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by From Where You Dream- The Process of Writing Fiction (mobi)

  "No. Of course not." We looked at each other silently for a moment more. Then he said, "They murdered my wife and child." Another pause. "We had only two years together."

  Other people were coming in. They were laughing at the back of the club, calling out orders for beer, pulling chairs around.

  "And why did you leave the VC?"

  "'The purity of the revolution must be preserved. The corruptions of the body are part of the decadence of our enemies.' One of the men in another platoon was caught making love to one of the nurses and was shot." Thanh thought a moment and then added, "Of course, that was logical to them."

  People were sitting just behind us now. Talking loudly and sitting on my other side now too. Thanh paused and I leaned closer.

  "The Communists love no one. They love nothing," he said.

  The OC made a little speech about keeping the noise down but how it was difficult to applaud with one hand anyway and everyone laughed and the lights went out and the films began. There were nine twenty-minute Danish films. Three hours of close-ups. Working bodies. And hands. Avid hands.

  Thanh sat unmoving through all nine films. He watched and the three-hour string of male jokes at the screen must have been nothing but a blur of foreign words. He watched earnestly, his hands quiet.

  When the lights came up, Thanh and I remained as the others drifted out of the tent or back to the bar. Thanh was looking at his hands.

  "Enjoyable, wasn't it?" I said.

  "It was so short."

  At first I didn't understand. Three hours, after all. I smiled.

  "Only two years." He looked at me. Then the easy smile came again. He shook my hand and we spoke the conventional Vietnames good-byes before he left.

  Lots of stuff wrong with this; in fact, everything's wrong with it in exactly the way I've been describing. "Hey, Yank . . ." Opening with a piece of dialogue very rarely works,

  because there's no context. And, important, in this whole piece there's not a single line of dialogue with subtext. Nothing's going on beneath the surface. Dialogue gives you the illusion of moment-to-moment sensual experience— after all, these are the words this character is speaking aloud in the moment—but in bad dialogue all you're getting is the information, exposition, or emotional declaration; and that's where your summary, your generalization, your abstraction, your analysis, run and hide in plain sight. Beware of that as you work to get that unselected, unironic, there-for-information stuff out of your writing: it's going to try to find a new home in the mouths of your characters. This story is full of sheer chunks of analysis and abstraction, often straight from my undigested notes, included just for the convenience of the story.

  The story is also inorganic. Even though there appears to be a motif, the images are totally unrelated. Looking out of the tent, and the trees, and going purple against the sky—what's all that about? It does not connect in its sensual pattern to anything going on in the story. Remember that I had written twelve just as awful plays, so these passages are like little stage directions (which was my failure as a playwright too): He's looking, I'm looking out, then he looks out, and I look out, and now we're both looking out. No resonance whatsoever.

  The trap of literal memory is very clear here. It was eighteen years later that I wrote "Open Arms," which as you can see grew out of the composting of the same event. Let's call "The Chieu Hoi" the bad story and "Open Arms" the good story. In the bad story, things happen exactly as they did in real life, whereas the good story involves a dramatic inversion of the literal event. In the bad story Thanh's motivation is that he was in a place where he was comfortable and where he belonged, a South Vietnamese democratic society. The thing he did against his own deeper nature was go off to join the VC in response to the killing of his wife and child by a South Vietnamese soldier. And now, in the bad story, he's basically back where he belongs. You notice that in "Open Arms" all this is inverted. He was a Viet Cong true believer and the Viet Cong killed his wife and child, and this Australian porn show where we find him is not where he belongs but a place where he also doesn't belong. I had to free myself from the way it literally happened in order to make "Open Arms" work.

  In the bad story the narrator is a passive observer. It's me. I'm sure every one of you has at least one story—and you may write another—where you are the sensitive writer responding to this unusual character you've met in life. You encounter somebody interesting and you go, Oh boy, that's a story. You sit down and write it, putting yourself in the middle as a passive observer watching this other person. Right? What's missing in every story where you've got a passive observer in the middle? The yearning. If the narrator in my bad story desires anything at all, it's to show what a swell sensitive American guy he is. Which of course is not a yearning at all. The narrator is doing fine, meeting this interesting guy he can communicate with in his own language, and the guy's doing fine, back where he belongs. Oh yeah, his wife and child are dead, but, you know, that's a problem, not a yearning. The dynamics of desire are utterly missing.

