by From Where You Dream- The Process of Writing Fiction (mobi)
In Brandy's story—talking now in this artificial, secondary way—planting things in a garden could operate as a metaphor for each of the character's barrenness. But barrenness itself is a problem; it does not constitute a yearning. You're on the verge of it here, Brandy, but the story does not yet move to the yearning in a clear and comprehensive way. One difficulty is that the building of the garden arch has not yet been made to work with metaphorical logic. Another is that some crucial things are told in flashback.
The narrator Becky feels unappreciated. She believes that her mother has always thought her worthless and in effective. The back story starts on the bottom of the second page and goes on for another two pages, recalling an earlier time in the garden. But the put-down element here, the mother's critiques of Becky, feel too small to have stuck and wounded. I need a scene in the back story to reinforce the hurt.
We miss some important things. The father drives by. That's very briefly dealt with. Again, the mother criticizes Becky, but in trivial ways. The mother's flashback to the hysterectomy does not resonate into Becky's grief over her miscarriage; Becky remains merely an observer here. The moment when the mother realizes that she's sick, that there's something wrong with her femaleness, is not in the story. At the end of the story, once it's clear that the mother knows about the miscarriage—which is therefore not a secret after all—she suddenly transforms; she's tolerant and approving, which feels unearned at that point. And then the story finishes on new terms—the cutting of the wisteria branch—so that the climax happens in sensual terms that do not recompose the story.
Nevertheless 1 think this story is on the verge. I think it came from something hot in you, and that there's yearning fluttering around the edges. The opening lines are often explanatory in a kind of on-the-nose way. Indeed, the first flashback is very sharp: "No matter how hard I tried to live up to the woman my mother was and wanted me to be ..."
We have to figure out how to flip the story around, from developed "problems" to a dynamic shape that could come out of those problems. If she has been criticized by her mother all her life, and if she had a miscarriage and cannot have children, and her mother has had a hysterectomy, what is the issue here?
What is the deeper issue? It certainly has to do with the common literary theme, identity. But more specifically, what does it mean to be a woman? What is womanness? The yearning is to understand what it means to be a woman in her life. I yearn to identify myself, to find my identity as a woman. The challenge is that she's had a miscarriage, she cannot have children. That's the natural yearning that comes out of the problems you give us.
So we begin in the garden. Now we have to find the connection between what she's doing in that garden—the deep, sensual patterned connection between that and this yearning. Again, I'm talking in analytical terms, figuring this out rationally, saying that certain scenes are needed and so forth. It's not the right way to work. But for the moment it's OK, because this is a learning process, and identifying what's needed, going through those motions, is helpful.
What is it in the arch they're erecting in the garden that relates to the yearning I've described? A portal is an opening, which is the female pattern, so there's a suggestion of the female body. (That may not be your intention, but it is a traditional metaphor, so you need to be aware of it. I'm doing this to help everyone understand how yearning relates to what usually ends up in stories; I'm not suggesting this as a way for you to work.) This garden has been cultivated since the departure of the ex-husband, an act of the two women in contradiction to the man. The ex-husband forbade the garden. The male thing was corn and soybeans—I don't know—but this is the thing that the women have done as an assertion of themselves. These things must somehow be in the story in real time.
Perhaps the instructions should say that the placement of the arch is of crucial aesthetic importance, and Becky keeps looking for where to put it? At the moment there's no such suggestion in the instructions. Say the present action has to do with where the arch should go; we know it's important, but we don't know where it goes. She's got this terrible thing to tell her mother. There's a reference made to the ex-husband having driven by sometime in the past. This is an opportunity. Is there a scene there?—I don't know—but think in terms of what's in front of you.
Or suppose we set the moment when the mother becomes sick. The mother's female body is still intact, and the daughter doesn't know how to approach her with bad news. Maybe she approaches her, and the mother's horrified—but in any case let the event of the mother getting sick and going to the hospital be in the story. She has an emergency hysterectomy and then the mother and the daughter are on the same plane. The mother always criticizes the daughter about what it means to be a woman—so that strain between them is indeed about what this means, and we dramatize the reality of Becky's fear of confessing her miscarriage.
