On writing | writingsmog

April 25, 2021

Reading as you write – A Swim in the Pond part II

So, it’s time to take a dip in the pond. In this post, I plan to do a writerly-readerly meta-analysis of the opening few paragraphs ofmy work-in-progress novella Understanding. To get a sense of what I aim to do here, you can access my previous post on the subject here. In short, this analysis has been inspired by George Saunders’ book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain in which he conducts a bunch of close readings of published stories and look at the decisions writers make with each word, phrase, paragraph, character, scene and how they open up questions and narrative paths that need to be resolved in one way or another during the story.

As I said last time, my story is still fairly embryonic. I’m only 20,000 words into the first draft and I’m progressing very slowly due to a host of other commitments at the moment – which in itself is interesting (at least to me) as it creates a different relationship between me and the work than I get with my usual approach which is one of destructive urgency.

Writing slowly means the subconscious writing that I do away from the desk happens in a more subtle way and gives me permission to try on a greater various of outfits for each new section before returning to the work. It’s not something I necessarily recommend – and I’m a firm believer in Stephen King’s idea that you have to show up as a writer, although I can never see myself writing 2,000 a day, six days a week, which has been his regime.

So, here goes…

Understanding

His naked feet dangled inches above the water, coaxing them up from the deep. From an upstairs window she kept watch. Glancing at the woods. The barn. The bleached straggly grass which had once been a lawn. And then back at him at the end of the diving board. Her binoculars weighed a ton.

An opening passage is always going to create more questions than answers. I’ve so far written this story in a linear fashion and started with this simple image in mind. I didn’t know who they were – the he and she in this short extract – or, indeed, where they were. Although I now know a lot more about their backstories, some of this initial ambiguity lingers – and I like that, because it means I too will be surprised by some of the things I learn about them as I write. In that sense I try to keep a feeling of alignment with the reader. I’m aware that this approach doesn’t work for every writer but it works for me, even if it requires more rewriting and retrofitting once the first draft it done.

The opening sentence is grammatically ambiguous. Strictly speaking the antecedent of “them” is the grammatical subject of the sentence – “His naked feet”. But the sentence also suggests there is something in the deep beneath his feet – an ominous “them” in the deep below him.

Although written in the third person, it is not clear who the narrator is (is she or he writing from inside or outside the fabula – who is focalising?). When I started writing, the narrator saw the world through his eyes in a close third person, but this soon changed as her character asserted itself in the text.

At this stage we don’t know who they are and what their relationship is to each other. We get a sense of their environment. With trees and a barn, it doesn’t sound urban and could be in the country. The diving board suggests a pool (although it could be over a lake or sea), which then reframes the notion of there being a deep below him. How deep is the deep end of the pool? And what lives in the pool? And why does she need to keep watch with binoculars? There is definitely something strange about this set up that I wanted to explore as a writer and a reader.

He peered down at the grey-green darkness she herself saw when it was her turn. The bottom invisible beneath the algae. With sudden violence – it always came sooner than she expected – he slapped the water with the back of the frying pan. The sound ricocheted off the trees that surrounded the garden. In the early days when he did this, she’d watch the birds scatter against the bluest skies. She knew them all by name. Goshawk. Buzzard. Swallow. Long-tailed tit. Today, apart from a distant squawk, there was nought.

This passage provides more details of their environment. It is a swimming pool. They are in a garden surrounded by trees. The list of birds suggests somewhere rural.

The narrative is explicitly from her perspective. Watching him, she knows what he sees from her own experience, yet she is still shocked by the strange ritual. She’s bright and possibly prone to distraction. “She knew them all by name” is a deceptively innocuous statement. It could be read as a simple piece of exposition – the narrator imparting information. But there is a childish boastfulness quality to it that suggests she herself would state this. The statement seems to come from her, and not just the narrator. Is it part of her character to be boastful? If so, is it because she likes to show off? Or is there another reason? A sign of defensiveness, perhaps?

He slapped and slapped. His thin, sinewy back glistening in the midday sun. It had been her idea to empty the fish tank into the pool after the winter rains. She hadn’t expected the carp to survive. When he’d killed enough – the fish floating on the surface of the green water, their bellies like bones – silence reigned over the clearing once again. He stared up at her briefly, checking she was paying attention. She pouted crossly and showed him the binoculars. The buckle on the leather strap dug into her neck. When he made a gun shape with his fingers, she lifted the rifle from the rug and held it up to the window with both hands.

