by Robin Black
And both turned out to be right. Right, and in plenty of company. When the collection came out, it was the rare review that didn’t single the title story out as either the high point or the low point of the book.
Years later, when writing my novel, I realized at a certain point that there was going to have to be an event in the book unlike anything else I’d ever written, definitely not something that fits in with the general tone of my previous work. Writing that part of the book felt risky to me, but necessary. To avoid writing it felt cowardly, choosing safety, choosing comfort, over what I believed to be artistically correct. So into unfamiliar territory I stepped…
And, sure enough, this element of the novel is the sequence most often singled out, by readers and reviewers both, as either the high or the low point of the book.
I recognize that what I’ve said here about the responses to those two works sounds pretty resigned, pretty thick-skinned. Some love my work, some hate it. C’est la guerre. But in fact, I have found the criticisms of these two examples to contain in them a spark of what I think of as my Genevieve Moment. I’m not only upset or bummed when someone hates that tragic story or says that this un-Robin-like element of my novel doesn’t work, I also feel foolish. Because I know that I tiptoed onto unfamiliar ground. I presumed to try something new, and some noticeable percentage of the people who read those pages kind of wished I’d just done what they’d seen me do before. Maybe because this isn’t what they read me for. Maybe because, unpracticed at what I attempted, I made mistakes. Maybe tucked into those moments of my bravery there are, unknown to me, inadvertent funny little rhymes—or an equivalent. Resonances of clunkiness, just where I was going for delicacy.
Criticism for something that feels risky has a particular quality to it, a potential to make me meeker about challenging myself next time.
Oh, never mind. It’s back to muted drawing-room dramas for me…Sorry about that.
But then I—we all—have to take the other side into account: the people for whom these experiments end up being the most powerful aspect of the work. I have to remember those readers, even though it is almost magically easy to let any criticism eclipse all praise. And I not only have to remember those people, I have to somehow imbue their encouragement with the same power, the same unique quality I so easily give to the detractors of the work. If the critics make me feel foolish for having tried, then those who appreciate the risks must have equal power to further embolden me.
And in fact, ideally, the voices of encouragement should not only balance those that are critical but negate them entirely. Not because one shouldn’t ever to listen to constructive or helpful criticism, but because in the specific case of writing that takes you out of your comfort zone, there is no role for voices that try to push you back to where you feel safe.
No role. Hands over ears. La-la-la-la-la-la….
At some point, we probably all glimpse, even nurture, the fantasy of universal approval. But it is a better goal to evoke passion—even when it includes both extremes. On my good days, when my head is truly in the game, I would rather my work be adored by some and despised by others than that it be liked by all. That expansion of acceptable response allows me to take risks. And taking risks is the only way I can grow.
None of which means I didn’t learn a lesson in 1982, way back when. For sure, I learned to read my work aloud—if only to make sure it doesn’t rhyme. And maybe I also learned that it is possible to survive a little ridicule and live to write another day.
Give It Up
The story begins with Charlotte getting dressed. She changes three times, because today is a big day. She settles on an outfit and heads downstairs, where she snaps at her children, because—let’s be clear—today is a big day, and maybe not in a good way. It’s making her short-tempered. She calls her former husband and tries to engage him, but he has no patience with her—maybe, she realizes, because she hasn’t told him that today is a big day. As she ponders this, she feels bad that she snapped at her kids, and thinks about how her mother used to beat her when she was a child. But she shakes those thoughts off and gets in her car. Some more stuff happens—during which she remembers again that today is a big day—and then eventually she arrives at a hospital. Where she feels terrible, as the reality of what’s awaiting her looms large. She takes the elevator up to a ward in which her unconscious mother lies. And she signs some papers. The papers that will allow the hospital to remove her mother’s life support, the mother who used to beat Charlotte when Charlotte was a child…And then she leaves the hospital, choosing not to watch her mother die.
The End.
In the course of my teaching career, I have seen countless stories with this essential structure, the secret withheld to the end. (In the course of my writing career, I have crafted more than a few.) Withholding turns out to be a huge temptation for many writers, even though this kind of withholding of key information is almost always a bad idea.
Here is what my meeting with the author would look like:
Me: “So, I was interested in the fact that you chose to withhold what made that day so special. Why’d you do that?”
Student: “I’m not sure. I guess I felt like it was more powerful as a surprise.”
Me: “Couple things about that…”
Student: “I guess I was wrong.”
Me: “Well, we’ve all done it, trust me. But there are definitely issues with withholding a key piece of information like that, especially when the point of view character would be thinking about it the whole time.”
Student: “Huh. I hadn’t really thought about that part.”
Me: “No problem. There’s no shame in learning new stuff. Anyway, if Charlotte is obsessing over signing those papers, and we have access to Charlotte’s thoughts, it’s a little hinky that we never know that she’s thinking about it all the time.”
