by Robin Black
My first response was pure irritation, fueled by my realization that I shouldn’t bother knocking on that editor’s door with my wares. My second response, less wholly self-involved, was that while I understood exhaustion with the subject matter, I didn’t agree that the subject matter was itself exhausted. Undoubtedly, there can be a certain sameness to these tales of loss, not to mention a whiny quality. Undoubtedly some such stories run together, indistinct and unoriginal. But they don’t have to. The challenges that arise with depictions of sorrow are not insurmountable.
Though they are challenges indeed. It is a well-known peculiarity of fiction that the more overtly a reader is asked to sympathize with a character, the less likely she is to do so. It’s also true that for many of us the impulse to write about loss grows from experiencing sorrow ourselves, which can make it difficult for us to see that grieving character as anything but wholly sympathetic. These two facts in combination do not bode well for success. After all, nobody, not even the kindest-hearted of readers, wants to be a guest at someone else’s pity party.
But, as I said, there are ways to increase your odds of not driving readers away. For starters, it is helpful if the sorrowing hero isn’t too much of a saint. Just because a character views herself as a victim, a wronged angel, lacking any responsibility or flaws, doesn’t mean the story has to echo that view. Though if the incidents resonate with events of the author’s life, it can be challenging to gain the kind of distance that allows for complicating a portrait of suffering saintliness. Challenging, but again, not impossible. Giving the character hobbies and habits, interests and inclinations very different from the author’s own can be almost magically useful. If the author has never gardened and her character is an avid gardener, that fact alone will require that her imagination get to work, and will force her into fictionalizing both character and situation more completely.
Another approach to keeping your reader from feeling overly tasked to provide unending sympathy is to use a secondary character to challenge the central character in some way. This is particularly helpful with a story which is—as many loss stories are—about someone who cannot get past her grief. That’s a very human problem, and one worthy of fictional exploration; but it’s also a set-up for having your reader throw the story across the room with an exasperated “Oh, get over it!”
One of the best edits I ever received addressed exactly this. I’d written a story about a young widow, my narrator, whose central problem was that three years after her husband’s death she showed no signs of moving forward. She was the classic stuck character, and though I found her entirely sympathetic, maybe too sympathetic, I couldn’t deny that other people found her frustrating—in a way that seeped into their finding the story itself frustrating.
My editor suggested that I have my character’s best friend, whom she habitually pushed around while demanding his sympathy, articulate every frustration a reader might feel. That scene, that expression of anger, was like a rush of fresh air in the piece, breaking the sealed quality that had resulted from the narrator’s previously unchallenged, inactive self-pity. And as a side note, I had no trouble writing that scene, discovering along the way that though I had thought I found my character only sympathetic, that wasn’t entirely true.
(This is a technique with broader use than only within stories about loss. There are many times when having a supporting player, or even the central character, express a frustration that the reader likely feels will help diffuse the reader’s irritation.)
Another approach to the timeworn subject of loss is to try to defamiliarize stories that might sound, in summary, like a million others that have come before. The aforementioned dismissive editor doesn’t think the world needs another story about “somebody’s sister dying of cancer” because he thinks he already knows what that story will be. But he can be proved wrong. A.S. Byatt’s brilliant story “A Stone Woman” depicts a daughter whose grief over her mother’s death leads to literal petrification. Mother dying? Old hat for us literary types. Daughter crystalizing? Not so much.
And one needn’t become a fabulist to make an old problem seem new. Another approach is to look to structure for a fresh perspective, employing ordering principles beyond that of linear chronology. Collage, for example, requires a type of intellectual engagement that a more linear structure may not, just by virtue of requiring a kind of puzzling-through. When the story asks for a response like that, beyond and distinct from sympathy, the reader is likely to feel less bombarded by those more emotional demands.
An intertwining, secondary plot line contrasting and resonating with the central one can also offer counterpoint to the potential drag and familiarity of stories of loss. A mother dies and her son can’t get over it. Sounds familiar. A mother dies and her son who has been set since childhood on breaking the world’s record for eating chicken wings and is in training to do just that, can’t get over it…This example may (or may not?) be a stretch, but it would be difficult to read that tale of loss and think that you had read it a thousand times before.
It is possible to make any old subject new. To say otherwise is to deny centuries if not millennia of retold tales. And with the subject of loss, there are some remarkable rewards. Prominent on my desk is a note I received from a woman who recently read my story about that widow stuck in her grief. The woman who wrote me had also been widowed for several years, and my depiction of stuckness, as well as the challenge to it that my narrator’s best friend articulates, set her thinking about her own difficulty moving forward.
To be clear, the story did not change her life. She wasn’t immediately relieved of her grief, nor shown an easy way through it. But by providing something like a mirror, the story illuminated something she had been unable to see; and as long as grief stories can do that for someone in pain, I will keep writing them—and I hope that others will as well.
Do we really need another story about someone’s sister dying of cancer? Yes. Don’t be ridiculous. Of course we do.
