Yesterday, I gave a lecture on selling a novel that I ended with the following advice:
There is no easy way to do this.
You will be rejected.
Rejection will hurt.
You will survive.
I told my students that success in this business relies on three things: talent, luck, and perseverance. We have no control over the first two, but the third trumps everything.
It is perhaps poetic justice that after such a speech, I had a story rejection in my e-mail inbox that night, gently letting me know I had failed to make the finalists of a short story contest I'd entered. I'll be honest, I set my hopes high on making the finalists. Worse, the rejected piece was the first chapter of my novel-in-progress, which I had adapted to stand on its own as a story. My first attempt at sending the book into the world had just been flung back. And I was right: it hurt. Though I have clearly survived, I have also been giving a lot of thought to the reasons for the story's failure, both because I want to persevere and send it out again and because the most important part of failure is learning from it.
In this case, I think my point-of-view character is a tough sell. He's a fourteen year old boy.
That may not automatically sound like a death knell to some readers, but in the literary fiction market, a young POV character doesn't help sell your book. I knew this going in, of course. I'd played around with young adult POV characters in grad school, and a professor had warned me that it marked my book as young adult fiction, which would prevent it from being taken seriously. "Try to think of one work of serious literary fiction that has a child as the point-of-view character," she said.
"What about Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird?"
She looked at me pityingly. "I would hardly call that a great literary novel."
I won't try to determine the literary merits of To Kill a Mockingbird here. The question, though, has stuck with me. Could you write a literary novel told from the point of view of a kid?
This question was driven home to me further this summer at a writer's workshop I attended. My workshop peers acknowledged the piece was well written, but they wondered whether "young adult fiction" was really appropriate in a literary fiction venue. The workshop leader, John Casey (whose work I highly recommend), came to my defense. "What makes you think this is a young adult novel?" he asked. "Just because we're in the point of view of a kid? This strikes me as literary."
The truth is, though, that I too had come to see book as a young adult novel. I had edited myself for language and sexual content that--let's face it--are a part of a real-life fourteen year old's experience. I came home and found myself writing a masturbation scene, and I'm happy with the results. In fact, scenes like this are becoming some of my favorite scenes in the book because I can feel the risk I'm taking there, and that risk feel authentic to the character I'm creating and the gritty world he inhabits. My rejection yesterday made me realize that I hadn't pushed the first chapter as much as I could--the character is still pretty squeaky clean there. I wasn't living up to the psychological reality demanded by literary fiction.
That said, the risk I'm taking by adding sex, drugs, and language back into the book takes me right out of the YA market, a market with significantly better selling potential than literary fiction. I'm happier with the book, but I may have just made it much harder to sell. The honesty required of literary fiction marks the book as "inappropriate" for younger readers, however more accurate it is to their experiences. Meanwhile, the fact that my POV character remains fourteen years old may make the book a no-go for literary fiction audiences. I want so badly for the book to be both literary and YA-friendly, but it seems I have hit a crossroads. I may lose both audiences by writing the book as I feel it should be written.
Should genre conventions govern the decisions we make as authors? On the one hand, surely we have to write towards Truth, or else what the hell are we writing for? On the other hand, if we want to have our book in the hands of readers, don't we have to acknowledge the realities of the market in at least some regard?
Yesterday, Richard Bausch posted the following advice on Facebook:
"Seriously, it's best to realize that it never
does get easier, and the writer who thinks it should get easier is
involved in a dangerous self-deception. Because as you go on and keep
practicing this craft and art, you know more all the time, and are
therefore apt to see with greater and greater clarity the large number
of possibilities that exist in each line or gesture--and so the task
just becomes all that much harder. And the heavy doubts never do go
away. Better make friends with them now, because they really won’t ever,
ever go away."
He's right in so many ways. There are endless possibilities in the line and gesture, and so many more in each scene added or deleted. I've signed on for the long haul; doubts will be my road companions. Perseverance is more than just sending out again after rejection. It's about facing your work every day knowing that each decision you make as a writer is going to be rejected by someone, and trying to determine what decision is the necessary one for you. It's about conjuring these decisions out of air and trying to make something that is authentic. There is no easy way to do this.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Thursday, February 7, 2013
25% of the Time: Questions of Process
did a remarkable job of collecting interviews with some of the best writers and writing teachers working today, including George Saunders, Steve Almond, David Sedaris, Margaret Atwood, among many, many incredible others.
The film is a wealth of thought-provoking insight, but in particular, I find myself coming back to a comment from Daniel Orozco, who commented that he loves writing 25% of the time and hates it the other 75% of the time. I'll be honest, this made me sit up, say, "me too!" and feel awash in all sorts of warmth and kinship. What's made me keep thinking of it, though, is what he said next--that drafting is least favorite part of the process. For him, to draft is the painful process of forcing down words when he can see that the syntax and words aren't working and everything is so, so bad. Revision brings the joy of relief, when he can make the language do what it needs.