Satisfied, he leant down and scooped up the dead fish with the frying pan, flinging each into the long grass by the pool. She scanned the treeline on both sides of the yard – nothing – before returning her gaze to her brother who wound up his arm as he tossed the pan deep into the grass before sliding along the board on his belly towards shore.

So what’s happening here? She is armed with a gun, which he checks she has – indeed, he checks “she was paying attention”, which underscores the notion she might be easily distracted, which might be because she is young, presumably younger than he is. The narrator seems to pop into her brother’s head for a moment (a shift in focalisation/point of view), reflecting on her brother’s reason for looking up, but it could just as easily be another part of the routine that she knows and expects – the narrator could still be focalising from her perspective when commenting on his motive for checking she is watching.

Her brother’s status becomes more evident in this passage too. He seems older and has an air of being the responsible one. When writing this story, I’ve been acutely aware of the different forms of status between them and how that, in itself, can shape their behaviour and drive the story on. (See Keith Johnstone’s book Improv for a great introduction to status.)

The nature of what he is doing is strange. Why slap fish in a pond with a frying pan? Why not try to fish them out another way? How have their lives evolved to introduce this pattern?

And I admit, I don’t quite know myself, but I like its oddness and feel that its strangeness is an appropriate metaphor for the odd patterns of behaviour people can adopt, especially when isolated.

I’m aware that readers will try to decode this world through their understanding of their own worlds. The story certainly has elements of magical realism or possibly even slipstream, but I’m not aiming for either genre. Rather, I’m attempting to write an appropriate metaphor for the strangeness many of us have felt in the last year or so while confined due to Covid-19. The key, though, is to do enough to make that implicit for readers – to show rather than tell.

She looked out at the yard. There was cow parley and elderflower and sprigs of glass that looked like wheat but didn’t taste good and dandelions and a tree that produced the most delicious pears and a slime-green pool. In the breeze it all seemed to come to life, moving silently, hither and thither, hither and yon, yon and thither…she held these words in her warm mouth like yoke in an eggshell. She felt their roundness on her tongue before each was released with the shallowest aspiration. There was no one there to hear them, which was just as well for her brother hated her silly words. She had little time to recall when she first heard them – to remember which of her parents used them – because her brother had stopped dead in the middle of the board.

His gaze fixed on something in the forest.

A curve in the treeline meant she couldn’t see what he was looking at. Still, she raised the rifle and pointed it in the general direction of the forest path, her gluey tongue working its way along her top lip.

He followed the usual procedure, taking a deep gulp of air before sliding into the water, keeping his fingers curled over the edge of the board so he could sense any movement. If the board wobbled, he would know she had failed. He took a final gulp of air – his beard lingering on the water’s surface like eelgrass she’d read about in the National Geographic – its proper name was Zosteraceae – before pushing his head back under the water.

Shit, she said quietly, so her brother wouldn’t hear.

This last bit extends on many of the ideas I’ve mentioned already. She lives in an isolated and fundamentally scary world. She is intelligent and has a tendency to withdrawal into her mind, possibly as a defence against scary things happening outside, e.g. she thinks about the proper name for eelgrass which she sees as an appropriate metaphor for his floating beard and playing with words in her mouth – words that she has obviously heard spoken to her at some point in her life, but that she can’t properly recall. Then, in the final line of this extract, we get a stronger sense of how she feels obliged to modify her behaviour for the sake of her brother – another marker of their differing status. Perhaps her intelligence is actually a defence against his dominance. Her knowledge and understanding are things he can’t control.

He submerges himself in the water, presumably to hide from something he has seen – some source of danger that she knows she has to deal with. Yet, she still thinks of the eelgrass – how much danger are they actually in? It is real or perceived?

In summary, the story starts at a point of potential danger for the girl and her brother, and offers glimpses into their internal and external lives, but leaves many unanswered questions about who they are, where they are, and what will happen to them. The overriding feeling is one of fragility. And as I write I am aware of the questions I am opening up, which creates a kind of puzzle that I must solve. Not only do I need to learn the answers, but I have to make decisions about how I will represent them on the page for readers to learn – a process which exemplifies the separate notions of the story and the fabula. But often, the decisions are made for me in the process of writing the fabula. That’s the fun of writing fiction.

