“Know that writing is born from the ache of contraries, polarities in search of peace, of unity. But not the unity of making mush. You want to live in the country. Your husband is an urban boy. You compromise and both live in the suburbs. What a squash of desire and energy.” “But writing has this quality where all the effort and desire in the world doesn’t do shit. It’s hard to comprehend. All our lives we’ve been taught to …
Memoir, storytelling, and Soren Kierkegaard’s sideways quest. K. Brian Soderquist, U.S.A.-born and now a Danish citizen, co-author of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony, teaches my son Tom’s Kierkegaard class this winter in Copenhagen. While on a recent field trip, Brian conveyed to Tom and to his study-abroad classmates an interesting perspective on storytelling that resonates for all nonfiction writers and especially for memoirists: “I think we should keep in mind that on this trip we’re going to hear a lot of narratives—or …
“The English language is derived from two main sources. One is Latin, the florid language of ancient Rome. The other is Anglo-Saxon, the plain languages of England and northern Europe. The words derived from Latin are the enemy—they will strangle and suffocate everything you write. The Anglo-Saxon words will set you free. “How do those Latin words do their strangling and suffocating? In general they are long, pompous nouns that end in –ion . . . Here’s a typical sentence: …
“What has been my habit, I suppose for many years, is to read one work of a writer whom I have heard of as being worth reading. That’s how I get to a book, and when I read one book by a writer, I’m satisfied. I don’t have to read four of them to form an opinion. For example, we’ll take some of my contemporaries like William Faulkner. I read one book of Faulkner which I liked very much. I …
A friend who is writing a complex book on evolution has been inspired by watching his artist daughter screen-printing layers of a picture. Successively using different colors, the image gradually emerges organically as a whole. He’s realized he needs similarly to line out his ideas slowly, giving readers the tools necessary to understand his theory’s major revelations deep into the book. This works better, he says, than “describing each of the parts separately in detail, which just doesn’t work.”
Narrative literature must bring readers along, too, and for similar metabolic reasons. Multiple storylines are a commonplace in drama and comedy—watch almost any movie—and sometimes there are current-action threads while past threads move, in sequential flashbacks, toward the present. We wonder, How did that screwed-up guy or gal get there?
I’ve struggled with tugging along more than two storylines, however, in a book-length work. I can keep the main narrative unfolding across many chapters, maybe with a related subplot—a reappearing villain, say—but want to tie off other threads as they arise. Introduce them, wrap them up, get them over with. Snip! This is because I feel I’m already doing a lot in a chapter, and shoving one more thing into it seems to imperil its shapely arc. Sometimes, I think, a thread must be used in a discrete heap. But maybe then it’s not really a thread? And too much of such summary turns narrative essayistic, in the old-fashioned sense—bloodless.
I like narrative, event sequence leading to incidents that culminate in a big incident. But readers need to experience, with the main character or characters, all threads develop if they are going to feel the emotions the writer desires. This is how it happens in life too: ongoing issues and layers of backstory keep moving into the present. Rarely does something arise out of nothing. The car with bald tires wrecked at least partly because you were broke because of your troubled friend and because, two years ago, your dumb brother-in-law got you a deal on those tires, a deal, you learn, that really benefitted him . . .
Not especially funny or witty myself, perhaps that’s why I admire those who are: I must have opened my blog a half dozen times today to read a first sentence by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. Then tonight I read it—again—to my wife and laughed, again. It’s one of the wittiest sentences I’ve ever read. Lane’s follow-up quip is pure gravy. “It got a rise out of Dinty, too,” I told Kathy. “He left a comment today on that …
The sex life of Grace Kelly, like the home life of the Incas, is one of those distant but down-to-earth matters which we can investigate in depth, and muse upon at length, but never really hope to understand. According to some observers, she herself may not have grasped its implications; in the words of a columnist at Photoplay, “I wonder if Grace Kelly knew she had so much S.A.” To which the only proper response is, W.T.F.? The quote is …