Jun 102013
 

 

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Steven Schwartz writes to his obsessions.  Currently, he’s obsessed by success, failure, and redemption, fixations which contextualize the main conflicts of his short stories and novels.  In the title story of his first collection, To Leningrad in Winter, Schwartz tells the story of manwho attempts to distance himself from his Jewish heritage even when faced with acts of anti-Semitism that compel him to join a cause.  Lives of the Fathers, his second collection, follows relationships between family members as they attempt to grow up and distance themselves from their parentage.  Schwartz’s title story of this collection is told from the perspective of a son who simply wants to help his father move after his mother’s death.  But when his father ropes him into helping him pursue Victoria, his father’s ailing, long-lost love, the narrator realizes he may be unable to avoid repeating his father’s mistakes.  Schwartz’s first novel Therapy is told from the perspectives of three interconnected characters, each working through family dilemmas, personal trauma, and therapy to find meaning and love in their lives.  In his second novel, A Good Doctor’s Son, Schwartz tells the story of a teenager who grows up in a racially intolerant small town in Pennsylvania.  After accidentally killing the child of a black family while drag racing, the main character refocuses his life by attempting to deal with the moral repercussions of his actions.  Schwartz’s most recent collection, Little Raw Souls, features stories of characters faced with difficult situations that force them to question their complacency with their lives, such as a man who can’t seem to let go of the adolescent crush he’d had when his transgender cousin was a girl; a rancher easily fooled by a couple vagrants who camp on his property; a woman at an airport who contemplates spending the night with a stranger rather than telling her husband her wallet was stolen.

Following the release of Little Raw Souls and his recent reading at an independent bookstore in Denver, CO, I spoke with Schwartz on how he maintains flexibility in his writer’s voice, pursues his obsessions, and wrestles his material into character-driven narratives.

—Jacqueline Kharouf

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CraftBookJacqueline Kharouf: You wrote a very interesting essay about voice called “Finding a Voice in America,” which was published in the AWP Chronicle (Oct.-Nov. 1991) and later published in the craft anthology Bringing the Devil to His Knees.  In the essay, you briefly discuss the discovery (or acceptance) of your “material” and that once you finally stopped avoiding it, you came into your voice: “[…] the writer’s voice emerges at the place where her unique experience meets the larger culture.”  I think of the writer’s voice as an ever-evolving aspect of being a writer (or that as we have new experiences, we meet that “larger culture” in ever-different and unexpected ways) and I wonder how you’ve noted (or embraced) that evolution in your own career.

Steven Schwartz: I think it’s important to say that writers, especially younger writers, although this can happen at any stage, spend a lot of time running away from their material.  And why do they do this?  Well, for any number of reasons.  They’re afraid of being boring, that is, what happened to them couldn’t possibly be of any interest to anyone else simply because it did happen to them.  They’re worried about dredging up material that might hurt those close to them—even when it’s disguised as fiction or only inspired by real events.  But you can’t run away from your material because you don’t choose it, it chooses you.  Even writers who claim not to be autobiographical at all—as if this is something to be ashamed about, suggesting they have no imagination—you’re still unconsciously going to run into your own obsessions if you write long enough.

Schwartz

For me, I had this idea that plot alone would make me an interesting writer, until I came to understand that I was only using plot to avoid revealing anything about myself that might stray into dangerous emotional territory and risk being sentimental.  But it quickly became obvious—and I remember the story in particular, “Monkey Business” in my first collection To Leningrad in Winter—that when I finally wrote about the pain of a lover having an affair, (and allowed the real life event to take imaginative flight) and saw the impact it had on readers, I understood voice came out of the depths of character.

That intersection you mention about voice emerging at the place where your unique experience meets the larger culture is always variable.  Which is another way to say that your voice does change over time depending on everything from your new experiences to what you’re reading to what you choose to write about.  The idea of “finding your voice”—that chestnut of writerly advice—makes you think once you have it, that’s it.  Good.  I’ve got mine, hope you get yours.  But actually you have to lose your voice periodically to keep it alive.  Otherwise it becomes stale because you’re clinging to what worked before.

One caveat here: I remember speaking with the writer Charles D’Ambrosio after he gave a reading of his wonderful story “Screenwriter” and asking him about its genesis.  He told me something very interesting.  He said, in fact, the story was all voice at one point, and he had to proceed in the opposite direction, find what undergirded the voice, a structure for that voice that had some sort of narrative arc.  So you have to be aware that your work can actually depend too much on voice and neglect all the other fundamentals of craft.

JK: One of the most intriguing and moving components of your prose is your dialogue, which is always a showcase of the differences that put your characters at odds with each other and an opportunity for those differences—and degrees of separation—to reveal what the characters most want.  I wonder if you could discuss how you work on dialogue and if you could explain a bit of your process for fusing motivation with desire in terms of the particular context you want to create for the story.  Do you begin a story with a particular context already in mind?  Or does the character (and his/her particular situation/conflict) shape the story context?

