June 22, 2007
The authenticity of fiction
From Penelope Lively’s Making It Up
To write fiction is to make a succession of choices, to send the narrative and the characters in one direction rather than another. Story is navigation; successful story is the triumphant progress down exactly the right paths, avoiding the dead ends, the unsatisfactory turns. Life, of course, is not at all like that. There is no shrewd navigator, just a person’s own haphazard lurching from one decision to another. Which is why life so often seems to lack the authenticity of fiction.
May 29, 2007
Of corporate governance, executive compensation and the muse
I’ve been back to work now for just about a month at this summer job of mine, and things are in full swing. I’m really enjoying it, and it’s nice to be back and know what’s going on, rather than enduring the steep learning curve I endured last year. So I’m working 9-5 and writing short stories in the evening, and though my productivity has not been at an all time high, I am pretty satisfied. And I am trying to blur the line between my writing life and my daytime life by including components of the latter in the former. I am currently writing a story about Thomas, who is a compensation consultant. I suspect this could be the first story about a compensation consultant ever written. I’ve certainly never read one. How exciting! I wonder what will happen?
May 25, 2007
My Office Haiku
(Now up at Bookninja. Go here for more)
clock hands ticking round
slow and stilted second hand—
outside it is spring
May 23, 2007
During the journey
During the journey Patrick didn’t know if Katrina was asleep, and he didn’t want to ask in case he woke her, and so he sat beside her quietly, looking past her and out the window. Her chest was rising and falling, so Patrick knew that she was still alive. Outside, the city began to fade, and soon he could see the sky again. The buildings got lower, and farther apart, and the road grew wider. The bus picked up speed. It really was a lovely day, warm with a breeze. The sight of the blue sky from his window that morning had given Patrick his first inclination that maybe things would work out fine with all this. Katrina had agreed to go with him after all, which had to mean something. And now with not a single cloud in the sky, at least one thing was going his way, and Patrick glanced down at Katrina’s knees. Any knee was really quite a miraculous construction really, but Katrina’s in particular. Emerging so effortlessly from her thigh, her tanned skin pulled taut with some blonde hairs skimming the surface.
At work Katrina’s skirts usually fell below her knees, or else she wore pants. Patrick had never even imagined Katrina’s knees, either of them, though he’d thought plenty about the rest of her. He was well acquainted with her face, her defined collarbone, the shape of her breasts beneath her blouses and sweaters. With his eyes shut, Patrick knew her narrow shoulders, her arms right down to her slim wrists. He knew her body curved into her hips, and the swell of her backside. Those strong calves, leading tidily to her ankles. Though her feet were as unknown to him as her knees were, but Katrina’s feet, he could see now, were uncharacteristically ordinary. Her knees, on the other hand, were lovely, and he might have found an excuse to touch them. But then Katrina was either asleep or awake, and each state would have called for a different approach, and Patrick didn’t know which to choose.
May 22, 2007
Worrying
I mentioned that I recently unearthed the “novel” I wrote when I was eleven, and a big problem I am having with the novel I am reading at the moment is that it utilizes many of the same plot devices. And I was not a particularly prodigious eleven year old, no matter how hard I tried. Hmm.
May 21, 2007
Bang
I really should have known. The Girls came recommended by Patricia Storms, Richard and Judy, and everybody else in the whole wide world. If, like me, however, you were put off by all the hype, and by the prospect of a story about craniopagus twins, you really have been cheating yourself. Lori Lansens’ The Girls casts a perfect spell, expresses every lovely notion I’ve ever had about the world, and says so much about perspective, writing, and love. (Those of us who love Kate Atkinson will definitely find something to love here.)
I was under that perfect spell from the very start, probably due to Lansens’ dramatic beginning. A lot gets said about great opening lines, but what about great opening scenes? It’s actually the second chapter of The Girls: “A tornado touched down in Baldoon County on the day Ruby and I were born”. And Lansens’ describes the tornado with such energy, intricacy, and action, I could almost feel the wind. I was hooked from then on. It was the best story opening I’ve read since Arthur Seaton fell down a flight of stairs in the pub and puked all over a woman in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Since the moment of Ruby Lennox’s conception in Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Sometimes it pays to start with a bang.
