie has been involved passionately/sexually with a guy named Rakeem, and dropped out of school for six months during their affair — but when the story starts, Lorrie is back in school, but meets up again with Rakeem, who makes him feel he can be himself, and by the end of the story he is going to see Rakeem again, but also keep on with school — as if he’s integrating the disparate parts of himself, to get to have all the pieces of the pie of himself.  The story ends on an upbeat or optimistic note that is not quite believable, because I’m not sure whether this will work for Lorrie — that he can “do both, have it all.”  “Words” become a central metaphor in the story, and when he says “I know these new words and the old words without looking at them…”  is this for real or is he fooling himself?  “The words are in my heart” seems to be saying he has gotten what he needs at home to be able to be himself, to “have this flavor of the pie” — his gayness? — he seems strong at the end.  It’s really a wonderful story, original and moving.

What happens?  After being out of school for six months when he was involved sexually with Rakeem, on the day the story starts Lorrie meets Layla, Rakeem’s cousin, who says he is looking for Lorrie.  Lorrie has been studying words with his mother, who wants him to stay clear of trouble and move up in the world.  At school Lorrie is teased mercilessly about being a faggot.  He goes home to his mother and all the kids he takes care of, and it’s generally chaotic – -his brother-in-law Tommy is there, having brought home another girlfriend that morning (?) and Lorrie intends to learn some new words, but all the kids need attention, and he suddenly knows he will know them without studying — and he decides to go meet Rakeem, who makes him feel like himself.  He vows to return home, continue in school.  

What is the story about?  Being oneself.  Being disenfranchised from those around you.  About life as a black, gay teenager.  About a strata of society, poor urban blacks with gangs, aids, teenager moms/dads.  About staying alive inside.  About hope.

Point of view: sympathetically Lorrie’s first person.  Reliable, except for some question at the end.

Voice: amazing.  Both the external voice of the social/racial/ milieu and the inner voice of consciousness/feeling/dreams and desires that would never be vocalized.

Tone:  Compassionate on the part of the author; Lorrie’s tone is dignified, sincere, candid.  He (and the author) lets us know him.

Language: Amazing.  Both the ghetto talk, and the inner poetic talk of Lorrie’s spirit.  “Moving on.”  P. 7 “Soft like the dark hair…” section example of how we dip into his heart — and also the pie talk — Language is personable, original, energetic, alive.  The language conveys the experience of getting into his soul — not just what happens externally, the situation, but his story in the emotional sense –

Time:  All in one day, with backsstory/context of six months when he dropped out of school.  The day is followed blow by blow, apparently, scene by scene (illusion of) — so that we believe time is actually passing — he leaves for school, he’s at school, he comes home.

Place/settings:  the Bronx; his mother’s apartment; school Jane Adams.  Bus.  Fully imagined settings so that details resonate and carry the whole picture. 

Characterization: rich with secondary characters brought to life by dialogue, information, situation — Lorrie is fleshed out by those around him and his reactions to them.  We see him as very caring, good, we’re on his side.  “I love me some kids.”  We get into his inner feelings — he is speaking so frankly, honestly to us — as if nothing separates us, we might as well be him.    We have wonderful scenes where we see him being tormented by others, and we empathize with him. Enough repetition of this to convince us and to establish refrains, motifs: keep moving; pie; etc.

Description: carefully and lovingly observed descriptions from Lorrie — of the kids, especially — establishes his character — his own perceptions as “true” –

Details: surprising and pleasing details — that ring true.  From the juxtaposition of the grocery cart and his passionate feelings, to small details like the kids having their bottle of Sugar Shack syrup out – the author knows this world, and shows it to us in concrete details –

Scene and Summary:  First scene: with Ma as he leaves for school.  Tommy comes in with new lady – talk of “love.”  His sister gives him letter knife.  No quotes for dialogue — why? 

#2.  Layla Jackson comes running up with baby – will he baby sit.  Yes. Rakeem is looking for him.

summary section follows, filling in about Rakeem

#3.  He’s on the bus, gets teased about being a faggot.

#4.  He meets Rakeem who says be there, Rocky’s Pizza.  Lorrie thinks he will not go, that the kids and words are enough.

#5. He’s in Mr. D’Angelo’s class  — Lorrie’s thoughts, feelings — about “doesn’t the heart count” and Mr. D’Angelo –

#6.  Mrs. Cabrini tells him he’s his own shooting star

Next section — background, context — about learning words, doing things the right way.

#7.  He’s in history of civilization – gets note from girl, “Please give me a chance.”

next section — background/context about Estine’s words

#8: Woodworking class where teacher mocks him and he leaves.

Section about Rakeem and how he made him feel

#9.  He receives Layla’s baby tee tee in fourth class.

more memory/background about Rakeem with mini-flashback scene

in several sections.

#9.  He arrives home to his mother — there’s trouble with Tommy — he intends to learn his words, but house is in chaos — and he suddenly feels he doesn’t need to study them because he already knows what to do, he knows them without studying.  His mother comes in and he tells her he’s going to meet Rakeem — and he feels that he can bring it all together — home, school, Rakeem — but what has led to this — and is it believable?

Opening: really curious opening section.  With “fucking in the butt” phrase so strange — whose voice?  Lorrie’s?  He doesn’t feed people, his mother does — it’s a curious rather confusing opening — but the author must have wanted it — felt it had to be — but it doesn’t exactly tie into the story in any way.

Ending – why does the author end on Tommy and what he tells his wife about love? How does that reflect on Lorrie’s story — or end it or open it up?  Doesn’t seem to hit the right final note.

Form: story takes place over one day, with interspersed background that informs this day.  By end of story, Lorrie has “moved,” come to a different place than he was at the beginning –

Vision: something compassionate and hopeful in the author’s vision — even with all that is going on in this kid’s life, he’s basically valuable, good, hopeful for the future — surviving and trying to reconcile who he is with the world he lives in — a good heart — no condescension or twisting of our emotions regarding him — he’s treated with enormous respect and dignity — but she doesn’t romanticize him too much either. 

 

“Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story” by Russell Banks

My reading of the story:  I think Banks creates a fascinating narrator who tries honestly to understand a past painful experience but is ultimately too limited to really fully appreciate what he has done.  But it’s hard to say!  Is this a reliable narrator?  In the end, Banks has a climactic scene in which the action becomes very ugly as the narrator breaks down and “kills” Sarah by calling her ugly — but at the same time he is saying this, he sees her as transformed into a beautiful woman — a fantasy.  He seems to recognize that he has “killed” her in some way — but is it that in saying the “truth” that he really feels, he has made her all the more desirable?  What’s going on at the end?  It’s very hard to interpret and may not be interpretable, which doesn’t diminish its power — provocative stuff.

What happens in the story:  There are layers of story here — a man looks back from ten years distance on his younger self, who was “extremely handsome” and tries to figure out a love affair with a woman he describes as the homeliest woman he ever knew.  The story he tells is that they meet in a bar when Sarah introduces herself to him on a dare from girlfriends, he gets fascinated by her because she’s so homely and so unlike him, they meet again at the bar, again he’s fascinated by the experience, he walks her to her car which has been hit and dented, she cries and he comforts her.  Several weeks later, they meet again and go to his apartment to make love — he comes on to her but she tries to tell him they’re different — she leaves before anything happens.

He becomes obsessed with her and stays away from her, because he distrusts his obsession — doesn’t understand it — but runs into her after “forgetting” that she lives on a certain street – he’s goes up to her apartment to carry her groceries in, and she kisses him — and he leaves.