Thanks for reading.

Leave a comment

January 22, 2021

A Swim in the Pond with George Sunders – lessons on reading your own work: Part 1

George Saunders’ new book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain has broken the drought. I can’t quite believe my last post was in 2017. Where has the time gone? Margaret Atwood says every writer has a fallow state, although I wonder if it is meant to last quite as long as my fallow epochs tend to last. Nevertheless, here I am, writing a post with particular gusto on this wintery January afternoon.

Reading Saunders has taken me back to the creative writing workshops I attended at Birkbeck about a decade ago and the writing classes I took as an undergraduate in Sydney a decade or so before that.

Creative writing is typically taught in workshops, each with a slightly different format, but they usually involve some form of peer scrutiny of your latest work. Until you get comfortable with the group, it can be quite a daunting process, a weird sort of stage fright that can leave you with mixed feelings of elation, niggling doubts about hidden subtext and a general desire to drink, possibly alone.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a lesson in reading as a writer (and, I guess, writing as a reader) and includes anecdotes about the classes George Saunders teaches on the MFA programme at Syracuse University. Saunders writes with empathy. He knows the drill. Writing fiction can be a tough gig.

I confess, I’ve only just scratched the surface and have only read the first of Saunders’ seven readings. But his page-by-page breakdown of Anton Chekhov’s In the Cart has done enough to inspire me to brush up on the ways of reading your own work that came up in numerous writing classes I’ve taken in the past.

Saunders starts by looking at the sorts of questions the first page of Chekhov’s story invokes in a reader. Questions about who the characters are, where they live and what events have brought them to be where they are, where the story is heading and why they might be interesting for us as readers. Questions that a writer is beholden to answer through the storytelling process. Regardless of the genre of story, or how playful and innovative it might be, that unwritten contract with your reader still stands.

So, I thought it might be a useful exercise to ask these questions of the novella I’m writing (or novel, it’s too early to tell). The benefit of reading a published story from an accomplished writer, such as Chekhov, is that it delivers what Saunders wants it to do – it has been through a process of crafted and redrafted, loose ends have been sorted out, lingering questions have been answered. It’s not an embryonic mishmash of possible paths that my story is. Some of these paths might not make it to the final cut.

Of course, in the process of writing a story yourself, you typically have very little idea of where the story will go, at least initially, which is why Saunders is giving this class in his book – it can help to a meta-discussion about these questions as you write, especially after your first draft.

Nevertheless, the extract below is still a first draft, so I’m still learning about the characters in the story. I’m still becoming aware of their world, which in this case is confined to a remote house somewhere in Europe, although I can’t say for sure when and I don’t yet know what has brought them to be where they are. Nor do I know what genre of story this is. It has an oddness about it. There is a magical realism quality, perhaps dystopian, or perhaps it will be revealed later in the story that it is something about their isolation rather than the world around them that is odd. I have rough answers for these questions, but am not ready to set them in stone. It’s an exciting and sometimes (actually often in my case) frustrating process.

At the risk on conjuring some of the workshop anxieties and doubts, I’ve included the opening extract of my work-in-progress story, which is currently entitled Understanding. In a week or so (and hopefully within the next four years), I’ll consider some of the questions it raises and some of the decisions I’ve made during the writing process.

Hope you enjoy the extract and thanks for reading.

Working title: Understanding

His gaze fixed on something in the forest.

Shit, she said quietly, so her brother wouldn’t hear.

1 Comment

March 6, 2017

When writing becomes reading: notes on The Occupants

I was thrilled to learn my story The Occupants had made it into the top three of the London Short Story Prize in 2016. I was also surprised that this somewhat off-the-wall story, written guiltily when I was trying to finish of another project, should make it so far. Whenever I enter competitions, I generally expect to hear nothing back. A piece is never quite right and with each rereading I find some cringeworthy word or phrase that calls the story out for a poor imitation of someone else’s highly revered work.