Bookwise, what’s ahead? Cease to Blush and then The Children of Men (upon the recommendation of my husband!).
May 15, 2007
Wooden leg first
I think it’s quite cool that my rereading of A Good Man is Hard to Find coincided with Flannery O’Connor in the news, as a new letters archive is opened. Maud Newton provides excellent coverage, as well as links to previous O’Connor posts she has written. I especially like her “But it is a wooden leg first”.
“If you want to say that the wooden leg is a symbol, you can say that. But it is a wooden leg first, and as a wooden leg it is absolutely necessary to the story. It has its place on the literal level of the story, but it operates in depth as well as on the surface. It increases the story in every direction, and this is esentially the way a story escapes being short”.
May 14, 2007
Glorious youth circa late 1990s
Fun was had! Mucho family, and lobsterfest with my favourite cousins. Saturday my dad took us shopping for baseball gloves (we love catch) and now we’re all kitted up for the big leagues. Last night we hit downtown Peterborough with Mike my best friend 6 and hilarity reigned. I drank too much beer and a tall tri-coloured drink, behaved like an adolescent and was ill the next morning. Recovering just in time to have my Muv and Farve take us out for brunch in celebration of my finishing school, and we sat with a view of the lake and the food was delish. We had such a good time with my parents all weekend, but then it made Stuart miss his. Thankfully we’ll be seeing them three weeks from tonight.
My mom is moving, and so I had to do something about the last few boxes of my stuff in her house. One looked vaguely interesting, so I brought it home. Sorting through tonight, and I find the most extraordinary things: the “novel” I wrote when I was eleven, which was really long and all about dragons and princesses and the kind of story I never had any interest in, but precocious children in other books always wrote about things like that, so I thought it was the way. Story books I made throughout elementary school (I had an early gift for the rhyming couplet, but not so much for staying inside the lines). Essays from grade nine English (“teenagers today are too worldy for religion” said I). Terrible articles I used to write for the “teen” page in our local paper (“violence is something that affects people in many places”). I was pleased (and surprised) to find out that my grade thirteen and first year uni English papers were not as terrible as I had feared, and that I did not entirely make my TA’s want to kill themselves. Oh the list goes on, pages and pages and treasure. But the best is an entire journal of Bad Teenage Poetry, written between 1995-1998. Back when nobody understood me, I was jealous of my best friends, and thought that poetry had to be obligatorily weird (“I found the meaning of life/ in my glass of orange juice”). Oh, but the angst I knew.
Your knife has dug deeper/ into me than any other/ I feel the metal slice/ cut me and I bleed/ You use your knife for a purpose/ but you didn’t succeed/ I am not destroyed.
And can you believe that that actually is edited, as the original was so awful that any poetic sensibility I have come to possess wouldn’t allow me to transcribe it as is? Oh what fun. And all of this has underlined why I have zero interest in Facebook.
April 27, 2007
Never never never salt
Up here at the cottage there is no line between inside and out; the domestic is only barely tamed. We will wake up with windows dripping on the inside, and grit underfoot. Newspapers are kindling. Bat’s wings flap in the rafters while we sleep out under the stars. The old board games have missing pieces, mismatched dice, and mice have ravaged the Monopoly money, leaving their droppings behind. And the screen door is ripped, which is how the flies get in, but if the hole was patched, the bugs would only find another way.
Nothing much else happens. Which is the very point of being here, fortunately and unfortunately. I picture cottage days constructed of blocks, only the same shapes, patterns and colours. Once or twice we’ll go into town for a diversion, but diversions get in the way of hours spent hot and sunburnt, prune-skinned and water-logged. Evenings are warmed round the fire always, with marshmallows burning on the pointy ends of sticks, and warbly old songs everybody else knows the wrong words to.
Fish and chips and vinegar, never never never salt
March 29, 2007
It's so easy to be charming
“I felt like a writer for the first time when I was twenty-nine years old and writing a series of poems. I was very strict with myself for some reason, and each time I finished a poem, I put the question to myself: is this what I really mean? It’s so easy to be charming. It’s a lot harder to say what you really mean.” – Carol Shields, “An Epistolary Interview” with Joan Thomas.