She brings his shirts to his apartment the next day, a Sunday, and they become lovers — connecting like real lovers, real intimacy.  For the next few weeks they meet and make love until one night in August, she wants to go out together, in public, for a drink — he resists — they argue — they begin going out and he is uncomfortable, she gets drunk, they grow apart — until they agree they have to talk.  The narrator interrupts the story and says he ran into someone who knew Sarah and that she isn’t actually dead probably, as the narrator first said.  Now he admits that by thinking of her as dead, he is able to tell this story, because he wishes he could say the things to her he didn’t know or say when she was alive, that he did love her.

Part VIII is the final scene where she comes to his apartment to talk, he tries to break up, she says she isn’t leaving, he grabs her by the arm and makes her leave — she cries — and he says three times that she’s ugly — as he does so, she is transformed into a beautiful woman in love, until she disappears.  He feels he has killed her –

What is the story about?  About love — about man and woman coming together — and social forces, conditioning, appearances, class.  About storytelling and memory — about how we harm one another –

Point of view: Complex — a narrator looking back on younger self — trying to be “honest” and “tell the truth” — whether he arrives at self-knowledge at end is interesting…

Voice: Voice of narrator purports to be truth-seeker, sincere, remorseful –

Voice of author — sophisticated story teller interested in layers of meaning, complexity of truth telling — honesty –

Tone: purposefully unreliable?  Falsely remorseful or complicatedly remorseful –

Language: very precise, detailed, complex sentences expressing complex thoughts, experience, feelings –

Time:  Told looking back from ten years — takes place between late May into maybe early fall — we are specifically placed in late August and in last scene a few weeks later, she’s wearing shorts and it’s described as “still warm.”  The story is told more or less chronologically from the first meeting in the bar, but interspersed with the present day narrator interjecting present day musings and an incident from “a few years” ago where he ran into a friend of Sarah’s who said she had gone back to her husband –

Place: est. as Concord, New Hampshire — but we’re told it doesn’t matter where it took place — the milieu is very class -reflecting — his world of white collar work vs. hers of blue collar work –

Settings: his apartment and hers; her street; the bars they go to –

Characterization: both external of Ron — his clothes, looks,  job, objects, apartment (same of Sarah), their backgrounds, current lives in terms of jobs, family or lack thereof, their relationships with others; and internal — his feelings and hers as expressed in scene, dialogue, actions — the trappings of the external and the internal feelings — through actions — and development of the story — everything he does builds up a portrait of him — occasionally we get a clue from “outside” him — such as the friend of Sarah’s saying “you haven’t changed a bit” — self-centered –

Description — as part of overall conception of story — his descriptions of how ugly she was — and his fascination with that –

Detail — such as her car and his bike — functioning to reinforce characterization, theme –

Scene and summary —

Scenes:  #1.  the initial meeting in the bar

            #2.  meet again in bar and get better acquainted; he walks her to the car and embraces her when she weeps

            #3.  several weeks later scene in his apartment when they go there to make love and don’t

#4: they meet on Perley street and go to her apartment where she kisses him

summary of when she comes to his apartment and they make love — and the next few weeks of making love.

            #5.  “One hot night, a Saturday in August” — they argue about going out for drink – “You owe me.” 

            summary of going out to parties in which he overdresses and she gets drunk –

            #6.  telephone conversation in which they must talk

            #7.  scene in which he meets her friend years later and declares he loved her

            #8.  scene in which he tries to break up and she won’t leave and he makes her –

Dialogue – pitch perfect — her inarticulateness — his command — their gestures, eye contact, physical way of being in the world.

Opening: red flags –of sincerity and fascination with the material of beauty and ugly — these bold juxtapositions — breaks ground –

Ending: ambiguous — fascinating –

Form — the story within the story — the narrator looking back and imagining Sarah as dead — and that he has killed her — he did do damage to her — he used her — but also got drawn in in some way he doesn’t understand — the “love” part – his own mysterious pain

Vision: author’s complex view of human relationships — of the external world of appearance and inner world of feelings/intimacy – a man and a woman — can we separate the two — love and harm — we “kill” those we love sometimes — by conditioning, shallowness, societal pressures –

Lessons in Third Person Narration

It’s quite possible to tell a story in third person with almost no narration.  The “camera” is simply centered in the head of the third person main character, and we experience the story as if we “are” that person, experientially.

 “The girl Ryan Callaway was following turned off the Boulevard St. Michel, where Ryan knew every shop and office, and onto a side street that he hadn’t been on before, even though he had been wandering the city streets for weeks.  She walked past a papeterie and an abandoned shoe store and an art gallery selling glossy prints of American movie posters and then led the way into a dimly lit office that once might have been used by an insurance salesman.  To Ryan the room smelled like his parents’ basement back in the states, a wet and musty resting place for the broken appliances and old clothes the family couldn’t bring themselves to part with…”

                        Opening from “Numerology” by Christian Michener

 Here about the only concession to a narrator is to call Ryan by his first and last name, which he would not do himself, internally.  Otherwise, we experience everything as Ryan does, in a scene.  The only information we are provided is through his senses.  We are thoroughly limited to his head.  Later in the story, there is some background information provided, but it is done as “daydreaming” on Ryan’s part or sort of memory on Ryan’s part — events he has lived through, such as news of his parents’ separation.  Many stories are told this way.  They have the advantage of putting you right in the character, “suspending your disbelief,” and making you experience right along with the character.  On the downside, they limit you as the writer to a plot-driven, scene by scene story.  You are limited in terms of getting through a lot of background information quickly, having some angle on the character that he or she might not have on him or herself, of using language that the character himself can’t use, and creating density.  There’s no real narrative “voice” to this story.  We are not being told a story, we’re being shown one.

Other examples of narrator-less third person point of view stories:

“ ‘Hey, Captain,’ Stuart said.  He’d seen the dog as soon as he turned the corner, stretched over the doorsill of the bar in a wide amber beam of the afternoon sun.  ‘Hey, babe, you still remember me?’ He hesitated, just outside the doorway, in case the big German Shepherd did not remember him after all.  No doubt that Captain was a lot older now, shrunken into his bagging skin, the hair along the ridge of his back turning white.  A yellow eye opened briefly on Stuart and then drowsed slowly back shut.  Stuart took a long step over the dog and was inside the shadowy space of the bar.”

            Opening of “Finding Natasha” by Madison Smartt Bell

“Janet woke suddenly.  She could tell, even with the blinds closed, that it was early on a cold day.  Well, February was unpredictable in San Francisco.  And Valentine’s Day was unpredictable anywhere.  She felt a stab of self-pity about her solitary state and snuggled under the covers.  No, she was wide awake.  She would make the most of today because she was behind on her taxes and on her tapestry orders.  Christ!  The Federal Express truck was supposed to collect the last piece for the New York gallery this morning and she hadn’t even completed the address form.”

            Opening of “Valentine’s Day” by Valerie Miner

It is also possible to have a third person story with a limited omniscient narrator.  This is very very common in third person short stories.  In fact, it is difficult to tell a story about a third person character without a narrator.  Limited omniscient means that the narrator is limited to what the third person main character, the protagonist, can know or perceive, and also to what is within the character’s knowledge, such as background information, description, the past.  The narrator stands a little behind the main character, rather than right inside him or her, as above, and can comment on what the characters perceives or knows or what is within his or her knowledge. 

“Mark flung a final shovelful of cement into the mixer and stuck the spade in a pile of sand.  ‘She’ll be done soon!’ he hollered at Elmer, who was knocking the forms off a fresh burial vault.  Elmer nodded and coughed.  Like Mark, he wore a red bandanna across his face.  The air inside the Sunwall Brothers’ Vault Company was heavy with fine gray dust.  By the end of the day his lungs felt so thick that more than once as he sank into sleep Mark had imagined his lungs were hardening, slowly turning into concrete.  Still, it was the best summer job he’d ever had.  The day was decent, Elmer was good if quiet company, and the nearness of death made him feel serious, adult, and curiously alive.”