But it wasn’t just the fact the story had (almost) succeeded that surprised me. It was the judges’ responses. The mirror they held up to me showed a picture of the story I had not seen during the writing process. They categorised it as a “nicely disturbing piece of Sci-Fi”, “an unnerving, intoxicating dystopian nightmare” and a “piquant, unsettling, dystopian tale”. (Their full comments appear at the end of this blog.)

They were right, of course. The Occupants is a dystopian story, and by definition is quite unsettling. Yet, up until the point of reading these comments, I hadn’t thought of the story in any sort of category. I certainly hadn’t ventured to construct a tale in any of the moulds reflected back at me by the judges (which I think are brilliant, by the way!).

This probably speaks to my inexperience as a published writer. I’ve never had anyone else describe my work in any sense at all. Sure, I have particular styles of writing that I admire and steal from (I was a massive JB Ballard fan in the late 1990s, for example, which might explain why I sometimes err towards dystopian writing). But I’ve never consciously aligned myself with a particular school, whether it be sci-fi or minimalism or romance. Whatever I have produced has been far more intuitive and has been an expression of a mood or feeling about the world, obviously using the tools that I have assimilated over years of reading and writing. Borrowing from an idea from Ballard, my fictions seem to be enunciations of how I apprehend my lived experience.

When writing this story I was conscious of a few things in my immediate environment. Food waste. The rise of robots. The inexorable spread of low and mid-rise housing across South East London, where I live. My kids’ school being developed to the point where each child has less playground space than that required to meet the standards of being a free-range chicken. Those were the issues at the back of my mind.

But really what I set out to do was write a piece of flash fiction – a story of under 500 words. I failed within a day of writing (the story is about 3,000 words), but this aim alone meant that temporally the story moved along quite quickly and I tried to avoid superfluous details. In an odd way, this gave the story a fairytale quality and if anything I was writing to that genre over any other. A fairytale complete with the sense of menace and horror that is part and parcel of that genre.

Pretty soon, character took over. Danny, whose point of view the story follows, has very little awareness of himself or the world around him. His lack of self-awareness was something I played with, sometimes to the point of absurdity (I was a massive Harold Pinter fan in the early 1990s). After he gruesomely disposes of his father’s cadaver by sliding the body out of his apartment window into a large rubbish bin waiting below, Danny’s first thought is to worry that his sister will be distressed to hear he’d lost his job at the local supermarket. Irrational. Absurd. Comical.

Dystopian fiction is a wide category and each story from this genre presents a different vision of the world – post nuclear or climatic disasters, or the apocalypse of the self, a typically Ballardian form where affluence leads to strange behaviour, using in relation to technology or within gated communities. Dystopian fiction is a form of speculative fiction, often where an element of the present world is exaggerated. What would happen if, say, the world was flooded (as in Ballard’s The Drowned World) or humans hooked into cyberworlds (as in William Gibson’s Neuromancer).

In The Occupants Danny’s milieu is overtly dystopian. He lives in a city of uniform apartment blocks (like the 500 Barrett apartments being built near where I live in Catford) and lives in a fractured society. If I were to put a label to this dystopian world, I’d say it was a post-epiphanic world.

Scripture presented the original epiphanies. Joyce then introduced to secular epiphanies. Now twitter has reduced the notion of epiphany to a type of pornography. The narrative build up to the moment of epiphany has been stripped away, leaving just its shell, devoid of any real meaning. Self-awareness is bankrupted – many people now frame everyday experience as a potential tweet – seeking a potential moment of fame as they strive to create the most appropriate epiphany for that second in time. Danny’s is a world where this habit has run its course and has robbed the world of meaning, secular or otherwise. Not just in terms of question about our purpose on this planet, but also about our everyday existence – how we get money to buy food. He comes close to experiencing epiphanies – of glancing through a window into some deeper meaning about his life – but they are never fulfilled.

I suppose that was part of my dystopian vision for this story. And it’s quite dark…

Judges’ comments

AL Kennedy says: “The Occupants by Aaron Cox is nicely disturbing piece of Sci-Fi, doing what Sci-Fi does best, using metaphor and altered reality to produce deep resonance.”

Irenosen Okojie says: “The Occupants is gloriously dark. A surprising, tautly written tale full of slow horror. An unnerving, intoxicating dystopian nightmare. Fearlessly holding a lens up to life’s bleaker moments. A compelling read.”

