Suspending Belief: How I Can Now Enjoy Annie Dillard

I struggle with nonfictional narratives—be they memoir, historical, or informal essays in the vein of David Sedaris or Annie Dillard.  Reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek recently, I was finally able to articulate why: I struggle with the suspension of belief.  If the narrative recounted is supposed to be personal and “true”, then I don’t feel like I can properly connect to it without disturbing it.  In other words, if what Dillard is writing is a factual account, then I can nod, sympathize, say that must have been wonderful or that must have been awful, but I can’t make it my own without feeling like I’m trespassing on someone else’s property.  The same is true when a friend tells me a non-fictional story or I read a blog about someone’s day—I care, engage, but the story is never mine.  I never laugh at the non-fictional butt of jokes or sympathize with the non-fictional villain the way I would were they fictional.  I suspend judgment.  I let words be as literal as possible.  I pretend to see authorial intention.  In fact, my best friends and I are quick to turn out non-fictional stories into a series of what-ifs and imaginary alternatives.  That’s how we engage.  That’s how we connect. 

Unless it’s in a conversation about craft, I never want to know what is “non-fictional” about a piece.  Leave it out.  All of this is to say I felt great relief when a friend told me that Pilgrim is largely concocted and exaggerated and I therefore have a green light to read it as fiction—thank God!  No more need to suspend belief.

Elizabeth Hand, Errantry: Strange Stories

A: Elizabeth Hand 
B: Errantry: Strange Stories
P: Small Beer Press, 2012

I'm not sure what to take from the stories in this collection.  The writing was consistently vivid and strong.  The stories seemed to fall somewhere between a highly sensual and descriptive fairy tale like Oscar Wilde's and more plot-driven fare.  Generally speaking, the tensions felt unresolved or, even, forced.  The first story was by far the best, in my opinion.  Though the image that will linger with me is a description of a fantastical creature in "Hungerford Bridge," from which you can hear the author read by clicking right here.

"Break Me In and Out" by Kindall Gray

A: Kindall Gray

T: “Break Me In and Out”

B: One Story, Issue No. 174, Jan. 23, 2013

Q:  This is a study of the plot formula Gray so expertly employs, what Janet Burroway calls the “story form as a check mark” (Writing Fiction, 6^th edition, 2002, p. 40).  There’s a whole level of abstract desire, excellent dialogue, rendering, and plot complications around secondary characters in Gray’s story that I haven’t touched on in this brief breakdown of the story structure. 

“Break Me In and Out” by Kindall Gray is a model short story for several concepts teachers tried to instill in me during my intro to fiction workshops.  First, as my notes to one workshop have it, “The protagonist’s desires drive the plot.”  In the first three pages of Gray’s story we learn that the narrator has a chance to see her favorite animal, the monitor lizard and that she has a bike that she likes and a lock that was her only birthday gift the previous year.  The desire to see the monitor lizard is the main journey the protagonist undertakes and it’s introduced by the second paragraph.  The intensity of the desire is ratcheted up immediately: she’s been wanting this for over a year, it’s her favorite animal, she knows everything about them (showing, not telling, that she is somewhat obsessed with monitor lizards).

The other side to “the character’s desires drive the plot” is the obstacles that they have to overcome in order to achieve their desires.  The main obstacle introduced in the first few paragraphs of “Break Me In and Out” is poverty.  The other, related obstacle hinted at in the first section and developed throughout is the negligence of the mother.

Another teacher once said that a story needs a Thing, and another thing.  The Thing in this case is the desire to see the monitor lizard.  The other thing in Gray’s story is the protagonist’s neighbor, Edilio.  He’s the subplot, if you will, and he’s introduced on the third page.  Gray does an excellent job of using dialogue and in-scene interaction to demonstrate the bond between Edilio and the protagonist, but I won’t dwell on that here.

The desire and the obstacles are ratcheted up, until finally the mother agrees to take the protagonist to see the monitor lizard if she will give up seeing Edilio.  It’s a model example of merging subplots, on the one hand, and the character having to give up something meaningful in order to achieve her goal, on the other hand. 

Using F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” as an example, my first fiction instructor once said that it is very effective to give your character what she desires then take it away.  That’s precisely what happens in “Break Me In and Out.”  The mom promises to take the protagonist and then fails to follow through on her promise.

The ratcheting up of the stakes of seeing the monitor lizard, the play of desire and obstacles, and tensions in the subplot (which I’m neglecting) continues for 17 pages.  On page 18, everything is taken away from the protagonist, all is lost, and we have a model crisis.  The mom has forgotten to take her to see the lizard, her bike and lock have been stolen, and Edilio is not at home.  My first instructor called this moment, the “all is lost” moment in a story.  All is lost indeed.