Then, what happens in the hospital room between mother and daughter where the mother has just had her womb removed? There's a lot that's still to be dreamed here. Maybe in the dreaming you will have had her tell the mother already, and she had a harsh reaction, so that there will be a reconciliation. Or maybe this is when she tells her—even as the mother's devastated—this is something as women we can share because I've lost a child. Suddenly there's a very complex relationship possible, and a complex reaction involved.
Whether we come back to putting the arch in at the end of the story I don't know. I'm sketching out a way in which the stuff that's in the story can be transformed from problem to yearning, and the way that yearning can find its arc; a way that everything can be pulled together, so that mother and daughter together redefine what it means to be a woman. I hate the way I'm talking here. You understand why I'm doing it, right? Feel free to alter or ignore anything I've said. But that's the kind of thing all stories need in order to shine in their best light. There's a lot of good stuff here, Brandy, and I think it'll be a wonderful story. It's just a matter of taking the problems and transforming them toward the dynamic that will make us understand what's at stake.
Jocelyn: You mentioned "metaphorical logic." How does logic come to bear on this, or is there any need for logic?
ROB: Logic itself is being used here in a metaphorical way. I mean that a story has emotional logic; there's a spiritual logic, an aesthetic logic to a work. The universal principle behind any narrative sequence is the yearning. But once the character's desires are driving her forward, then, given that yearning, given that character's ability, her circumstances, the milieu, the kinds of obstacles challenging her, there is a logic of sorts to what goes in and what stays out—what scenes are necessary, inevitable, emotionally logical, and what sense details are the logical choices.
The logic here is not that of rational premises and intellectually perceived results but rather a kind of emotional, psychological, aesthetic, spiritual, metaphorical fitness. If certain conditions exist and they are accessed by the writer through the senses and the dreamspace and perceived by the readers through their senses and their dreamspace, certain things will necessarily follow. That describes the kind of logical form. It's an emotional logic.
Janet: I have heard you, including in these lectures, talk about the way that you picked up images, and I know that when I read you one of my great pleasures is seeing the repetition of motif. There are many other writers' works where I'm not aware of that as a pleasure; mostly I'm reading for the page-turning, wanting to know what's going to happen. As a writer my main pleasure is that other sort, and it comes at the moment when a metaphor or motif clicks into place.
ROB: Let me address the "logic of the metaphor." Metaphor works, of course, at its first level as a vivid intensifier of sensual experience, to enhance sensual access to the creative world. It vivifies the moment. That's its first function. But metaphor then has, like all the other sensual elements in this organically whole object, a pattern behind its content. Whether you think of it as motif from the reader's point of view, or think of it as recomposing, reincorporatin
g things that are already at play in the work, the metaphor's essential pattern needs to intersect or interlock with the pattern echoed microcosmically and macrocosmically in the work. The movement between one metaphor and another is also by its pattern the arc of the character through the book.
My Summer in Vulcan
When I open the door, Paul is standing at the top of the stairs grinning, with one hand behind his back. He looks past me and puts a finger to his lips, pulling his other hand from behind his back, revealing a bouquet of flowers. I notice some red and orange and yellow before he winds his hand behind his back again. He's wearing a blue sports coat though it's hot outside and too-white running shoes. He steps through the doorway.
"Hello, Lilly," he says.
"Sheila's in the living room, playing with the baby," I tell him.
I was getting the baby dressed to go when Sheila, that's my sister, started tickling Gracie and acting goofy. Gracie's the baby; Sheila's her mom. People say Gracie looks more like me.