For me, the reverse is true. I love the magic of discovery when I write into a scene and begin to envision the place and start to understand the complex reactions of my characters to their private and public conflicts and feel their humanity. I love getting carried away by a sentence and feeling like I'm an oar-less canoe floating along its whorls and eddies.
Revision, though? Oh revision. It would be unfair to say I hate it. Hate is too strong. As I tell my children, I'm too young to hate. I don't want to hate or be hateful. And honestly, I don't hate revision. Dread, yes; hate, no. Revision can offer the same magical and exciting surprises, the same writer highs, the pleasure as drafting. Unfortunately, they're often fewer and painfully far between. Revision is the necessary work, the moment where I acknowledge that the draft that carried me away is nowhere near good enough, the part in which I tear the scenes along their seams to try to determine what stuffing is missing.
The thing is, I probably spend 75%-80% of the time I'm "writing" a book locked in this final battle, trying to revise it so that the text resembles the vision at least in small part. And I'm wondering whether, for Orozco, it's the reverse. Does it take him 75% of the time to ache out a draft so he can have a joyous 25% time revising it? Do writers, by our natures, rush the part we love in the frenzy of our delight only to slog through the other part, and vice verse? If so, can--or should--we spend more time in whatever phase is the "good" part?
Ultimately, I find I don't trust the desire to prolong the joy or to mediate the hard parts. As masochistic as it may sound, I suspect that the painful 75%, wherever it lies, is the part that actually makes the finished book good. It's the part we can be proud of later. I suspect that, whatever the painful part of writing is, we avoid it at our work's peril.
Friday, January 25, 2013
The Next Big Thing, continued
This week, I'm passing "The Next Big Thing" torch to Kirsten Kaschock, whose book Sleight is one of my favorite novels published in the last few years. The world Kaschock creates here is our own touched with a surrealistic feathering. Inhabiting this landscape are Lark and Clef, two sisters who dance in a Sleight troupe, an invented art form in which dancers create intricate architectures and sometimes disappear, or "wick," from the stage. When the sisters are confronted with the news of the mass murder of children, they are left to navigate the turbid question, what is the proper artistic response to horror? Would creating a dance that responds to this atrocity be exploitative, or cathartic, or something else, something wholly unimagined?
Kaschock has published two collections of poetry in addition to this thoroughly gripping novel, and her language sings in every line. She is the rare writer whose mastery of stunningly gorgeous word choice, rhythm, and syntax does not soften the harshness of the ideas she explores. She doesn't flinch from difficult questions, but instead finds the images and narrative that allow us to question with her. I'd love to put a copy of this book in every reader's hands.
For more on Kirsten, her work, and her "The Next Big Thing" interview, check in at https://kaschock.wordpress.com/
Find her books here:
Sleight
Unfathoms
A Beautiful Name for a Girl
Saturday, January 19, 2013
The Next Big Thing
NOTE: The Next Big Thing is a blog series, winding its way through the internet. I was invited by writer Eric Sasson, whose short story collection MARGINS OF TOLERANCE is published with Livingston Press. Check back next week for the blog addresses of the other writers whom I've invited into the challenge.
What is the title of your book?
Borrowed Horses
Where did the idea come from for the book?
The novel started as my dissertation at the University of Georgia. For a long time, I'd resisted writing about horses or riding. They were my passion, but I felt that few readers would share that passion. I couldn't stand the idea that the thing that I loved might bore other people, so I silenced myself rather than taking that risk. Then one day I stumbled upon Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, which had only recently come out. I knew nothing about her or the book and hesitated to buy it because it was about opera and what did I know or care about opera? But for some reason, I did buy the book. I immediately fell in love with it. She wrote so beautifully about opera that it made me care. I thought, if she can do that for me with opera, then I must try to do the same thing with horses. I realized that the wonderful thing about great language is that it can transcend our prejudices and biases. The root passion is what we respond to, even if that emotion triggered by different objects for the writer than it is for the reader--which is ironic because, to transmit that passion, one must write in images and things. That's the paradox of fiction and what makes Eliot's idea of the objective correlative so sticky. It's what Patchett had realized and I had to learn from her. If the language is right, the writer's feeling for the objects trigger the necessary emotion even if readers do not share the writer's emotional associations with those objects.
