My ten year old daughter wants to be a writer, and we talk about writing a lot. The other day, she was telling me about a short story collection she admires. "The ending lines are so good," she told me, "that sometimes I take them for my own stories."
I closed my eyes and bit back the lecture on intellectual property. She's ten. It can wait. Instead what I said was, "don't you think, though, that what makes an ending line really good is all the sentences leading up to it? I mean, doesn't the story have to earn its ending? If your stories are different than that writer's stories, don't they need different last lines? your own last lines?"
Easy for me to say. Lately, my project has been to revise my 2nd novel, a novel whose ending needs major work. As I'm reading, I'm trying to decipher my own tracks, to determine where they might lead. I know I've stopped short somewhere along the way, but the snow looks pristine all around, and I don't know where I've been leading myself.
I'm also trying to find chapters within this novel-in-progress that might work as stand-alone stories. I've got two in circulation right now, and what's my primary worry about both? The endings. In each case, I've revised them to try to achieve a little more closure (for lack of a better word) so that they feel like something that has ending, rather than a piece of a long story building up to another end altogether.
I've been reading a ton of short fiction as I do this, looking admiringly at how nuanced good writers are in their endings, how gracefully they let us go, allowing us to close the story and feel done with it, even as it haunts us. In good stories, the writers earn their last words.
And the best stories start earning their ending with the very first line, which is not to say that they're circular or "pat." I'm not talking about the gimmick ending here where the writer circles back to the same line or image and says "ta-da." Good openings feel subtle and effortless--a sure sign that a writer has done a hell of a lot of work.
Part of me wishes I could end this blog entry with a nifty formula or tips for writing good endings, but if I believed writing could be so easily reduced to formulas and tips, I wouldn't be doing it for a living. It's the hunt, the following of the tracks, that makes the job so interesting in the first place.
When I worked at The Georgia Review, I saw plenty of examples of failed voices. A story would start in heavily misspelled vernacular, heavy with the y'alls and yokelisms we might expect from a bad actor, and I'd find myself scanning ahead quickly to see if it ever redeemed itself. They almost never did. And because I associated "voice pieces" so heavily with bad writing, the concept of voice itself became suspect. I cringed when I heard people talk about a writer finding "his/her voice," as if it were lost change in the couch cushion that had to be dug out. I figured, a writer's voice was whatever was natural, and if I had to think about it too hard, then the piece was doomed to feeling hackneyed and artifical.
Lately, though, I've realized just how wrong that assumption is. I've been listening to the New Yorker Fiction podcasts (which are free through iTunes and are, for the most part, mind-blowingly good). A few weeks back, I was listening to Eudora Welty's "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" while scrubbing my toilet, and Joyce Carol Oates, who selected and read the story, talked with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman afterward about the title and how crucial the voice was to the piece. The language seemed so natural. Welty said that she felt she knew this person because she had grown up with him. He was her neighbor, her uncle, her grocer, etc. He was a part of her community and thus a part of her--though, as the title suggests, a part that perhaps she didn't know was there and may not have wanted to acknowledge.
On Thursday, Joshua Ferris read George Saunders's "Adams" intimately into my ear while I ran around the track (again, thank you New Yorker Fiction podcast), and I felt the same impulse driving the story. The speaker's voice was crucial, as Ferris pointed out, to mediating the violence of the story, allowing it to flirt with the comedic while we are simultaneously horrified by the speaker's action. It's the same trick Burgess pulled off in A Clockwork Orange, a book I've always loved for its language, its voice.
It dawned on me just how many books I first loved for the voice of their speakers: Jane Eyre, Holden Caulfield, or more recently, Christopher John Francis Boone (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime) and just about any character by John Green. Their voices made the speakers real to me. They drew me in.
A speaker is a book's emissary. We have to like them if we're going to root for them--especially if they're as despicable as Burgess's Alec or Nabokov's Humbert Humbert. I think a part of me always recognized that voice was a part of this liking, but I've arrived at the conclusion that it's more than that, that voice is nothing less than the embodiment of personality in language.