            Opening of “You Ain’t Dead Yet” by Barton Sutter

Here we have the lightest of narrators: it is the narrator who tells us, for example, that Elmer is also wearing a bandanna, and that the air in the vault company is heavy with fine gray dust.  Mark can and does perceive these things, but they are being told to us by a narrator.  We begin, in this example, to hear a voice outside the third person character, a limited omniscient narrator who will tell us what we need to know, but in an almost invisible way, so close is the narrator to Mark’s own perceptions and knowledge.  Still, it’s an important distinction, because now this narrator, established in the beginning, can give us information as needed.  But again, once the initial terms are set, the narrator must pretty much adhere to such a narrow omniscience as established in the opening.  For example, later in the story, the narrator gives us this bit of description: “The river was slowed here by a series of small dams and backed into marshes and mudflats to form the Deep River Wildlife Refuge.  The water was low this time of the year, and the breeze blew the rank stick of the exposed bottom through the cab of the truck.  Mark noticed a raft of big white birds floating far out.”  Mark is there, perceiving, but it is actually the narrator who describes the river, not Mark.  We hardly notice, so minimal is the narrator’s intrusion.  Just the necessary information to set the scene, then disappear. 

In the next example, we hear a third person limited omniscient narrator who is more “assertive” in a sense than the last one.  We are much more conscious of the narrator telling the story.  Again, we will be centered in one character, Susan, but we are also conscious that the story is not being told/shown simply from inside her head.  There is another consciousness/voice that is narrating the story.  Again, this narrator is “limited omniscient,” limited to focusing on and through Susan.  The narrator can give us information about her.  The narrator has separated more from the main character than in the last example.

“The woman, who likes to be called Susan, not Sue, looks down at her hands in her lap; and when she looks up, still listening, the man once again catches her eye.  He has dark, curly hair and a mustache.  His look is steady, absorbed, savoring, unabashedly sexual.  She has no idea how long he has been staring.

            The audience for the lecture is arranged in a horseshoe around the lectern, which places Susan and the man, though 20 feet apart, virtually face to face.  If she looks straight ahead, she cannot avoid him.”

            Opening from “Rose” by Margaret Edwards

Hear the narrator in the line, “The woman, who likes to be called Susan, not Sue,,,”?  That is a voice that is not in the character’s head.  It is the limited omniscient narrator narrating the story before moving into Sue’s experiential action of looking down at her hands.  If it were purely scenic, it would start: “Sue looks down at her hand in her lap…”  A very different sense of distance and control. 

In the next example, there’s a very strong third person limited omniscient narrator.  This narrator gives us a lot of information — all of which Jane, the main character is privy to — but it’s separated from Jane-in-a-scene.  It’s background, context, and the narrator sets the story up by giving us some initial information, rather than becoming “stuck” in having to show everything.  Then the narrator, strongly established from the start, can continue to shape and manipulate the material, even as it becomes more and more scenic, as we focus more and more on Jane and her feelings and experience. 

“Jane’s husband, Martin, works for the fire department.  He’s on four days, off three; on three, off four.  It’s the kind of shift work that allows plenty of time for sustained recreation, and during the off times Martin likes to do a lot of socializing with his two shift mates, Wally Harmon and Teddy Lynch.  The three of them are like brothers: they bicker and squabble and compete in a friendly way about everything, including their common hobby, which is the making and flying of model airplanes.  …In a way, Jane is the outsider here: the Harmons have known Martin most of his life, and Teddy Lynch was once point guard, to Martin’s power forward, on their high school basketball team.  Jane is relatively new, having come to Illinois from Virginia only two years ago, when Martin brought her back with him from his reserves training there.

            This evening, [my bold—the story actually begins, scenically] a hot September twilight, they’re sitting on lawn chairs in the dim light of the coals in Martin’s portable grill, talking about games…”

            Opening of “The Fireman’s Wife”

Hear how much the narrator packs in as information, by telling us the context initially but in vivid, specific detail.  Think how much space and time it would take to “show” all that!  You couldn’t do it; you need a narrator to get it down.  And notice how dense it makes the story, rather than a more diluted “showing.”

By the second paragraph, we have moved to a specific evening, and the actual story can begin.  The story is Jane’s story, her experience, and we will adhere to her as the main point of view character with this limited omniscient narrator throughout the story.  The narrator recedes as the story gets underway, but can come in to give information, background, description. But this narrator, being limited, CANNOT go into anyone else’s thoughts and feelings.  Only Jane’s.

 Here, later in the story, we see how we get close into Jane and her inner feelings.  The limited omniscient narrator doesn’t foreclose that by any means.

            “Two boys from high school come past, and one of them winks at Jane.  She remembers how it was in high school — the games of flirtation and pursuit, of ignoring some people and noticing others.  That seemed like such an unbearable time, and it’s already years ago.  She watches Eveline light yet another cigarette, and feels very much older than her memory of herself.  She sees the person she is now, with Martin, somewhere years away, happy, with children, and with different worries.  It’s a vivid daydream. She sits there fabricating it, feeling it for what it is, and feeling too, that nothing will change: the Martin she sees in the daydream is nothing like the man she lives with. She thinks of Milly Harmon, pregnant and talking about waiting to be surprised by love.”

            from the “The Fireman’s Wife” by Richard Bausch

Here’s another example where we have a strong third person limited omniscient narrator.  We know who the main character will be –the young woman (Claire) but we are watching her along with the narrator.  Here, just to complicate things, the narrator is not limited to Claire completely. The narrator claims more omniscience than the previous one by describing the main character not by her name in the beginning, which would put the narrator closer to her, but from the more distanced “young woman.” Not only that, the narrator roams into the heads of the men on the plane near Claire.  But the focus is still Claire; the story will be her experience and hers alone.  Only gradually does the narrator move in closer to Claire and her feelings. But having claimed it, this narrator always retains a great degree of control, distance, and omniscience in telling this story. She is not limited by any means to a “scenic treatment.”  In many ways, this allows her to go deeper than mere showing (though that is effective in certain stories also; think Hemingway).  Notice how different this story opening is from the one by Valerie Miner, where there is no narrator.  Remember, there are all kinds of variations and degrees of narrator involvement, omniscience, and distance depending on the story.

“Suddenly, on a routine flight between Atlanta and Washington, D.C., a young woman who has been staring intently out of her window bursts into violent tears.  No turbulence can have upset her — the air is clear and blue and calm — but in an instant her eyes clench shut, her hands fly up to cover her face and her shoulders convulse in spasms.

            She is seated near the front of the plane and the seat next to hers has not been taken.  No one is aware of this outburst but the two men across the aisle from her.  Because she is good-looking, in a dark, rather stylist way, these men have been observing her since she got on the plane with them in Atlanta; they like the somewhat old-fashioned smooth way her hair is knotted, although, good old Southern boys at heart, they are not so sure about the look on her face, what they could see of it, before she began to cry: wide-eyed and serious, she hardly smiled.  One of those women too smart for their own good, they think.”

The second section of the story begins, “The young woman, Claire Williston, who is not on drugs, or drunk, has been deeply mortified by those tears, which came on her like a fit, a seizure.  Generally she is a disciplined person; she behaves well, even under emotional stress.  She does not make scenes, does not cry in public, and rarely cries alone.  Maudlin, she is censoriously thinking, and How could I do this to myself.  How could I take a flight that would go right over Hilton?

            Vague about the specifics of geography, she had simply not realized what any map could have told her: flying from Atlanta to Washington of course you go right over Hilton, the small mid-Southern town where Claire was born and lived for the years until she went away to school up North.  To which, except for one fatal summer and her father’s funeral, she has not been back for years, and where, as she sees it, she cannot ever now go back.  But here she is, directly overhead.”

