Narrative Momentum. What Is It Anyway?

Earlier today I interviewed Melissa Bank for the Writers At Cornell podcast. Melissa is a Cornell grad, and is in Ithaca filling in for me and Ernesto Quiñonez, who are on leave.

I didn't read The Girls' Guide To Hunting And Fishing back when everyone was raving about it. As Melissa and I discussed in the interview, the book had ridden a particular current of the zeitgeist, one that she had never expected to benefit from, and it was marketed as thinking women's chick lit. This of course is why I didn't read it. But I read it this week, and I liked it, and I liked her newer book, The Wonder Spot, quite a lot more.

The thing I like about them is something that you never read about in reviews of any book, and certainly not on the front flap of the dust jacket: they have an odd approach to narrative. They are not novels, and not really story collections; they're large narrative units composed of loosely arranged medium-sized narrative units, which are themselves made up of loosely arranged small narrative units. They're basically a bunch of anecdotes and jokes mashed together.

And yet, though there are no real plots to speak of, these books have forward momentum, and often that momentum is really compelling. In the podcast, Bank explains that she was trying to give the stories the shape of stories from life--discursive, off-kilter, but still purposeful. And she succeeded. But for the life of me I can't really tell how. The do feel very lifelike; during the interview I told her that, reading them, I never really realized I was being taken somewhere, but was surprised and delighted when I arrived.

One thing Rhian complains about a lot (and perhaps she will comment on this post) is her frustration at trying to make her ideas fit into an organizational scheme, and assume the form of a story. But Bank's books don't bother to do this, and they still feel like stories. And the more I think about it, the more I think that all the books I like have unconventional approaches to plot. Even the crime novels.

Maybe writer's block is the result of feeling detached from your story, from the model story in your soul. Life can do things to tear you away from it--tragedy, or the distractions of home and family, or the pressures of work. You may be generally happy, but the pieces don't fit in the obvious way they once did. In the parking lot of the Agway the other day, Rhian and I were talking about how, during times of stress and slavish adherence to our routines, we feel as though we don't have the small epiphanies we sometimes have, which show us, in an instant, new possibilities for living. Writers need these epiphanies, and they need to put themselves in circumstances that favor them.

I think that it's rare for a good book to have a structure imposed on it. The movement of the narrative has to find its natural shape, and the writer has to assume the state of mind that allows this to happen. I'm not big on "inspiration," the concept. Writing is work, to me, and sometimes it's rather dreary work. But the times that it isn't are the result of everything falling into alignment--the details, the emotions, your life, your story. You can't force it to happen. But at the same time, you don't know how to let it happen on its own. I think this is why really good, really consistent writers are scarce. Such people balance on a knife edge their whole lives, and barely even consider the possibility of falling off.

Shauna Seliy, and the Structure of the Novel

I had a wonderful opportunity this week--my old friend Shauna Seliy came to town to give a reading, and we got caught up on the Writers At Cornell podcast. We mostly talked about her new novel, her first, When We Get There, which I believe I plumped for last year here on the blog (and which I enthusiastically blurbed on the back cover). I don't think it's just my affection for Shauna that makes me think this book is wonderful, but I was surprised to hear how it had been written.

The book had originally consisted, Shauna told me (and told the audience at Cornell Thursday afternoon), of a series of linked stories. But she decided that they ought to be a novel, ripped them apart, and put them back together again, with a new narrative line (a missing mother) that ran through the whole. The process of writing and editing had taken ten years.

The surprising part is that the result appears seamless to me--I assumed Shauna had been writing unrelated stories all this time, and then wrote the novel whole-cloth in the recent past. A theme of our conversations this week was just how different novels are from one another--even within the conventions of the genre, you can do almost anything.

Those of you who are writers, how do you structure your stuff? Is the structure dictated by the material, or do you envision a structure into which the material can be poured, like wax into a mold? I've let the former happen (Mailman), and I've imposed the latter on my work (my first two books), and while both methods can do the trick, I think the former is where most of the potential is.

It's hard, though, to have the confidence to let the material take over the process--to allow the chips to fall where they may. And sometimes the instinct to do so is, in fact, wrong, and the book must be taken apart and put back together again, as Shauna's was. Her book goes to show, however, that the artificiality of that process needn't create a work that feels artificial--indeed, When We Get There unfolds very naturally, as if it had always been intended that way.

All of narrative is illusion--the creation of coherence from abstraction, compulsion, and arbitrary whim. Sometimes I think I ought to be thinking about this process more. At other times I think I shouldn't think about it at all.