Patchett's book gave me permission and, thus, I had a subject to write about, but not a plot. In fact, I was frantically plot-less for quite some time, which is terrifying for any writer but especially one with a self-inflicted deadline. (I was bound and determined to finish my PhD in 2006, come hell or high water.) Aside from journaling and note-taking, I stopped work on the book while I was studying for my comprehensive exams, simply because I was spending nearly every waking moment reading. About midway through that terrible nearly writing-less year of relentless speed reading, I re-read Jane Eyre for my Victorian exam, and as I was reading, I kept thinking about what an amazing book it is. I first read it when I was thirteen, and I've read it over and over since, and every time, it holds up. I kept thinking, I wish I could write this book, and then I started wondering if I could... Would the plot bend to the characters I envisioned? My speaker was no Jane, but she might be a Rochester. I started to wonder if I could tell his story through a female speaker. What would happen if my main character had a mad man who wouldn't stay safely in her past? I worked from that idea forward into the book.
What genre does your book fall under?
I like the word choice "fall under" here. I'm imagining a steam roller called genre about to roll me over. I imagine myself tripping on a curb and being pressed into steaming tarmac.
I call Borrowed Horses a "literary pot boiler." I don't think book stores are using that genre label yet, but wouldn't it be cool if they did?
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I kind of love this question because when I was workshopping early chapters, Jeff Newberry, who is a good friend and an amazing poet, said that he pictured Dave (my madman) as Matthew McConaughy, an actor whom I adore, and it really helped make Dave clear in my mind.
Beyond that, I'm afraid I'm going to run out of answers quickly because I am really bad with celebrity knowledge. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think the characters shouldn't be played by known actors. I often love movies best when I don't recognize any of the actors and can, therefore, utterly buy the idea that they are exactly the people whom they play on the screen. It removes a layer of artificiality for me. In Borrowed Horses, the male and female leads would need to feel authentic. Joannie sees herself as a kind of Clint Eastwood/ Spaghetti Western character, in spite of which--or perhaps because of which--she is extremely attractive to men. She's athletic and smirks a lot and has curling dark hair. Timothy is tall and thin with hazel eyes and a kind of punk-ish vibe, but also exudes a lot of quiet wisdom. The actors who played these two would want to embody those kind of traits.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Borrowed Horses retells the love story of Jane Eyre, inverting the genders and re-setting the story in Idaho with lots of horses and fence-jumping.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Borrowed Horses will be published by New Rivers Press in October 2013.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
This is a tough question because I had been taking notes on the book and letting ideas percolate for about ten years before I started writing the novel in earnest. I'll say though that I wrote the first draft in roughly a year and a half, and then re-drafted for the next six years--including rewriting the entire manuscript from page one. The novel that will be published is a far, far different book from the one I defended as a dissertation in 2006.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
It seems somehow egotistical to compare my book to those that I love, so rather than comparing, I'll just mention a few books that I admire and wished to emulate: Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, everything by Louise Erdrich, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (of course), and Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow. I'll also say that I had Sherman Alexie much on my mind, both because he and I write about a similar region and because my character Timothy is part-Native American, from Spokane like Alexie, and I wrote very much afraid that I would fall into stereotypes or, inversely, that I would fail to capture the culture. It was really important for me that Timothy be a person rather than a caricature. Alexie's poem "How to Write the Great American Indian Novel" was very much on my mind. I don't want to be the writer he parodies there.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I was inspired by two of the great loves of my life: horses and Idaho. I wanted to capture the feeling of flight a rider has when jumping a fence, and I wanted to give the world a glimpse of some of the most beautiful landscape this country has to offer.
What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
Joannie is an x-ray technologist, so I did a lot of research into bones. I don't know if that actually peaks anyone's interest, but our bones are amazing, fascinating things, and far, far stronger than most people would imagine. I worked a lot of bone research into the language because I found it so beautiful and inspiring.
Also, I know writers are supposed abhor cliches, but I've always loved the old saw "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger." This book is an exploration of how true that is for my main character, but also of the ways that personal strength, if it becomes cold and removed, can become its own brand of weakness.
What is the title of your book?
Borrowed Horses
Where did the idea come from for the book?
The novel started as my dissertation at the University of Georgia. For a long time, I'd resisted writing about horses or riding. They were my passion, but I felt that few readers would share that passion. I couldn't stand the idea that the thing that I loved might bore other people, so I silenced myself rather than taking that risk. Then one day I stumbled upon Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, which had only recently come out. I knew nothing about her or the book and hesitated to buy it because it was about opera and what did I know or care about opera? But for some reason, I did buy the book. I immediately fell in love with it. She wrote so beautifully about opera that it made me care. I thought, if she can do that for me with opera, then I must try to do the same thing with horses. I realized that the wonderful thing about great language is that it can transcend our prejudices and biases. The root passion is what we respond to, even if that emotion triggered by different objects for the writer than it is for the reader--which is ironic because, to transmit that passion, one must write in images and things. That's the paradox of fiction and what makes Eliot's idea of the objective correlative so sticky. It's what Patchett had realized and I had to learn from her. If the language is right, the writer's feeling for the objects trigger the necessary emotion even if readers do not share the writer's emotional associations with those objects.