At the end of the story, we are right “in” Claire.

“However, instead of finally getting down to work on the serious article that is her assignment, in a dreamlike way Claire sits back in her chair, and she begins, rather, to recall the particularities of her trip.  She remembers certain accents, heard on streets, in restaurants, in Atlanta and Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans — and gestures observed, both unique and indigenous to that region.  And she sees again the colors of earth and leaves which, at certain times of the year, in a certain place, are absolutely unmistakable.”   

            from “An Unscheduled Stop” by Alice Adams

Hopefully you have seen how we can start at one end of the spectrum of third person stories where there is almost no narrator to a very dominant omniscient narrator — even though the story is still third person limited (but with a little true omniscience in the opening).   This last story still has only one main character, and it is her story we will follow.  But the narrator takes great liberty in being able to tell us a lot about the character – not everything but everything we need to know. 

Begin to notice the use of or lack of a narrator in stories you read. 

None of this is meant to confuse you.  No way is “best.”  Point of view depends on the story you want to tell — how you “see” the material, what you want to do with it, what your idea or point is.  My point is that you have choices, options, technical possibilities.  Don’t be “limited” yourself by thinking there is only one way to tell a story — the “show” way of everything having to be scenic. Many beginnings writers fall into this trap. Don’t be afraid to use a narrator who can “tell” the story.  Experiment with openings.  Strike out boldly with a very omniscient narrator a la Alice Adams, or a more limited omniscient one a la Margaret Edwards.  You’ll be surprised what a difference the use of a narrator can make sometimes. 

My attempt to practice the use of a narrator in “Numerology,” the first story we looked at here:

“Ryan Calloway had been in Paris for five months when he received the news that his parents were getting a divorce.  Ryan was officially registered as a student in a study-abroad program — his parents’ latest attempt to get him to actually get his degree — but as soon as he learned about his parents, he more or less dropped out and began walking around the town.  He was not terribly ambitious to begin with, but it wasn’t just that.  It was that he was angry at his folks, and losing himself in this particular way felt like as good a form of punishment as any.”

I took this material from later in the story, compressed and began with it – just to see the difference in the two ways of opening the story: scenic vs. more expositorially, via a narrator.

“Not Nice”

What do I mean by “not nice” in terms of writing?  Certainly it’s a value of mine to be “nice,” in person and in writing; I want people to like me, to like my writing.  And certainly I don’t have as a value “not nice” for its own sake.  But I do find that I’m very interested in exploring with you the notion captured in the phrase “not nice.”  It seems to me an important concept to consider.  I’m sometimes aware, when I read student or client writing, of a feeling I have that the writer isn’t going far enough, or has more to express — more feelings and emotions — than are getting on the page.  I feel a sense of constriction, constraint, convention perhaps.  Other times I don’t think along these lines, because the notion of “not nice” doesn’t apply. It’s not an issue in whatever is being written.  But I’m interested in our looking at subjects or places in our own writing where some internal censor pops up — either consciously or unconsciously — and shouts “don’t go there — not nice!” and the writing suffers for it.  

In musing over this subject, I remembered what I believe was the first time I encountered (or maybe registered) “not nice!” as a reader and developing writer. It must have been the early seventies. The moment came for me in a story by a wonderful Southern writer whom I knew peripherally at UNC, Doris Betts. The story was about childbirth, and the protagonist hasn’t had a particularly delightful experience.  In referring to having to have an episiotomy and being stitched up from it, she says something to the effect of, “They could just sew the whole damn thing up for all she cared.”  I remember being both shocked and thrilled when I read that.  Now such candor seems old news, but back then women were just starting to write honestly and openly about their experiences, feelings and bodies in a way we take for granted now.  Betts’ story introduced me to the idea that you might be able to say things — you might develop a voice — that could do that: tell the truth about your own experiences or about the truth of your character’s experiences.  You didn’t have to be nice.  Nice to me meant the opposite of telling the truth; it meant saying what people wanted and expected to hear.   I knew nice up one side and down the other, so I recognized very well when a woman was not being nice.  It was great!

So the issue of not having to be nice was something I wanted for my own writing, perhaps because I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated as a Southern girl to be nice, to look out for other people’s feelings, not to offend, not to cause trouble.  Nice is still a part of me and even a value to some extent, but in writing I want to be able to go where I want and need to go.  I want to be able to follow my own thoughts — and I want you to be able to do that too.  I admit to a lot of timidity in my life and in my writing (though I feel braver, I think, in writing than in life itself). But I find that sometimes when I “go” places that require some risk, some sense that maybe not everyone is going to find this very “nice,” I feel sort of invigorated and free.  Sometimes that writing is particularly energized. 

Now, no one wants to hurt other people (at least most of us don’t!).  And being “free” or going places that are taboo for you or others can involve the issue of hurting or offending.  But often people operate as if other people’s feelings and judgments — whether real or imagined — are more important than their own, or they’ve incorporated some super-ego that keeps telling them “don’t go there” long after it matters.  They become children at some level not wanting to offend Mama or Daddy.  Or else they’re so full of rage at having to repress so much that they know they can’t let that out without burning down the house!  So these are hard issues, hard choices.  There are ways of handling these things, but you have to deal with them on your own terms, you have to figure them out for yourself.

Of course “being nice” isn’t a problem for everyone.  Some people avoid that trap from the get-go, due to their upbringing, their own personalities, their own values.  But for a lot of people — women especially — being nice can be a problem, because it shrinks the range of possibilities, in life and in writing. 

Have you had reading experiences where you’re excited to see someone being “not nice” in their writing and where you were in synch with what was being expressed?  Have you had moments in your own writing where you surprised yourself by what you were saying — and felt that you were speaking the truth?  Where you felt some inhibition or constraint fall away, where the voice that was speaking took over?  Are you ever aware in your writing of places where you pull back, where you stop short of what might come out?  What are your feelings when you do this?  Are you aware of some other voice in your head that tells you not to go there?  How able are you to give yourself over to the writing experience in the moment?

Of course, we all know people and writers who can be obnoxious or off the wall.  We don’t want “not nice” for its own sake, but only where it feels necessary, authentic.  And the reader will always pick up on the motives and will naturally want to defend anyone who is being treated unfairly (even the writer herself, if her view of herself seems too skewed or harsh).  Vivian Gornick has a phrase, “the honesty of the endeavor,” which I take to mean one isn’t trying to get back at someone unfairly, you’re not writing with a chip on your shoulder, you have arrived at some state of mature understanding and compassion perhaps.  You see the big picture. 

Try to pay attention to places where the inner censor or some inhibition keeps you from following your writing or your thoughts where they are going.  Be prepared to push on in those places.  It might help to write down on the side what is stopping you, so you can see whether your fears or reservations are realistic and whether you want to honor them.  Or are they simply reflex or loss of nerve?  If you’re susceptible to certain messages, try to bring them to consciousness more.  Maybe you’re sensitive to some internalized messages, such as “that’s not very nice of you,” or “you’re not being fair here” or “what will people think?” (my favorite).  Do you really care what people think?  Which people?  Why?  Who are you trying to please? 

