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There are two types of writers. Those who treat the reader’s time as gold and those who think that the reader should be eternally grateful to them. No prizes for guessing what category this guy falls into.
I often write the first paragraph of a story in a notebook, add to it every so often or leave it there to see if something might emerge from it. In 2008, in San Francisco, I went with three friends on a hike near Muir Woods overlooking the Pacific Ocean. At the summit, there was a kind of lodge where you could get a bed for the night and use the kitchen to make your own dinner. The view was spectacular.
As we climbed, I began to imagine a character, an Irish guy who had made up his mind to go home. This was his last big outing in the landscape. He had been working as a plumber. Dotted in the Bay Area were houses where he had repaired pipes and installed new sinks and toilets and washing machines. This was his legacy in America. He was someone who could be depended on in an emergency. But he was illegal and he was going home.
Yawn. So a story about an illegal working illegally in the US taking away jobs from legal US citizens.
[…] Sixteen years later, the story came back into my mind. It occurred to me that the election of Donald Trump for the second term and the prospect of him taking it out on illegal immigrants would be the actual spur to make my character really decide that he had to go home. He would leave on Monday 20 January 2025, the precise date of Trump’s inauguration. The hike with his daughter, almost a teenager, would take place on Saturday 18 January.
I worked it so that I would write the story of the hike on the very day it took place. I was in the same time zone. The inauguration was looming. ICE was coming towards us. Trump was getting louder and more ominous. As my protagonist and his daughter set out from the city, I was writing what they might say and do at the same time of the morning in question. They didn’t know (as I didn’t know) how they would find a parking space. But then it became easier than they (or I) had imagined. The aim was to finish this section that day. I could make changes, but they would be small. I would try to make it stick, so that I would not have to rewrite it on another day, a day when Trump had already taken over. I wanted the story done by then. And I wanted to publish it soon afterwards. It was superstitious; it felt serious at the time.
One thing about the left is that, whenever they write, they think they are mirroring reality but are really talking crap. Margaret Atwood, who seems to have an unhealthy obsession with rape, is a prime example.
Sometimes, a glimpse is enough to start with, or a small detail from a much larger story. In his preface to The Spoils of Poynton, Henry James talks about this idea of a “germ”, what he called “a mere floating particle in the stream of talk”, something that “has the virus of suggestion”. Life, as James would have it, is “all inclusion and confusion”, just as art is “all discrimination and selection”. If you are seeking the inspiration for a story, then very little is more than enough. Something hinted – a clue, a suggestion – can do more in the imagination than something spelled out.
Yes, I stopped reading that word soup of a paragraph after the second sentence, too.
About 20 years ago, I interviewed an historian in the area of the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pallars. Because the Pallars is sparsely populated and remote, the historian had been able to account for every single death there in the Spanish Civil War. And he was also able to collect many small details about injuries, bombardments and movements of troops.
[…] The confrontation that does not occur is often more dramatic than the one that does. At the very end of another story, A Sum of Money, the young man who has been sent home from boarding school for stealing money has to face his parents. I sat gazing at a blank page for a long time as I worked out how this fraught encounter might be written until I realised that it didn’t have to be written at all. In the finished story, no one says anything. They almost do and then think better of it.
But something happens that makes a difference. The lack of open drama is a way to allow a shift to take place in someone’s sensibility. My job is to give it as much nuance and ambiguity as I can and also make it matter, make the arrow hit its mark.
In other words lead the reader on thinking there’s going to be drama then leave them still hanging when the story ends. Oh, and underlining drama is nothing new. Think psychological horror for example.
[…] In spring 1988 I decided to find a small apartment in Barcelona. One day, as I waited to be shown around a possible rental, three women in their 60s joined the queue. We spoke for just two or three minutes, but enough for me to discover they were sisters, they were Catalans, they had come back from living in Argentina for many years, they found prices in Barcelona very high. They finished one another’s sentences.
I waited 30 years to write The Catalan Girls. It is, at 30,000 words, the longest story in my latest collection. I imagined the lives of those three women I had fleetingly encountered. I dreamed up how and why they went to Argentina, how each of them lived there, and then how they came back to Catalonia. I made the middle one lesbian, the youngest dreamy and the eldest bossy. I gave them lovers and husbands. I imagined that the bossy one bossed her two younger sisters into getting the same hairdo as she had before they travelled back to Spain.
Thirty years? Obsessed much? Man, I can’t wait to read 30,000 pages about the eldest sister bossing her other two sisters into getting the same haircut as hers. Oh, the drama!
At the end of the day, what we have here is some pompous writer with TDS who thinks what he writes is soooo important. But this is what the left does. They make up stories or take stories written by others and present them as evidence of fact. The Marvel movie Black Panther is one example. And then there’s The Handmaid’s Tale…