Student: “Right, right.”
Me: “That’s just a very practical issue with withholding a fact when the point of view character is aware of it—especially if they are obsessing on it. That’s when your reader feels manipulated—in a bad way. But the point of view thing isn’t the only problem with doing that. What do you suppose would happen if your first sentence was, ‘It was the day when Charlotte was going to sign the papers allowing the hospital to remove all life support from her mother?’ ”
Student(frowning): “I don’t know. I guess my worry is that the reader wouldn’t have anything to be curious about.”
Me: “What about being curious about how Charlotte is dealing with all this? I mean, in this draft I had no idea why she snapped at her kids, or called her ex, but if I knew what was on her mind, all those things might be much more interesting…”
Student: “You’re always saying our work should be surprising. I guess I thought this was a surprise.”
Me: “The thing is, there’s a difference between a story being surprising, and a story having a surprise in it…”
And so on. I have cast myself as teacher here, but I have been at the other end of this exchange more than once.
We writers are terrified that a reader won’t turn from one page to the next—a reasonable concern. That page-turn is the sine qua non of success, and a secret can create the sort of curiosity that will keep someone hooked. But reading to find out a fact is very different from being immersed in a story. Though a secret may indeed keep pages turning, it is also often a distraction from the story itself. (Obviously whodunnits fall into a different category, but my students and I aren’t generally writing those—though you never know.)
The reader consumed by curiosity is not truly reading those pages at all, but rushing through them to get to the reveal. And the author may not quite be writing those pages either. Using an absence of information to generate the majority of a story’s narrative momentum can allow a writer to slack off on every other element.
What happens if the reader knows from the opening line where Charlotte is headed that day? First (and m
ost frightening to any author) the reader needs a new reason to turn the pages. Something else of interest must replace the taunting of secrecy. The author needs to access why the story matters, what makes it compelling, beyond the parlor trick of satisfying a curiosity she has created. Very likely, Charlotte has to change. Having existed only as a vehicle for a mounting tension that does nothing to shed light on her character, she must now become something more like a real person, just as the story itself, which was primarily a riddle, must now become a real story.
It’s impossible to exaggerate the degree to which a narrative’s structure is formed by withheld—and dangled—information. The reader’s curiosity about what is unsaid creates a kind of shadow-plot, one that is ultimately resolved, not by any actions within the narrative, but by the false dénouement: “And then the reader finds out the truth about the big day.”
It’s a result notable for its lack of emotional content, and notable too for being the identical resolution whatever the subject of the story. In this case, the reader’s potential stake in Charlotte, her dilemma, her day, is completely overpowered by the intellectual experience of learning something. “Oh! That’s what’s been going on all this time.” The story is solved—and arguably, stories should never be solvable, much less solved. Even when central problems or questions intrinsic to the story are resolved, a story only survives being read if some mystery remains for the reader to contemplate.
I have often thought about the ways in which writing is an inherently hubristic pursuit. Embedded in the lines of every composition is the author’s presumptuous assertion that what she has to say is worth hearing, that what she asks you to care about is worth caring about. It is tempting for many of us to find ways to undercut that stance, battle the possibility of being thought arrogant, and maybe avoid the experience of discovering that our confidence is misplaced. Withholding key information may feel like it places the author in a superior position, the puppet-master, the riddle-teller, but in fact it is often the strategy of a writer who is afraid she has nothing of genuine importance to say.
“It was the day that Charlotte was to authorize the hospital to take her mother off life-support…”
Now what?
House Lessons II:
To Renovate, to Revise
We had lived in our home for sixteen years when we began a much-needed renovation in preparation for selling it a few years down the line. (And yes, it was in bad enough shape that we required that much lead time to get it pulled together.) The family home had long before crossed the all important boundary between shabby chic and shabby, the line between lived-in and unlivable. Our roof was leaking. Copiously. The exterior paint was peeling off, revealing colors that predated our ownership. Two ceilings on the second floor had actually caved in. The bathrooms were disconcertingly gloomy. A number of our rugs had been chewed by moths who turned out also to have colonized our couch. And the list goes on…
Certain decisions were easy. Fresh paint, a new roof. Get those pesky ceilings back over our heads where they belonged. But then there were other choices to make, including some choices we hadn’t even realized we could make.
When we moved in, in 1995, we commissioned a beautiful, pine desk from a local Amish craftsman. We wanted something that would fit in with the rest of our décor—countryish—but would be equipped with such crazy newfangled things as a pull-out keyboard shelf and holes through which computer wires could go. (Way back in ’95, kids, it wasn’t so easy to find such a piece of furniture.) The desk was beautiful, and by the summer that we began readying ourselves to move, it was imbued with many wonderful memories. It was also huge.
