Startle and Illuminate

by Carol Shields

  By the fifties, the purity of this belief had become muddied. Readers felt obscurely cheated; writers felt depersonalized. The whole set-up was too ivory-toned, too difficult to apply evenly, and too damaging to the contract between writer and reader.

  It was Jean-Paul Sartre, I think, who said, “To read a book is to write it.” This seems to me a rather profound observation, since the reader of a text does, in fact, travel the same hills and valleys of thought as the writer, uncovering along with the writer the same revelations, leading to somewhat similar though never perfectly congruent emotional leaps and thrusts.

  The writer-reader connection must be one of the most intimate in human experience, the voice of the writer going not onto a large shared public screen, but directly, privately, leaving the shut room and entering the single consciousness of the reader who makes the cognitive shift inside a singular and particular brain, translating symbol to meaning and thereby becoming part of the creative process. The reader knows the writer, not just the written work. St. Augustine believed the act of reading to be a conversation with the absent, and the word conversation is interesting here, since reading in Augustine’s time meant mainly reading out loud (although St. Augustine himself was said to have read silently).

  Some writers resent the public’s need to know who they are. I have a friend who, when she goes on book tours, wants to shout out crossly into the audience, “You read the book, now here’s the body.” She doesn’t want to share her secrets, to betray where she gets her ideas or admit to certain influences, and she certainly doesn’t want to be asked whether she writes with a computer or a pen, or what she eats for breakfast.

  But the fact is, those who have chosen a writing life have already surrendered a portion of their DNA. There are all those clues in their work, all those revealing gaps that I spoke of earlier, all those teeth, and there is the implicit contract they have formed with their reader. They may choose to shroud their lives in privacy—think of J. D. Salinger, of Thomas Pynchon, of Anne Tyler, Don DeLillo—but autobiography comes spilling through the work itself. Attitude. Distance. Geography. Gender. Intellect. Education. The ability to embrace the real or create the “other.” Risk. Love. Damage. Vision. All these draw an outline of the self-reflective human consciousness that writes a book into being and places that book in the reader’s hands.

  Nevertheless, publication meant having a public self after a life that had been austerely private. Her scale of values, her opinions were now being read by a wide public, and not just received by the family circle. The two selves, public and private, were in danger of flying apart, but her correspondence shows her efforts to hang on to all that was familiar while enjoying the titillation of celebrity.

  —Jane Austen: A Life

  Some of you may have had an opportunity to look at a facsimile of a manuscript by Marcel Proust. I like to show a page or two of Proust’s work to my classes as an example of a text that is rethought, reworked and enlarged by a mind that is electric with thought and hard at work, generous in its energy and patient with the demand for precision. Only the most patient literary sleuth can make out Proust’s manuscript pages, they are so covered with changes, additions, explications, refinements, emendations, scribbles in the margin, the better phrase, the more exact word. This has to tell us something about the writer-reader contract, and in fact it does.

  I work on my sonnets at a small keyhole desk in a corner of our blue-and-gray bedroom. I actually work with real paper, lined paper from a thick tablet, and a ballpoint pen, with a great many crossings-out and dozens of arrows and question marks and sometimes such marginal scribblings as “No!” or “saccharine” or “derivative,” or else I present myself with that bold command: “Make fresher?” Freshness is the most demanding task one faces when dealing with a traditional meter, no matter how forgiving that meter is.

  The first several pages are a mess, but I like to allow the mess to flow and flower. I make it move, sitting back in my chair, rotating my shoulders every half hour or so; I try to unknot my muscles, go, go, go—as long as it is forward. Forget you are a sixty-seven-year-old woman with a girlish white pageboy. Forget all that business about fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter; think of Leonardo and his sage wisdom: “Art breathes from containment and suffocates from freedom.” Or the problems that accrue from the “weight of too much liberty” (Wordsworth). Drown out the noise of rhyme and rhythm. Think only of the small dramatic argument that’s being brought into being—a handball court, or a courtroom itself, hard, demanding thick stone walls—between perseverance and its asymmetrical smash of opposition. Think of that rectangle, perfect in its proportions, that plastic cutlery tray in your kitchen drawer, with its sharp divisions for forks, knives, spoons. Or think of the shape of a human life, which, like it or not, is limited.

  —”Segue”

  Or perhaps you have seen a reprint of one of Susanna Moodie’s letters. Here is an elusive life, but we can know her, italics again, and something of her times through her texts. Her sociological context comes drifting inevitably like snow, across the surface of what she writes. It is possible, for instance, to read a feminist consciousness through a text that denies any such thing. One of the other things we know is that letters in the middle of the nineteenth century were expensive to send and that they were paid for by the foolscap page. And so Susanna Moodie did what many of our thrifty early settlers did when writing a letter home to the old country: she indulged in cross-writing, writing her lines first horizontally on the page, then turning the paper and writing a second series of lines vertically. But Mrs. Moodie was also Mrs. Frugality, or Mrs. Resourceful, if you like, and turning her page forty-five degrees, she was able to write in a third cross, a diagonal set of lines. Her cheerful and generally newsy letters speak—forcefully—of all she did not set down: of poverty, desperation and an anxiety about connection at any inconvenience to herself and others. No wonder we read not just her books but these extraordinarily revealing letters. Furthermore, she lets slip now and then an unguarded, unedited thought that would never find room in a published book, and each of these “slips” becomes a cultural or personal moment that is secured, and that gestures toward a thousand other such moments. An author’s papers, then—the letters, the drafts, the diaries, self-notations, and shopping lists, the photographs and drawings and audiotapes and publishers’ catalogues—are collected for a reason. So that we can know about the making of the book and know also that the making and the being of a text are part of the same knit.