SS: As a child I was always listening, always the witness to a lot of other more flamboyant family members. I think many writers, who tend to be watchers or witnesses in their families, silently take on the voices around them for lack of having any voice themselves. They become mimics.  They study their subjects.  They teach themselves to imitate others in order to get attention.  But with the polyglot of voices you’ve collected, you begin to populate an inner world, and you do that by a sort of talking to yourself.  You then come to appreciate how sound can be associated with image and before long you’re creating stories that are more interesting than what’s going on around you.  Soon you discover that lived life isn’t enough for you, that it needs to be heightened, in particular by language.  That’s how you learn to speak.

Dialogue as everyone knows can’t just be about delivering information.  It has to be about creating character.  So while other people may be listening for information, all that watching and listening that you’ve done has primed you to hear resonance.  You hear all the shadings of meaning, the tones and intentionality, the emotional landscape behind the words.  Without realizing it, in the silence of your listening, you’ve been teaching yourself about subtext.

Schwartz

When I’m working on a story, I usually have some idea of when a scene has to occur and how vital it is to bring in the actual voices of the characters.  In one of the more dialogue-heavy stories in Little Raw Souls, “Stranger,” I needed to allow these two strangers who meet in an airport and contemplate having an affair to speak for themselves, as if only direct testimony from them could explain their actions.  So you might say that dialogue comes into play when it’s most urgent for characters to speak and no other words than theirs will do.  Dialogue has to feel special in a story.  What I mean by that is that when you come across it, you have to be a little thrilled to hear directly from a character, and if you’re not, then it’s either bad dialogue or it’s being overused.  Dialogue has to have force behind it—a pressure to speak.

JK: I really enjoyed your reading and I especially admired how you handled the variety of questions that you received from the audience.  The first question, in particular, was pretty interesting because someone asked about the risky subject matter of the story you read (the story includes a transgender character).  The audience member didn’t say whether he liked the story or not, but if you had hesitations about sharing it.  Do you think—in this current state of the culture, which tends toward shock value and grabbing the consumer’s attention with as little effort from the consumer as possible—an author should worry about what readers will think of their work?

SS: Well, the short answer is no, of course not.  But let’s be honest.  What writer doesn’t—especially in this age of populace commentary—peek at those sometimes nasty comments on Amazon or Goodreads.  In the past, writers were more insulated from that opining.  You published a book.  Someone maybe sent a letter to you.  Or to your publisher.  But it was all relatively private.  Not anymore.  And those comments stay.

All that said, it still shouldn’t matter one bit.  If you want to take risks as a writer, and you’d better, if they’re honest risks, then you have to find a way to block those outside voices that are more prevalent today than ever before and would like to tell you everything from how you should write (or not) to tips about your personal hygiene.

JK: What are your obsessions that you write towards in your work?  Do you actively cultivate these obsessions in other aspects of your life (aside from writing) or, in writing about your obsessions, do you work through those obsessions as a way of learning and letting them go?

SS: You have to make friends with your obsessions.  But the catch is you don’t know your obsessions until you write enough to discover them.  What you think you’re obsessed with may in fact not turn out to be the matter at all.  I know for a fact that I’m obsessed with success, failure, and redemption, but how those forces will play out I never know, and in fact, don’t want to know.

You can’t rid yourself of your obsessions but you don’t have to assume you’ll always be trapped into writing about them either.  If you say, I’m not going to repeat myself in this book by writing about X or Y, you’ll undoubtedly do just that.  On the other hand, if you don’t fear that you’ll repeat your obsessions, you’ll find that they evolve into fascinating elaborations on a theme.  Thomas Wolf couldn’t seem to stop writing about going home, Fitzgerald about wealth, Flannery O’Connor about mother figures, Dostoyevsky about suffering, judgment, goodness, violence and a whole bunch of other obsessions bursting at the seams of his books.  In short, you have to embrace your obsessions with a faith that they’re both inexhaustible and capable of transmutation.

Schwartz

JK:I’m curious about the hierarchy of characters in your first novel, Therapy.  Each character has such depth and dimension that, as I was reading, I often thought that they could each carry on in their own separate narratives.  The novel’s close third-person point of view mostly centers on Cap, but also dips into the perspectives of Wallis (Cap’s wife), Julian (one of Cap’s therapy clients), Celia (Julian’s classmate), and Anna (Julian’s reclusive mother).  I wonder if you could talk about what you hoped these other points of view would reveal about the story.  I think there’s a certain danger in having too many points of view—a need to collect more information than the reader needs to feel invested in the story—and a risk in creating red-herrings (events or people who turn up, seem important, and then don’t necessarily influence lasting change on the main characters or their situations).  However, each of your characters, with their various issues and desires, propel the plot forward and you return to and revisit other characters (and simultaneously drop others) in a kind of juggling act that raises the stakes of the story the longer you keep this number of characters in play.  Ultimately, the novel (and the point of view) culminates at the point in which Cap recognizes what I think is at the heart of all desires: “It was what he’d always wanted to know too.  The riddle of The Thing: Am I loved?” (331).

SS:  Among the different points of view in Therapy, I have, Julian, a young man in college who is epileptic, Cap, a psychologist, and Wallis, Cap’s wife.  At one time I was trying to write three individual books about each of these characters, toiling away over a period of a decade.  Then I realized they could all be united in one story by the device of therapy and benefit from working off of each other.