Patchett's book gave me permission and, thus, I had a subject to write about, but not a plot. In fact, I was frantically plot-less for quite some time, which is terrifying for any writer but especially one with a self-inflicted deadline. (I was bound and determined to finish my PhD in 2006, come hell or high water.) Aside from journaling and note-taking, I stopped work on the book while I was studying for my comprehensive exams, simply because I was spending nearly every waking moment reading. About midway through that terrible nearly writing-less year of relentless speed reading, I re-read Jane Eyre for my Victorian exam, and as I was reading, I kept thinking about what an amazing book it is. I first read it when I was thirteen, and I've read it over and over since, and every time, it holds up. I kept thinking, I wish I could write this book, and then I started wondering if I could... Would the plot bend to the characters I envisioned? My speaker was no Jane, but she might be a Rochester. I started to wonder if I could tell his story through a female speaker. What would happen if my main character had a mad man who wouldn't stay safely in her past? I worked from that idea forward into the book.
What genre does your book fall under?
I like the word choice "fall under" here. I'm imagining a steam roller called genre about to roll me over. I imagine myself tripping on a curb and being pressed into steaming tarmac.
I call Borrowed Horses a "literary pot boiler." I don't think book stores are using that genre label yet, but wouldn't it be cool if they did?
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I kind of love this question because when I was workshopping early chapters, Jeff Newberry, who is a good friend and an amazing poet, said that he pictured Dave (my madman) as Matthew McConaughy, an actor whom I adore, and it really helped make Dave clear in my mind.
Beyond that, I'm afraid I'm going to run out of answers quickly because I am really bad with celebrity knowledge. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think the characters shouldn't be played by known actors. I often love movies best when I don't recognize any of the actors and can, therefore, utterly buy the idea that they are exactly the people whom they play on the screen. It removes a layer of artificiality for me. In Borrowed Horses, the male and female leads would need to feel authentic. Joannie sees herself as a kind of Clint Eastwood/ Spaghetti Western character, in spite of which--or perhaps because of which--she is extremely attractive to men. She's athletic and smirks a lot and has curling dark hair. Timothy is tall and thin with hazel eyes and a kind of punk-ish vibe, but also exudes a lot of quiet wisdom. The actors who played these two would want to embody those kind of traits.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Borrowed Horses retells the love story of Jane Eyre, inverting the genders and re-setting the story in Idaho with lots of horses and fence-jumping.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Borrowed Horses will be published by New Rivers Press in October 2013.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
This is a tough question because I had been taking notes on the book and letting ideas percolate for about ten years before I started writing the novel in earnest. I'll say though that I wrote the first draft in roughly a year and a half, and then re-drafted for the next six years--including rewriting the entire manuscript from page one. The novel that will be published is a far, far different book from the one I defended as a dissertation in 2006.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
It seems somehow egotistical to compare my book to those that I love, so rather than comparing, I'll just mention a few books that I admire and wished to emulate: Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, everything by Louise Erdrich, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (of course), and Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow. I'll also say that I had Sherman Alexie much on my mind, both because he and I write about a similar region and because my character Timothy is part-Native American, from Spokane like Alexie, and I wrote very much afraid that I would fall into stereotypes or, inversely, that I would fail to capture the culture. It was really important for me that Timothy be a person rather than a caricature. Alexie's poem "How to Write the Great American Indian Novel" was very much on my mind. I don't want to be the writer he parodies there.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I was inspired by two of the great loves of my life: horses and Idaho. I wanted to capture the feeling of flight a rider has when jumping a fence, and I wanted to give the world a glimpse of some of the most beautiful landscape this country has to offer.
What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
Joannie is an x-ray technologist, so I did a lot of research into bones. I don't know if that actually peaks anyone's interest, but our bones are amazing, fascinating things, and far, far stronger than most people would imagine. I worked a lot of bone research into the language because I found it so beautiful and inspiring.
Also, I know writers are supposed abhor cliches, but I've always loved the old saw "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger." This book is an exploration of how true that is for my main character, but also of the ways that personal strength, if it becomes cold and removed, can become its own brand of weakness.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Pursuing Endings
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.
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.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Coming to Terms with "Voice"
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.
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.
Friday, December 21, 2012
It's a Wonderful Life: The Lost Image
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.
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.
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