And though pretty much unused for several years, it was Our Desk, a piece we thought of as integral to our lives. But it was in the wrong place for our new design scheme, so we began moving it around. My husband and I hauled it from one end of a room to the other to make space for a little sitting area we wanted—and discovered that the desk didn’t work at all on that side. So we cleared out part of another room, though we didn’t really think it fit there either. We ran through a series of imperfect placements over the course of some weeks, until I thought of something that had never occurred to either of us.
“You know, if it doesn’t fit in here anymore and nobody is using it maybe we should sell it or give it away…”
And the funny thing was, once I had said it, it was obviously true. We gave the desk to our local hospital thrift shop, and felt nothing but relief.
But that is furniture. That is not fiction.
While much about revision is difficult, nothing presents the same kind of challenge as when an element that has been there from the start no longer works. It may have taken me and my husband weeks to realize that our desk could—and should—go, but it has sometimes taken me years to understand that what’s wrong with a story I’m writing is that the original conceit no longer has a place on the page.
An example: I begin writing a story about a boy struggling in woodshop class, working through his father issues with the teacher there, but before many drafts the story “wants to be” about a young woman teacher who knows them both, and the baby she gave up. She is taking up more and more room on the page, and the sections about her feel more urgent, more alive, than anything else. But now, the character of the boy’s father, whom I once thought central, whom I have crafted with great care, has been rendered unnecessary. It takes me some time to see this, and when I do, I keep him anyway through a few misshapen drafts, because it’s next to impossible for me to perceive him as vestigial. He was the lynchpin of the original idea. He was the spark.
Another example: I decide to write a story about a young woman with two cats who is romantically involved with her much older landlord. I put a lot of effort into writing about the cats, using them to set up a whole symbolic thread in the work. Eventually though the story “demands” that I focus on him instead, and on his relationship with his former wife. And those cats are a misdirection now—pulling away from the heart of the story, confusing the question of what’s important. But it takes me two years even to see them as an element I might change. Of course, once I do, I then resist.
Logically, if the result of cutting or drastically changing those characters, those circumstances, is good for the story, there should be no sense of loss with revisions such as these. But the writing process is anything but logical, and my experience with stories that “insist” on being about something other than what I thought they would be, is that I fight and fight and fight against even considering that possibility, much less accepting it.
This is not the same phenomenon as clinging to a well-turned phrase or poetic passage. I’m not talking about so-called “darlings” here. My resistance to seeing that a story has grown away from my original idea isn’t about being entranced with that idea. It’s closer to a kind of panic, as though that early thought, “I want to write a story about…” is a moment of security I don’t want to leave.
And that makes sense to me—illogical though the result may be. There is precisely one time during which a writer is ignorant of the challenges and failures and frustrations of any given story, and that is when the story is still only an idea for a story. Bright. Shining. Promising. Unblemished. Take every vestige of that moment of optimism from the work, and you are left with the mess of it all, with the reality of not having had a clue about what you were getting yourself into. You are bereft of the confidence you first felt when you were in charge.
But it is also true that, whatever my resistance to such changes, the stories of mine I value most are those that exhibited enough flexibility and enough strength along the way that nary a trace of my original idea exists. They are the stories that seemed to be partners in the process of their own creation, bullying me to give up my attachments, pushing me toward questioning my assumptions, teaching me along the way. These are the stories that outstripped my understanding of what I should do. Stories that pulled me away from the temptations and dangers of cer
tainty.
Perhaps it is odd that when a story succeeds in my eyes, as those have, I am quick to credit the story itself with an intelligence. But throughout the revision process, it becomes so important to listen to what one has written as if it were a separate entity, that in memory it can feel as though it was. And in reading the stories you are proudest of, it can feel oddly as though you, the author, were less their creator than you were the recipient of gifts with origins you don’t understand. In letting go of your own assumptions, there can be wonderful rewards.
As of course there were for us with our desk—which I barely ever think about anymore. Though I do still keep a picture of that room, beautiful, reimagined, come into its own since that vestige of our distant past was removed.
Revising Reality
I recently read an article about reality, a physics theory I cannot even pretend to understand. The degree to which I don’t understand it is itself kind of enjoyable, an intellectual free fall without a net. Not that being baffled is a rare experience for me—math, anyone?—but taking a few minutes to be actively baffled about the nature of existence, trying to wrap one’s head around a specific bizarre hypothesis, is inherently different, trippy, requiring a letting-go that isn’t just about giving up on “doing sums” or accepting never being able to spell restaurant without auto-correct. There’s an enjoyment in the inability to comprehend—right up until it all makes me flip out.
And now, having admitted that I don’t understand the theory at all, I will proceed to sum it up. Basically, the idea is that bunches of realities exist all at once and sometimes intersect. Not only are we not alone in the universe—old news—but we are not even close to the only version of our own reality. (Whoa!…and um, sure…I guess?) For example, one of two scenarios given by a physicist for a potential alternate reality was that it was the Portuguese who colonized Australia, not the British.
