Remembering a Story
A week ago I finished a short story, the first fiction I'd written since my father died late last December. The story is called "The Last Night at Nan's Han-N-Egger". Oddly, for me at least, there are no gay men in the story (so far as we know) and there is no sex. There is a bit of violence and an off-stage possible murder. Evidently this is my first story in a crime genre. In large measure the story came out as I had hoped it would, and it seems to elicit the type of response from its readers that I had planned.
In fact the story seemed to end up having a rather vivid presence for me and I am still seeing bits of scenes from it. Creating a vivid, uninterrupted dream in the mind of the reader is my primary responsibility as the author, at least according to my favorite fiction theorist John Gardner (see his The Art of Fiction); we'll talk more about that someday. The stories I think my best are the ones that have for me a vivid presence, usually because I know a great deal about the characters, but I don't always know whether that effect is shared with my readers. If it's vivid for me is it vivid for them? Often, I suspect, but not always perhaps.
Creating the vivid dream takes time and effort, and doing it with enough detail and vividness feels to me a lot like remembering the events of the story; thinking up the story and working out its details feels like trying to remember every detail about what happened even though, of course, none of it's actually happened. So far as I can tell this remembering work goes on prior to any of the actual writing, by which I mean that it precedes the writing down of words one after the other that are meant to convey to readers the story that I have remembered.
If all goes well I am able to choose just the right words with exactly the right economy to convey the dream into the memory of my readers as vividly as I remember it. Of the infinite things one can write, how I or any other author goes about choosing just the few words to do the work (in essence, a vanishingly small sampling of possible words and sentences) of conveying enough pertinent detail about the dream vividly to the reader is pretty much a mystery to me and I'm sure it presumes something about my audience. How one can overload that operation with other short-story features like themes and symbols only deepens the mystery.
My best stories–and the ones I have read, too–are populated with characters that have really "come alive". Everyone has heard numerous authors explain how it is that characters tend to take on a life of their own in stories and do whatever they damn well feel like whether it is contrary to the author's plans or not. If I needed a theory I'd suspect that characters feel so real because the story, if it reaches the vivid target, becomes like a memory and then the characters necessarily seem very real because in our memory they are indistinguishable from the memories we maintain of real people.
I'd better stop before this gets any spookier. By the way, since "The Last Night at Nan's Ham-N-Egger" was written for a more general audience than my usual, I'd like to share it with my blog friends. If you would like to read it, leave a comment (with email address, please!) and I'll send a copy in email.
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on Sunday, 10 August 2008 at 16.04
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I'm something of an amateur biblical scholar. I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that some of your comments on turning memory into words struck me as an admirable and succinct description of the Gospels on the New Testament. Treading fairly lightly over your word "dream," or substituting for it "story," this paragraph seems entirely apt to the Gospel writers:
"If all goes well I am able to choose just the right words with exactly the right economy to convey the dream into the memory of my readers as vividly as I remember it. Of the infinite things one can write, how I or any other author goes about choosing just the few words to do the work (in essence, a vanishingly small sampling of possible words and sentence[s]) of conveying enough pertinent detail about the dream vividly to the reader is pretty much a mystery to me and I'm sure it presumes something about my audience. How one can overload that operation with other short-story features like themes and symbols only deepens the mystery."
What triggered the association is the similarity of what you say about "choosing the few words to do the work (in essence, a vanishingly small sampling of possible words and sentence[s])" and John's "if every one of [the things Jesus did] were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written."
Jesus — or any one of us, whether "real" or "fictional." Even what we "remember" of our own lives is highly selective, the account shaped and interpreted until it's at least as much fiction as it is "fact". There are as many "true" stories of our lives as there are volumes in Borges' library of all possible books.
Now I wouldn't for the world be taken to mean that the Gospels are works of fiction. But in their intense selectivity, their shaping the story to communicate a message, their awareness of their audience, and their aim to convince their readers of the verisimilitude of an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative, they have much more in common with the creative work of the novelist, it seems to me, than with the statistical complier and reporter of "the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts" that we think non-fiction writing to be.
And I think what you say in a later paragraph is as true of the gospel writers, who were putting words something that had been handed down to them by memory and reflection across two or three generations, as it is of the fiction writer: "If I needed a theory I'd suspect that characters feel so real because the story, if it reaches the vivid target, become[s] like a memory and then the characters necessarily seem very real because in our memory they are indistinguishable from the memories we maintain of real people."
on Monday, 11 August 2008 at 02.05
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Interesting observations on the creative process. I would like to read your story, although I might not be able to right away. You have my e-mail address.
on Friday, 15 August 2008 at 20.28
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Bill, I'm fascinated by what you say, and it makes me think of all sorts of things–too many to fit in this little box on the screen. Fiction and nonfiction alike certainly both tell stories, regardless of our different expectations, and they seem to operate in very similar manners, particularly if they're interesting! All this without commenting, of course, on the fictioness or nonfictioness of the Gospels, which distinction hardly makes any difference at this remove.
I'm beginning to think that scientists can improve their [nonfiction] writing by working at fiction some.
Thanks for the corrections, too, which I think I'll make in the main text.
on Friday, 15 August 2008 at 20.32
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One more thought. I'm also interested in these thought coming into your mind from reading what I was writing; it's another interesting reminder of the extent to which different readers will always see different meanings and intentions and resonances behind my words. I like that, although one could despair of ever getting across some exact meaning, but that's rarely my goal in writing fiction.