House Lessons III:
Showing Not Telling
After eighteen years, we were ready to move, my husband and I, selling the home in which we raised our three children, the home in which we unimaginably slipped from being young to being members of AARP, from having four parents to having two, from believing we would raise four children, to grieving the one who was stillborn. It is the home in which I made birthday cakes decorated as maps of family vacations, and designed Halloween costumes to do Martha Stewart proud, the home in which we all punched down the Rosh Hashanah challah dough each year because I, the nonbeliever, believed this was a way for us to pray. It is the home in which I grew panicky as my youngest child failed to crawl, month after month, the home in which I learned the meaning of words like hypotonic and dyspraxia. It is the home in which my husband and I have both lived the longest in our lives, a home in which I’ve heard almost all of my local writer friends read from their work, at one or another of our “salons.” And it is—we believe—a work of art, an eighteen-year-long collaboration between us, two very different people who share a quirky sensibility and a desire to have a home unlike any other. And so, no two knobs on our kitchen cabinets match, and the walls are dotted with hanging, miniature chairs. And then there is the mess. This is the home in which I have waged an eighteen-year battle against my own inability to keep a house clean or anything close, the home in which I have unhappily faced the certainty that my chaos sometimes embarrasses my children in front of their friends.
We have lived novel after novel in this home.
But the experts are agreed that when you put your house on the market you are meant to erase yourself. House sales are all about competing narratives. My story, our story, was embedded in every room. The task for me was to render the house a blank page so a potential buyer could imagine writing, living, her story here.
No family pictures, my realtor said. And nothing too idiosyncratic.
Staging is the word the realtors use—a word tha
t connotes both artificiality and a locus for unfolding events. And so I went from room to room removing objects that are, I realize, exactly the sort of telling details I might want in a piece of fiction. There was a mirror in our hall, bright red, with strange, multi-colored birds seemingly flying into it, that had to be replaced by another mirror, one with a simple light wood frame. On the inside of our powder room door an aluminum sign read: Please flush after each use except when train is in the station. That too has to go, the four screw holes filled, sanded, painted over. And the bright pink woodwork in our oldest daughter’s room was deemed too gender specific, the chalkboard wall in our son’s too young. The plumbing pipes that ran and turned just overhead in the basement and that I had painted the colors of the London tube map, were to be restored to their original black.
I was once asked in an interview why houses play so prominent a role in my work, and I gave a few answers, but the one on my mind as I prepared our house for sale had to do with how homes reveal character.
When I first started writing, I struggled with physical descriptions. Someone in a workshop once told me that a story of mine was “like two enormous brains arguing with each other under water or maybe in outer space.” I now think that might make for an interesting work, but it wasn’t my intent at the time; and so at some point around then, I decided to start placing my people in actual rooms. At first it was difficult for me—my interests were so entirely rooted in people’s emotional interiors. Objects, floors, colors all seemed irrelevant. And so my early attempts at writing physical descriptions read as though I were ticking off a list: Okay, I mentioned the wall color; I talked about the age of the house; I described what everyone’s wearing. Can I get on with it now?
I didn’t understand the possible role of the physical world in fiction, at all. I can theorize about that being related to my ADD—we of deficient attention are often unconcerned with our physical surroundings. Moreover, my ADD may have been the cause of my skipping over so many descriptive passages as I read. Anything over an inch long can be challenging for someone with poor powers of concentration—the sort of person who measures prose by the inch. But whatever the cause, it all seemed irrelevant to me and to my dissections of my characters’ emotional lives.
Until I discovered that the interiors of homes and the interior lives of the people who occupy them are often not so very distinct. In a short story, the right description of that crazy bird mirror of mine might go a long way to define the woman who chose to hang it in her entryway. Our choices (those unmatched kitchen cabinet knobs…) speak volumes about us. A character who paints her walls in jewel tones and hangs vibrant floral curtains in every room is immediately distinct from the one whose home displays a minimalist aesthetic. Those descriptions are shorthand, packed with information it might be difficult to otherwise convey.
As are living conditions that have less to do with intent and more to do with aspects of ourselves beyond our control. My messy, chaotic home is a manifestation of a truth about me, whether I like to admit that or not. My unkempt lawn was as well—and was quickly mowed, landscaped, brought to order by the people who ultimately bought our home. Driving by, seeing that, seeing the gate they put up, detecting ways in which they decided to exert control, I immediately understood how very different from me they must be. That it saddened me is a testament to the power of physical detail.
When we bought the house in 1995, this theory of neutralizing houses in order to sell them hadn’t become orthodoxy, a phenomenon I blame on HGTV and its like. I don’t remember seeing a single home then that wasn’t overflowing with personality and therefore with narrative. In fact, in our house, when we first saw it, there was a telltale massive dark stain on the living room’s hardwood floor, just next to the fireplace. Urine. The previous owners had potty-trained their twin sons in that central spot. That should be in a story, I think now, though the stain is long gone—so eloquent, so evocative a stain. I imagine the harried parents, overwhelmed with two babies. I imagine their tacit, exhausted agreement never to discuss the fact that the most convenient way they’ve found to potty train their boys is resulting in such costly damage to one of the finest features of their home. Marriages are conspiracies and this was evidence of the nature of theirs.