It’s always interesting trying to decide exactly who will be a primary character and who a secondary one.  I just wrote a paper for a panel about this topic for the AWP conference, and one of the conclusions I came to is that secondary characters have to be distinct in their own right.  They can resemble types but at the same time they have to freshen that type.  Secondary doesn’t mean second rate.  But they are basically there to illuminate the struggles of the major characters, as Celia does for Julian when she meets and falls in love with him.  So secondary characters can often fulfill their role, contradict it, or exceed it, and you have to be alert to the possibility of discovering your secondary characters are outgrowing their intended potential.

Schwartz

This is far often more true for a novel than a short story, a short story being an exclusive operation that weeds out material and a novel being an enterprise that wants to suck in everything around it including the idle conversation you just had with your neighbor about cantaloupe at the market (“I know I can work that in!”).  So one of the characters in Therapy, Maureen, with her highly charged sexual behavior, started out more as a minor character but blossomed into a major one as she got more involved with Julian and I had to understand her motivation.  And once you start mucking around with a character’s actions, and those actions are perhaps damaging to others as in the case of Maureen, you almost have an obligation to investigate the complexity of why a character behaves as she does, and that in itself indicates you’re on to creating a primary character. You have to explore motivation in a way that even if an act appears random the possibilities of what caused that act are myriad and compelling, otherwise you’re light on character.  In Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Bartleby literally winds up doing nothing, fading away as a human being, but it’s the why of his nothingness that makes this story a fascinating study of motivation with its possible social, economic, psychological, spiritual, philosophical explanations for behavior that can’t be reduced to one cause.

And this is where point of view often comes in, regardless of whether we’re talking about a primary or secondary character.  I knew for most of the principal characters I could go into their heads, but with Maureen, I had to stay out of it, despite her being a major character.  I simply could not do justice to—and in fact would be subtracting from—the nature of her behavior if I tried to explain her from the inside out.  It was an intuitive decision to stay out of her head, as many decisions about point of view are, knowing that she would have more raw power as a character seen from the outside than from the inside.  My friend, Robert Boswell, talks about the half-known world of characters, that “you can measure how successfully you’ve revealed a character by the extent to which his acts, words, history, and thoughts fail to explain him,” and I think that’s true of all characters: you don’t want to over-solve.  If you do, their mystery disappears.  You have to take the measure of how fully you’re going to expose each character, or to use your phrase, complete or make incomplete their lives.

To be clear, this has nothing to do with not developing a character to the fullest—all characters need to have their trajectories followed through on—but with psychological constructs of a character, if you still believe in that sort of thing as a writer of mostly realistic stories, as I am.  And since I’ve brought up the subject of realism versus other modes, I should say that I think it’s often an artificial or perhaps useless distinction.  A Jonathan Franzen versus an Aimee Bender.  Borges versus Roth (who’s taken a few fantasy turns in his fiction himself).  In Therapy, I have an absolutely bizarre sequence of events that takes place in the basement of a psychiatrist’s office.  People always ask me about that scene, and I really can’t give any more justification for it other than it fits and that’s where the story took me.  Likewise in Little Raw Souls, in “Absolute Zero,” there’s no explaining the Seer.  But nothing could persuade me to take these moments out just to make the stories “consistent.”  Insisting on categorization can only inhibit the work and the possibility of a truly original moment happening.  I published an essay in The Writer’s Chronicle called “In Defense of Contrivance,” and one of my arguments I make is that it’s not what happens but what happens afterward that makes an event believable or not.  Create the right context and follow up and there are no limits on how a so-called magical moment might pop up and become integral and credible to an otherwise erstwhile realistic work.

Schwartz

JK: In your new story collection Little Raw Souls, you create situations for your characters and then introduce conflict that threatens to disrupt or end these situations.  For example, in “Bless Everybody,” the narrator Charlie is retired, divorced, and living off the land he’d always wanted to own, but then two hippies arrive and want to stay for a time.  In “Absolute Zero,” Connor’s dying mother won’t sign the papers allowing him to enlist for the Marines, but then he spends time with a classmate who is also dying.  In “Seeing Miles,” David reconnects with his second cousin who—over the years—has changed her gender.  Did you begin your stories with these situations in mind first?  Or did you think of the conflict first before crafting a situation that contextualizes the resolution of that conflict?

SS: I really don’t think one knows the conflict in advance of writing stories.  In “Bless Everybody,” Charlie has a run in with some young hippies who take a liking to his land but turn out to be different people than they appear at first.  That story came out of an experience of a couple who did call us out of the blue and ask to stay on some land we owned.  They turned out to be deceitful and though it’s not necessary to go into exactly how, I can say, what intrigued me about the situation for years before I could write about it was how easily I was hoodwinked.  In other words, I couldn’t get over my own susceptibility.  In writing the story I had to find a way to investigate that initial miscalculation of mine, given I consider myself a good reader of people, which broadened into a conflict about a man confronting the idea of what it means to be a good person and whether he’s failed at that over the years or been too rigid in his pursuit of that goal.

So the original conflict that might initially intrigue me and be based on my own experience has to evolve into something more universal in the course of writing a story, otherwise it just stays limited—a situation, not a story.  Likewise for “Seeing Miles.” I was always fascinated by how I had my first crush on my lovely cousin at thirteen, who turned out in her thirties to have a sex change, and what that meant about me.  The real conflict, however, involved wrestling with a story about the nature of desire.  Did I at any point sit there and say to myself, I’m writing a story about the nature of desire?  Absolutely not.  I probably would have hit myself over the head with hammer first and said get back to work, Steven!  Wake up and write a story, not an idea.