One distinction I want to make is between being free from certain inhibitions or restraints, and making good and conscious choices about how much you want to say or expose or reveal.  I think it’s good and important to be able to follow your own thoughts, not to censor too soon, but to fully explore what you really think and feel about your own experiences and your relationships to other people and events.  BUT — that doesn’t mean you have to use anything that makes you uncomfortable when it comes to showing it to an audience or publishing.  You may very well not want to deal with the consequences of things you could write, or you may decide it’s not worth it in terms of the harm it would do to other people or the embarrassment it might cause you.  I think you have to be clear on what’s going on with you and the writing.  It may be that you decide that your truth and the values behind that truth outweigh the trouble and grief the writing might cause.  Edward Ball’s book called Slaves in the Family traces his S.C. family’s involvement with slavery, and he’s related how upset some members of his family were about the book.  It seems that the pain and shame he caused some family members truly upset and saddened him, but that he believes the truth he’s telling is more important.  “…He is sure he’s doing the right thing.”  I think he is too.  In terms of your own work, you have to figure out where your own comfort level is, what your motives are, and whether your choices regarding censorship are good and legitimate, or coming from a part of you that is under someone’s thumb or society’s control or your own timidity.  Your instincts about what is unacceptably “not nice” may be correct, after all.  It’s just that you want to be in charge, make conscious decisions whenever possible, not be at the mercy of unconscious prohibitions that keep you from being the writer you really want to be. 

Bottom line: Aren’t you glad when a writer isn’t nice, but real?  Honest.  Truth-telling.

Examples of Writing that Some People Might Consider “Not Nice!”

“When he beat me, I screamed and kicked and cried like the baby I was: But sometimes when I was safe and alone, I would imagine the ones who watched.  Someone had to watch — some girl I admired who barely knew I existed, some girl from church or down the street…. In my imagination I was proud and defiant.  I’d stare back at him with my teeth set, making no sound at all, no shameful scream, no begging.  Those who watched admired me and hated him.  I pictured it that way and put my hands between my legs.  It was scary, but it was thrilling too. Those who watched me, loved me. It was as if I was being beaten for them.  I was wonderful in their eyes…

I was ashamed of myself for the things I thought when I put my hands between my legs, more ashamed for masturbating to the fantasy of being beaten than for being beaten in the first place.  I lived in a world of shame.  I hid my bruises as if they were evidence of crimes I had committed.  I knew I was a sick disgusting person.  I couldn’t stop my stepfather from beating me, but I was the one who masturbated.  I did that, and how could I explain to anyone that I hated being beaten but still masturbated to the story I told myself about it?

Yet…I loved those fantasies, even though I was sure they were a terrible thing.  They had to be; they were self-centered and they made me have shuddering orgasms.  In them, I was very special.  I was triumphant, important.  I was not ashamed.  There was no heroism possible in the real beatings.  There was just being beaten until I was covered with snot and misery.”

from Bastard out of Carolina, a novel by Dorothy Allison

“Our fights became more and more destructive.  Several times that summer we were both awake all night fighting the most personally harmful battles of our lives.  Jim began to tell me that I couldn’t trust my instincts, that really I was very ill, even though I may have thought I had begun to put my life back together again. I felt that somehow he had managed to insinuate himself into my deepest self, my most private mind and soul.  But then I realized that I was trying to do the same with him.  We had both begun to say things we had always considered off-limits.  We began to make insidious and unfair comparisons between our two families, a dirty way of fighting which would have horrified us earlier and has ever since. 

Even worse, we began to threaten each other with seizing custody of the children.  “Now that you have been identified as an alcoholic, I can take the children away from you,” Jim shouted at me one night.  Terrified, I flashed back with accusations about Jim’s past which I thought would equally disqualify him in the eyes of a divorce court.”

from News from the Border, a memoir by Jane McDonnell

 The Pope’s Penis

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate

Clapper at the center of a bell.

It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a

Halo of silver seaweed, the hair

Swaying in the dark and the heat—and at night,

While his eyes sleep, it stands  up

in praise of God. 

Poem by Sharon Olds

“It wasn’t the gonorrhea or herpes, and it wasn’t the hard strokes of the fuck Frank L—gave me. It was something he said to me when his penis was inside me.

 Because I was dry, it burned each time he moved into me.  It was like fire, it was like a knife—I didn’t know how to describe the slicing, burning sensation. But I lay still, thinking it would hurt less if I didn’t move

“Good pussy doesn’t just lie there,” Frank L—told me then.

 And because I wanted it to be over, but mostly because I didn’t want to be a bad lay and a lousy fuck, I began to move with him.  I participated in my rape.

  And that was the thing: because I had believed I was going out on a date, because I willingly got in the truck, because I was convinced on that day when I was sixteen that my main worth in the world was sexual, I believed I had to please my rapist.  Him of the stinking hair and infected cock.  And in that way, Frank L—became king of my vagina, boss of my pussy, chief of my cunt.” 

            From Thief, a novel by Maureen Gibbon. 

Experiment:  Write a list of subjects or topics that feel taboo or scary to write about, for whatever reasons. 

Pick one of these subjects and listen to the voice in your head that doesn’t want you to write about this.  Write down what it says.  Let it speak fully. 

Now engage in a dialogue with this inner censor, and answer back from another part of you that wants to write about this and feels you have the right to do so.  Make sure this part of you has the last word (Thanks to Jane McDonnell for these ideas.) Now try writing about that topic.  Listen to hear the voice that wants to speak.  It may have unusual power or energy once you let it out.

Think about something in your life that you know you SHOULD feel one way about but don’t.  Maybe you KNOW you should love your mother, but your feelings are much different from that.  Think about the complexities and complications of things in your life, and explore one of those subjects with the whole range of your feelings, not just what you want to feel or think you should feel or think about it.  Try to write what you really feel and think.  You don’t have to show it to anyone.  You can shred it when you’re through.  You may or may not choose to use it in a piece of writing.

Humor in Writing

Just as humor is a saving grace in life itself, so can it be in writing.  Granted, life is serious, writing is serious, WE are serious, but we can also be funny sometimes, if we let ourselves.  There are definitely plenty of things that just are not funny and it would be insane to try to make them so.  But what I’m interested in is expanding or stretching the range of your voice so that when the time is right, when something has some comic, ironic, absurd or just “light” possibilities, you’ll be ready.  Also, just inviting you to practice hitting this note, so to speak, might open up some writing possibilities for you you’re overlooking.  You might actually find a voice or tone you can use by consciously trying on something you don’t normally do.  Opening up this aspect of your personality more in writing might allow you to write things you wouldn’t otherwise write.  And that would be good. 

Certain situations or experiences lend themselves to humor, but humor can also come from a worldview or personality trait.  Some people see the world as basically absurd, or themselves as basically absurd (or if not absurd, at least they recognize the humorous potential), and then everything comes out that way more or less.  But for most of us, we tend to see things pretty straight and serious, and so we may have to look for moments or memories or situations that lend themselves to a little light humorous treatment.  When I was writing my memoir, Crossing the Moon, I knew I wanted it to be funny and sad, sad and funny.  It’s about ambivalence about motherhood, infertility, and finally not being able to get pregnant, which was sad for me at the time.  But I didn’t want to present myself as a victim or depressed or dreary.  So I looked for places where I could be, if not funny, at least light.  It was important to me to have that side of myself in a book that could be such a downer.  I looked for places where I could lift the mood.

Actually, they’re everywhere, these situations or moments in which something is wry or slightly (or greatly) ridiculous, including oneself.  And being funny or sharp often involves being energized, which can make the writing have more punch, flair.  It can also give us good practice in considering the needs of the reader, because we become more conscious of actually needing to be entertaining, that we’re “performing” to some extent for someone, the reader.   Also, using some self-deprecating humor doesn’t mean that that’s the only note you can strike in any given piece. It might just provide a little spice.  And I’m not necessarily talking about knee-slapping humor here; it can be light and subtle, a part of the overall texture of the voice, or just a pinch somewhere like a bit of cinnamon, even in a basically serious piece. It’s part of your human self, really – humor.  So make it a part of your writing when it’s appropriate.   