  I don't care how smart you are. Your mind is stupid artistically, and here's another striking example of that. I have to emphasize that this event in the story I'm about to point out did not happen in real life. In "The Chieu Hoi," this sensitive American who speaks Vietnamese says, "Why did you join?" Thanh turns to him. His "easy smile was gone. ..." And Thanh even tries to avoid answering. " 'The government was robbing the people. It was corrupt and wasteful and repressive. .."' And so forth. Then Thanh pauses, obviously hoping that's all he has to say on the subject. And the narrator drills in." 'Was that all?'" he asks. He makes Thanh talk about the tragedy.

  This is utterly cruel. But it's no longer about people, it's about crudely applying fiction technique. The writer wants to get this information about Thanh into the story in his own voice, and to show how the guy is struggling, trying not to face the terrible thing that's happened. Gee, how do you show that? Well, you have your narrator ask him, and when he waffles, you press him. Now I promise you I never would have done this in real life. But when I wrote the story I was totally oblivious to the moral implications and didn't notice until I came to teach creative writing and pulled the old bad story out that this sensitive American guy does something truly heinous. That's what comes from writing from your head. As writers we must have compassion for all the characters we create. If we're going to play God, we have to be a loving God, and you can't love with your brain.

  By contrast, the Vietnamese narrator in "Open Arms," whose yearning resonates organically into the story as it's reconceived, does a similar heinous thing; but he himself is conscious of it—and so am I as writer. Both the Vietnamese narrator in "Open Arms" and the American narrator in "Chieu Hoi" know ahead of time that the man's family was murdered and that is why he left his home. In both cases, even though they know it, they make him say it. But the Vietnamese narrator, says: "To my shame." He says it both times. To my shame. He knows he's doing a terrible thing here and acknowledges it. We see that tension in him.

  Of course, you might write a story with an insensitive character like the narrator of "The Chieu Hoi." Obviously there are cruel characters and cruel acts in fiction. But in that story the cruelty is totally incidental—or maybe the intent of the author was to show a sensitive guy responding to a sad character who misses his wife. And that's all he takes away from an afternoon of porn films. How pathetic. The narrator's insensitivity is not an issue; there's no repercussion, there's no realization, and no seeming ill effect on Thanh. We don't see the cruelty of it in any manifest way. It's just on-the-surface cruelty, and it stays on the surface.

  Let me elaborate on a point I made earlier in passing about the beginning of "Open Arms": "I have no hatred in me. I am almost certain of that." How do you establish dramatic irony in a story? Well, to begin with, anyone who has to say he's got no hatred in him is already protesting too much. And then, one way to suggest irony is with a qualifier, in this case just that one word almost. "I have no hatre
d in me. I am almost certain of that." He has self-doubt that lets us doubt him. "I fought for my country long enough to lose my wife to another man, a cripple. This was because even though I was alive, I was dead to her, being far away. Perhaps it bothers me a little"—perhaps—"that his deformity was something he was born with and not earned in the war. But even that doesn't matter. In the end, my country itself was lost. . . ." My country.

  This whole story, as you soon learn, has to do with trying to find a place in the world. "In the end my country was lost and I am no longer there. . .." It's not that it's no longer his country, it is his country, but he's no longer there. He takes some pleasure in the fact that his wife and her new lover are suffering. And then he brings up this stranger, this guy:

  . . . who suffered the most complicated feeling I could imagine. It is he who makes me feel sometimes that I am sitting with my legs crossed in an attitude of peace and with an acceptance of all that I've been taught about the suffering that comes from desire.