This is perhaps what is most terrifying about finding the voice for a novel. Let's face it: most of us worry about whether we're likable enough. Do we have the necessary charisma? Are we witty enough? Can we create a character who is?
I suspect that it's this fear (that no one will like me enough) that drives my avoidance of voice-driven fiction, but, in this season of resolutions, I vow to avoid it no longer. I still believe it's inaccurate to talk about a writer finding "his voice" because that implies there is a single voice to find. The voices a writer seeks are multiple: the voices of all of those characters, the embodiment of all those personalities. In Welty's example, the killer's voice is and is not her own. Her and her speaker's language are related but not identical. Welty allows what's familiar in their common language to draw her into a vernacular of racial hatred that was not her own, and the story is terrifyingly successful as a result.
Whether they come easily or not, the best voices draw us in not because of any politician's false charm but because they feel natural and authentic, because the writer erased the footprints that got him there.
Unlike most Americans, I didn't grow up watching It's a Wonderful Life every Christmas. In fact, I didn't see the movie until I was in my late twenties. Perhaps because of this delay, I remember the first clip I ever saw vividly: I was watching some morning news program, undoubtedly around the holidays, and the reporters had gone to visit the pool from the classic 1946 holiday film because it had just been refurbished. As in the movie, the gleaming gym floor retracted to reveal a multi-laned swimming pool. I was struck by how strange and cool that was, and when I watched the movie, I was watching especially for that crazy floor.
You remember the scene, right?
No?
That's the amazing thing. It seems very few people do. I've talked to people who grew up their whole lives watching that movie and talked to them specifically about that moment, and, without fail, they look at me a little baffled or a little pityingly, and say something like, "you must be thinking of another movie. Carrie, perhaps?"
Just in case you're in that boat, here's the scene:
Wild, right? And memorable! Or, at least, it should be memorable... so why isn't it?
With the holidays coming and talk turning to holiday movies, I once again find myself thinking about this. The pool scene sets up so much of the narrative that will follow: the couple falling into trouble, the unexpected crash, the recovery through love.
And yet, for the average viewer, it doesn't have that resonance. It blurs in with a dozen other images from the movie and so ultimately what we remember is Clarence or, more probably, the poor child actor delivering her stilted lines, "Teacher says, 'every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.'"
Surely, this should be the throw-away moment. It's not nearly so wonderfully strange as that evocative swimming pool. We've seen dozens of lisping children and adoring adults. We've seen the happy ending. Yet this line, this scene seems to be what sticks.
What makes an image resonate? Why is one so readily forgotten while another sticks in our mind like Christmas tree sap sticks to our hands, refusing to easily wash away?
I first thought perhaps it might have to do with relevance. Perhaps the story of redemption here is more important than the initial fall.
I thought next that perhaps it had something to do with placement. We remember best what happens near the film's end.
I dismissed both of these ideas, though, because neither holds true for one of my other favorite Christmas movie images: the leg lamp in A Christmas Story.
The leg lamp is no more relevant to the central narrative of A Christmas Story is than the swimming pool is to the narrative It's a Wonderful Life.In fact, if anything, it's less so. We need Mary and George to fall in love if George is to have family at the heart of his crisis, but we don't need the father to own a lamp in order for Ralphie to get or not get his longed for Christmas present. So much for narrative significance.
As for placement, the leg lamp appears in at the middle, not the end of the film, yet if anything, we're far more likely to forget the Chinese restaurant Christmas dinner scene that closes the movie than we are to forget Ralphie's father's "major award." Clearly, an image's significance and memorability did not rely on when it appears.
The theories I'm working on now have to do with tone and the familiarity, for lack of a better word, evoked by the strange object. Here are the ideas:
Tone: Part of the reason we displace the memory of the swimming pool scene onto other films is that it seems out of sync with our memory of the tone and theme of It's a Wonderful Life. That movie is about suicide, forgiveness, and redemption, not about dancing schtick and surreal under-floor swimming pools.
