Because I’m a very visual person, my first setting question is nearly always the same: What kind of movie or painting would this story look like? Every setting question after that is really still a question about character: What sort of lodging will best showcase Geraldine’s fussy love of manmade things? Which time of year will make the outside world contrast the most with Geraldine’s lush oasis of an apartment? What can I do with the setting to show how removed it is from Petra’s ordinary life?
I wish there was a better word than “brainstorming” for this process. It’s more like “brain-drizzling.” It can go on for a furious week of drenched activity, or it can dribble in fitful cloudbursts for years. I know this about myself now, so I always have several stories gestating. I can leave the ones that need more time sitting in my head while I pluck out the developed ones for actual writing.
This process used to madden and bemuse me. I thought it was something wrong with my skill set, not just an inherent part of my story-making process. I thought I was failing, that I was stuck, that I had run out to the end of an idea and needed to throw it out and find a better one. Now I know that that feeling really means I have only just found the beginning of an idea. Yes, I must put words on paper eventually. But I have to know why I’m telling the story before I do.
The most important thing is to tell a story that you want to hear.
—Maggie
LADYLIKE
Petra would never forget the stairwell to Geraldine’s loft. Calling it a stairwell was about as appropriate as referring to Geraldine’s living space as a “loft,” actually. The vertical concrete tunnel was far more than a stairwell. It was an undertaking. A career. A journey marked by frequent pauses to massage knees and suck in a deep breath and press hand to side like the statue of the Wounded Gaul.
The first time Petra climbed the stairs, she was too consumed by physical anguish to think of the five floors she was passing; it was like being lost—blocks stretched endlessly until a familiar waypoint appeared to shrink them back to size again. She would never reach the sixth floor, she thought. She would die, unmourned, on this landing, under buzzing fluorescents. She would not even have the dignity of rotting: it was so dry and sunless that her corpse would desiccate, like cat shit hidden in the back of the cedar closet at home.
That first time that she successfully ascended, she took thirty seconds before the door to grip her knees and catch her breath, even though she was already late (delay courtesy of the unfamiliar bus route and the converted Greenpoint warehouse’s confusing main doors). Her mother was ever and always telling Petra that if she would just take thirty seconds to breathe, life would stop attacking her with such gusto.
“Time gives you perspective,” her mother was fond of saying.
Petra breathed in for fifteen seconds. Petra breathed out for fifteen seconds.
She felt sweaty and wobbly and lacking in perspective on the other side of the thirty seconds. She resented her mother, for giving advice that clearly didn’t work, and herself, for continuing to try it.
Line editing is the very last step of my writer’s process. (What is line editing? you ask. It means improving the nitty-gritties of a story—grammar and word choice— rather than big-picture elements like plot, pacing, and character development.) It’s easy to get caught up in line edits too early in the writing process, but the reality is that it’s generally a waste of time to fuss over the perfect dialogue tag when you might end up cutting that conversation entirely in your general edits. These days I write long and then cut back, so my line edits generally involve me making sure I’m only saying each thing once. In this paragraph, for instance, I had three more sentences describing Petra’s blushing—all of them repeating the words “transformation” and “messy” and “began.” Yes, Stiefvater. We get it. My line edits involved me pruning the paragraph back to the most specific and vivid description: in this case, the school bus line.
Petra rang the bell. Already she was going red. The worst part about her blushing was that she could feel the moment it began and yet was powerless to do anything to stop it. It started with the scalp under her hair, nearly discreet, and ended with her ears, dreadfully exposed, flaming stop signs on the side of a messy school bus. In the face of adversity, Petra was a reluctant chameleon perfectly evolved to hide in poppies, in front of crimson wallpaper, or submerged in baths of blood. The door opened. She was messy. She was flushed. She was late. This is what it was to be her. Say something, Petra, she thought.
“I’m here,” she said.
“Yes, you are,” said Geraldine.
• • •
First appearances matter. You know how when you meet someone, you make an immediate snap judgment about them? Later, of course, you can revise that impression based upon real knowledge of the person’s character, but that first impression sets the tone for a long time. The first time you describe a character, that’s the moment you’re giving the reader. As a writer, I’m not particularly interested in using this space to list specifics because when we meet a person in real life, we don’t catalog stats (five-foot-four, gray hair, blue eyes). Instead we form an emotional impression, which is why it’s sometimes hard to remember if a new acquaintance wears glasses, or whether they have a mustache. That emotional reaction is what I try to convey.
Geraldine was not what Petra had been expecting. Before the door opened, Petra hadn’t been aware that she had expectations, but the surprise of Geraldine’s person assured her that she had. Because Petra had been told that Geraldine had not left her apartment for years and years, it did seem as if she should have been frail. Musty. One of those folded-over elderly women clearly on the verge of extinction. But instead Petra found herself facing a genteel old lady formed like a department-store mannequin. Not like a long-legged modern model, but rather like an old-fashioned dress form, something elegant and restrained from long ago. Something with very pointed breasts.
Geraldine stood straight. Her hair was a bobby-pinned vintage piece of silver-gray. Her hands clasped each other in such a way that her large rings did not touch. Pride lifted a sharp chin.