Juliet Mabey says: “Aaron Cox has created a piquant, unsettling, dystopian tale. Here is an immersive grey world of displacement, hunger, and want, with surprising twists and an incongruously resilient, almost cheerful hero who is oddly out of step in this strange setting. A thoughtful, discomforting story.”

The Occupants will be available in the summer of 2017 as part of the anthology of the short-listed stories for the London Short Story Prize 2016.

Leave a comment

January 20, 2015

Breaking the narrative circuit

In today’s blog I am going to briefly discuss the relationship between narrator and character by looking again at Favel Parrett’s Past the Shallows. Taking a structuralist view of fiction, it is possible to identify key narrative levels (author/reader, narrator/narrate, characters) that create narrative circuits. Pulling apart a story into its various narratological components can provide some really useful analysis of how a story hangs together. In particular it can help you identify and understand moments of transgression between narrative levels, whether intended or not, and what effects they might have.

Today, I am going to look at the relationship between the third person (external) narrator and the direct speech of a character. Of course this division is a fabrication. The narrator (arguably, as a proxy of the author) provides the situations and events and the architecture of the world in which a character speaks. However, it is a line that shouldn’t be crossed if the suspension of disbelief is to succeed and therefore the narrative is to be believed as a realist text.

100_2687

If this separation of narrative levels is transgresses, you can inadvertently destroy the illusion of reality and draw attention to the story as artifice. It can lose its sense of plausibility.

Direct speech should seem to be the words uttered by the character. If it isn’t the character speaking, the risk is that it may seem that the character is not embedded inside the text but is rather saying what the narrator wants him or her to say. As such, the character can seem like a reader of the story he or she is meant to be part of with a kind of meta-awareness of the narrative itself.

That’s all well and good if you are interested in Brecht’s A-effect or plan to write meta-fiction that messes about with how a story is framed, but it can otherwise make a realist story seem contrived.

As discussed in my last blog, Favel Parrett uses close third person narration in Past the Shallows to great effect, splitting the narrator’s gaze between two key characters, Harry and Miles. Although this form of narration sees the world pretty much through the eyes of one character (or in the case of Parrett’s book, one character at a time), when it comes to direct speech it is still important that the division between the narrator and the characters’ voices remains clear. Direct speech is the purest expression of a character’s voice, thoughts, attitudes, point of view etc.

In the opening scene of the book, Harry is at the beach with his two older brothers Miles and Joe. While the others are out surfing, Harry forages and has an epiphany that I find quite jarring because it seemed like an observation of a much older character and seems heavily laden with an ideological point of view from outside the story.

Harry picked up an abalone shell, the edges loose and dusty in his hands. And every cell in his body stopped. Felt it. This place. Felt the people who had been here before, breathing and standing alive where he stood. People who were long dead now. Long gone. And Harry understood, right down in his guts, that time ran on forever and that one day he would die.[1]

A few moments later he tells Joe: “This place is old.”[2]

On the one hand, this could be read as a boy feeling a sense of his own mortality. Death is present in his world. We learn that his mother has died, for example. However, there is more to this revelation than that. He seems to feel as though he is an interloper, made other by the history of landscape. It seems to me unlikely that picking up a shell would trigger such an observation in a boy of his age (I assume he is younger than ten, possibly as young as seven).

He seems to perceive something bigger in a kind of spiritual sense of place that is more akin to indigenous mythology than the musing of a young boy on a beach. Although not overt, there does seem to be a nod here towards the Aboriginal Dreamtime, a place beyond time and space accessed during dreaming and altered states of consciousness.[3] When reading this scene I wondered if Parrett was in some sense working within a particularly Australian canonical tradition which obliges writers to create a sense of place that confirms something about the Australian identity and how a sense of Australianess is conveyed in literary and artistic works. This in turn confirms the book as “Australian” satisfying a desire for cultural confirmation that seems to prevail among local publishers and readers and seeks to actively resist outside influences.

Looking at this scene in the context of events to come, I am also concerned that he seems to foreshadowing his own death, which makes the epiphany seem especially contrived and offers that sense I mentioned earlier about a character being a reader of the story itself. Again, it seems to show overt intervention rather than something earned or borne out of the story organically.