The leg lamp, on the other hand, seems perfectly in harmony with the theme of repeatedly stymied and unspoken desires that drives Ralphie's desire for a Red Ryder Carbine-Action, Two-Hundred Shot Range Model Air Rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time. The discord in the family and the comedic tone through which it's filtered is summed up in the soft glow of electric sex that shines through the living room window. In other words, the tone of the image needs to be in harmony with the overall tone.
Familiarity evoked by the strange: A strange image has to evoke a sense of familiarity for the audience to connect with it. The world created in It's a Wonderful Life is a surreal one: angels walk among us and talk people down from bridges. In the context of the film, this is a necessary strangeness. Viewers resonate with the idea that divine intervention might help a man turn from his own despair. The swimming pool, however, fails to connect. It may be a real object from our world, but its strangeness is not necessary to the audience in the way angels are. We haven't taken that plunge while dancing, and we don't know if it's essential that George and Mary do for their love to culminate. The pool under the floor feels less familiar than angels.
By contrast, the leg lamp, as strange as it is, starts an argument between Ralphie's parents that feels familiar to most of us. We've watched our parents struggle with competing and incompatible desires. The strange, then, must create the familiar.
I can't help but feel, though, that the swimming pool under the floor is not done with me yet. As I try to plant my feet firmly on a theory of what makes an image work, I can feel the watery fluidity of imaginative lurking just underneath, inviting me to dive in and swim or drown or dance.
or, "Sometimes, it's hard to love revision" (to be sung to the tune of "Stand By Your Man")
Lately, I've been knee deep in project revisions. Final edits for Borrowed Horses went to my publisher Monday, and I'm back to working on New Brighton, the novel I took to Sewanee Writers' Conference this past summer. Back at the end of July, I thought I'd be able to come home, knock out the revision to the book in a month of so, tinkering and tightening, so that I could begin querying before school got too crazy. As fall grew older and we headed into November, my students inspired me with their NaNoWriMo writing goals (a 50,000 word novel draft in a month), and I thought perhaps I could finish my revision before December hit. Now, I'm wondering if a goal of finishing before the end of Christmas break is overly optimistic.
The thing is, though, I really, really like the new stuff I'm writing for the novel, even though it's taking me so much more time to write it than I'd planned. I'm taking more emotional risks. The scenes are more immediate and intense. Over the course of my writing life, I've heard a lot of writers say you have to "trust the process," and for the first time in my life, I feel like I might know what that means.
(The picture on the sidebar is what I look like when I'm outside playing in the snow. The picture above is what I look like when I'm writing.)
My students know that I'm a big believer in the hand-written journal. I make them all keep one as part of their fiction writing course grade. The want to type them on computers and iPads, and I refuse. For one semester only, they have to try things my way. "Hand writing accesses a different part of your brain," I tell them, both because I know this to be true and because in this NaNo world, they need someone to remind them to slow down.
This year, I've been reminding myself that as well, using my journal far more extensively as I revise than I ever have in the past. And you know what? I was right. It may feel slow and inefficient to close the computer, but most of the stuff I'm most proud of in this re-write is coming straight out of the journal.
This morning, for instance, I was working on a scene in which the protagonist's mother returns to work for the first time in twenty years. Reading the scene on the computer screen, I could tell it was happening too quickly. A mother returning to work is a big thing. It needed space to become that, but I couldn't see where to put it in the draft as written. So instead of trying, I highlighted the passage on the screen ("he knew she was nervous"), giving myself an idea to riff off of and a place to come back to, and then I closed my laptop and opened my journal and wrote for an hour about only that one idea in that one line. And then I opened my laptop again and wrote this post. Why? Because the journal stuff is *good.* Because I now have the details to make the crisis real. Because I'm excited again. Because when I open my journal, I'm discovering, and it's what I love best about writing and what makes it live and breathe.