I sit down at the kitchen table to put my tennis shoes on. They are looking pretty ratty. Last time I talked with my mom I told her I needed a new pair but she hasn't sent the money yet. We'll see. I can hear Paul and Sheila laughing the goofy grown-up-for-babies laugh and then the quiet murmuring sounds they make when they kiss. I bet Sheila hasn't finished putting Gracie's shoes on yet and sure enough, when I walk in, the baby is waving her socked feet around in the air, looking up at Paul and Sheila kissing. Sheila has the bouquet in one hand and walks past me into the kitchen, sighing something about water and avoiding my eyes. Paul looks directly into mine, grinning purposefully. His eyes are a watery blue, like shallow water.
"Isn't she beautiful?" he asks me.
She is. She has long silky brown hair that I used to brush and brush. I thought it would be more like that, staying with her this summer. Today she has her hair pulled back and she's wearing a white sundress with eyelets and daisies embroidered in white from the waist up and with little white buttons all the way up the front. She has always been beautiful. I just shrug.
"And she's got a fine ass."
"Shut up, Paul," my sister warns him from the kitchen over the sound of running water.
I sit on the couch, capturing one of Gracie's feet at a time and screwing the little sneakers down onto each. She captures the first sneakered foot and watches me.
"It's good for her to know about loving. Not like ..."
I don't look up but I can hear his voice travel into the kitchen, the words now pitched in their special frequency, his and Sheila's, and indiscernible from this distance.
I wonder if he has just said her husband's name. We never say it on these Tuesday and Thursday afternoons while he's at work and Paul, Sheila's instructor from the community college, comes over. Jack, Sheila's husband, simply ceases to exist for those hours and I wonder what will happen when he becomes real again. I wonder if any of us will cease to exist that same way some day.
I hoist the baby up on my hip and she bats at my cheek. She smells like baby, like fresh bread but powdery. Her hands are sticky but I don't want to stop to wash them.
I'm halfway down the stairs and nearly outside when Paul calls for me to hold up. He gives me five dollars in case I decide I want anything. He squeezes the baby's cheek with one of his square hands. "Be a good girl," he says.
I've only been in Vulcan a few weeks but I've covered every inch of this town, not that there are that many inches of it to cover. It's bigger than where me and my sister grew up—Wolf Pen, West Virginia, which isn't even on a map, or not on one I've ever seen; there's about fifty families, a stoplight, and a gas station, nothing else. Wolf Pen is 136 miles from Vulcan but Sheila acts like it's in another hemisphere. Since she's moved here a year ago she has come home three times, the last time to pick me up and bring me here to help with the baby for the summer.
In Vulcan, there's a glass-blowing plant at the far west end, about a mile past anything else on Highway 20. There is a library, and a police station, and some shops downtown that sell candles and knickknacks. My favorite shop is Aunt Dee's Quilts. The sign in the window says that the quilts are hand-stitched and inside it always smells like apple pies, so much so that I expected Aunt Dee to offer someone, me or one of the rare customers, a slice. I finally figured out the smell was coming from the potpourri burners on the little table at the back, where she sold some picture frames and candles. Aunt Dee doesn't offer me anything. She was nice to me the first time I came in, cooing over Gracie, but after that she watched me like I might try to stuff one of the quilts up my T-shirt or pull out a can of black spray paint and start running up and down the aisles turning all of her pretty quilts black.
The quilts are pretty and Gracie and I like to go in if Sophia is working instead of her stepmother. Sophia is three years older than me and goes to the same school Sheila goes to. She's a little fat and never wears shorts, even when it's over ninety degrees outside, like today. She always wears T-shirts with the names of bands I've never heard of and her hair always seems greasy. But she's nice and I think she's smart but it's kind of hard to tell.
Gracie and I like to look at all of the nice colors in all of the pretty patterns; my favorite is a double wedding ring mostly in blues. My sister is supposed to pay me for babysitting at the end of the summer, and I'm going to take that money, it'll be just enough, and buy that quilt. I always look to make sure it's still there.
