How do novelists keep all this disorderly material on track? For years I fretted about the impossibility of the task, and kept putting off actually writing a novel. A novel, it seemed to me, was too big for someone who had scarcely been able to bring logic to a short story. Novels sprawled, or at least pretended to sprawl. Surely, characters or threads of thought got lost in the spreading chess game of prose, and no one could control it, least of all the inexperienced and fettered person sitting at the typewriter.
But I was getting close to forty, and, like many writers before me, I arrived at the now-or-never moment. Luckily for me, writing a master’s thesis in my mid-thirties gave me a chip of courage; for the first time I had completed a long piece of writing and had discovered what should have been spectacularly self-evident: that long pieces of writing are made up of short pieces somehow sewn together.
Happily, my master’s dissertation, about Susanna Moodie, a pioneer writer of the nineteenth century, contributed material for the novel that became Small Ceremonies. There were so many interesting footnotes I hadn’t been able to incorporate, so much conjectural material that had been inadmissible in a scholarly document. And so, like my mother, who never threw out two tablespoons of leftover peas if she could help it, I decided to use up my research notes, to hand them over to a character I named Judith Gill, who, if the truth were known, was not all that different from myself, a woman nearing forty, a wife, a mother, a suburbanite—and someone who, like me, had an interest in history and in the idea of biography.
Because Judith Gill was part of an academic community, I arrived at the idea of using the academic year as a framework. My nine chapters were titled September, October, November, and so on, right through May. I didn’t know where the novel was going, what its substance would be, but I found myself with a structure I could handle.
This structure felt to me like a series of similar-sized boxcars lined up on a track, nine of them. All I had to do was fill them up with “stuff,” and I would have my novel. Every day when I sat down to write, I called up in my head the image of boxcars, much as we call up images on our computers. It kept me sane, the knowledge that my unruly, unsorted thoughts could be distributed along the timeline, each in its own container.
I’ve heard of writers who do complex outlines of their novels, but, in fact, I’ve never met one of these eager outliners. Writing for me is generated out of writing. I honestly don’t know where I’m going. The ideas come as I push forward—some days there are too many swarming possibilities and other days not enough. But at least with that first novel, I had found a vehicle—my slowly loaded train—that allowed me to keep track of my novelistic bits and pieces.
My second novel, The Box Garden, was also built on the practical contrivance of a timeline, seven long chapters that more or less approximated the events of one week—approximate because I wanted to avoid being too schematic. I thought of these chapters as seven wire hangers on a coat rack. I didn’t know what would be suspended from these hangers, but I knew their position and order. This novel was more compact in its events than the first, the temperature correspondingly higher, and more intense. The image of my fictional week was less important for the novel—which could have spilled into months or years—than it was for me, the writer; it gave me a disciplined structure that I could call on, depend on, and lean on. It made the maddening work of novel writing easier.
I don’t know how other writers organize their material, but I suspect that each of us finds a way to keep control. I had a very clear image for my novel Swann, a book that broke free of many of the traditional narrative patterns I was accustomed to. Because of the point of view of the novel—four characters in search of a subject—I wanted the book to be built on four independent novellas with a concluding dramatization, each leaning just slightly on the others for coherence. This matrix swam into my mind very early in the writing. I was not absolutely wedded to it, but worked toward it, relying on it, and returning to it when I felt myself going off on wasteful tangents.
The original structure for The Republic of Love failed. My plan was to write a love story (a tricky business in these cynical times) by using a short notation from each day of a year, giving my book 365 related segments. This proved impossible, for I soon saw my novel swelling toward what looked like a thousand pages. I abandoned the plan and chose daily segments stretching from Easter to Christmas, a more manageable framework. The chapters of the novel alternate between the two lovers, Fay and Tom, and each chapter covers the events of one week, moving always forward on the timeline.
When I came to write The Stone Diaries, I again felt I needed a working image. I decided on a series of Chinese nesting boxes. I, the novelist, was constructing the big outside box; my heroine, Daisy Goodwill, struggling to understand her life, was making the next box, and the inside box was empty, a reminder to me of my original premise: that I was writing an account of a woman who was absent from her own existence. This organizing principle with its solid and easily retrievable image was not sketched out on paper and it certainly wasn’t projected onto the reader. Instead, it served as my scaffold, my silent working orders and aide-mémoire.
These concrete structures—concrete in my mind, that is—have been tactically useful, but they have also forced me to open my mind to new ways of organizing fiction. We’ve all heard the rumour: the novel is dead. I don’t believe this for a moment, but I do think certain traditional structures have lost their relevance. The old conflict/solution set-up feels too easy for me, too manipulative, and too often leading to what seems no more than a photo opportunity for people in crisis.
The structure of these kinds of novels could be diagrammed on a blackboard, a gently inclined line representing the rising action, then a sudden escalatory peak, followed by a steep plunge that demonstrates the dénouement, and then the resolution. I remember feeling quite worshipful in the presence of that ascending line. The novel as boxed kit, as scientific demonstration; and furthermore it was teachable.