Petra felt messier than she had before the door opened.
“Geraldine,” said Geraldine. She clasped Petra’s hand in both of hers, her rings cold in Petra’s palm. Then she smiled, entirely around the eyes. Petra felt more at ease at once. Her ears cooled.
What magic is this!?
“Petra,” Petra said, copying Geraldine’s method of greeting. Then more clearly, because she’d mumbled—she was always mumbling, her mother said, her teachers said, her stepfather said, her grandparents said—“I’m Petra.”
“And you’re the reader!” Geraldine said with delight. She had an accent, or perhaps merely a very careful way of pronouncing her words. Like Petra did when she was reading out loud, only all the time. She patted Petra’s hand and released it. “How wonderful. Do come in from that concrete tomb.”
She meant the stairs. That was the first moment Petra thought she might become friends with this creature.
Teen readers often ask me if I am trying to secretly embed meanings in my novels. “When you make the curtains red,” they ask cunningly, “do you actually mean that the main character is angry?” They are certain that this is a trick their teachers are playing on them to make boring homework. But the truth is that I do sometimes mean that the characters are angry when I make the curtains red. I want to embed clues in the reader’s subconscious so that the reader feels the truth as well as knows it. So I am trying to tell the reader something about Geraldine’s life with my word choice— without saying it outright just yet. I want it to play in the background until I turn up the volume later. “Oh,” thinks the reader, “this song was actually playing all along.”
• • •
Just like the first description of a character, the first description of a setting needs to pack an immediate punch on a nearly instinctual level. Too many words will slow down the story and remind us that we’re readin
g description. Too few and the action will take place in a floating, empty room. Ideally, I strike a balance that lets the reader feel they know precisely what the space looks like. Oh, and another thing: if we’re in close third person or in first person, the description can’t know more than our point-of-view character. So if Petra wouldn’t know the specific names of the plants, I can’t list them. She’s the camera I’ve chosen for the story, and I have to accept the limitations of her knowledge.
Geraldine’s apartment was not an apartment: it was a world. A habitat, Petra thought the first time she entered, not realizing at the time how true that was. Petra’s rudimentary investigations into the address revealed that it belonged to a nineteenth-century commercial laundry converted to apartments. Because Petra knew Brooklyn, she had expected to find something chic and large-ish. She had also expected a retroactively installed elevator.
Wrong, wrong.
She’d already encountered the concrete pilgrimage in the place of an elevator, of course, and now she discovered that there was no ish in large-ish. Geraldine’s living space occupied as much space as Petra’s high school gymnasium, perhaps more. And chic was utterly the wrong word. Because of its past as a laundry, the floor was the same concrete as the stairs, but it was covered here and there with Persian rugs and grass rugs and yet more Persian rugs, all of them sumptuously shaggy and colored in the blue of blood and the red of lips. There were more plants than anything else. Palms taller than Petra, potted trees that seemed like they might grow bananas, fairy-tale vines trailing from stands like coatracks. Hundreds of tropical plants unfolded and strove and pushed out blooms only slightly more exotic than the leaves around them. There were nearly as many lamps, old and curled, and all of the light through the plants was beautiful and alien and unexpected. The furniture—antique desks and foreign-looking screens, old-fashioned chaises and filigreed settees—formed carefully distinct chambers. It was one room, but it felt like a place to explore. A maze of secrets.
One of the French translators of my novels once told me that, in France, it was widely considered a terrible flaw to use the same word twice in a paragraph. She said that translating my novels was a challenge because I would often use words with very similar definitions in my descriptions (i.e., “enchanting, magical”) and she would have to struggle to find two different French words with the same meaning and rhythm and then hope I didn’t use a third similar word later in the paragraph, because she could not repeat one she had just used. Ever since that conversation I’ve been far more attentive to redundant word choices and repeated words in my writing. It might not be a terminal flaw in American writing to use “nineteenth century” twice in as many paragraphs, but I do think it’s more interesting writing if I don’t. Much of my line editing for “Ladylike” involved murdering repeats, especially in this section. How many times, Stiefvater, can you say that everything looks “old-fashioned”? A lot, apparently.
“This is really cool,” Petra said, and felt stupid immediately after she spoke. She could tell already that cool was not a Geraldine word. She mumbled, “Beautiful, I mean. It’s like a conservatory.”
“You’re very kind,” Geraldine said. “Please make yourself at home.”
Petra’s actual home was covered with framed inspirational sayings and wedding photos and sports team logos. Less distinguished and more peppy. She wouldn’t know the first thing about acting as if this place were her home.
“Thanks. Uh—” Be cool, Petra! “I didn’t know what you wanted me to read, so I brought a lot of things.”
“Very clever,” Geraldine said, without a trace of sarcasm. “Shall I make us some tea before we begin?”
Petra didn’t drink tea, but she didn’t want to be rude. “Oh, thanks.”
“Would you like honey or sugar? Honey, I suppose? It’s supposed to be good for that lovely voice of yours.”
