by From Where You Dream- The Process of Writing Fiction (mobi)
"You watch. I'll be right back," he says and rises.
I watch the alley and the darkness of Paco's windows. A white curtain floats up and settles, floats up again. I imagine an entire life beyond the alley and that apartment. A life my father makes in his paintings. I could have chosen to be a painter. Maybe I am. He taught me to draw. He encouraged me. I drew sneakers and the toaster oven and her, even her, when she dressed in long skirts and shawl, the chopsticks in her hair, to teach at the studio or to dance. I didn't know. I fixed her. He was proud. He taught me to draw without looking at the paper. I remember the first time. The old shoes tangled together, the laces, the perspective of one shoe atop another.
No singing. No sound at all. Not even cars on the roads outside, doors, children, music. Nothing. My knees start to ache, but do not move. This is important. Not to see Paco or my mother, but to carry this through for him.
He returns, and between his legs, pointing straight up, a rifle. It has a thin barrel and a metal sight at the tip. "I didn't know you had that," I say.
"Pellet gun. She's gone, Son."
"Gone," I repeat. Not my mother, I realize. The chair where Megumi sat is empty. The light brightens and burns the empty chair. The canvas where he started to paint her looks like it's smoldering in the intense light.
My father pumps the pellet gun angrily. He claps the stock shut, then pumps it again.
"It needs ten pumps to get through that window," he says between breaths.
He sticks the rusty barrel through the window and rests it against the windowsill. He snuggles the stock against his shoulder and cheek, cocks his head, watches. "Tell me if you see them," he says.
"You won't shoot her?" I ask.
He looks at me like he can't believe I would ask the question. He will not shoot her. He is sane. He will shoot Paco.
"I can't see anything," I say.
My father takes deep, heavy breaths, then blows air slowly from his pursed lips. Some practiced routine for shooting, I guess. But the alley is silent. The windows are empty of movement. I'm not sure if anyone is there anymore.
"I'll check around back," he says. Before I can ask him what this means, he's gone, slipping from the room like a young man, agile, on a grave mission.
I watch the alley for a few seconds and wonder if my father will appear wearing fatigues and a mask of black and green. I hear the screen door slam, but no one appears. I stand and try a few numb steps, but my legs are chunks of wood. I walk like Frankenstein, grab the stool, and lean on it. I stretch my legs and feel the size of the canvas in front of me. My legs run beneath it when I'm this close. I see all the grains and imperfections of the undercoating. I see the spaces in the charcoal lines where he's drawn Megumi's faint outline. It's only a human shape. I don't see her yet.
I take a pencil and press the tip into the line of her left eye. i imagine her face close to mine. We are in bed and she's laughing. I smell her; feel her breath on my chin. Her soft eyes widen, and she looks at me; I count three freckles.
When I finally look, I'm surprised to see I've ruined what little there was to start. It looks nothing like her. It seems ridiculous to realize I don't know her well. Maybe I never will. I drop the pencil into the tray. I look toward the front windows of the studio to see if the car is still there. Maybe she waited. I realize that one day she will know some furtive craving I will be unable to satisfy. I open the front door, smell turpentine baking in the heat, the vegetable smell of hot vines, dirt, and grass. The car is not there.
ROB: I want to say this about these pieces—all are remarkably well written. You've got the tools, folks. Good writing, very good writing. Why don't you give yourself a moment and refresh your memory about Erich's story. Remember the guidelines in here: if you feel you have something useful to say, great. Keep it focused on the text and let's work from basics first, but you're under no compulsion to speak. On the other hand, I don't want you to take anything I've said to mean "Keep your mouth shut," either. You will often have wonderful, useful things to say. It won't affect your grade either way. So it's up to you.
No one? OK, I'll start.
The story sets up quite beautifully—line to line, it's nicely written. "His hair is fine and light gray, tossed up from thinking with his fingers." That's a fabulous line; And you set the tone of New Orleans beautifully. You must have responded to Tom Piazza—remember the Brownsville story? You catch New Orleans—not derivatively, but in a way reminiscent of that milieu. Your narrator talks about coming into this place in the Quarter where artists live, and you evoke it vividly.
The father is an artist, and when you have a father artist and an accountant son, there's at once a discrepancy that suggests the possibility not only for traditional conflict but also for the prime mover of conflict, yearning. And there's an interesting kind of undercutting of polarity, in that the son met Megumi along the Bayou at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
But that undercutting, in fact, is just the foreshadowing of the actual dissipation of any sense of difference in the story. The son readily understands his father's art—seeks it out, in fact, with regard to Megumi—and the father in turn seems quite comfortable with his son and totally accepting of Megumi as a future daughter-in-law. The only problem is beyond the wall. And it's a shared problem, of sorts, but it remains a problem.