My fellow fiction writer Matt Bell posted this quotation on Facebook this morning:
"I
write slowly because I write badly. I have to rewrite everything many,
many times just to achieve mediocrity. Time can give you a good critical
perspective, and I often have to go slow so that I can look back on
what sort of botch of things I made three months ago. Much of the stuff
which I will finally publish, with all its flaws, as if it had been
dashed off with a felt pen, will have begun eight or more years earlier,
and worried and slowly chewed on and left for dead many times in the
interim." —William Gass
I'm going to sign off with that quotation, one I hope to hold in my mind throughout the end of the revision of New Brighton--however long it takes me.
The short answer is this: green eyes are nearly the only eye color that exists in fiction.
True, every once in a while a character might have "ice blue" eyes or "chocolate brown" eyes or, in some rare cases (including Anne of Green Gables and Katniss Everdeen), gray eyes, but none of these colors appear with nearly the frequency of green eyes. Green eyes are everywhere. It's as if an epidemic raged though the worlds of fiction, and the only noticeable symptom was a change in eye color. Even my own beloved Jane Eyre insists on having green eyes, though Rochester calls them blue*. From pop-genre novels like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code to gorgeous, heart-breaking literary fiction like Aimee Bender's The Girl with the Flammable Skirt, novels seem bursting with green-eyed characters.
In a grad school workshop, I made this complaint when my major professor, Reg McKnight, began to laugh in the big-hearted way of his that made us all love him. "Why are you laughing at me?" I asked him. "I'm not," he said. "I'm laughing because I'm pretty sure I gave the main character in my last novel green eyes."
Even among the best writers, green eyes have becomes fiction's short hand for "pay attention to this person, s/he is *interesting.*" When I read that a character has green eyes, I think what I'm supposed to be picturing is something like this:
When I know full well that actual green eyes are probably closer to this:
And don't get me wrong. This is by all means an interesting eye, but is it any more inherently interesting than this eye?
Or this one?
And anyway, don't we all know that eye color no more determines a person's intelligence or charisma or abilities than their skin color does? To misquote Martin Luther King, Jr., I would like the chance to judge a character on the content of their character, not the color of their eyes.
I must add an aside here that I have no bias against green-eyed people in life, only in fiction. My husband has green eyes, and his eyes are, no doubt, among the reasons I find him so attractive... though his sideburns and inveterate love of flannel have a lot to do with it as well.
My point is this: I think as writers we have to up the ante for ourselves. If a character is interesting, we cannot attempt to show this by resorting to the least interesting of all fictional eye colors. We must instead show it in surprising but character-appropriate action and dialogue. In other words, if we want an interesting character we actually have to make an interesting character.
To prove my point, I give my student writers this challenge: write down the eye color of ten people you know well who are not in class. I then ask them to come back next time and tell me if they were right. They come back blushing, embarrassed not to know the eye color of the people whom they love best. But why be embarrassed? My students weren't paying attention to the eye color because they were paying attention to what mattered most about their friends and family. They were paying attention to the goofy way those loved ones laugh, or the way they substituted in nonsense words for curse words, or the way they rub a shoulder, or the way they pet their dog absent-mindedly as they're reading the paper, or to any other of a million gestures and quirks that show who they are and why we love them.
As writers, that's exactly what we want to be paying attention to.
------
*Note: Jane and Rochester's disagreement over her eye color is, for me, why Charlotte Bronte gets away with a green-eyed character. Whom do we trust? Is Jane unreliable? Or is Rochester just not paying very close attention to her? Either way, the disagreement isn't a throw away detail. Rather, it does some work in this narrative, suggesting more about these characters than just physical appearance.
It seems like it has become morally suspect to suggest that a book, essay, or story should have a "hook." The implication seems to be that it's a contrivance or a gimmick, and as such, I understand why it has become unfashionable to use the term. Still, I think there is something to be said for thinking in terms of a "hook," and so I'll try to say that something.