Let’s consider some examples:

“My parents’ marriage was, it’s safe to say, less than happy.  They stayed together for the sake of their children and for want of hope that divorce would make them any happier.  As long as my father was working, they enjoyed autonomy in their respective fiefdoms of home and workplace, but after he retired, in 1981, they commenced a round-the-clock performance of ‘No Exit’ in their comfortably furnished suburban house.  I arrived for brief visits like a U.N. peacekeeping force to which each side passionately presented its case against the other.”

From “My Father’s Brain,” a personal essay by Jonathan Franzen  in How to be Alone

     “I had made several unsuccessful attempts to lose my virginity at Duke, and Harvard had begun to seem like a possible solution.

My roommate at Duke was named Darlene.  Darlene was an angular, good-looking girl with sharp cheekbones and black hair cut in a smooth pageboy that swayed when she moved.

She had been coaching me on the loss of my virginity.  In high school I had read an article that said sperm could swim right through your underpants, so, whenever I got close to intercourse with a boy, I imagined microscopic tadpoles swimming desperately through cotton fibers the size of the columns at Stonehenge.  And I was distracted by other thoughts: germs swim back and forth between mouths; the tongue is a muscle and disappears down the back of the throat, so what is it attached to?

“I want to be normal,” I kept saying to Darlene.  “I want to lose my normal virginity.  Normally.”

“I fixed you up with Don.  He doesn’t have any experience either.  You can learn together.”

“Darlene, how could that be a good idea?”

“Trust me, it’s a good idea.”

[later]

So Darlene arranged for this boy named Don to take me to dinner at a restaurant called Chicken in the Rough.  The restaurant’s logo was a long-legged chicken in a tam-o’-shanter swinging a golf club.  Sitting in one of the dark red booths, I felt as if I were in a dentist’s waiting room….

In the bathroom I confronted the most serious obstacle to the loss of my virginity: under my skirt I was wearing a panty girdle.  I hadn’t really meant to wear the girdle, but when I was dressing I kept hearing my mother’s voice saying, Any woman looks better in a girdle, so I’d put it on experimentally, and it felt so secure, so bracing, that I’d left it on.  Now I didn’t know what to do about it.  I considered taking it off, but it was too bulky for the pocket of my trenchcoat.

What I did have in the pocket of my trenchcoat was a Norform vaginal suppository that Darlene had given me to insert “just before intercourse.”  It was supposed to lubricate me, a word that made me feel like a car.  But when was “just before intercourse”?  After I peed, I inserted the suppository and pulled the girdle back into place, feeling deeply relieved.  The girdle meant I couldn’t make love, but the suppository meant I sincerely wanted to.”

from The Revolution of Little Girls,  a novel by Blanche Boyd

 

“And what does one do on Easter? Would anyone like to tell us?”

The Italian nanny was attempting to answer the question when the Moroccan student interrupted, shouting, “Excuse me, but what’s an Easter?”

Despite her having grown up in a Muslim country, it seemed she might have heard it mentioned once or twice, but no. “I mean it,” she said. “I have no idea what you people are talking about.”

The teacher then called upon the rest of us to explain.

The Poles led the charge to the best of their ability. “It is,” said one, “a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus and . . . oh, shit.” She faltered, and her fellow countryman came to her aid.

“He call his self Jesus, and then he be die one day on two . . . morsels of . . . lumber.”

The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm.

“He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father.”

“He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples.”

“He nice, the Jesus.”

“He make the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today.”

From “Jesus Shaves” by David Sedaris (personal essay or memoir about a foreign language class)

“I had a boyfriend my sophomore year of college who wanted to marry me.  After we graduated, of course…What Bill and I had in common, besides our profound youth, was a great desire to please our parents.  My parents loved Bill Nelson. He was everything they hoped for in a future son-in-law.  I loved Bill Nelson—at least I thought I did.  I loved it that he matched my parents’ expectations, which I still assumed were my own…I was well away of what was valued, acceptable, respectable, approved.  Bill fit the bill.

The moment came, however, when I threw it all over. This was the moment when I began to turn away from motherhood, though I didn’t know it at the time. I just thought I was dumping Bill.  In a way it was like one of those Frankenstein monster stories where a previously inanimate form springs to life and takes over. This was the moment when my real self made herself known, and her first word was ‘no.’

The breath of life, the spark that ignited this dormant self was Bill’s parents’ French Provencial living room furniture.  We were driving somewhere in Bill’s little white Skylark convertible (there was a plastic rose on the antenna, a romantic touch).  Bill was telling me how his parents were going to give us their French Provencial living room furniture when we got married.  I had never seen this furniture, and so he described it to me in detail—the curved legs of the sofa and chairs, the cool blue of the upholstery, the pale coffee table. I’m sure it was quite nice.  A vision came into my mind, of Bill and me lounging around on his parents’ French Provencial living room furniture in our future married life. This was supposed to be a beautiful scenario for a girl like me.

But suddenly I didn’t want it.  I didn’t want it at all!  I didn’t want his parents’ French Provencial living room furniture,  I didn’t want married bliss, and most of all, I didn’t want Bill.”

from Crossing the Moon, a memoir by Paulette Alden

“How to be a Writer”

“First, try to be something, anything else. A movie star/astronaut.  A movie star/missionary.  A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World.  Fail miserably.  It is best if you start at an early age—say, fourteen.  Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain.  Count the syllables.  Show it to your mom.  She is tough and practical.  She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair.  She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots.  She’ll look briefly at your writing, then back up at you with a face blank as a donut.  She’ll say: ‘How about emptying the dishwasher?’ Look away. Shove the forks in the fork drawer.  Accidentally break one of the freebie gas station glasses. This is the required pain and suffering.  This is only for starters.”

            From “How to Become a Writer,” a short story by Lorrie Moore

“My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening me!, because I am always spleening her.  If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with my friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother.  Father used to dub me Shapka, for the fur hat I would don even in the summer month. He ceased dubbing me that because I ordered him to cease dubbing me that.  It sounded boyish to me, and I have always thought of myself as very potent and generative.  I have many many girls, believe me, and they all have a different name for me.  One dubs me Baby, not because I am a baby, but because she attends to me.  Another dubs me All Night.  Do you want to know why?…”

            From Everything is Illuminated, a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer 

Experiment:  Choose to see yourself as a “character”  (in both senses of the word) and write a little piece in which you view yourself or life humorously or self-deprecatingly, perhaps from an absurdist point of view.  Try for something that will amuse or wake-up the reader, something offbeat and original.  It might be based on something that is a part of your life right now, or a situation you found yourself in recently which you can certainly see has its absurd elements; it might be you viewing some aspect of your life as quirky or a little weird, and exploiting the potential in that at your own expense; it might be based on a past experience, when you were a young (but cute) fool.  Or you might take one of your obsessions and poke a little fun at it.

A Few Thoughts on Critiquing or One Size Doesn’t Fit All

One of the difficulties in trying to establish some guidelines for critiquing manuscripts in a creative writing class or feedback group is the vast array of differences we see from piece to piece.  One piece may be whole and nearly perfect as it is presented to us (whether from a lot of revision or because it sprang fully formed the first time) whereas another may be just struggling into existence, a virtual embryo compared to the full term birth above. Obviously we cannot approach these two manuscripts in the same way. Likewise, what a piece may need is a macro approach, where we talk about large issues such as themes or the overall structure; or it may need a micro-approach, attention to the language in the first paragraph, say, which establishes a certain voice and tone–or doesn’t.  It may be a combination of these two.  There is also our sense of the writer, whether she wants and need a lot of criticism or needs basically affirmation in order to proceed, or permission to engage in a lot more process as opposed to rushing a product.  And of course there’s the possibility that we feel either blank in terms of our own response or overwhelmed and disorganized about how to address the issues.  In other words, one size does not fit all.  We have to be sensitive and adjustable regarding every piece of writing.  At the same time, we need some general ideas and approaches to guide us.