  It is thought by some that the reader longs to be part of that knit out of a belief that the writer is holding hands with some god of creativity, or has a toe immersed in the creative source. To touch the writer is to touch, indirectly, that primal well. This seems to me a romantic notion that most writers would find hard to live up to. On the other hand, the reader’s desire to “know” the writer and the writer’s yoking of world and word, speaking from my own response as a reader, is one of vital, natural curiosity: how does the process move? What are the igniting forces? How is one idea linked to another? How is the writing illuminated by what is known of the writer’s personal narrative—a narrative that can be at least partly pursued through a collection of working papers that are more or less (always qualifying here) available to anyone. So much in a writer’s life is unwilled, capricious, inexplicable and unrecorded, but the small papery documents that accumulate on writers’ desks are often capable of pointing to steps in the imaginative process. Behind the prose of a novel or the lines in a book of poems the author’s personal narrative points toward the writer’s unspoken reserves of thought or the sad or happy sea of a diurnal existence. The swirl of paper that surrounds a final draft is not just an extra suitcase taken on board to use up the weight allowance, but a demonstration of the distance a writer has travelled. Fiction possesses a puzzling inability to stare at itself—how did it get here, for instance, and what is its relation with reality—questions that these fragile, peripheral so
uvenirs of a writing life can assist us with.

  Some writers are savers, some aren’t, but most, when cautioned by archivists, become scrupulous with their scraps. I have to say that, from a writer’s point of view, there is something disturbingly egocentric about this cherishing of one’s personal minutiae and then the selling of these bits and pieces. At the same time, we are encouraged to believe we are a part of a useful enterprise that, aside from forming a picture of our society’s culture, contributes to the charting of individual creative endeavours—although the archival record may greatly modify and streamline what is, in fact, a messy process relying on such non-recordable stimuli as weather, mood, accident or unexplained brain waves. No one fully understands the creative process, least of all writers. Virginia Woolf talks about her creative energy as that which “bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book” and that only later is transformed into “a tiresome bewildering distraction,” as she wrote in her diary on Thursday, January 19, 1933.

  Even so, we will never be able to reach through acid-free archival material to the essence of a writer. We all recognize that when a writer picks up a pen, a second self comes out, and this applies not just to manuscripts but to letters and even personal diaries. That which seems unguarded is in fact, in varying degree, composed, enhanced, deprecated, erased, or dressed for dinner. Freud once observed in a letter to Arnold Zweig: “Anyone turning biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, and even to hiding his own lack of understanding.” He might very well have said the same thing about the raw materials of biography. There is reality on one side—though “reality,” Nabokov tells us, is the only word in the language that always needs a set of quotation marks around it. And there is the author’s willed impression of the world and the self the writer gives us: a smoke screen, a concealing cape, an occluded mirror, a kaleidoscope, a magic lantern, a lens polished with the self’s self-conscious hand—the subjunctive self, which is perhaps all any of us can offer each other.

  There is also the problem of the publicity machine, which turns writers into public creatures who do not resemble in any way the writing creature. Who, after all, is more skilful than the novelist when it comes to creating that nubby presence we refer to as persona. I never look at my book photos and bios without thinking: “What an interesting life that woman has. But who is she?”

  I know who she is: she’s my shadow self, my subjunctive self, a distant cousin who is only on nodding acquaintance with the person in the room with the shut door.

  In Brief …

  • More than one person sits down to write. Inside every writer is the performer, the creator, the storyteller. And seated next to her, or perhaps crouched inside her, is the source.

  • The great world and the droplets that fall from it is the source of at least half a fiction writer’s material.

  • The use of public transportation can be extremely profitable to fiction writers, who are always looking to restock their supplies. And so are such public places as elevators or restaurants.

  • We can’t interrogate strangers, so we are forced to deal imaginatively with the great gaps. For novelists this means observing, listening at the keyhole as well as peering into it, gently probing, but in the end risking ourselves and our small truths, guessing at the way other people live and think, hoping to get it right at least part of the time.

  • Where you write is less important than you think. Writers often perform their tasks in small rooms with the door closed. Their scenery is the interior life with its collection of images, discoveries, scenes, observations, dreams—that whole unwieldy cotton sack of material we refer to as memory.

  • Save your papers; they document the creative process and show not just the top refined border of a writer’s life and times, but the full depth of it. They show the making of the book.