  Let me indulge in a bit of artificial and secondary analysis. The Vietnamese narrator asserts that he understands the story he's going to tell. As a result of it, he has accepted his fate. None of that's true. I hope you understand the irony at the end, that little litany of I'm OK: I've got a VCR, I've got a good job, there's no hatred in me, everything's fine. Not so. He is utterly lost, for the same reason as that other man, Thap, who came to a moment in which he realized that he had no country whatsoever. That's what our narrator is really responding to, because in spite of his avowals at the end of the story, deep down he feels he belongs nowhere. I live on Mary Poppins Drive in Gretna, Louisiana. . . . And of course, his yearning is for a place in the world.

  Understand that when I came to write "Open Arms," I did not refer to this older story at all. In 1988 I was finishing my sixth novel, The Deuce, which is in the voice of a sixteen-year-old half-Vietnamese, half-American former Saigon street kid who ends up on Forty-second Street in the bad old days before Mickey Mouse overran the place. Alan Cheuse called me to say he was producing a series for National Public Radio called The Sound of Writing, and he was soliciting original short stories that would be read by actors on the radio. He said, Would you give us one? You bet. I hung up the phone and ... what have I done? I was writing good novels, and I'd convinced myself that it's a rare writer who is adept in both forms. I went back to those stories to see if there was something I could salvage, but they were worse than I remembered. So I put them away again.

  However, there was a bit of Vietnamese folkway on one of the three-by-five cards I'd made for The Deuce, which I'd expected to put into the novel but hadn't. The card that fell out of the stack had to do with a Vietnamese boy who loved to catch, train, and fight crickets. Suddenly a voice came out of my unconscious, the voice of a Vietnamese father in Lake Charles, Louisiana, on a Sunday afternoon. Everything's boring and dull and his son is bored and he tries to interest the kid in cricket fighting. So I sat down and wrote it in one six-and-a-half-hour stretch. It turned out well.

  I went to bed that night and the next morning when I woke up I had two dozen other voices in my unconscious, saying me, me, me. All the stories in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain presented themselves to me at once. When "Open Arms" came to me, it was not in reference to that old story; it wasn't even a reference to the notebook. I didn't look at the notebook either. The voices came strictly from my unconscious at that point.

  Before you go, let me give you an assignment for next week: you'll need to be able to tell some personal anecdote, something you've told before aloud. I don't want you to give this any thought; you don't need to write it out; it doesn't need to be profound; it can be totally trivial: taking a shower, sitting at a traffic light. You don't have to be funny, it doesn't have to be moving or well told. Just tell an anecdote as you would over coffee. Of course it's going to be full of summary and generalization and analysis. It should be. An anecdote is not a work of art; it's something else. So do the something else. It'll give me a little fragment of your life to walk you back through in a special exercise.

  How many seriously want to do this tonight? We're going to hear your informal anecdotes first, so you have to make a quick choice about whether you're open to doing this in front of the class. You will also get a fair amount of benefit from just observing and listening. Volunteers . . . ?

  You have to actually lift your arm above your head. One, two, three, four.

  Good. Now the four of you are going to tell your anecdotes as you would over a couple of beers, and after you're all done I'll bring you up front one at a time. Everyone else—these are your instructions for the evening—when we redo these little narratives, nobody look at the speaker. Or at me. All of you are to go into your trance state and participate moment to moment with the person retelling a fragment of the anecdote. You will all stare at a blank sheet of paper, or your thumbs, or you'll close your eyes, meditating. You will concentrate on evoking the images that come out of the subject's

  mouth. I promise you, we will not get past the barest first few moments of the anecdote.

  Those of you in front of the class: I will walk you sentence by sentence through a fragment of your anecdote, demanding absolutely pure moment-to-moment through-the-senses narrative. When you vary from that, I will gently identify the way in which you vary it and have you back up. Then at some point I will even step in and make you consider certain things: What do you smell?—and so forth.

  At every question, at every little fork in the road for the speaker, I want you at your desks to be making those same decisions. And if your decisions are different from the speaker's, fine; then back up, edit that, and keep going forward. I want you to be participating internally.