—Steven Schwartz & Jacqueline Kharouf

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Steven Schwartz grew up outside Chester, Pennsylvania, and has lived in Colorado for the past twenty-eight years.  He is the author of two story collections, To Leningrad in Winter (University of Missouri) and Lives of the Fathers (University of Illinois), and two novels, Therapy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and A Good Doctor’s Son (William Morrow).  His fiction has received the Nelson Algren Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, the Cohen Award, the Colorado Book Award for the Novel, two O. Henry Prize Story Awards, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Bread Loaf.  His essays have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Crazyhorse, Image, and have been awarded the Cleanth Brooks Prize in Nonfiction from The Southern Review.  He teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College and the MFA program at Colorado State University, where he also serves as fiction editor for the Colorado Review.  Married to the writer Emily Hammond, they have two grown children.  His new collection of stories, Little Raw Souls, was published by Autumn House Press in January 2013.

 Jacqueline KharoufJacqueline Kharouf is a graduate of the MFA in Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.  A native of Rapid City, SD, Jacqueline currently lives in Denver.  Her work has appeared in Numéro CinqOtis Nebula and H.O.W. Journal, where she won third place in a fiction contest judged by Mary Gaitskill.  She had work forthcoming in NANO Fiction. Jacqueline blogs at: jacquelinekharouf.wordpress.com and tweets  @writejacqueline.

Oct 212010
 

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I just did Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s University of Toronto online class on Elle over three days this week. Since I hate to let words disappear into the ether, I am posting a digest of my answers to class questions here. I have deleted the actual questions since it would be too much work to get permissions from all the students (it was an intelligent, perceptive and eloquent group). Most of the questions are implicit in the answers.

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On researching Elle and historical novels in general: This is a vast question and speaks to some extent to an author’s intention. I don’t set out to create costume melodramas or documentary histories which might require huge amounts of research. I don’t try to recreate contemporary dialogue (always a failed project). I tend to research looking for precise kinds of facts. What did people think about? What were their motives? How did they act? Always assuming that people distantly removed in time from us are alien in systematic and peculiar ways but also in an evolutionary line and I look for crucial details that will dramatize and ironize that difference. I do a kind of anthropology, if you will. And I look for small, precise facts that will convince the reader I know everything there is to know.

Practically speaking, I read general books about a period. And then focus and refocus the research until I get to the stage of tracking through the bibliographies of scholarly papers looking for obscure essays on small details of custom or behaviour.

The best books I read, of course, are listed in the author’s note in the novel itself.
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On my editor’s contribution: The editor was quite restrained in her remarks. They mostly dealt with copy editing issues. And, no, I don’t recall any issues with historical accuracy. I had already published another historical novel, The Life and Times of Captain N, in which I used deliberate anachronism for structural effect. I don’t think anyone was confused.

On the other hand, I cut another 5,000 words out of the ms. after it came back to me. I always cut things at the last minute, the more the better.
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On Gordon Lish and learning to cut: Thanks for your kind words about the birth scene. It was a deep pleasure to write. The thing to remember is that in prose though the words are written and read serially the effect can be simultaneous. So the passage works by the serial juxtaposition of images of deformity and death and images of maternal love.

The question about editing is interesting. Thanks for pushing me a little more. My best lessons in cutting came from Gordon Lish who was my editor for The Life and Times of Captain N at Knopf. He also took a story of mine for The Quarterly and I interviewed him once when I had a radio show at the Public Radio station in Albany.

He did very little hands on editing with the novel. He just sent it back with a note that said cut about 5,000 words of history, background and explanation. I did that and sent it back to him. Then he sent it back to me again and said cut another 5,000 words of history, background and explanation. He also said not to forget the commas around non-restrictive clauses beginning with “which.”

Every cut I made was like melting fat off a bone. The drama became quicker and clearer. As soon as the words were deleted, I forgot them. I have never regretted a cut scene or explanation. Later, when I interviewed him (I should get out the tape and listen to it again), we talked about his idea of “mystery,” how the white space on the page should somehow float the words in mystery. If you write too much, the mystery dissipates. Mystery here isn’t the same as being mysterious or obscure; it has an almost metaphysical tinge. When he explained it, I almost understood it.

Lesson learned though. At Vermont College, I am known as “the shredder” for my tendency to draw lines through page after page of student work. Boring and dull lines dilute energy. You want only the lines that burn left on the page. So much explanation, commentary and background is unnecessary.
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On making things seem real in a text: The question of verisimilitude is pretty broad and, in fact, I never think about it much. Though I do have an essay in the current issue of upstreet about truth, novels and history which might be enlightening in a general sort of way.

One tries to get the larger facts straight so that the general reader isn’t stopped by obvious errors. But beyond that, truth in fiction is a matter of consistency and coherence rather than reference. Kafka wrote a story about a young man who turns into a bug. The fact that this can’t be real in a certain sense doesn’t stop readers from believing in the story in another sense.