Is this short scene an example of authorial intervention? Is this an example of indigenous Australian culture being appropriated by the mainstream? There were enough of these qualities on the page to make me step back and wonder about these things. Rather than coming organically from the story, the sense of place and its inherent cultural identity seem somewhat forced upon Harry. But I am aware that my reading is just that, my reading. Others may beg to differ. I am an interloper here too, reading the book through my own lens.

I guess it hits home to me that when writing, maintaining a sense of authenticity about a character’s perspective, no matter how artificial, can be very challenging and there are lots of paper-thin walls that you can inadvertently pass through.

[1] Favel Parrett, past the shallows, published by John Murray, 2011, pg. 4

[2] Ibid., pg.5

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamtime

Leave a comment

November 11, 2014

Past the Shallows – when seeing through two eyes can be better than one

When it comes to writing fiction, few choices are as important than the choice of point of view. Who is telling the story? If they are a character in the story, what is their role and how to do they perceive events? If the third person is adopted, what is the narrator’s attitude to the story or it’s characters? Does the narrator see over the shoulder of one character (i.e. close third person) or is the narrator an omniscient god-like figure?

The answers to these questions will help inform the sort of voice that is adopted. It will influence the tone of the narration, how narrow or expansive the narrator’s worldview will be and therefore how much the reader sees. It can have an impact on issues of a narrator’s reliability and whether dramatic irony might be used.

From my experience, it’s not an easy decision. Getting point of view wrong can really kill the writing. But when you get it right, the narrative possibilities can really open up before you.

Favel Perrett uses point of view to great effect in her novel Past the Shallows and that’s the topic of today’s blog. She adopts a “close third person” style. This form of point of view involves looking over the shoulder of a character and is thus more limited in vision than an omniscient style of narration. Close third person creates intimacy. Flaubert, the master stylist, famously used this style to great effect in Madame Bovary.

What is interesting about Parrett’s use of the close third person is that she employs it with two characters rather than one and this point of view shifts between chapters.

Before going on, a rough outline of the book may be necessary for those of you who haven’t read it. Spoiler alert: I’m going to talk about the end of the novel, so you may not want to read this blog if you plan to read the book.

Past the Shallows is a harrowing story of two boys, Harry and Miles, who live with a violent father, an abalone fisherman in southern Tasmania. Harry is the younger of the two and I figure he is around eight years old. Miles is presumably a teenager. The story chart’s the boys’ quest for survival and their journey to find out more about the suspicious death of their mother, who died in a car accident. Questions remain about whether Harry is in fact the child of their mother’s lover, which adds to the sense of risk for him in the household: the father figure treats him more disdainfully than he treats Miles. Their harsh domestic existence is matched by the precariousness of life on the sea.

The close third person point of view shifts between Harry and Miles (they have an elder brother, Joe, who has a more minor role than the other two). This works really well to control the flow of information and to show differences in how they understand and negotiate with similar experiences. The contrasting lenses also convey tension; for example, when Harry defies Miles’s wishes and disappears to find solace at the home of George, an ambiguous character who lives an unobtrusive life alone in the bush. The dual points of view also allow Parrett to carefully control time and the unveiling of information: for example, she uses ellipses to great effect, although the story can seem too elliptical at times, at the expense of some character development. Many events occur off screen, including the potential death (or otherwise) of Dad in the climatic fishing accident in which Harry dies. Interestingly, we are left hanging about Dad’s fate.

However, the device is most powerful when Harry dies at the end. By implication, one of the points of view is killed off. As a reader, I felt the loss of a narrative position gave his death greater immediacy. I no longer had access to his point of view.

Parrett could have achieved something similar by using two first person points of view. This might have been quite effective. Given how young the boys are in the story, Parrett could have exploited dramatic irony, allowing the reader to understand more than the characters. However, the Parrett’s evocative, dreamlike narrative voice would have been lost if she’d chosen to write in first person and field of vision of each character more limited (a third person, even a close one, allows a certain amount of peripheral vision). Overall, I believe Parrett’s use of dual close third person points of view works.