 What follows are my suggestions for how to go about critiquing:

 1.  Read the piece through the first time as a pure consumer, for interest and hopefully enjoyment.  Try to give yourself over to the piece.  See what is there.  After finishing the piece note how you feel about it.  What is your overall feeling or impression?  What are the first things that come to your mind about the piece?  Write these first general impressions at the end of the piece for the writer.

 2.  Now consciously read the piece through more critically.  Even though you may have been very enthusiastic about the piece initially, that doesn’t mean that now on the second pass, you can’t see some ways to improve it.  This second effort really requires critical thinking.  Some people take the word “critical” to mean something negative.  But it really just means that you’re applying a different way of thinking about the piece.  This way of thinking is still based in your feelings and responses, but now instead of simply consuming the piece, you’re actively looking for things which, now that you think about it, didn’t work so well for you.  Or it may be that your initial reading left you feeling very unsatisfied with the piece.  Now, on this second reading you try to figure out why.

 Some people combine these two stages or steps, and process their response to a piece very quickly.  This certainly may be appropriate in some cases.  The danger it is that you may stop at the first stage and not want to do the harder work of actually critiquing a piece.  It may be that you don’t feel trained or qualified as a critic.  But you’re not being asked to be the final word on a piece or to write it for the writer.  You’re only being asked to be what you already are, a good reader.  The writer has reached the point where he or she can no longer “see” the piece, and so needs your eyes and ears and heart and mind to know what is really there.

 One thing I always ask myself in responding to a piece of writing is What are the terms of this piece?  In other words, what is the writer trying to do?  What is the writer’s intent here?  It’s nearly impossible to have a helpful response if you don’t understand the terms of the piece.  For example, let’s say someone is writing a short story which tries to capture a character who is very analytical, very cold, someone who intellectualizes everything in his life.  The writer writes a first person story in this character’s voice using very abstract, intellectualized language throughout.  Unfortunately, because the language is so abstract and distanced, the story never engages you.  To critique this story, you go through step No. 1, noting your initial reactions, and then you move to step 2, in which you try to grapple with why the story doesn’t engage you and what might be helpful to the writer.  You have figured out what the writer’s intentions were, and determined that the technique didn’t work.  But because you know what the writer is after, you might have some useful ideas that go beyond simply saying It didn’t work for me.  In this case, the writer might need to try a different approach to the material, such as trying it in third person, rather than simply revise here and there.  In another case, you see, for example, that the writer is attempting to be humorous or lighthearted.  Those of the terms of the piece.  You need to address the piece in light of its terms. 

So the questions become, What are the terms of this piece?  Does the writer meet them?  It’s not why not, or are the terms themselves off in some way?

 Here are some useful questions to ask yourself as a reader:

 1.  Did this engage me?  Why or why not?

2.  Did this hold my attention throughout?  Where was I most engaged and why?

3.  Are any things confusing to me?  Could I follow the piece, or were there gaps, or need for more information?  What else did I need to know?

4.   What about the opening?  Did the piece draw me in?  How effective is the first sentence and first paragraph and why or why not?  Did I want to keep reading?

5.  Do things move along?  What is the pace of the piece, and why?  Again, come back to the terms of the piece-what is it trying to do and how well does it succeed, and do you question the terms?

6.  What about language?  How would you describe it?  How does it function in terms of what you feel the writer is trying to do?

7.  What are you “getting” from the piece?  This could be any number of things, but it’s really helpful for you to feed back to the writer what is coming across for you, story or meaning or themes or emotional impact or enjoyment or whatever-wise.  The writer is really hungry to hear what is coming across.

 This raises the question of how to receive criticism.  Let it be said that we all want to hear, “I loved it!”  That would be nice every time, wouldn’t it?  But sometimes, often in my case, I sense that my piece is not all it could be, but I’ve reached a point where I don’t know what to do to make it better.  At this point I ask for criticism.  I’ll probably be a little defensive, whether I want to or not.  I’ll certainly want to explain what I was trying to do, and maybe even what everyone is missing!  But I do better if I simply listen, at first, before I “pollute” the conversation about my piece with my explanations, apologies, defenses.  After I’ve heard some initial responses, I may want to enter into the dialogue about the piece.  I try keeping an open mind, and also not to react too strongly to things that are said.  I recognize that the dynamic of the workshop is oblique, mysterious, indirect, and I’m not to take suggestions too literally, at least a first.  I know from my own experience as a critiquer that I can’t really tell another person how to write his story or memoir. I have to trust my own feelings and authority ultimately, but I also recognize that other people can “unstick me” sometimes, give me new energy, open my eyes to something I’m blind to, or look at the piece much more objectively.  Usually it takes some time before the value of the criticisms sink in.  David Huddle puts it this way: “stories yearn towards a state of perfection. It is up to an author to give the story what it wants or needs, and it is up to a critic to help the author discern the story’s desires.”

Capturing Childhood/Engaging the Adult Reader

The world of childhood is terrific material for writers, both memoirists and fiction writers and everyone in-between.  We all went through childhood, after all, so we can relate, and we know childhood to be intense, sensual, weighty.  Does anyone buy the myth of a happy childhood anymore?  Well, certainly some childhoods are happier than others, but regardless of how lucky we were in this regard, we usually can identify with children’s pain.  We “get” as adults how much things can hurt, how innocent or unprotected by our adult coping skills children can be.  We also can relish the freshness of experiences, the wonder of it all.  We seem drawn to see the world again through the eyes of children — and often that world, in writing, is more vivid than the one we experience through our own present weary vision.  Children are not “lesser” humans; they’re just at a different stage of the life experience.  They have the same ability to feel things (sometimes more intensely) and to have a whole consciousness, albeit not a particularly verbal one.  Therein lies the problem.  We didn’t have much language as young children; it was all sensation.  So the challenge for the writer of childhood stories is to capture the non-verbal felt experience of children while still appealing to the adult verbally sophisticated reader.

Begin to notice, as you read pieces about children, from a child’s point of view, how there is often (always?  I don’t know) the sense of the adult narrator, either overtly looking back (“I remember…”) or there as a kind of omniscient presence, setting the scene or providing the descriptive language that the child would not have had for herself at the time of the experience.  There seems always to be this dual or double voice in childhood stories.  It is hard to come up with a story in which there isn’t this adult intervention in the material at some level, in some way.  That’s because, I suppose, there is an adult WRITING the material.  And that adult is speaking to other adults, not other children.  And the writer has the possibility to both capture what it felt like to be a child and at the same time to be interpreting or shaping or even commenting on that experience from the adult perspective.

Let me say, too, that these two perspectives (the child’s and the adult’s) do not always have to be singing duet.  Sometimes they have “solos” by themselves in the piece or story.  And one may be much more pronounced than the other.  And in that sense, this is another “voice” lesson because again it’s a matter of finding the right voice that will let you tell the story.  In this case, finding the voice has to do with finding the right combination of adult and child, of finding a method to do what you want to accomplish.

Let’s look at some examples:

Angela’s Ashes is a brilliant memoir about an horribly impoverished childhood.  Readers have responded to this book by making it a best seller, and it has won about every prize there is.  A lot of the appeal is how authentic the child feels in this book, how close to childhood we get.  BUT — it isn’t all written in just the child’s voice and perspective.  It seems significant that the voice that begins the book is very much the adult narrator’s, whom we trust to shape the material for us, to tell the story, to write the book.  From the second paragraph of the book: “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all.”  Clearly this is the adult looking back, and reflecting. We get the sense that he has absorbed his experience, and is now going to recount it for us, having made some sense of it.   A lot of the rest of the book is the “showing” of that childhood.  A few pages later, after a section break, McCourt goes right into a pure child voice:  “I’m in a playground on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn with my brother, Malachy.  He’s two, I’m three.  We’re on the seesaw.