So you concentrate on giving enough precise and striking detail to make the reader sense the world of the fiction and then you repeat references to many of those details to give the reader a little pop of recognition here and there along the way. Repetition creates familiarity and familiarity (as in Kafka) is enough to make the reader feel that the fictional world is trustworthy enough to live inside for a while.

Also I think that a lot of verisimilitude in narrative derives from the author inventing plausible and consistent motives for character action. So much of what makes a reader identify with a story has to do with making him engage with the character’s hopes and dreams.
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On image patterns: Okay, yes. I call that image patterning. It’s part of the repetitive structure of the novel (or story). All writers do this to some extent. Margaret Atwood, for example, works wonders.

Basically, you take an image, some significant aspect of the character’s scene, and you repeat it. You can add or control meaning by giving the image a little story or by juxtaposition and association. And then you can split off sub-patterns of the main image. If I could do the art work here, I would draw you a diagram.

Once you get the hang of this, it’s a lot of fun. And then you start to set yourself impossible tasks. At the beginning of Elle, the girl throws the tennis ball off the ship and the dog jumps after it. Ball and dog gone, dead, defunct, out of the text. I knew I was doing to bring them back somehow. The problem was how. In the back of his or her mind, the reader is wondering this, too. Then there is the delight of recognition and discovery when Itslk shows up with the dog and the ball. Then the dog and the ball keep coming in again and again.

The tennis ball belongs to the tennis pro lover who dies very quickly in Canada. It’s an aspect of the opening scenes of the novel. It is a part of French culture imported to Canada. It doesn’t do much except remind us over and over of Richard and his failed attempt at colonization. The dog, on the other hand, becomes a kind of subplot. He ends up staying in Canada, the only member of the whole expedition to do so. You can chart the various colonizing strategies and levels of failure (these all count as subplots). Richard tries to make in Canada a replica of the Old World and dies. The General tries to force his French vision onto the new Canada with violence and fails. Elle, more open, finds herself turning hybrid and will never be at home again anywhere. And the dog finds a way to be happy in Canada.

The use of images helps control and focus the meaning of a story. It also creates a density of repetition and reference such that lines of text can be vibrating, as it were, on several different frequencies at once: plot, scene, image pattern, subplot, etc.

And then, of course, some of the repetitions carry barely any weight at all–I think the tennis rackets idea is mostly for fun. But the act of repetition in a text, as I said in my earlier response about verisimilitude, creates consistency, recognition and unity within the text. It relentlessly reminds the reader that, ah, yes, this is the world of the novel I am in.

In my novel The Life and Times of Captain N, there is a more inclusive and systematic use of image patterning. The main image is the Iroquois Whirlwind mask, painted half red and half black. The image represents the split of the Revolution, the split between oral and literate cultures, translation, etc. Everyone in the book eventually bears the mark of the split face. And then I splinter of sub-patterns. The Iroquois word for mask is also the word face. Death is Without-a-Face. And so on. But you can also learn a lot about patterning by reading Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye in which the main pattern is a cat’s eye marble.
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How long did it take to write Elle: Your question is pretty complex. How long did it take to write? Well, I got the idea years before I wrote the novel. At some point, I started to write it as a play, and some of the theatrical dialogue actually made it into the novel. Then I started it as a novel, writing a few paragraphs of Elle’s voice, much of the initial What do you do with a headstrong girl? passage. At the time, as often happens, I didn’t notice that this was actually pretty good. Later, I picked it up and started again. Once I got rolling, I think it took about nine months to write. But I had gathered a lot of notes and research materials prior to this final sprint.

I don’t really think about “inspiration” as such. I only think about what is going to happen next, the next line, the next bit of dialogue, the next scene, the next plot step. And I am always playing with a set of technical structures (repetitions, images, subplots, aphorisms) which are fun. And certain problems come up in the writing of any complicated novel. E.g. If I am in a strong first person single character narration, how can I possibly get in information about her uncle and the Quebec colony hundreds of miles away? And, then, since the novel has a mirror or butterfly-wing pattern at the centre (life in Canada and life back home in France), I had to invent a set of events for Elle’s return to France that were interesting and somewhat reflected what had happened to her in Canada. Thus I am always finding that form drives content.

If I am stuck for a way to move ahead, I tend to put in a linebreak and then start with something I have already put in the novel earlier (a character, a moment, a repetition, a theme), and out of that text something new often develops.

And then I am always frothing the text, as it were, looking for verbal excitement and surprise. That’s always fun, too. I am always thinking where can I go with this that will make the reader gasp or sit up and say, Wait a sec! You can’t do that. But I do it anyway. Good readers like to have their assumptions damaged.
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On outlines: No, I don’t work from an outline at all. For both my historical novels, the putative historical facts provided a framework of sorts. But in the case of Elle, there was very little to go on, and I deformed some of it anyway. For example, in one contemporary source, it was said that she killed three bears “white as an egg.” This didn’t make much sense. I couldn’t find evidence of polar bears that far south. So I invented a mythic bear. Also the record indicates that she was on the island for two years and some months, but I ran out of plot events after a year, so she gets rescued in my book earlier than in real life (always assuming there was a real girl).