There is more to be said about how point of view works in Past the Shallows, which I will leave until my next blog. That discussion will look at point of view in terms the particular way a character sees the world. I will look at a section early in the book where I feel the narrator seems to impose a certain perspective on Harry, making his way of seeing appear somewhat contrived rather than an observation he might make himself. It will hopefully be an interesting discussion. Thanks for reading.

Leave a comment

October 2, 2014

What Barthelme told me about time…

I’ve become a little obsessed by narrative time lately and have revisited a few writers to work out its function and ways it can be manipulated.

I guess the default understanding of story time, as taught through children’s stories, is that events happen chronologically. This happened and then this happened and then this happened then we got to here and this happened, etc. – laid out with an overtly obvious causal structure. There might be variations in pace, long sections of description (of say a painting or a room) where not much seems to happen and the time on the page (or fabula time as narratologists tend to call it) seems to stretch out far longer than the story time that the imaginary characters might experience. Then on the flipside: a phrase like “five years later” might indicate a massive jump in time, an ellipsis, or “five years later, she had learned to play the piano and was preparing for a concert at the Royal Albert Hall” might be considered a summary where time on the page moves much faster than experienced by our piano player.

I recommend Mieke Bal’s discussion of time in her book Narratology (I believe this book can offer a great deal to writers and artists searching for different ways of understanding their craft). At one point she talks about how time appears slow in Madame Bovary to express Emma Bovary’s boredom. Even when describing her affairs, scenes have a slow pace, seemingly to underscore her dissatisfaction and entrapment. This is at the expense of pivotal scenes (which in film language are called plot points), which are summarized and thus given less fabula time.

I find that following a strict chronology without a clear purpose can be a little boring for readers. They don’t get to do much of the work, rooting around in the elisions for hidden depths and meanings. Being too faithful to time can also result in a lot of excess baggage that readers may feel compelled to skim over. And I know that in my writing I tend to struggle when it comes to deciding which events only require a brief sentence and those that warrant a couple of pages.

When thinking about time, I tend to go back to short stories for inspiration. This is a form where economy and time are acutely important and it has been a great place for experimentation over the years.

So this morning I picked up Donald Barthelme’s anthology 40 Stories. As can be expected from Barthelme, I was immediately dazzled by all that he brings to the page. He takes readers on quite a journey, one that is both familiar and surreal. In only a few pages, characters cover vast physical, emotion and philosophical territory.

I could pick out many stories from the collection to discuss time, but one that strikes me most is his story ‘On the Deck.’ It runs to just less than three pages.

For the first page and a half Barthelme describes an eclectic mix of characters on the deck of a boat: a lion, a Christian motorcycle gang, a man in a car named Mitch who leaves the motor running, a man with a nosebleed, a steel basin under his chin, a tree between his legs, the captain, a young woman, a dog named Scotty, the boat owner and her boyfriend and a man with a bucket full of liver for the lion. These characters are introduced as though the writer is scanning a picture and has an odd circularity, starting with the lion and ending with the man looking after his food. Apart from the swaying of the boat, there is minimal movement; conversation is brief and rich in non sequiturs. It’s a claustrophobic scene of great tension and there seems an interesting symbolism in the way all the other characters appear to be between the lion and its food, even if this is only a trick of the narrator’s eye. Is it a metaphor for urban life? Primacy versus cosmopolitanism? Who knows? In a classic surrealist twist, a postman arrives and they all get mail: “Everyone likes mail, except those who are afraid of it.”

Then time speeds up dramatically and the seasons pass in two lines:

“Winter on deck. All of the above covered with snow. Christmas music.

Then, spring. A weak sun, then a stronger sun.”

On one level, you could say that like in Madame Bovary, this leap in time shows characters in stasis, trapped by circumstance. On another, it seems like a great trick on the reader to show just how artificial narrative time really is.

Leave a comment

September 9, 2014

Zoo Station – some lessons in historical fiction

by Aaron Cox

I’ve been reading David Downing’s Zoo Station. On the book’s cover, C J Sansom describes it as “an extraordinary evocation of Nazi Germany on the eve of war…” He’s right. Downing has done a tremendous amount of research to create a vivid and dare I say it realistic picture of Berlin in the months leading up to the Second World War.