  ~ 7 ~

  PACING, PASSION AND TENSION

  THE ADVICE WE REALLY NEED IS HOW BEST TO AVOID THE prescriptions, the wisdom, the rituals of other writers. And, yet, here I am, about to dump on you some of my ideas about the pacing and tension of fiction. The two go hand in hand. And I hope you’ll remember that for every statement I may make, there are a hundred alternate ways in which you can pace a story, and that the further most writers go in their writing lives, the more liberties they feel able to take.

  An example might be that old classic, the crime novel. Thirty years ago, it was possible to diagram a novel of this genre. You had a problem and a solution, and, between those two poles, a number of revelations, red herrings, and educations. The size of these internal structures escalated; the climax arriving at approximately page 135, followed by the wrap-up. But the crime novel has grown unruly. Sometimes the villain is named on the first page. Sometimes the body is discovered on the final page, and sometimes there is no body at all! The hardboiled cop is sometimes a soft-voiced professor, sometimes even reflective, sometimes even a woman, and sometimes gay.

  Fiction, generally, is changing. The old problem/solution structure is harder to pin down, and a postmodern view holds that plot is the enemy of fiction, that characters, setting, theme, etc., get in the way of writing. It is harder and harder to say what a story is, but I am going to make an attempt at least. I think a story is about moving from one state to another, a movement that, in more interesting fiction, is psychological, involving a growth of awareness, a gathering of insight about what it means to be human.

  Of course, this gathering of insight does not come in one flash, but in a series of revelations, revelations that come riding atop an important question. That question may, in some fiction, be only who murdered the ship’s purser, or it may be, what is this story about?

  By aboutness, I don’t mean such facile descriptions as, for example: “this story is about a railway engineer who goes to London and meets a ballet dancer,” or “this story is about an Alberta farm wife who decides to leave her husband in the middle of the haying season.” These stories, to use the same two examples, are about 1. dislocation, 2. freedom and capability. Stories can often be reduced in this way to one or two words—what our old English teachers used to call themes—and the opening up of these ideas—the how, why, and where of it—is the question that hovers over the story from beginning to end, keeping the reader bonded to the text.

  I have to say that not once during the writing of my own novels did it occur to me that I must worry about pacing or take responsibility for the creating and sustaining of tension. I can only suppose that I must have reasoned—with enormous arrogance—that, of course a reader would be glued to these pages of mine, since I, in the act of writing, was glued to the task at hand. I approached the typewriter each day with a combination of zeal and panic, and assumed, though I didn’t articulate it, that something of that tension would spill onto the page. And this led to a fairly elementary conclusion—that the simple bonding of one’s self to one’s writing can create a sort of tension that no artificial plot ever will. A sense of urgency underlies certain books, a feeling that this story is being told because it has to be told.

  A second insight came to me more painfully—and that was the discovery that a writer cannot speak to all audiences, cannot, that is, meet every reader’s requirement in terms of tension. I don’t care, for example, how the body got in the library. A terrible and cynical question—so what?—swims into my consciousness. Someone else may not care, though I do, about the famous, unhappy housewife Madame Bovary and whether or not she gets a measure of the sublime passion she craves. Jane Austen uses tension in one way and Helen MacInnes in another, but they are both doing one thing, which is moving from one state to another. Tension does not rely on an explicit sex scene every twenty-six pages, or on the reinforcement of so-called major themes. What it does rely on, to a very great extent, is that thing called pacing.

  Pacing involves the selection and placement and timing of the variables of the story, the way in which the story is unrolled for the reader, the manner in which we mov
e from revelation to revelation.

  A number of problems arise in the pacing of a story. One of the most troublesome is the need a writer often feels to “frame” the story. It’s easy to see, especially in these postmodern days, why we have grown to distrust the narrative voice and therefore feel the need to justify it. So, instead of simply telling the story, a scaffolding is set up, a way into and out of the story. The relationship between the teller and the tale is laboriously worked up and is almost always in clumps and interfering. For example: a story about a woman who goes to a high school reunion and is reminded about an episode in her early life. She recounts the incident in the story. The last scene finds her back at the reunion, reflecting on the episode. The actual story has been buried, or shall we say, muffled. Another example: a Canadian soldier in Italy meets an Italian farmer and the farmer tells him a story about a ghost in the village. It’s a good story, but by the time it’s filtered through the Canadian soldier and the Italian farmer, there is very little immediacy left. Other examples: Stories found in discovered diaries. Stories overheard in restaurants. And stories that leak around the edges of memoirs. Normally, it’s easy to edit these stories—a simple cutting of the first and last paragraph, the entrance and exit lopped off.

  How does a writer confess that the printed offering is a tissue of imagination? The whole force of moral imperative rages against such a whimsical presentation: lying, inventing, daydreaming. In desperation early fiction writers supplied their narratives with implicitly understood framing devices like: This is a tale found in an old trunk. This is a story related to me by an ancient gentleman. This is a dream recorded by an angel.

  We love fiction because it possesses the texture of the real. The characters in a novel resemble, more or less, ourselves. Fiction’s dilemmas are similar to those we encounter every day, and there are novelists who do indeed write close to the autobiographical bone. As for the others, if they don’t draw on their own experience, where on earth does it all come from?