Instead of an outline, I think in terms of form: plot, repetition, reflective structures. If I knew too much of what was going to happen ahead of time I wouldn’t be so inventive.
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Reading recommendations: If you are interested in novel form and structure, you might want to look at my book about Cervantes The Enamoured Knight. The middle section is about the history of the form, the main elements of the form, and various theories of what a novel is and how they create unfortunate conflicts in people who don’t understand the differences.

The foundational document in terms of my views on writing and literature is an essay I wrote called “The Novel as a Poem” which you can find in my essay collection Notes Home from a Prodigal Son.

I later wrote an essay on novel form that appeared in The New Quarterly No. 87, Summer 2003, along with an essay on short story form. A somewhat rewritten version of this is currently in print in a book called Words Overflown by Stars (an anthology of Vermont College of Fine Arts faculty craft essays and lectures) edited by David Jauss.
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On writing across genders: Elle is not my first female narrator by a long shot. Many stories and huge sections of my novel The Life and Times of Captain N are written from a woman’s point of view.

It’s really not unusual at all for a male writer to adopt a female voice or a female writer to adopt a male voice. As Brian Moore once said, It’s just part of the job. He meant that as a writer you’re supposed to imagine yourself into the minds of characters who are not like you.

At an early stage in my writing life, I got incredibly bored with myself and anyone like myself and discovered a feisty, talkative, sardonic female narrator I really liked to be around. If I recall correctly, she came to life in my short story “Red” which, amazingly enough, was first published in Playgirl (I believe it was the first issue with a fully erect  centrefold). She released me from the drudgery of male domination and allowed me to think about and poke fun at all sorts of things including men and women.

Whether I do it well or not is for other people to decide, but composing, now and then, from a female point of view has made writing a lot of fun. I don’t think there is any trick to it. I don’t sit there thinking, well, what are women like and how would a woman act in this case. As soon as you start thinking about how men or women act, you’re dead as a writer because you’re always supposed to be writing about a particular man or a particular woman and people differ vastly in their particulars.
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The state of marginality or liminality has been an especially interesting theme in my last two novels. And to me it has tremendous metaphorical throw. Every relationship contains a frontier zone wherein all the definitions have to be translated. It’s fascinating to think about love that way.

Same goes for the space between the official and the unofficial. Mikhail Bakhtin talks about the novel as a form that encapsulates the struggle between discourses. His idea of the carnivalesque, in part, derives from this–the idea that carnival is an upturning of the official by the unofficial, the spiritual by the carnal. I tend to think that way about fiction. It’s always meant to subvert some authoritative or generally accepted discourse, to surprise the reader with access to something real.
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On women writers (lost and found) and captivity narratives: But you should always examine and test your premises. Were there, in fact, as few female voices as you suggest? One of the main contemporary sources for the Elle legend is a famous collection of early short stories called the Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre. She was brilliant and well known in her time.

Of course, at a certain level it’s true that some female writers have been overlooked. One of the joys of feminist criticism is its relentless search and rediscovery mission in favour of female writers. But you should always look around before you reiterate the received wisdom about the dearth of female voices from the past. They tend to surprise you by their presence.

As to captivity narratives, I have read a lot. But mostly they were of use in writing The Life and Times of Captain N which is, in part, the story of a captivity (whereas Elle is not). Mary Jemison’s little book was especially helpful because she actually knew Hendrick Nellis, my protagonist, although she misremembered his name as “Captain Nettles.” She also knew his Seneca captive wife Priscilla Ramsay. But beyond coincidental discoveries like that, the literature of captives–not just their narratives and biographies–is rich with anthropological implication. The scholar James Axtell is especially good on this.

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Did she actually turn into a bear? Both Elle and The Life and Times of Captain N are about people who find themselves between languages and between cultures. And I don’t just mean the Euro-white protagonists. There are crossover characters coming the other way such as Itslk or Tom Wopat (a character in Captain N). Elle is between a European culture that’s Christian and literate. The natives she meets are from tribal, oral cultures with a shamanic elements in their religions. What is common sense and real in one culture is not necessarily real in the other culture. I ask the question: As one enters the world of the Other, does one actually begin to perceive a different reality? If so, what does that feel like? How does the subject perceive it’s own transformation? In my own mind, I wonder if the world really does look different within another cultural construct? What would I have been like had I been raised in a community that believed in shape-changing, animal totems and ritual curing.

The passages you’re referring to in the novel are an attempt to represent the confusing state of transition from one reality to the other. A native would say, yes, she changed into a bear; a European would say she was hallucinating. In our cynical day, it’s very easy to fall back on cultural relativism which amounts to saying that people believe different things but they’re all wrong except for the scientific observer (cultural relativism amounts, in my mind, to a covert reassertion of the metaphysical correctness of the Euro-white point of view).

On a slightly more personal level, imagine the state of falling in love, when you have to learn the other person’s definitions, point of view, and you begin to change yourself so that you fit into your lover’s sentences. What you thought was true might change or at least be altered ever so slightly. The world is different.

Or think of learning another language.

In philosophical terms, people used to talk about conceptual systems and wonder if different conceptual systems actually described actual different realities.

Frankly, I like the idea that she actually turned into a bear. I like a world where that is possible even though, I know myself, that I am incapable of that sort of transformation.