It wasn’t until I had been teaching literature for several years and passing on these inscribed truths to others that I started to lose faith. The diagram, which I had by then drawn on the blackboard perhaps fifty or sixty times, began one day to look like nothing so much as a bent spatula, and yet my students, hunched over the seminar table, were dutifully copying this absurd image into their notes.
Suddenly, I wasn’t interested in the problem-solution story I had grown up with. The form seemed crafted out of the old quest myth in which obstacles were overcome and victories realized. None of this seemed applicable to the lives of women, nor to most of the men I knew, whose stories had more to do with the texture of daily life and the spirit of community than with personal battles, goals, mountaintops, and prizes.
I thought I understood something of a novel’s architecture, the lovely slope of predicament, the tendrils of surface detail, the calculated curving upward into inevitability, yet allowing spells of incorrigibility, and then the ending, a corruption of cause and effect and the gathering together of all the characters into a framed operatic circle of consolation and ecstasy, backlit with fibre-optic gold, just for a moment on the second-to-last page, just for an atomic particle of time.
I had an idea for my novel, a seed, and nothing more.
—Unless
I had abandoned after my second novel the kind of people-in-crisis set-up that was the engine of so much realistic fiction. This meddling with form, though, was so gradual and tentative that I had scarcely been aware of it. Now I was. I felt emboldened enough to allow the fictions I was writing to fill up on the natural gas of the quotidian, and, without venturing into the inaccessible, to find new and possibly subversive structures.
More and more I trusted daily detail, wondering why domesticity, the shaggy beast that eats up fifty percent of our lives, had been shoved aside by fiction writers. Was it too dull, too insignificant, too flattened out, too obvious? I wanted wallpaper in my novels, cereal bowls, cupboards, cousins
, buses, local elections, head colds, cramps, newspapers, and I abandoned Chekhov’s dictum that if there is a rifle hanging over the fireplace, it must go off before the story ends. A rifle could hang over a fireplace for countless other reasons. For atmosphere, to give texture, to comment on the owner of the house, to ignite a scene with its presence, not its ammunition.
Out of her young, questioning self came the grave certainty that the family was the source of art, just as every novel is in a sense about the fate of a child. It might be argued that all literature is ultimately about family, the creation of structures—drama, poetry, fiction—that reflect our immediate and randomly assigned circle of others, what families do to us and how they can be reimagined or transcended.
—Jane Austen: A Life
The inclusion of domestic detail seemed much more to me than just an extra suitcase taken on board to use up my weight allowance. Diurnal surfaces could be observed by a fiction writer with a kind of deliberate squint that distorts but also sharpens beyond ordinary vision, bringing forward what might be called the subjunctive mode of one’s self or others, a world of dreams, possibilities, and parallel realities.
In short, I wanted to write novels that were both tighter and looser. I wanted to create new structures that would give stability to the less stable material of my books and help me stay on course. And I wanted, then, to fill those structures with randomness, with side stories, surface details, potted histories, drifting thoughts—the whole raw material, in fact, of our lives. It meant taking a chance, looking around, tapping out words, shifting my sentences and paragraphs, getting the noises in my head onto paper, making something new.
In a sense, I use my structure as narrative bones, and partially to replace plot—which I more and more distrust. I’m comforted by something that Patrick White, the Australian novelist, once said: that he never worried about plot. What he wrote was life going on toward death. This is what interests me: the arc of a human life.
These are interesting times for a writer. The strands of reality that enter the newest of our novels are looser, more random and discursive. More altogether seems possible. The visual media, television and film have appropriated the old linear set-ups, leaving fiction, by default, the more interesting—to me—territory of the reflective consciousness, the inside of the head where most of our lives are lived.
In Brief …
• Remember that long pieces of writing are made up of short pieces sewn together.
• It helps to have a structure and an image of what those pieces are. Your structure serves as a scaffold, as silent working orders, and as an aide-mémoire.
• The structure could be
• the months of a year
• the days of a week
• boxcars lined up on a track
• wire hangers on a coat rack
• linked novellas
• alternating points of view
• Chinese nesting boxes
• A structure should be approximate, instead of rigid, in order to avoid being too schematic.
• Traditionally, novels could be diagrammed as a gently inclined line representing the rising action, then a sudden escalatory peak, followed by a steep plunge that demonstrates the dénouement, and then the resolution. It is possible to find new and possibly subversive structures.
~ 4 ~
TO WRITE IS TO RAID
FICTION WRITERS, DOING THEIR PART TO PROMOTE THEIR BOOKS, welcome the chance to appear on a certain national network show. The host is genial and intelligent and, in fact, it seems he actually reads the books. Nevertheless the interviews almost always become a game of gentle cat-and-mouse in which the host attempts to link the work of fiction with the life of the writer, who is driven to cries of “No, no, this is fiction, I made it up.”
“Well, yes,” the host agrees, “but it must have really happened, if not to you then to someone else.”
There is a curious opacity here, perhaps even a kind of honourable innocence that prefers to believe that people on the whole tell the truth and refrain from telling lies. This attitude, which seems to me to be very widespread, acknowledges the experience-plus-imagination recipe that makes fiction possible, but for some reason, devalues or distrusts the role of imagination.