I like to pretend I'm shopping for my own home. When I get older I'll have a beautiful home and Gracie will come over in the afternoons when she's a teenager like I am now and ask me for advice and tell me about how she can't get along with her mom and I'll listen but of course I won't say a word against my sister. Gracie won't talk about killing herself because she'll know she always has my house to come to and me to listen to her. She's smart and she'll know that's enough. In the quilt store Gracie pats her hand against the air, wanting to feel the fabric like I do but I won't let her. I don't let her drool or get anything on the quilts.
Sophia is working today so we go in. She's reading a book behind the counter. I park Gracie's stroller and sit on the stool beside Sophia. She keeps reading her book. I watch a woman in jean shorts and with dark wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail running her fingers lightly over the fabrics. I sit up higher on my stool so I can see her long bare legs. The wood floor creaks beneath her feet as she weaves between a dark blue quilt with tiny yellow flowers in a starburst pattern and the crazy quilt, this king-size riot of reds and oranges and yellows, with gold and shiny strips and silk and velvet, like a costume I'd seen once in a school play—the guy was an old poet or something and would just come onstage and say outrageous things and then be gone. The other characters never really talked to him, not even to tell him to shut up, mind his own business; I didn't get it.
She comes up to the counter and tells Sophia that she wants the crazy quilt and Sophia goes over with a ladder to pull it down from the rod that hangs from the ceiling. The woman watches her for a minute. I can smell her perfume over the apple pie smell. She smells golden. I make myself busy getting the squirming Gracie out of her stroller and trying to get her to play with one of her plastic books or the ring of big plastic keys. The woman smiles at us but I pretend not to see her. Sophia calls me over to help her fold up the quilt and I start to put Gracie back in the stroller but the woman asks if she can hold her. She coos and bounces Gracie while Sophia and I struggle to fold the quilt down into a manageable size. Sophia makes faces at me while we stand across from each other, bringing our hands together and then apart, the quilt growing smaller each time.
The woman hands me back the baby, telling me that I have a beautiful daughter. I don't correct her. When she's gone, I tell Sophia I'm going to miss that quilt. Sophia motions for me to follow her to the door of the back room. She flings the door open dramatically and I see boxes stacked five feet high with quilts just like the ones hanging up front perched in plastic on top of each. Even the crazy quilt has
boxes and boxes of more just like it. I say, "I thought they were hand-stitched," and Sophia says, "Yeah, in Pakistan," when she shuts the door.
"Why didn't you just get one out of the back then?"
"She wouldn't even want it then, dummy."
Gracie starts crying in her stroller, kicking her feet furiously. She doesn't like for me to be out of her sight for even a minute. I pick her up and quiet her down while Sophia goes back to reading her book. I tell her we've got to go and she just grunts, waves a little without looking up when we're going out the door.
Gracie is looking around like she's lost something and won't stop crying. I put the pacifier in her mouth and she spits it out. Sometimes I think it would be a lot easier if I just had to stay gone for a few hours but without the baby. Sometimes I picture leaving Gracie on one of the benches in the town square and finding her in the exact same spot, two hours later, still sleeping. It'd be nice to have a locker to put her in where she'd be safe and a pause button so she wouldn't get scared or bored.
We pass the pharmacy. A woman walking out looks at me like I've been beating the baby to make her cry. I stop outside the pharmacy window and pull Gracie up out of her stroller. Shut up, I hiss in her ear. She looks at me for a second from her wet, red face and stops, like she understands me and then she starts in again louder, bouncing her body like she can bounce away. I pinch her calf. I ought to stuff you in a trash can, I whisper. She slumps against me, cries against my shoulder like she's lost her last friend. I feel bad. I relax my grip, hold her gently and say Gracie, Gracie, Gracie over and over in her ear, as soft as I can.
She stops crying, drawing a few sharp breaths after the tears stop. I look into the pharmacy, through all of the posters and displays. The only person in there is the woman behind the counter. I've already read all of the cards in there. I imagine buying one, "Thinking of you," for my mom. But it seems like a lie. I think about buying one for Sheila, "For a GREAT! sister," but she's not great anymore. Maybe it would guilt her into being at least a good sister again.
