The Anatomy of Curiosity
Page 17
• • •
Invited to meet the Queen, in part because I never answered any summons when I was recovering, and the desire of An Riel to honor somebody for what we did is fading. They brought her because they thought, Aunt Lusha said, it would serve dual purpose: make a huge deal of the Restoration Campaign, and introduce a powerful woman from the star clans to the court.
Oh, oh. It made me laugh even as all that old ache in my chest flexed itself to make sure it was still strong.
• • •
I’m going.
I don’t know what I’ll do when I arrive, but I’m going.
I might—
I might kiss her in front of the Queen, in front of my aunts and mother. Everyone.
I might ask her to dance.
I might only stare.
I wonder if I will be able to hear her voice. Will she hum?
Maybe I will walk up to her and only say her name. Feel it on my tongue again.
Dinah. Aniv.
I leave at dawn.
Here is a story that began with magical bombs and ended up being about love and identity—national identity, gender identity— and ambiguity. Of course the ending is ambiguous, too, and very much about point of view.
All my world building is there to spiral around a few questions and point toward a few key emotional moments I hope will leave an impression on readers’ heads and hearts.
THE END
REVISION
Brenna
Revision means getting rid of every needlessly convoluted twist that seemed like a good idea in the first draft. It means refining concepts and combining scenes and finding as many connections as possible between characters and images and ideas. Once these connections start clicking into place, I have a better sense of what’s important, and that’s the point at which I finally have enough information to sit down and figure out the exact shape of a story. Until then, I’m always just looking for where the edges line up.
Tessa
Drafting to me is inherently messy and chaotic—it is gathering the raw material that will eventually be a story. It’s like mining. I dig into world and character, forming and shaping what I think I want and discarding what I don’t. Sometimes I shape something, only to realize it’s greatly flawed and throw that out, too. (Also known as burning down entire drafts—it’s painful, but in a cathartic way because it only happens when I’m doing something very wrong, and therefore it’s a relief to start fresh.) Every time I throw something out, it brings revision into drafting. But until I have a complete first draft (beginning, middle, climax, denouement, with all the character arcs within) I still think of it as drafting.
The real revision happens when I look at this mess I’ve made and start to make sure I’m communicating what I want to communicate. Because writing is all communication between writer and reader. Revision is when I look at the story I’ve put down and instead of focusing on what I want or need to say, I focus on making it understandable, relatable, relevant, clear, and desperately engaging to a reader.
Revision is the part I liken to being Doctor Frankenstein. You’ve gathered the raw parts from a variety of dark cemeteries; now you have to sew arms onto torsos, remove intestines and replace them with better ones, find the right heart and the best connective tissue to bring it all together.
Maggie
Writing a novel is a lot like being pregnant. For several months, you consider what this creature you’re making will look like, contemplate names for it, dreamily imagine what it will grow up to be. You pester your friends about it until they begin to dread your number on their caller ID. They block your posts about it on Facebook. “Show me when it’s done,” they say. And you do. Only when you finally give birth to this thing, it’s a tiny, hideous monster with a wrinkled tomato face and the voice of a bronchially challenged pterodactyl.
Well, that was anticlimactic.
It is precisely like writing a novel. The good news is, after you birthed this short-limbed Winston Churchill–doppelganger wombfruit, you now have its entire life to dress it in cute clothing, put hats on its weird-shaped head, send it to schools to learn Spanish, and teach it how to play a small assortment of pleasant sonatas on the pianoforte or recorder.
That is what revision gives you: the rest of the novel’s life to make it (and you) look brilliant. It doesn’t matter how ugly it begins—you’re only graded on how it ends.
It’s my favorite part of writing because it’s when I feel like I have total control to fine-tune. I like my drafts like I like babies: they’re the best when they start to get funny.
INTRODUCTION
When I first sit down to write, I don’t always know what I’m trying to say. For some people, it seems like the major events of a story leap into their heads fully formed. Other people do so much planning and outlining ahead of time that they know even the tiniest details of a plot point or a character before they ever type a single word.
My process is a messy, meandering one. When I write, I’m really just taking stock of all the things inside my brain and then fiddling around to find the circuits and wires between them. I think a lot about ideas—where they come from, what they mean, how their insides work. I like the way that you can start with a single event or image and then steer the part that comes next in an infinite number of directions. And if you don’t like where you end up, it’s totally fine to backtrack and try again from the same jumping-off point. Or a different one that you discovered along the way. You might not be happy with Version One of something, but you won’t ruin an idea just by using it to find out where it goes.
My contribution to this book is a little bit different from Maggie’s and Tessa’s. Even though the pretext of this project—of our entire critique relationship, in fact—revolves around writing fiction, the story that comes next is a strange kind of hybrid. At first I kept trying to tell just one part of it, but it turned out that I couldn’t talk about how I relate to ideas without getting into all the ways that my own story is part of a bigger one. Or else, my story is the actual one, and the fictional parts are just different versions of the messy, sprawling world that lives inside my head.