So I've got the yearning deficit here. There is no dynamic of desire. It's not until pretty late in the story that anybody thinks to take any action. Once taken, it gets sort of extreme. As a result, it feels dragged in. When we get to scenes that might contain heat—that is to say, scenes that involve the mother from the past, or even in the present—we never see her. To make anything of the story, you have to believe that the mother and even his mother being with his father are somehow important to him. But there's no evidence of that, and this is where the emotional logic of the story breaks down. Before there's even a serious reference to the mother's flamenco career—the background of her stage presence, the relationship of the mother and father, the mother dancing next door with this Paco guy—all of this is done in summary, abstraction, generalization. There isn't a single memory, not a single scene, not even a peeking through the window. Here these double shotgun houses sit. The son comes and goes always to the father, and yet the mother's right there. We have no real sense of why there's this absence, this division, this gap between son and mother. The past offense seems to be, even from his point of view, between the mother and the father. It's not as if he's sided with the father in some drastic way against the mother. Then when we hear about the mother learning flamenco in Tulane—and this was some time ago, wasn't it— there's not even a moment of flashback of his seeing her. If your mother suddenly turns into a flamenco dancer—there's a lot of potential here, Erich, but there needs to be a moment when he sees her dance for the first time, at whatever age, im-pressionably. And a moment when he is compelled to see her dance now, in the present of the story. When, for example, he is somehow compelled to carry those flowers from this doorstep to the other and put them where they're supposed to be, and then look, peek, spy. We want to see his mother dancing the flamenco, especially with a strange man.
I would not be surprised to find that this is one of those stories where there was something hot you were looking into, something dangerous, and you cooled it down, defensively, before it got onto the page. So much is possible here if, in fact, a dynamic of real desire got into the story. As it is, the situation represents only a kind of distant problem to the narrator.
Megumi is not really developed as a character, especially in relationship to him. Why is he seeking the painting? There is a reference briefly to a work in which his mother appears in one of his father's paintings, but it's quite incidental; she's lost in a landscape, and the image doesn't become a functioning part of his psyche; it does not tap into his yearning. There just seems to be so much potential in this story. His father had done a portrait of his mother, and now the son wants to bring Megumi here, to recreat
e in this woman he's about to marry an emblazoned image of the mother—that, for example, would be possible. Development of that kind of interconnection and connection with desire . . .
When we finally come to a statement of how Paco has corrupted a situation that the narrator might wish to be pure, we begin to get a whiff of yearning. The narrator says that "Paco disrupts an already shaky marriage." He finally asserts a feeling about this but, again, it's done abstractly and analytically.
The absence of a relationship between our narrator and Megumi is also reflected in the fact that he's so open in front of her about what's going on next door. It's as if Megumi vanishes from his consciousness—indeed, that's part of the reason she walks away from him. But how much does she realize here? When she whispers, "We should go," it feels like she understands whatever ache he's feeling but, again, this is only vaguely hinted at, not really there.
There's a story full of possible yearning here. It's just that you've distanced yourself drastically from that story. I'm left with the question that I put to most of you at this stage, which is: Did the story come from your head? And then, if so, why?
It could be because the story from the get-go was a willed story, a thoughtful story, an idea story; in which case, when you put this thing away go on to something utterly different. Or, given that there's so much potential, was something coming from your unconscious that began this process, but you flinched and distanced yourself (and us) out of some kind of self-protection? In which case, I still say put it away and don't look at it—but do go back to your protagonist, to his father the artist, and his mother the flamenco dancer. There's a rich circumstance, a wonderful setting, a lot of potential here. But the story itself, as written, is disassociated from it. Do you have a sense at this point of which it is, whether the story is hot and you flinched, or whether the story was cool from the start?
Erich: Oh, yeah. Very cool from the start.
ROB: Well, then I'm impressed that you coolly set up so many possibilities.
Jocelyn: I'm curious why you say Put it on the shelf. I thought there was a lot of excellent rendering of setting, for instance. That was something very beautiful.
ROB: No matter how much beautiful stuff—we all have to learn this—I know I do—we're all struggling with it—if you write a thing from your head, everything in that piece is tainted. Even if you have passages that are beautifully written, brilliantly sensual, and maybe in their beauty and sensuality have actually come from the outer foyer of your unconscious—you don't go back and try to save those passages. Don't say, "OK, I've already got a good description of New Orleans; I'll just stick that in." An art object is organic, and this beautiful rendering of New Orleans may be exactly the wrong beautiful rendering of New Orleans for the object that's going to come out of this place. This make sense to you, Jocelyn?
Jocelyn: It's so hard.
ROB: It's the hardest thing in the world, but it's necessary. You go back and pull something out of one piece and stick it in another and everything is lost. It will just bend the story to fit an external factor. It's the same danger you run with a literal memory. Yes, Kent.
Kent: In the scene in New Orleans where they're walking down the street—say you go back to your trance, maybe there's something about his mother or something like that.. . it won't be rendered the same way. .. .
ROB: It's in the realm of human possibility that the same brilliant sentence may come back and flow right out of your unconscious once again and work perfectly.
Kent: Or you go back into the artist's studio or into . . .