Lovely voice. Petra’s ears burned anew. They would never stop; there would be waves of redness like a constant heaving shoreline of humiliation. Geraldine was getting the full Petra show in no time at all. “Uh, thanks—” Stop saying thanks, Petra. “Honey would be great.”
Petra’s voice was what had gotten her this job, after all. There was one blushing Petra who hunched like a lump in her school desk, who possessed hair that frizzed in the humidity and a face that pimpled at the suggestion of sugar and lips that mumbled every answer to every question. But there was another Petra who was a member of the Two-Three Oratory Club, who stood at a lectern and recited Yeats, Hopkins, and Swinburne with perfect, ringing clarity. Both Petras had pimples, but the zits didn’t matter as much to that second one.
Supposedly, Geraldine’s relatives had heard Petra reciting “The Song of Hiawatha” at the Two-Three open mic and had at once made inquiries to see if Petra could be secured as a companion and reader for Geraldine.
“See, boldness makes opportunity!” Petra’s mother had said. “That would be a good cross-stitch. It will be good for you to not sulk around here with the babies.” By “babies” she meant Nikki and Mae, Petra’s sisters (who had not been babies for eleven and thirteen years respectively), and by “sulk around” she meant “avoid public humiliation.”
I used to always forget siblings in my writing, even though I have a ton of them in real life. When I was starting out, I knew that I needed a main character, some conflict, a fleshed-out setting, character arcs. Juggling just these elements occupied all of my brain; I had no more neurons left to consider something like siblings, pets, grandparents. It wasn’t until I began thinking of my characters as portraits of real, living people that I began to more naturally populate my world with dynamic, nuanced characters. My life was full of people influenced by sibling relationships, and it was my job to see if I could mirror those relationships in my writing. I did have to learn to add them in organically, however—I can’t just throw in siblings willy-nilly. Every person I add to my narrator’s family must have an influence on the narrator in some way. Yes, writer-brain, another thing for you to juggle. It’s worth it, though. Even if the siblings or grandparents don’t appear on screen, a mention of them can make the world feel fuller.
Now, Geraldine handed Petra a gilt-edged teacup nested on a gilt-edged saucer and sat elegantly on one of the sofas. She asked Petra how she had come to be in the Oratory Club. Petra muttered something about her mother’s ideas about facing fears head-on before petering out. She didn’t know how to talk about herself—she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to tell if Geraldine was merely being polite, in which case Petra needed to answer in the briefest way possible, or if she wanted to be informed, in which case Petra’s shortness would appear rude. In any case, when Petra’s reply occupied only twelve seconds, Geraldine smoothly leaped from that topic to a discussion of tea. Did Petra like it, she asked with her curious and distinct accent. Petra did, in fact, like it, though she wasn’t sure whether she was actually tasting it or merely smelling it. She was experiencing roses. That was what it came down to.
Geraldine and Petra burned nearly a third of their time in this manner. Possibly, Petra thought, her services had been engaged out of pity, and Geraldine was merely stalling.
But finally Geraldine said, “Well, this is splendid. Shall I take that?”
With relief, Petra offered up her teacup—it had an old red-brown stain on the rim, she noticed—and asked, “Do you know what you’d like to … uh …”
Geraldine swirled away with the cups in hand. Over her shoulder, her voice rang out crisply. “Perhaps something short to warm up?”
Petra fumbled through her bag for the book and fumbled to double-check that it held the poem she meant it to and then, as Geraldine returned from behind one of the decorative screens, she gracefully stood in a patch of sunlight. There was no lectern or stage, but the light seemed dramatic enough to act as a focal point. Petra stood up straight and didn’t feel foolish about it. She swept her hair out of her eyes and did not find the motion clumsy.
Poetry was magic. The
words in this book were the magic spells necessary to conjure the Petra that Petra was good at. Her own words she fumbled and her own gestures she smeared, but someone else’s words—yes. Magic.
In a clear voice she said, “I will be reading ‘Dead Love’ by Algernon Charles Swinburne.”
“Oh, Swinburne,” Geraldine said, as if she knew him personally. “Why did he write this one?”
“Oh.” The inferior Petra was back, unable to form sentences. “I don’t know. I, uh, will look it up. Do you want me to look it up now?” The unexpected question was already burning her ears again.
Geraldine waved away Petra’s phone. “No, later, later, don’t trouble yourself, Petra. The context is part of the poem, though, so I always enjoy knowing it. Please carry on!”
Petra carefully folded a yellow Post-it note out of the way; she’d marked each poem for performance with a different colored sticky. The book’s edge fluttered with notes the color of a marigold, the sky, a fern, a pumpkin, a furious blush. Then she swallowed the spit from her mouth—too much saliva ruined the p’s and s’s—and read:
Dead love, by treason slain, lies stark,
White as a dead stark-stricken dove:
None that pass by him pause to mark
Dead love.
His heart, that strained and yearned and strove
As toward the sundawn strives the lark,
Is cold as all the old joy thereof.
Dead men, re-arisen from dust, may hark
When rings the trumpet blown above:
It will not raise from out the dark
Dead love.
The Anatomy of Curiosity Page 2