Up, down, up, down.

Malachy goes up.

I get off.

Malachy goes down.  Seesaw hits the ground. He screams. His hand is on his mouth and there’s blood.

Oh, God.  Blood is bad.  My mother will kill me.

And here she is, trying to run across the playground. Her big belly slows her.”

This is practically “See Dick run” type writing.  Very simple sentences.  Experiential.  Present tense.  We’re right there with the child.  And from there on the book takes off in this present tense child’s voice (for much — but not all — of it).  The interesting question is, What would it have been like to start the book off like this?  To write it all, from the start like this?  What difference would it have made?  A lot, I think.  We need that sense, in this book, of someone telling us a story, framing the material with something in mind, not just pure sensation.  We first communicate with an adult about the childhood we will soon experience.

Likewise, in Mary Karr’s very successful memoir, “The Liar’s Club,” the story is framed and narrated by an adult looking back.  “My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by dark.  I was seven, and our family doctor knelt before me where I sat on a mattress on the bare floor.  He wore a yellow golf shirt unbuttoned so that sprouts of hair showed in a V shape on his chest.  I had never seen him in anything but a while starched shirt and a gray tie.  The change unnerved me…”  This opens the book, and we hear both the adult narrator and the child who is experiencing the moment (“sprouts of hair showed…”).  Obviously both the language and the commentary is not that of a seven year old (“unnerved me”).  But we will accept this adult commentator if we also feel we’re really getting the scene, the experience of the child.  Her details are concrete and sensory and original and therefore make us feel we’re experiencing the moment along with the child, even though we’re aware we’re “hearing” the narrator too.  The classic duet.

What about fiction, however?  Those two examples are from memoir, and it’s easier to see how the duel perspective works in memoir, since someone is looking back.  Well, some “fictional” stories about childhood are written in memoiristic style.  I put “fictional” in quotes, because we don’t always know how autobiographical a short story is, or which parts of it are.  Few arise purely from imagination, of course (whatever THAT is).  “The Secret of Cartwheels” is a short story that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and then was reprinted in Best Short Stories of 1990.  In her bio notes, Patricia Henley says it’s her “most autobiographical story.”  It opens scenically, with just the perspective of the little girl protagonist:  “The winesap trees along the road were skeletal in the early evening light.  I stared out the school bus window and cupped like a baby chick the news I looked forward to telling Mother: I’d decided on my confirmation name.

‘What’s nine times seven?’ my sister Jan Mary said.

‘Sixty-three,’ I said.  Joan.  That was Mother’s confirmation name, and I wanted it to be mine as well.  She’d told me it was a name of strength, a name to carry you into battle.”

Later in the story, the narrator says: “When I remember those years at home, this is one of the things I focus on: how nothing ever matched — not sheets, not barrettes, not cups and saucers, not socks.  And sometimes I think the sad and petty effort to have matching things has been one of the chief concerns of my adult life.”  That’s the adult narrator speaking to the adult reader.

Of course you may not want the adult narrator to be so overt.  It’s possible to make the story more experiential than reflective; to have it unfold as if it is happening, not being remembered. 

Here’s the opening of Julie Schumacher’s “The Private Life of Robert Schumann”:  “Before Mr. Zinn came to teach us music, we were bored every Wednesday and Friday afternoon.  We’d had to study with a woman named Miss Fox, who scratched herself with a pointer, and who died of a heart attack one day in the coatroom, clutching the sleeves of a dozen jackets in her arms.  With Miss Fox we’d had to learn “This Land is Your Land” and the national anthem on two different instruments: we had a choice of the autoharp, the recorder, the triangle, and a pair of blocks.  The blocks had sandpaper stapled to their sides.  If you couldn’t play you had to sing, so most of us banged and strummed away, while Miss Fox counted time at the front of the room, her worn heart pounding away like a tired drum.”

What do you notice about this passage?  It draws you in and holds your attention by the strong, specific writing — the details pin you to the page.  And of course, that’s the writer working the material, writing.  It isn’t the girl speaking, though we assume we hear her voice — and we do, but “written” by the author, who is working hard.  Is it the young girl’s language or idea that Miss Fox’s worn heart “pounded like a tired drum.”  No, not really.  That’s a simile, that’s writing — so — the girl has the sensation but the narrator/author has the language. 

Also, it seems important to note that this is in the past tense.  The present tense, the tense of childhood sensation and immediacy, isn’t always the tense of story.  Using the past tense probably makes it easier for the writer to create the consciousness of the girl without having to write like the girl speaks/thinks, in an immature way (only because of underdeveloped language skills, not because of underdeveloped consciousness).  The author doesn’t fall into BEING the girl exactly.  Or it’s that this dual business goes on, of both being the girl, experiencing the story through her and with her; and being the author, writing the story, keeping an eye on the adult reader and her needs as well as the needs of the story.

One more fictional example: from The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy.  In a novel that beautifully renders what it feels like to be little children, Roy sometimes experiments with language to try to get at the non-verbal experience of children:  “”She turned to wave across the slipperoily marble floor at Estha Alone (with a comb), in his beige and pointy shoes.  Estha  waited in the dirty marble lobby with the lonely, watching mirrors till the red door took his sister away.”  But there is always a sense of the author/narrator providing information where needed, shaping the material, coming in when needed.  For example, the chapter opens, “Abhilash Talkies advertised itself as the first cinema hall in Kerala with a 70 mm CinemaScope screen.  To drive home the point, its facade had been designed as a cement replica of a curved CinemaScope screen…”  This is the omniscient narrator setting the scene, and then the children’s point of view takes over, but the narrator always remains in control, shaping, selecting, watching to make sure things work in terms of the effect she has in mind. 

So in writing out of childhood, it seems important to be more than just the experiencing child.  I’m sure there are some stories in which there is just the experiencing child but the only one I can think of is James Joyce’s opening to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which he purposefully tried to capture the pure sensation of non-verbal childhood.  It opens “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo….

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was a baby tuckoo.  The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt….”

But in general, stories about childhood involve not only the childhood perspective but an adult perspective, either in the form of an “I” narrator looking back, or in a shaping kind of omniscient narrator who knows the story and is telling it in adult language, so that we’re vaguely aware of that other presence behind the story, the author.  But these are not “rules” to be followed, but rather food for thought, so that as you read childhood stories and memoirs, you’ll pay attention to what is going on in the writing. And remember, you can do whatever you can get away with.  You get to decide what effects you want, what you’re trying to accomplish, what your vision is.  You get to be the authority behind your own work.  You pay attention to what others do, you learn from them, but then you get to do what you want to do, and you find your own means to do that. 

 Exercise:   Here is a list of words.  Beside each one write down a childhood memory or association. 

shoes:

Horse:

Rain:

Paint:

Or: make a memory chain by writing, “I remember….” and writing down a childhood memory, and then returning to “I remember…” and just let as many different memories come to you as will, writing quickly and without filling in the details, just brainstorming, returning again and again to “I remember”.

Now, take one of the generated memories, and practice writing it two ways.  First, write it in first person present tense, as if you’re reliving it, without trying for a narrator.  “I am standing on our front porch watching the rain come down in hard spears…”

 Next, consciously try to inject a sense of a narrator looking back at this experience.  Use the past tense.  Try to sing the duet of both the child’s experience and the adult’s language and maybe interpretation/ reflection on it.  In other words, search for a different voice for the same material.  “The summer I turned ten, I stood (or “I remember standing”) on the front porch watching the rain come down….” 

 In what ways are these two versions different?  What does either allow you to do that the other doesn’t?  Which feels like your natural voice?  Easiest for you?  Why?