Imagination, to be sure, is hard to talk about, this amorphous, transparent ether of the senses. We resort to metaphors, saying it is a kind of elementary wooden spoon with which we stir, blend, and generally rearrange life’s offerings. Or we claim to lift it from the lint trap of our dreams or our unconscious. Or find it beneath a trapdoor labelled “What if—.” Or describe it as a species of wistful daydreaming or the artful resculpting of actual experience to conform to a more satisfying aesthetic pattern. As I’ve mentioned, Alice Munro talked about “real” experience being a lump of starter dough. Everyone knows how little that small, damp, yeasty lump resembles the risen loaf with its lightness and fragrance, its imaginative dimensions and substantiality.
Russell Hoban, in a speech I heard a few seasons back, encouraged writers to expand our realities, to include in the realm of the real those not-so-rare moments of madness or transcendence. Audrey Thomas once declared in a radio interview that “everybody writes autobiography,” but I wonder if she wasn’t using the word autobiography as a filter that concentrates and refines the comprehended world and makes it legible to the individual consciousness. When Oonah McFee’s first, and I think only, novel was published in 1977, she was asked if the book was autobiographical. “Well,” she admitted, “there’s at least an arm and a leg of me in it.”
Just how much arm and leg gets into the writing varies enormously from one writer to another, but I don’t believe there’s a writer alive who hasn’t struggled with the alchemy of re-imagined reality and the moral questions it poses. To write is to raid, the saying goes, although I suppose you might also say: to live is to raid, life being mainly a kind of cosmic lost-and-found bureau, or an everlasting borrowing and lending of personal and communal experiences.
Writer as thief, writer as scavenger—almost all writers feel the sting of such charges, even, I’ve noticed, beginning writers, or writers who have published nothing, or writers who are only just thinking about writing. The question generally arises early in a creative writing course: how can we deal honestly with the experiences of others without injuring them? How, too, can we deal with our own experiences without exposing ourselves unmercifully? My advice is always to write first and revise later (or disguise later as it were), since it’s unlikely that a writer hobbled by the fear of giving offence is going to write at all. As my friend, the writer Sandy Duncan, says, there’s no need to let the facts get in the way of the truth. The essential core of truth (that problematic word) need not necessarily be diminished if names are changed or if the short, fat bond salesman becomes the tall, thin lumberjack. In the same way River Heights can be renamed and moved to Nova Scotia if you like, or even to Mars or Baloneyland. The fictional variables can be moved forward or backward in time, or else the timeline can be fractured or even smudged. (By the way, an astute interviewer once fixed me with a steady eye and demanded to know why the women in my novels were invariably tall and large-boned, with heads of thick, dark, curly hair.)
I like to sketch in a few friends, in the hope they will provide a release from a profound novelistic isolation that might otherwise ring hollow and smell suspicious.
—Unless
I would defend the right of writers to use any experience they choose in their fiction, but I have come to think that it is more charitable, kinder that is, to refrain from embarrassing others or borrowing their stories without permission or else dramatic revision, or especially, redemption. Like everyone else, writers need to sleep easily at night. “I don’t write about my family members or friends,” says novelist Barbara Kingsolver, “because I want them to remain family members and friends.”
But beyond the ethical questions of exploitation, beyond the simple respect for the privacy of ot
hers, is the work itself, and I am convinced that the increased weight of the imaginative element contributes to the aesthetic power of a piece of writing. Colouring outside the lines may be harder to accomplish, but can yield more in the end than simple follow-the-dot transference. (Yes, I do recognize this as a botched metaphor, but I give myself permission to use it.)
On the other hand, I think we owe our work the texture and taste of the apprehended world, and it seems to me ungenerous to withhold those few insights we may have gathered along the way. Kennedy Fraser, in an essay on Virginia Woolf, confesses that she once suffered a time in her life that was so painful that reading about the lives of other women was the only thing that comforted her. She claims she was slightly ashamed of this, pretending to her friends that she was reading the novels and the poetry of these women. But in fact it was their lives that supported her.
“I needed,” she says, “all that murmured chorus, this continuum of true-life stories, to pull me through. They were like mothers and sisters to me, these literary women, many of them already dead; more than my own family, they seemed to stretch out a hand.” I have seen this passage from Kennedy Fraser’s essay quoted a dozen times, and can only guess that it summons up the writer-reader relationship that so many of us know and are indebted to.
In particular, Fraser says, the brave autobiographical writings of Virginia Woolf answered her, as they also helped heal Woolf’s own pain. In her fifties, shortly before she died, Virginia Woolf set down the history of child abuse she had suffered, and wrote that “By putting it into words … I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me.”
“Honest, personal writing,” Fraser concludes in her essay, “is a great service rendered the living by the dead.” What we need to establish, perhaps, is a new form, a form that invites the personal without risk to the self or to others and one that incorporates the author’s voice without giving way to self-indulgence. One thinks of diaries or certain forms of memoirs or docu-fiction, forms that attempt to place the self in time.
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