ON SHAMELESS GRANDMOTHERS, JUDGING A STORY, AND POSITIVELY TINGLING WITH EXCITEMENT
The week of October 25 – Friday October 30, 2020
Dear Sarah,
Happy almost-Halloween Friday! I’ve been working on my letter to you on and off all week — I recommend getting a doc started right away where you can start tucking notes and ideas, if you want to be ultra efficient about it! — and still here I am wrapping it up at the end of the day on Friday!
I’ve continued thinking this week about fiction and what makes a story. And guess what: I’m thinking again about John McPhee and Draft No. 4! In his chapter on “Frame of Reference,” McPhee writes, You will never land smoothly on borrowed vividness. If you say someone looks like Tom Cruise — and you let it go at that — you are asking Tom Cruise to do your writing for you. Your description will fail when your reader doesn’t know who Tom Cruise is. The chapter is about doing the real work to convey an image or idea, instead of leaning on existing depictions, leaning on what you think your audience will already know, borrowing from how other characters and stories did their work, standing on their shoulders a bit too heavily. It’s also about how our common frames of reference diminish over time; what was commonly known to an audience at a particular time might not be familiar some years or decades later.
In my recent reading I’ve come across some stories heavy on a certain kind of description, this is like that, folding in a density of detail that doesn’t paint a clear picture but rather confuses the scene at hand with other possible scenes — the application of layers of detail that are trying to accomplish a single goal but that distract the reader into other stories altogether, stories that are not fully formed on the page.
On the topic of detail — I think I’ve mentioned before a fellow student in undergrad who sprinkled her stories with a certain kind of product, things like Frette linens, which I didn’t (and don’t) know personally, but I assumed from the context that they were simply rich and fancy linens. There could be many ways to interpret what it means to apply detail and specificity, and sometimes people translate this into a type of product placement, replicating the product details of the fancy or divey environments we all move through in our worlds. How to bring detail into our stories, detail that helps tell the story? Products can be a form of shorthand, and including certain products in writing is perhaps a slightly embarrassing form of riding on the coattails of corporations’ work to establish brands — giving them free placement in fiction, no less!
I have also thought about whether a story that is completely unreal can be more real than something that actually happened, and I think the answer is yes. Some stories get into documenting precisely what a character was thinking and feeling in a way that feels drawn from life and which can become exhausting; the pace of the eye over the text runs faster than the pace of whatever is happening in the text; you are suspended in a gluey mass of description.
I’ve been thinking too about different ways of reading stories. There is reading stories for pleasure, to luxuriate in word choices and the rhythm of sentences. There is reading to learn, to gain insight and understanding through a person’s research and ideas. There is reading to be helpful, to offer feedback, to find nuggets to dig into more deeply, to ask questions that can help another writer advance their thought process and their writing. And there is also reading as judgment, which is the actual task at hand for me! (I’m helping to screen a big stack of stories to make it a smaller stack for someone else to review.) It took me some time to realize that reading as judgment has its time and place. I get squeamish about passing judgment on others’ writing, which is perhaps a form of passing judgment on myself. Maybe this story is really good and somehow I’m not seeing it… I should leave it to someone else to decide. But when you are reading to pass judgment you are looking for a story that will keep your attention, that is doing its job well, that carries you through and almost makes you forget you are reading a story. Some of the stories I have read never let you forget you are reading a story. If I find myself distracted by any old thing off the page, that is a clue. If I find myself wanting to skip directly to the end so I can be done and move on, that is a clue. And if I find myself reading the story at the pace it has established, moving through page by page, in step with the writer, then that is also a clue, and a story worth considering further. So this week I said to myself, it is all right to judge a story when the intention of this exercise is to judge, to filter up a few stories that truly caught my attention. The goal of this effort is not to go back to every writer who submitted a story and talk with them about how to make it stronger. The point is to make choices, not to equivocate.
On another note, I think it is a talent and a clue if you feel, as you described last week, that you have an inability to use words when [you] don’t have a firm grasp on and/or belief in the concepts they represent. Even if it may be a useful skill to circumvent these scenarios with the written word, I imagine that such a skill could edge into territories where maybe you don’t want to go! I would almost venture to say that in some contexts, using words effectively, without a firm grasp on or belief in the concepts, could be an evil power! (Very context-specific!) That’s a bit dramatic but I think you will know what I mean. I do understand the hard part of finding words even when you do have a grasp on the concepts. I don’t think you’re bad at words! Maybe you need more drafts? You did close your thought by stating that you’d sent off a fresh draft with which you were satisfied! I think somehow this is a case where it’s useful to suspend judgment until the end of the whole process. The process is going to be messy and that’s a given! If it stays messy across all the drafts and still ends in something messy, then you might have a problem on your hands, that may or may not be entirely your problem. Some of it depends on having the time to let a process unspool at a pace that fits the task at hand. Sometimes there’s not enough time, for any number of reasons, and then you are in a bind, needing to pass judgment on drafts and ideas that might not be ready for it. And yet the moments of judgment keep coming!