A lot of what you’re about to read is actually true, and when I tell you about poetry or drowning or Anthony Perkins, I’m talking about things that really happened. Those stories and that voice, that’s me, but it’s a constructed me—a character of myself. It’s a version of me who is telling you a story about how complicated it gets to figure out the steps you took to reach someplace, and then go back and describe how you got there.
People sometimes ask where I get my ideas, and the answer is simple. Ideas are everywhere. They can start from a single line you read on the back of a jar of peanut butter, or something that your grandmother said when you were little, or remembering how once you saw a guy in a pig suit in the train station and it was weird. I collect ideas like I’m picking up shells along an endless stretch of beach, and it’s easy to remember a specific moment that made me start thinking about something, but the evolution of an idea is hard to show without explaining the tangled structure of its roots.
Or trash along a municipal highway. One of those.
The piece you’re about to read is the story of how long it took me to find the true, beating heart of an idea and then use it to tell the story that I meant. The one I actually wanted to tell.
—Brenna
DROWNING VARIATIONS
I. THE SWIMMING POOL
There’s a story I’ve been telling my whole life. Does that sound weird? The shape of it is lumpy and undefined. It changes in the telling and the retelling but never actually resolves itself.
Sometimes a specific moment can take on the weight of a stone—dense, asymmetric. Heavier than the sum of its parts. Afterward, you carry it around with you, tucked inside a coin purse or a pocket, and mine is this: when I was very small, I almost drowned.
It was in a public pool, on a remote afternoon when the lifeguard had turned away, in broa
d daylight. Probably in a yellow bathing suit, because for a long time that was my favorite color. Probably even in the shallow end. (I was still small enough that shallow ends weren’t always shallow.)
I don’t remember it the way it must have been: the concrete, pale blue around me, the water in my mouth and the way the light moved on the surface when I looked up. I don’t remember the day or the weather, or what I was thinking right before, but I remember dreaming it again and again.
In my dreams, the water fails to hold me. I reach for something solid, but it comes apart in my hands. Overhead there’s a web of reflected sunlight, and through it I can see the sky. For the longest time, there’s only blue—blue and shadow below, blue and light above—and the fact that I can’t breathe seems nearly inconsequential.
I’m never scared until I wake up.
II. THE RESERVOIR
Sometimes the things you live through take on a second life inside you.
I didn’t come out of the swimming pool afraid exactly, but I was changed by it.
For most of childhood I didn’t think I was obsessed. When you’ve been obsessing about something since you can remember, obsession just starts to seem normal.
From my house, I could stand out on the deck and look down at the reservoir—a murky body that swelled in spring, then shrank to a muddy puddle by November. I thought about the landscape underneath, drawing crooked maps, imagining the rotting church that everyone said was down there—left behind when they scraped the houses to make the lake. I saved up money and bought a snorkel and a mask, but I never saw any sign of the drowned town. And still, I stayed under as long as possible, searching for the wreckage, holding my breath. The act of sinking filled some impulse in me but didn’t quite cancel it out.
I swam in flooded quarries and jumped from piers and floating docks and out of boats. I wore canvas shoes, because all the duck ponds and creeks were dark and full of glass.
By the time I was ten I’d begun writing things down, recording my findings. I filled whole notebooks with charts and observations, trying to come to terms with the implacable weight of water.
The place I lived was nearly desert, and drought awareness was everywhere—on billboards and splashed across bus-stop benches, advising us to deprive our yards and limit our showers. One summer there was a citywide campaign warning against the dangers of overindulgent bathing. It cautioned us in giant font not to drown the duck, while a crowd of plastic bath toys looked on in concern. I grew up constantly reminded that the thing that had almost killed me was the one thing we didn’t have enough of.
In my mind, drowning had become the worst, most magical thing that could happen to a person. I was stricken with it, consumed by it—deeply preoccupied with the animals that washed into the inlet by my house each spring, floating down through the concrete spillway, matted and puffy in the winter runoff.
I memorized poems and wrote them on the soles of my shoes, covering the rubber with murder ballads and smudgy water lilies. With lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It wasn’t the longing of the poem that struck me, or the creeping yellow fog, or the part about the patient etherized on a table, or even that perplexing question, do I dare disturb the universe. The answer to Prufrock’s dilemma seemed obvious—largely irrelevant. The universe was already disturbed.
Yellow had already stopped being my favorite color, but the cheery insistence of it still blindsided me sometimes. In the poem, a cloud of yellow smoke moves through the city like a huge, imaginary cat, lazy and vaguely ominous. It seemed like something out of a horror movie, and I liked that.
What I loved were the mermaids.
I was enchanted by the image of them calling to each other, and that one heartbreaking sentence, I do not think that they will sing to me. I wrote the line inside an empty seashell, in tiny letters, in black marker, and dropped it in a glass of water. It was strangely satisfying to watch the words bleed away. They dissolved in front of me, blurry and magnified, like I had hit upon some fundamental secret of the world and was holding it captive for study.