For me, it offers a few lessons on how to sew historical fact into fiction, an important aspect of any “naturalist” fiction, which assimilates facts and details about the world to create the artifice of being cut from reality.

I am currently working on a novel set during the financial crisis and often have to wrestle with the research. Facts can sometimes appear so extraordinary as to crowd out the story that I am trying to tell. And I get frustrated. The story becomes a retelling of history rather than characters set in history. The narrative invariably becomes clunky, overburdened by detail and opinions from outside the novel. Falling in love with research can turn the whole project into an essay, telling takes over from showing, characters become pawns.

Reading Zoo Station has reminded me about a few things to do with my project. History (I’d include the present and the imagined future) needs to be used with some purpose to carry the story along and to be framed by events and match the point of view of the character (in the sense the literary sense of who is seeing and his/her bent on what is being seen).

In Zoo Station (and I am aware I could use numerous historical novels, Birdsong, Winter in Madrid), historical information becomes something of a character itself within which human characters interact. It plays a supporting role. Getting it right requires finesse and a clear head about the book you are trying to write.

What got me thinking about all of this was a small event in the middle of the book when Russell, the protagonist, buys the Daily Mail. It is worth getting to know a little more about Russell to understand why this is significant. Russell is an English journalist who lives in Berlin. After agreeing to write a series of propaganda articles for a Russian magazine, he finds himself caught in maze of deceit between the Russians, Germans and Americans. His profession as a journalist is important as it gives him a certain lens for viewing details and events in the lead up to war. It also means he read’s the Daily Mail in a particular way. It therefore makes sense when he contrasts the reportage of the German and English press.

He is also a father of Paul, who is German born and a member of the Hitler Youth, a group Russell has deep suspicions about but is forced to tolerate because of his relationship with his son. In addition to his career as a journalist, Russell teaches English to two Jewish teenage girls whose parents hope to send to England. He is therefore a complex and rich character forced to negotiate competing sympathies and we see events from his perspective.

So when his picks up a copy of the Daily Mail (the fact it is available in Berlin at this time is interesting in itself) he reads it not for the headlines, but for what might be interesting to the people in his life.

“This [the Daily Mail] had an article on young English girls collecting stamps, which he knew would interest Ruth and Marthe, and a big piece on the recent loss of the Empire Flying Boat Cavalier, complete with map and diagram, which Paul would love. He saved the best, however, for the very end of the girls’ lesson – a report of a tongue-twister competition on the BBC. Trying to say ‘should such a shapeless sash such shabby stiches show’ soon had Ruth giggling so hard she really was in stitches, and Marthe fared little better with ‘the flesh of freshly fired flying fish.’”*

Rather than focusing on war news, he pulls out normal details, which are poignantly juxtaposed against the horrors to come. It is deftly done. I only wish I could do it so well in my own writing.

Facts or fictions?

Of course, I don’t have that copy of the Daily Mail to validate whether these details are actually correct. And I do wonder how much poetic license Downing took when incorporating these details. I guess doubts about historical accuracy are always going to be part and parcel with a genre called historical fiction, despite the reputation of the author as a specialist on his subject. While the detail may seem plausible, readers can never be absolutely certain of their accuracy. In fact, some argue that the artificial devices for creating fiction (being selective with information, embellishing detail to fit the story, and being limited by the particular point of view of characters within the story) combine to play down its own narrative limitations. The fiction is made to seem too real.

This has been a preoccupation of many 20th century writers – fabulists who have trod the shaky grounds where fact meets fiction. Metaphorical writers who dwell on the subject of how views and perceptions are manufactured through the writing and re-writing of history. Laurent Binet’s HHhH comes to mind. While telling the story of Reinhard Heydrich, he tells the story of how difficult it is to write historical fact without using fiction. Milan Kundera’s books are other examples. Kundera doesn’t mind incorporating essay into his novels and is upfront about the fact his characters are fabricated. Despite this they never seem derivative or pawn-like. Robert Coover’s tome Public Burning fuses real conversations, historical documents, archetypes and caricatures to present the events leading up to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1952 in a way that screams out that this story is so horrifically fantastical, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Fact and fiction are indivisible. The styles of these writers don’t match my own. But each stylist is brilliant and worthy of a blog at another time.

*Page 122

Leave a comment

Category: On writing