Perhaps the problem is the term "hook" itself, which implies the reader is a fish. The reader is not a fish. The reader is an intelligent human being with many demands on his/her time--but in abandoning the term hook, it seems like too many writers also forget this crucial fact of the reader's humanity. Too often, I see writers who seem to feel that the reader owes it to them to slog through pages or attempt to penetrate their word puzzles and mind games just because the writer bothered to write the pages in the first place.
The reader, however, owes the writer nothing. In fact, it's the reverse. If someone has been gracious enough to spend time and money to read our efforts, we owe them.
What I like about the term hook is that the metaphor implies the writer should offer the reader some morsel up front--something we can see and smell and taste just as much as we can see, smell, and taste the barbed hook itself. The writing needs to establish a reason for us readers to willingly sacrifice our time.
Ultimately, the hook should not be a gimmick. If it is, chances are the reader will be disappointed in the work. Readers will rightly feel cheated. Instead, the hook should offer readers a glimpse of what the rest of the piece promises to give: romance, tragedy, mystery, comedy, philosophical questions, etc. The hook establishes the art of the book. It is the offering the writer makes for the reader's time. The best hide hooks themselves because, like well-tied flies, they feel a natural part of the narrative landscape. When those lures are artfully done, I as the reader will bite every time.
------
PS. (ten minutes later)
After writing this I stumbled across Julie Ritter's poem "Ravi Shankar Hand Dip" at http://pbq.drexel.edu/pbq/archives/462. Synchronicity?
Quick as a fishhook flared into the water, the way hip rubs against hip intentionally unintentional on the dance floor, furtive as a glance at someone else’s bank statement, palmed like a cigarette in the rain, the fingers exploratory, an insect’s antennae, twitching to capture texture to populate the hinterlands of a long winter night alone, a maneuver not catalogued by the Kama Sutra, but full of nervy frottage, pervy wattage, a slip of skin on skin thin as a wine glass stem and more circumspect, harder to unpack than a tackle box and oft-deployed in subway cars and murky bars – that’s the hand dip.
For the past few years, I have started every creative writing class by telling my students that there is one question that I can't ask but that is more important than any other. "Who cares?"
I tell them this on the first day of class, before I've seen any of their writing, because I can't read their stories, the ones they've worked so hard on, the ones they've poured so much of themselves into, I can't hold those narratives up in front of all their peers, and say "honestly, y'all, who cares?"
To do so would be soul crushing, and it is neither my job nor my desire to crush souls. Still, before we've read any stories or can attach the question to any one writer's work, I have to put the question out there because, if we're serious about writing for publication, then our writing must above all other things make someone care.
Fiction, when it works, works like a gut punch. Whether we're out to make someone happy or sad, the purpose of fiction is not to move someone's rational mind, but rather, to move them emotionally. That's not easy to do. Most people are tired at the end of the day.
Flannery O'Connor knew this and wrote brilliantly about it (see her essay on "The Tired Reader" in Mystery and Manners).. The only problem is, she blames the reader, writing “I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.”
Now, I love Flannery O'Connor, and, though I know she is in part being facetious, I also want to believe that she is right because so many people are moved by her writing. Still, I wonder if the less-talented rest of us can get away with this attitude? Don't we have to go after those tired hearts and, if not uplift them, make them at least care a little about the characters we write? If we're moving hearts, and then minds along with them but hearts first, isn't making someone care the single most important function of a piece of writing?
I'm not advocating we start asking "who cares?" on any student's story. As I said earlier, I believe it would be destructive and harmful in the long run... Still, I'd like to throw the question out there as one we writers should be asking ourselves. We may not live in the sentimental age of the Victorians, with their love of melodrama, but nonetheless, readers turn to fiction because they do want catharsis; they do want to care. Our job is to provide matter worth caring about.