As I scrubbed away the narrative in which we lived, I found my thoughts returning to when we had no idea what our story would be.
There’s a videotape of me, pregnant with my youngest in the summer of 1995, out in the yard, barely able to keep a straight face as I describe to the camera, to the children, to the future, that the reason the front door of our new home doesn’t face the street is that during the Mesozoic Era there was some kind of extraordinary earthquake event, and the house was violently shifted sideways.
Wait, I’m not sure I caught that, my husband’s voice says. Tell us again. How exactly was the house moved?
Well…I begin, my hand resting on my rounded front, a mock serious expression on my face. A very, very long time ago, this house…
Giotto’s Perfect Circle
The story goes like this: Back in the early fourteenth century, the Pope needed a painter for an important project, so he sent a courier to Florence, that bastion of all things painterly, to collect submission pieces from the hottest artists of the day. When the courier asked Giotto for a painting to take back to Rome, Giotto took his brush and drew a perfect red circle in one elegant stroke, pronouncing that to be his entry. The courier—as legend would have it—suggested that this was some bullshit, but Giotto retorted that the Pope would understand what it meant about his level of giftedness. And the Pope, of course, did understand and gave the commission to Giotto—which, as an aside, is why this is a story. If he hadn’t, I doubt we’d still be talking about that circle some seven hundred years later.
I first heard about Giotto’s bold move and nearly unique skill when I was fifteen and was—remember, not all teenagers are alike—a little obsessed with fourteenth century Christian art. I’m not sure how much I actually knew about it (not much, I suspect) but, as with so many teenage obsessions, I had a lot of posters. And it almost goes without saying that after hearing about Giotto’s circle, I spent the bulk of my math period doodling-time that year trying to draw a perfect circle freehand. I failed. (I also failed math, but that’s another story.)
Flash forward thirty-seven or so years, and now, much like the Pope, whom I assure you I resemble in no other respects, I find myself judging competitions from time to time. And much like Giotto, with whom I at least share a creative bent, I find myself being judged in competitions, as well.
We writers love a good analogy.
Unfortunately, there isn’t an exact one here. There is no abstracted single element that a writer might submit to prove overall excellence, even in a hypothetical competition with no rules about word count and such. Among other reasons, we lack objectivity in our art. We lack a compass with which one might trace the perfection of a sentence, the genius of a single word. Though I admit I enjoy thinking about that scene. The courier, seeking an official short story writer for the Pope, arrives at the garret of a writer who sneers, takes out his pen, and scribbles: Unmoored. The courier suggests that this doesn’t fit the bill. “Actually, His Holiness was looking for something more like a story. Even flash fiction…” And the writer smiles—a bit smug. “He will understand. He will recognize my genius. It is a perfect word.”
Cut to Pope rolling his eyes. “Please don’t waste my time with this idiocy…”
Which leads to the obvious question. What are literary judges looking for anyway? First answer, given as one who submits to contests herself: I don’t have a clue. Second answer, given as someone who judges contests from time to time: Giotto’s story isn’t entirely irrelevant to what I’m looking for.
What I look for has nothing to do with perfection though, nor with the mastery of a single skill, but the qualities of confidence, distinctiveness, and memorability are all critical—and first impressions too. Bec
ause if you don’t hook me on Page One, I am unlikely to turn to Page Two. Novels, even short stories, don’t get their full length to prove their worth. An author’s first job is to make a reader want to turn the page—and the very first time that desire takes hold is the most important time.
But how? There is no one answer, but it isn’t wholly a mystery either.
In real life, face-to-face, confidence can either impress or irritate. It wobbles eternally on the wall separating it from its evil twin, arrogance. I suspect that the courier who visited Giotto that day muttered some version of cocky bastard as he stepped back out onto the street. But in writing, in fiction, there is a necessary relaxation a reader must experience, a surrender to someone else’s imagination and to their care—and to their authority. When I talk about the quality that hooks me into a piece I’m reading for a contest, I often say things like, “I could just tell that someone was doing something. Someone was in charge.”
It’s tempting to reduce that to: Go big, or go home. But the problem with that exhortation is that it can be misleading about what “big” is. Big, when it comes to story openings, is often taken to mean shocking, but “big” in this context, does not mean shocking, or eventful, or anything except having intent. Not just jotting words on a page. Not just getting things rolling. But getting things rolling with authority. Having a confident intelligence beam through.
Distinctiveness is another such characteristic. The Pope walks into his den and finds a dozen or more easels there. On each one is the face of Christ, or of Christ’s beatific mother, or the cherubic smiles of smiling cherubs, and then, like some emissary from the mid-twentieth century, a red circle appears. Just that.