The part that struck me most of all, though, was the part at the end—an eerie, melancholy couplet. A promise.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
That last line seemed like the most essential truth. All there was to know. I clung to Eliot because he understood—he knew that you could go into the water willingly. You could linger there, under the heaving surface, but only until the world intruded. (Till the lifeguard turned and noticed you were down there, hair curling around your head in a baby-fine cloud like a jellyfish, a pale and tangled octopus, and when he came splashing in and grabbed you by the arm and the water in your throat finally burned, when all this time it had just been stifling, that was when you knew. That was when the feeling of floating stopped being curious and started being dangerous.)
I was on familiar terms with a hundred versions of magic, tragic women—the Slavic Rusalki and the Latin American Llorona, and with the Lady of Shalott, who did not drown. But still. She died near water.
This kind of pattern spotting involves more than a little confirmation bias.
The lists I made were comprehensive—practical guidebooks to haunted wells, Japanese fairy tales, folk songs about jealous sisters and bonny swans. When we read about Ophelia in school, I drew pictures. She drifted peacefully down the margins on her back, blue-lipped and covered in flowers. I might be fuzzy on multiplying fractions and diagramming sentences, but I can tell you about more drowners than you ever wanted to know. The sad ones, the pretty ones, the famous and the infamous. The real ones, sometimes—Natalie Wood and Virginia Woolf. Anyone who might know anything about tiptoeing down to the water, slipping, falling, sinking under.
In a rational sense, I understood that drowning was ugly. It was purple and panicked. It meant scrabbling, flailing, choking. But my own encounter hadn’t been like that. In my dreams, as in the stories, it was a kind of death that seemed strangely uneventful. Passive. Feminine.
When I looked back through the pages of my research, one thing stood out clearer than anything else: drowning is what girls do.
III. THE BOY(S) WHO DIED
I turned fourteen.
I turned fourteen, and eighth grade was not a world of ballads and fairy tales. I thought I’d outgrown my fascination with drowning, or else come to some tacit understanding of it. A reluctant truce. Then something happened.
Afterward, I wrote about it. To myself. In scribbles and fragments. I referred to it in the most nonspecific of terms or found ways to bury it in the middle of other things, referencing it obliquely, but avoiding actually saying what it was.
It wasn’t until my freshman year in college that I finally wrote it down—all of it, in order, without generalities or evasion. It had been raining for a month. The ground was mostly clay, the clay had reached saturation, and the whole campus was underwater. I sat on my windowsill, looking down at the flooded parking lot. I held a blue, spiral-bound notebook against my knees and wrote and wrote and wrote.
I was fourteen the year that Kurt Cobain died, gone inside of a second, inside a shotgun blast. I’d always liked Nirvana but was still too young to understand them. I was too idealistic, or maybe just too nice. I had a dictionary definition of apathy, but I didn’t know what it felt like. For a while, it seemed like the whole world was crying except me.
I was fourteen the year that a fourteen-year-old boy drowned facedown in the small stream behind my aunt’s house. It was winter, and the water was less than a foot and a half deep in most places. The banks were rimmed with ice, and scraps of paper and cigarette butts floated in the eddies where the rocks jutted out.
On the news, they said he’d been so ***ked up that when he passed out in the creek, he just stayed there, breathing the water until it killed him. Only that wasn’t how they phrased it.
I was babysitting my cousins, and as near as I can tell, he died while Psycho III was on the television. My aunt had cable. Afterwards, I kept thinking, Maybe if I’d gone outside, if only I’d gone outside …
I’d opened the back door, just to check for Norman Bates. But in the dark you couldn’t see that far. You wouldn’t be able to see a fourteen-year-old boy lying facedown in the stream. At least, I couldn’t didn’t see him.
My aunt found him the next day, with ice in his hair, facedown like he’d fallen. His friend was lying farther up the bank, dry but frozen.
By midafternoon, the television crews were everywhere and it was on three channels. You could see his school picture on the front of all the newspapers. Everyone was talking.
I think it was because he had done something that no one thought was possible. When you are in the middle of a hundred-year drought and it’s the driest season of the year, there’s something magical about drowning in less than two feet of water.
I kept telling myself there was nothing I could have done. If he had managed to drown in a place where the air is so dry that your skin cracks and bleeds, then it was inevitable. Preordained, even. I said to myself, There was nothing I could have done.
Eventually, I sometimes believed it.
There’s guilt in the telling, and I didn’t mean it to be there. Or maybe I did. The fact that I felt it seemed important, but it was a guilt I couldn’t quite explain. My sense of responsibility was impersonal, but very large. Not for my failure to circumvent someone else’s catastrophe—I didn’t believe I should have reasonably been expected to save anyone. When I felt a responsibility, it wasn’t for any practical oversight on my part, but simply for the fact that I’d survived the pool.