The story continues for 4 more pages, which are a satisfying bit of “unknotting” and the character obtains her epiphany (or anti-epiphany, I’m not sure).  The abstract meaning of the lost objects, and the monitor lizard, are developed.  It’s an ending that reminded me of Joyce’s “Araby,” if that means anything to you.  It’s a model ending.

P is for Postscript: There’s an interview with Kindall Gray at One Story, here’s the link, that’s fascinating to me for two reasons.  The first is that Karen Friedman, the interviewer, describes the “heart of the story” as Edilio’s journey—I see what she means, but it’s something I completely neglected in my unpacking of the plot structure.  It makes me wonder about the relationship between a “heart of the story” and a story’s structure in general.  The second is that in response to a question about the most challenging aspect of writing the story, Gray said that the “structure was very difficult.  I found it hard to organize the events in the story in a way that increased tension and suspense but didn’t feel gimmicky.”  I think she succeeded in a model way.  Furthermore, she also ends the interview by saying that the best bit of writing advice she received was that “plot is only part of the equation.”  Indeed, and perhaps not even the equation’s heart.  

"The Thing Itself" by Alethea Black

A: Alethea Black

S: “The Thing Itself”

B: I Knew You’d Be Lovely, Broadway Paperbacks, 2011

T: foreshadowing

“Foreshadowing” is a somewhat mystical storytelling device.  It’s hard to distinguish from an organic series of events.  This mysticism is implicit in the name: the shadow of things to come.  So I don’t find it surprising that the driving premise behind Black’s story, “The Thing Itself,” that plays so happily with foreshadowing, is somewhat mystical: the main character can sense things happening before they do.  The tension in the story arises when the main character senses something life-changing about to happen.  Both the main character and we readers are on tenterhooks waiting for the axe to fall.  Towards the end of the story, when everything is going pretty well for the protagonist, he walks home drunk.  I groaned while reading: he’ll be hit by a car.  Then I turned the page and read, “Then it hit him” (84).  But it was an idea, not a car.  On that walk home he gets hit by a Pepsi bottle, people wave at him and yell at him (warning him?), he stares obliviously around at the moon while things “whizz” by.  In other words: everything points to him getting hit by a car, that’s where the shadow falls.  As readers we also expect this because so many works follow a rule of hitting characters at their highest and saving them at their lowest.  Spoiler (seriously, if you don’t want to know the ending, stop reading now): then Black surprises us by defying expectations and letting the shadow fall elsewhere.    

Stories within Stories: Zadie Smith and Kyle Minor

TS. “The Embassy of Cambodia” by Zadie Smith, found in New Yorker, Feb. 11 & 18, 2013

TS. “Seven Stories about Kenel of Koulèv-Ville” by Kyle Minor, found in The Iowa Review,  Vol. 42, No. 3, Winter 2012/13

Both of these stories employ numbers to break up the narrative sequence.  In Smith’s case, it allows for a series of disconnected brief scenes.  Settings, characters, and images repeat, so it’s not as though the scenes are entirely disconnected, but rather the “flow” of the plot and conventional development of tension is replaced by repetition with difference.  In fact, if anything, this method allows for more connection than a conventional narrative, rather than less.  For Minor, as the title implies, the seven stories are seven stories, which means that seven “short shorts” involving the same characters, settings, tone, and some shared imagery, combine together to create the one complete short story—though in Minor’s case the seven sections are themselves clearly stories with the basic beginnings, middles, and ends.      

2 kinds of weird: "Flesh & Blood" by Helen Phillips and "Reeling for the Empire" by Karen Russell

2 kinds of weird. 

S&A: “Flesh & Blood” by Helen Phillips

S&A: “Reeling for the Empire” by Karen Russell

B: Tin House,Issue #54/Winter Reading (Vol. 14, No. 2, Winter 2012)

Reading these stories in the same journal made me reflect on the different types of “weird” (AKA, slipstream, magical realism, absurdist, fabulist, fantastical) story-telling styles. 

Helen Phillips’s story starts with a concept and then runs with it.  There’s no real plot, no character development, or conflict—just one person dealing with new, bizarre circumstances.  It feels rather like an exercise to me, rather than a finished story.  In Helen’s piece, the main character cannot see flesh, just everything under it.  It’s treated so literally, without any extraordinary circumstances, so it never seems like a symbolic or allegorical situation, just the exploration of a “what if”.

The conceptual framework of Russell’s story is every bit as bizarre as Phillips’s, if not more so.  Young women emit silk through their bodies and die if it’s not released.  Some factory owner capitalizes on it.  The color of the silk, the pain/pleasure of releasing it, the labor conditions and recruitment situations, and the development of characters beyond the protagonist, along with multiple layers of conflict (internal, between co-workers, against the boss), make this story at once highly symbolic, highly fantastical, and largely plot-driven.  Like Phillips’s story, “Reeling for the Empire” has a cool, unusual concept, but unlike her story the concept is balanced out by the features of story-telling one would expect from a realist piece (in sum: character-driven plot).