The objects that are taken out of her body are similarly multi-valenced. a) It’s common shamanic curing practice among the Algonquian natives to massage objects out of the flesh of patients. b) A white westerner sees obvious trickery and doesn’t believe the objects are actually inside the person being treated. c) The objects inside Elle, some of them, are images from other places in the novel (this is me playing with literary effect, even making little jokes). d) I never use the word symbol to describe what I am doing in a piece of writing.
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Irony: Basically, I think every sentence should turn the screw a couple of times so that the meaning of the text is both refining itself and becoming more complex (often by inversion) as it proceeds. Irony is a lovely tool.

And, of course, I and my characters generally take a dim view of life on earth, a view that has to express itself as comedy or we’d all be cutting our wrists.
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On the first person point of view: I think that if your first person character changes inappropriately from scene to scene it’s because you haven’t imagined yourself into the character deeply enough. In some ways, writing is like Method Acting–you have to become your character, at least, in your imagination. This isn’t a matter of knowing your character objectively, or writing out tedious character biographies on the side. I never even think of characterization as a technical issue. Characters are what they do and why (motivation). And perhaps that is the key–because consistent motivation is a major part of structure in all sorts of ways. A plot is a series of events on a consistent line of desire and resistance. Desire is motivation.

Okay, I’ve given two jumbled answers in one paragraph.

Inhabit your character. In other words, work hard to imagine yourself inside the character’s mind and body in an intuitive and tactile manner. Body is important. Sometimes at the end of a scene, if I don’t know where things are going next, I try to recede into the character’s body, imagine the effects of the scene just finished, imagine the overall desire/motive of the character in the text, and then feel the character’s next move. Given the overall direction of the text and the scene that has just taken place, where does my character go next and why? Sometimes characters change inappropriately from scene to scene simply because the author is foisting a plot move on the character that is out of character–that is, the author has a plan for the story as opposed to letting the story develop organically and playfully. Plans are terrible inhibitions. A sense of form, on the other hand, allows for discovery and play.

The fact that you retreat into the third person is interesting. It seems as if you are trying to escape your problem by pulling even farther away from your character’s subjectivity. Truth is there is very little difference between a close third person single character narration and a first person narration.

There is an awful lot of silly talk in the creative writing world about point of view. The best introductory book I’ve seen is one called Points of View by Moffett and McIlheney. There are two versions: try to find a copy of the older one which is out of print. It’s safe to say that most learning writers have an incredibly narrow idea of how point of view works. No point of view choice is wrong; they all have advantages and disadvantages. The main thing is that whatever point of view you pick, you need to be inventive and flexible. You need, as E. M. Forster says, to “bounce” the reader. Every point of view choice gives you technical options in terms of modulating distance (getting closer or farther away from the character’s mind) and in terms of incorporating other points of view (e.g. one of the disadvantages of the first person point of view is the narrator’s tendency to monopolize the text; but there are some lovely techniques for giving other characters a counter-voice in a first person text so the disadvantage can actually be avoided). You can even mix points of view to keep the reader from being bored. The main thing is to keep the point of view structure alive, surprising and flexible.

It’s possible that your first person character changes from scene to scene because you’ve manacled yourself with a constricting point of view structure and, in the back of your mind, you’re bored with it–so you change the character.

Of course, I say all this without the advantage of having read you work so I might be completely off base.
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Solving the first person monopoly problem: You may call that a standard technique for avoiding the first person monopoly, but I find most learning writers haven’t figured it out yet. It’s nice to see that you have.

So, yes, one thing you can do is have your first person narrator imagining, intuiting, speculating on, deducing and interpreting how other characters feel. In Pickwick Papers, Dickens introduces a dog’s point of view simply by having the narrator notice the dog as the coach drives by and imagine what the dog sees.

But the most useful technique would be conflict. The world outside the narrator intrudes upon the text by disagreeing with him and taking action against him. So you construct your scenes and plot such that things don’t go the way the protagonist expects. Reality (and other people) is always surprising, disappointing, hindering. This may seem obvious except that, in fact, in student stories, over and over, I find characters ambling through scenes (hitting all the jumps and gates according to the story plan) without any concrete opposition (passive avoidance, no one telling the truth–these are the worst). The character might as well be inhabiting a dream where everything is a projection of his thoughts.

If you think of a scene or event in a narrative as a win/lose situation, you can see that the most boring text would involve the main character winning every scene (interchange) and thinking about how he won it (self-congratulation). Other points of view become concrete by thwarting the main character. This can be in the dialogue as well–That’s what you think? Let me tell you what I think?
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More reading recommendations: Thinking about that last question, the point of view question: I wrote an essay on point of view called “The Masks of I” that’s in my collection Notes Home from a Prodigal Son if you are interested.

In addition, I’ve gradually been writing essays on reading and writing for another book of essays, moving toward completion.

Several have appeared in The New Quarterly. Probably not impossible to find via interlibrary loan, or you could wait til my next book of essays comes out.

There is one on the use of rhetorical devices in contemporary fiction. It’s called “How to Read a Mark Jarman Story.”

And there are two essays on writing strong sentences: “The Attack of the Copula Spiders” (on the importance of verb choice) and “The Drama of Grammar” (on the dramatic effect of what I call but-constructions).

