July 27, 2007
Seasons Change
Now out of school, with my wide-open days full of writing and reading behind me, I’ve found I need something different. Whereas last year it was important for me to work alone, listen to myself (and to my advisor), and dance to my own tune, now that writing is quite officially something I do “on the side”, I crave connection. Sitting at my desk at the end of a long day, putting in a few hours of writing whilst I’m conscious enough, ignoring my husband– it all feels terribly lonely in a way it never did at high noon, bathed in the sunshine of my self-importance. And so I am very lucky that my creative writing group from school is willing to have me back among them. As soon as I knew they would, my whole self was flooded with relief, and contentment. The group is a on some sort of hiatus this summer, but sessions continue informally. This eve I met with Rebecca for two hours of discussion, paragraphs read aloud, and silent typing across the the table. It was absolutely inspiring, and we both came away feeling we’d been quite productive. More than anything, too, I was fascinated by writing in a different place. For the past two years, I’ve been writing in the same little corner, and how fabulous it was to sit somewhere different, in a hot and crowded cafe, and all the different stimuli. Which opened up my story in ways I hadn’t considered, somehow, and it was almost as though I were a different pair of eyes looking at it. Now I don’t think writing on location will always be for me– I am way too much of a hermit– but semi-regularly will be a most interesting exercise. I look forward to finding what future Thursdays have in store.
July 24, 2007
Truth is Overrated
I’ve been thinking a lot about the authenticity of fiction, and the Penelope Lively quote I cited a few weeks back:
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.
As a woman who yesterday fell over a ledge, landed hard at the foot of concrete staircase, and has spent today at home packed on ice, there is plenty I could discuss about this from a personal perspective. I will, however, refrain, because I recently watched the movie Breach, which I enjoyed for the reasons I like most movies involving Russians and espionage, but I also found the things wrong with it so worthy of discussion.
Breach, you see, is BASED ON A TRUE STORY. As a result, the tension is subtle, pacing is slow, and various aspects of character don’t make a lot of sense. The main character has a wife who is East German, which is incidental to the plot. Afterwards we were discussing the movie and I said, “I just don’t get why she was East German.” And then I remembered– oh yeah, because she was. It’s that simple. Why didn’t the movie come with much of a climax? Because real life doesn’t tend to take the shape of an arch. Why did some bits drag? Because that what days do. And so on– I suspect the mini-climax this movie offered was fictional; it seemed implausible. There were other bits which suggested mere spice, and it was jarring to be knocked in and out of truth and fiction this way. I might have even felt manipulated, had they actually managed to do it well.
The movie lacked the authenticity of fiction. Forced to be based on truth, a fascinating story was stripped of liberties, bound, gagged, and wrapped up in a 110 minute package where it faltered. A better script might have saved the film, but its relationship to real events would have always been troubling. Life is stupid, for example people fall off ledges. And later we will tell the story, its very point being unreality, but in the realm of the unreal, the story doesn’t function. The story is without context, like most things. Threads will fail to tie up neatly, and people will keep insisting upon being East German for no reason. And all of this mess isn’t even truth, but just somebody’s supposed version of it. At least with fiction you know what you’re in for, and you can do with the story what you may.
July 22, 2007
Dave comes home again
Dave comes home again, for this is what he does. Dave goes out in the morning and he comes home at night, always the same, unwavering. I think about lighting a fire in a wastebasket just to watch him spring up to extinguish it, or collapsing onto the floor so he could rush right to my side. But he wouldn’t. I mean, he’d put out the fire, if a fire was lit, but I’d never hear the end of that, and if I lay down on the floor, he’d know that I was faking. He’d check to see my chest fail to rise before he’d rush right to my side. But then maybe I’m being unfair. He’d only check because he suspects I’m prone to such displays, and in a true emergency he’d be discerning enough to act. Dave “has my back”, I suppose, this defined by the very fact he so perpetually comes back home again. I’m lucky, I know I am, and I love him, but lately that love has been like loving the trunk of a tree, or the back of an elephant. The back of an elephant that keeps coming home again, and sitting down to dinner, puttering around annoyingly in the evening, and then asking, “You coming to bed?”
July 11, 2007
Wholly visible and reliable
What is it when pathetic fallacy functions in reading? Because at the moment I feel like I’m reading Salt Rain in just the right climate: “the raindrops making an endless circuit from earth to clouds, the same water falling again and again for decades.” 80% humidity is probably as close to the Australian rain forest as Toronto ever gets. It’s a funny thing.
So far Salt Rain is a pretty good story, but then you’ve got to feel sorry for any book that has to follow Henry James. Such an unfair pitting, but the narrative voice feels so slight in comparison. Which came to mind last night when I was reading James Wood’s review of Edward P. Jones’ Aunt Hagar’s Children in The London Review of Books. Writes Wood:
These days, God-like authorial omniscience is permitted only if God is a sweet ghost, the kind with whom the residents can peaceably coexist. This is especially true in most contemporary short stories, where the narrator may be wildly unreliable (first person) or reliably invisible (third person), but not wholly visible and reliable. Few younger contemporary writers risk the kind of biblical interference that Muriel Spark hazards, or that V.S. Naipaul practices in A House for Mr. Biswas, in which the narrative eschatologically leaps ahead to inform us of how the characters will end their lives or casually blinks away years at a time: ‘In all, Mr. Biswas lived six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom and futility that they could be comprehended in one glance.’ Comprehended by whom?
And now, post-James, I am craving omniscience. And have set myself a little challenge: the next story I begin will have a narrator who is not a sweet ghost at all.
(Update: Oh, yes, I looked it up. “eschatology [esk‐ă‐tol‐ŏji], the theological study or artistic representation of the end of the world.”)
June 26, 2007
Call For Submissions
I know there are more than a few among you who write short fiction. As Fiction Editor of echolocation (the Literary Journal of the Graduate English Department at the University of Toronto), I’m sorting through our submissions right now, narrowing down the batch, and if you would like to add your work to it, I would really love to see it. We pay $10 per page, and our coming out with issues I’ve been really proud of. Submission details are on our website, though summer means the process has slowed right down. It would be best to email me at my echolocation address (find it here) so I get it directly. And please contact me if you’ve got any questions.
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.