  We're going to be utterly obsessive about moment-to-moment sensual flow of narrative here. We're not going to do any fast motion or slow motion, we're not going to allow the narrator the leeway of abstraction and generalization and interpretation that are sometimes allowable as voice—none of that tonight. The details that I'm going to be eliciting have no center of gravity to them, because we're not going to get involved with yearning; that will emerge, we hope, next week in the coached writing exercise. But tonight there's no center of gravity, so the details will be promiscuous.

  Understand that what's coming out of your mouth is not the same as writing a work of literary fiction. It has a superficial similarity to literary fiction, but the purpose of the exercise is simply to make you understand what the normal mode of literary discourse is, what your normal focus and speed are in literary fiction, and to open up your sense memory and, therefore, to open you up to your unconscious. Don't be disturbed if it's frustrating and nothing comes of it. If you work your way through that, at least you'll feel what's wrong. I've seen spectacular breakthroughs a few times with people doing this exercise, but whatever happens is OK; you won't be graded, no one's judging you. It's just an exercise to help you and your colleagues.

  Because I'm going to be asking these questions, and because your literal memories are not sufficient to remember the kinds of detail I'm asking for, I'm obviously not looking for your memories of the actual event. We're using the anecdote as a familiar takeoff point for you, but mostly you're going to be inventing. We're going to lead you to invent a reality for a tiny fragment of the anecdote. So if you don't remember it very well, that's fine too—probably better. The invention must come from your sense memory—not your ability to remember exactly where you smelled that thing or exactly what you heard ten years ago; but your ability to collect all the sensual impressions of your life as impressions, to break them down in the compost of your imagination, and then to recover them, reevoke them, and recombine them into these new imagined things.

  Who's going to go first to tell your anecdote? Sandra— good, thanks.

  I'll be taking a few notes, nothing evaluative; I just want to get it down so I'll know where to come back to.

  Sandra: I don't remember how old I was, but I walked through
the streets of Liverpool to visit my grandfather, who had a barbershop somewhere. It was probably nearby somewhere, but I thought it was a long way away. And I went to the shop to visit him, and he was shaving. He used an old-fashioned razor. He stopped what he was doing—I think he said something like "Hello luv" to me. And he went over to the window and he picked up a pair of earrings, which were in the window. I don't know what he was doing selling earrings, but they were in the window and he just picked them out and gave them to me and I put them on. I really loved them. My wonderful grandfather. My mother never understood why I liked him when she didn't, but I think that was one of the crucial moments forming a relationship with him.

  ROB: Excellent, that's going to be very useful. That gives us a lot of good stuff to work with. Who else?

  Mary Jane: This is about the day after my father died. My brother and I drove out to the funeral home to make arrangements for his funeral, and walked in the door, and it was like a movie cliche of a funeral parlor. It had this really thick carpeting on the floor and heavy curtains; it was dark inside and there was air-conditioning and it was really cold. And then the fellow who was the funeral director—you know, black mustache and a cheap suit—exactly what you would expect, I guess. We went in and sat down, my brother and I, across the table from each other, and went through the checklist of what you have to do to arrange a funeral. My father wanted to be cremated, but what we didn't realize is that by law you have to be cremated in a casket, so we had to choose a casket for him anyway. So we took a tour of the funeral parlor; we got to look at all the caskets, and my brother and I decided we would buy the cheapest thing, which was a cardboard box, which in a way is kind of shameful, but we also looked at each other and thought if we did anything else Dad would kill us if he were here because he wouldn't want to spend the money. Some weird things happened, like we sat there across from each other arranging this funeral, trying not to laugh the day after our father had died, because it was all such a cliche. And I said, "Can I pay for this with a credit card?" and I thought: this is weird, to pay for this with a credit card. And the last thing that happened was somebody had to go and identify the body, and my big, tough, army-helicopter-pilot older brother didn't want to do it, so I did it. I went in and saw my father wrapped up in a blanket, laid out in this room, and somehow I had to touch his head and he was so cold that I thought, "He's been in the refrigerator overnight." It was very strange.