ROB: Oh, absolutely. Scenes, actions, movements—you can redream them. Sure, he brings Megami into the studio and asks his father to paint her. But you might do that after a scene in which either he sees hanging in his father's studio or remembers from his childhood a painting of his mother that the father had done, that memory having been rendered moment to moment from his yearning to find a home again, or to reconnect with his parents, or to something lost—if such a scene is already in the story, then the minute he and Megumi walk into that artist's studio—everything will be different than it was in this version. Every detail—all the receptors will be thrumming to something in the piece that isn't there now. However, if you have some brilliant phrase from the previous draft that you're bound to work in, but which was created in a context without these new scenes in which the yearnings are manifest, then you've got a problem. As I say, it's in the realm of human possibility that walking into that studio, the same brilliant sentence may roll out and turn out to be perfect, but not if you go and get it to save it.
Janet: There's a parallel here with Mary Lee Settle's advice about research, where she says: Don't read about the period that you're researching, read in the period . . . magazines, memoirs, letters that were written in that period, and take no notes. Because when you come to write the thing, if you've taken notes you think you have to use them, whereas if you've immersed yourself in the period, what you need will come to you.
ROB: Absolutely. The work is an organism. Any external thing that has its own existence, anything outside the creation of the work that insists on getting in, is like a virus. Once it gets into the body, it will eat up everything around it. The organic nature of art is such that within the process everything must be utterly malleable, utterly fluent, so that everything ultimately can be brought together; and if there's anything in there that will not yield, is not open to change, you cannot create the object.
My Impossibles
My mother stood beside me with the shovel in her hand and I stood looking at the ground wishing I had the shovel and that sweat was dripping from my forehead instead of hers. My mother and I seemed to always be flying at different ends of the earth, and whatever I did, she did it better. It was a quarter past four on the Saturday afternoon of my weekend visit and the poles for the garden arch were still in plastic wrap at my foot. I bought the thing for a project my mother and I could do together while I broke the news to her. I had miscarried and she wouldn't be a grandmother after all, and never would be, through me anyway. She delivered and raised three children practically on her own and I couldn't even carry one. It had been a last-ditch effort on my part anyway. My marriage was falling apart and I thought it would mend that as well as change the way my mother saw me. Now my plan was to toil over this structure for my mother's garden and hope she wouldn't see me as the worthless failure of a woman I felt I was. But, as I said, she had the shovel and was about to start digging the holes at the very same instant that I was trying to find the sentence in the instructions that told us we needed to dig holes.
"You gonna move, or am I gonna have to shovel around
ya?"
"Just a minute, Mother! I'll do it, just let me see how far apart they're supposed to be." I scanned the page and flipped the instructions over. There was nothing but a diagram on the other side, with no measurements. "You don't know where you want it anyway."
"I know exactly where I want it. So dig the first hole, then we'll see how far apart they need to be." She held out the handle.
I stood up and stuck the shovel into the hard black clay that crumbled into a nearby crack instead of scooping in as I pushed down with my foot.
"Give me that. For God's sake, Becky, don't you know how to shovel?" She yanked it from my hand and dug into the clay. With one swift nudge of her foot, she scooped up a chunk and threw it to the side. She did this two more times. "That oughta be enough. Gimme the pole."
"But, Mom, we've got to measure it."
"All right, get down there and measure it."
I grabbed the tape measure from the tool box and measured from the center of the hole to where I thought the next hole should be. She was grinning when I stood back up. "What?"
"Ain't you gonna measure the width of the arch first or we just gonna dig and hope it all works out?" She held out her hand for the measuring tape and I complied. "Why don't you just sit and watch. You don't need to be out here in the hot sun anywa
y."
Here was my chance. She brought it up; now I could tell her. But this was not what she meant.
"Becky, did you hear me? At least go in the house and put some sunscreen on if you're gonna just stand there and not get in the shade. This is Texas, you can still get a sunburn after four." She snapped the measuring tape back in and then pulled it out over the pole that connected the front of the arch to the back. I dusted my hands and moped toward the house.
It had always been this way. No matter how hard I tried to live up to the woman my mother was and wanted me to be, I couldn't. This was never more clear to me than when we lived alone together for the first time. At the end of the first summer in the house my mother bought after the divorce, the heat of the summer battles was over and she didn't talk about my father much anymore. We were settled. The furniture was in place, the boxes unpacked, and the yard, the one thing my father would never let my mother spend money on before, was gorgeous. This small rectangular patch of grass was placed directly in front of our porch. I say "placed" because that's just what it was. My mother bought a truckload of grass squares at the local lawn-and-garden center and placed them, like she was playing Tetris, between railroad ties that outlined the flower beds and our house. I had always wanted grass like this and the plush blades tickled my bare feet when on a day that August I took my shoes off just to walk across it.
"Why don't you quit prancin' around on the grass and help me out for a change," my mother muttered without looking from the dirt where she was yanking up weeds. She patted the dirt back down by the wild wisteria bush that she built the bed around. Its long coned bunches of purple flowers bounced around her when she brushed up against them. "Get down here and start pulling out anything that doesn't belong."
I squatted beside her, reached in and wrapped my hand around a long, thick weed sticking up above the rest, and pulled. My hand slid up its stalk and over the sticky seeds at the top. I fell back on my rear, and she started laughing. I scrambled back to my squat.