If you want to dig more into Elle, you can start by reading the interview and essays about Elle in Bruce Stone’s book about my work The Art of Desire. Stone did an excellent interview with me and Stephen Henighan’s essay is one of the best.

And here is a little list of some terrific critical papers–very insightful and well-written.

“I am a Landscape of Desire: Gender, Genre and the Deconstruction of the Textuality of Empire in Douglas Glover’s Elle” by Pedro Carmona Rodríguez, Proceedings of the 29th AEDEAN Conference: Universidad de Jaén 15 al 20 diciembre 2005. CD-ROM. Ed. Alejandro Alcaraz Sintes et al. Jaén: AEDEAN / Servicio de Publicaciones U de Jaén, 2006. 539-45.

“‘…[D]estined always to be on the edge of things’: Prolegomenon to a Dialogue of Transdisciplinary and Curriculum Theory” by Patrick Howard, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Vol. 20. Iss. 4 p.45, Winter 2004

“Canadian Crusoes from Sea to Sea: The Oceanic Communities of Douglas Glover’s Elle and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi” by John Clement Bell, Moveable Margins, The Shifting Spaces of Canadian Literature, Chelva Kanaganayakam, ed., TSAR Publications, Toronto, 2005

“Surviving the Metaphorical Condition in Elle : Douglas Glover’s Impersonation of the First French Female in Canada” by María Jesús Hernáez Lerena, Canon Disorders: Gendered Perspectives on Literature and Film in Canada and the United States, Darias Beautell, Eva, and María Jesús Hernáez Lerena, eds., Ed. Logroño: Universidad de La Rioja/Universidad de La Laguna, 2007

“Visited Graves in Colonial Cemeteries: The Resurrection of Marguerite de Roberval” by María Jesús Hernáez Lerena, Canada Exposed/Le Canada a decouvert, Peter Lang Publishing, Berlin, New York, Brussels, Oxford, 2009

“Self as Garbled Translation: Douglas Glover’s Elle/Elle,” in Traduire depuis les marges/Translating from the Margins, Denise Merkle, Jane Koustas, Glen Nichols and Sherry Simon, eds. Montreal: Edition Nota bene, 2008. 59-74

—Douglas Glover

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Jan 312010
 

Now think about how Shklovsky and Lish fit together. Lish is a child of the stillborn American avant garde (postmodern) of the 60s and 70s. I mean people like Gass, Coover, Barthelme and Hawkes. Hawkes was famous for having said that plot, character, setting and theme are the enemies of the novel. Shklovsky’s Russian Formalism evolves out of Futurism and Don Quixote and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. (Cervantes and Sterne invented most of the techniques of literary experiment; we just keep rediscovering them–note the blank pages in Lish’s novel Arcade and then go and look at the famous blank chapter in Tristram Shandy.) He says art is about technique (not about its subject matter). But the techniques he discusses are delay, stepped construction, deceleration, repetition, parallelism, differential perceptions and baring the device. His novels, even his essays for that matter, are strange, discursive, tangential, experimental narratives that include bits of memoir and literary criticism. Russian Formalism led through structuralist linguistics (Jacobson) and post-structuralism (Saussure and Barthes) to European literary theory–Barthes, Derrida and after.  Lately Lish has been quoting European theorists like Kristeva, Deleuze and Lyotard in his epigraphs. Though they talk and write quite differently, both Lish and Shklovsky believe that subject matter is secondary to technique. They both use the formal disruption of mainstream expectation to jar the reader into paying attention to the reading of the text.

dg

Jan 152010
 

I’m reading Millhauser as part of my exploration of short stories that seem to disobey the rules.  My question–my thesis, perhaps–seems to hinge on the question, what is a short story?  In “The Barnum Museum”, the narrator appears to be a 3rd person plural, ‘we’, but at times the closeness of the narration feels much more like first.   Even though nothing about the narrator is ever revealed as a character, there is a strong sense of ‘voice’ about this narrator.  I think Millhauser in particular does this really well…hides his narrators without making them characters.  In reading James Wood’s chapter on narrating in How Fiction Works, I was struck by the idea of ‘free indirect’ narration, a concept akin (I think) to stream of consciousness.   This topic came up in Jess Row’s lecture at residency.  The thing is, I don’t think Millhauser is doing this even.  He’s almost using ‘close-omniscience’ as a narrative voice.  Speaking collectively for his village but not really allowing the reader access to this narrative presence.  Of course that’s just one aspect of this story that shakes it free of the confines of traditional short story structure.  I was also listening to a podcast of Jeffrey Eugenides reading the Harold Brodky story, “Spring Fugue,” in which Eugenides and Deborha Treisman discuss whether or not Brodky’s story is in fact a story, or a prose-poem.  Eugenides says that he doesn’t think it matters that much (though he does think it is a story.)  I wonder what others think about this.  When does a story stop being a story?  In the Millhauser story, there are no main characters, other than the invisible, plural narrator and the museum itself.  Yet it does move like a story.  There is tension, drama, movement through time.  I’m not looking for anyone to write the thesis for me, but I am interested to know what others thing about the weird stories out there.  I know these lines are getting blurrier with time, but is there still a line?   By the way, the NewYorker fiction podcasts are great, and free, on Itunes if you haven’t been there before.

—Richard Farrell