Reading your letter last Friday, I positively tingled with excitement for Simon’s Superstar week. What class snack did he bring? I must know! I was thrilled to hear about his heavy interview prep and wish I could have been a fly on the wall for it all! Or perhaps just a guest in your home, trapped in a snowstorm and enjoying being present as your cozy family time unfolds!
Wishing you and yours a spooky (in a good way) fun-filled weekend with no worries about what the next week may hold!
Until soon!
Eva
October 26, 2020,
October 29, 2020
Dear Eva,
It is Monday(!), and I have the day off so I’m planning to seize the opportunity to spend a bit more time on this letter than I have been able to in recent weeks.
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Just kidding. It’s now Thursday evening. And yes, it will appear that I only wrote one sentence on Monday, and this appearance will be technically accurate but misleading. I did write a bunch of drafty bits, and pulled excerpts from your previous letters that I wanted to unpack. And now, as I sit down to bring it all together, I am realizing how different I feel today than I did just four days ago when I began this week’s letter journey. This contrast feels noteworthy and worth unpacking in itself. This is all a long-winded explanation for why I have bothered to leave in the unremarkable detail of my Monday start—I want to sit with these Monday bits and see how they aged over these four days as I finally lay them down onto the finished page.
Let’s start with your thoughts in last week’s letter about stories. You wrote: Stories are embedded in our being, we live and watch and read them, but the writing of stories is different than feeling those embedded stories — it takes time and much work to write them out. It’s hard! This got me thinking about all that we know and feel without being able to articulate it, and all that we can express and show through our actions and behaviors as opposed to our words. I agree with you that sometimes—often maybe—it is a matter of learning the craft to tell the story, doing the work to say what you know and feel. But I think I am also increasingly comfortable knowing that there is so much of the profound part of life that will always just be something I feel and know but cannot adequately express. I remember a stunning On Being interview with John O’Donohue where he said, “Music is what language would love to be if it could.” Somehow, this notion calms me. I guess it’s a way of being okay with all that cannot be expressed. The inability to put it into words doesn’t make it any less real or true. I say this not really in response to what you said; it is just where your words took me.
I was also thinking about your assertion that it’s also possible to simply not take on the obligations that may seem imposed, this in reference to gifts as hostile gestures, and emails and shared articles as IOUs. It’s worth noting that this week, I got the second direct complaint from a relative that I still had not read and replied back about the many articles I had been sent. In other words, I am not imagining the obligation-imposition in at least some of these situations—it is expressly made clear! But even so, you are right that I don’t have to take it on, even when it is expected and even demanded of me. The/my urge to see gifts and emails and shared articles as imposed obligations is rooted in a social instinct, wanting to reciprocate, meet expectations, fulfill wishes. This feels like one way in which being socially attuned can become self destructive if you’re not careful—taking on the needs and wishes of others before one’s own.
Shame is also a social instinct. What will others think, say, or do in response to my words or actions? My paternal grandmother seemed largely incapable of shame in her day. To my horror as a child, she would belch during my piano recitals and/or loudly proclaim that our waitress was slow or unseemly. This was not an ideal trait, but in retrospect I can see how it also brings with it a certain freedom. I could never be shameless, but I do wish I could be better at turning my radar off temporarily. This was really on my mind Monday, because I was feeling particularly anxious that day for reasons unknown. I was thinking about how it might help me to try to describe to you what my anxiety feels like, the way it physically manifests as a sort of suffocating force, occupying mindspace and blocking out that space for anything new. There is a repetitive, distracting internal chatter when I feel the anxiety starting in my body, bringing on a sense of dread as I feel powerless to reclaim control over it. It creeps up inside me and through me. Is this normal? I think I would be more relieved if it wasn’t. If someone told me that I’ve been fighting an actual disability all these years, it might feel gratifying.
Anyway, we are who we are. And I can recognize and appreciate that there are aspects of these tendencies of mine that are rooted in some prosocial instincts. You wrote in a recent letter that you have largely stopped forcing down your professional vegetables, settling in instead in what comes naturally and what you like. It can be hard, at least for me, to decipher what to resist and try to change, and what to accept and move on. I tend to think we need to do a bit of both, it’s just a matter of figuring out which is which and how much. Fighting the current is tiring! But riding it without any effort may lead us to places we don’t really want to go. To go back to the themes in your letter, maybe it is all—maybe we are all—just a long, messy compilation of drafts, waiting to be revised and reworked and pushed against, some that we will return to and some that we won’t. Either way, as you say, drafts are far better gifts than the blank page no matter what shape they are in.
I look forward to reading your words!
Yours,
Sarah