I’ve just read “And Salome Danced“. Beautifully written story and I thank you for that.
So my question isn’t about the story as much as it is about your process. I write a bit (more all the time) and often find it difficult to translate my thought-feeling into accurate written language. The effort to convey what I mean (as I think, feel, smell, and imagine it) is an ultimate challenge.
I imagine you struggle with this as well? Has it taken some self-discovery, self-examination and maybe an equal amount of willingness to let others know that you think (etc) that way in order to write it down? Are you vulnerable when you write “accurately”?
I think of this because Jo/e Sand seems to say exactly what Mars feels, desires, and experiences in the secret depth of her life. You were able to make it happen.
My experience of reading the story, of feeling Salome be inside Mars was exhilarating â I had to remind myself to breathe when it ended. If I could ever write one sentence that made another feel that way I would be successful.
I am grateful for any insight and willingness you may have to discuss this.
Robin
Hi, Robin. I’m glad you enjoyed the story.
Conveying the particular moment is half the essence of good fiction, in my opinion. So if you’re finding it a challenge, well, join the club (grin). The other half is knowing what moments to convey: in other words, what sequence of moments will best tell the story. But that’s a different discussion: you’ve asked about the process of making the moments truthful, which is a large enough question to be going on with.
Truthful prose, to me, combines physical and emotional/psychological truth. Our culture, our background and our experience affects what we believe about the world, and influences what we notice as we move through our everyday lives. Here’s an example of this that interests me. Another example is that people from groups that experience cultural discrimination or oppression will notice different things about an event or an interaction than mainstream folks.
And what we notice about a situation affects how we respond to it. In fiction it’s important to make these correlations visible to the reader, because that’s how we learn about the characters. For example, it makes no sense to a reader if Billy Joe says, âI like your shirtâ to Bobby Sue, and Bobby Sue hits Billy Joe with a baseball bat â unless we already know something about their relationship, or Bobby Sue’s anguished past, or we see Bobby Sue noticing that Billy Joe has a knife behind his back. Whatever. The important thing is that the particular moments â the sensory details, the internal dialogue, the rhythms of speech or movement â somehow support our understanding of the character and her actions.
One small example of this from Solitaire is in the first section of the book, when Jackal and Mist and Turtle are standing in line at the omniport and Mist tells Jackal that it’s hard to always have to be nice to her, to always have to support her. It’s significant, to me, that Jackal has to have this pointed out to her, and also significant that she is embarrassed by it. Without âexplainingâ the character to the reader, I’m (hopefully) giving you access into a corner of the psychology of the assumption of privilege, and the test of character that occurs when it is pointed out that we enjoy privilege at the expense of people we care about.
I think that good fiction is an accretion of small moments like this. I think one mistake that writers make is to rush these things, or to assume that it’s enough to âexplainâ a character’s actions at the time they are happening. But it’s not enough.
I think there are two kinds of these moments: things the characters notice, and things the writer wants the reader to notice. Sometimes they combine, sometimes they don’t.
I do think it takes awareness to write these moments, but not just self-awareness. I think it takes awareness of others, the commonalities and the differences between us.
In most cultures, and in most of our hearts, we use difference to separate ourselves from others. But I think that for writers, difference needs to become a path to connection. I will step into a core of strangeness in a character that in ‘real’ life would send me off the bus at the next stop, you know? And in order to do that, I have to imagine, and then I have to experience the world in another skin.
To write a sentence that makes someone forget to breathe because they have just seen some aspect of their secret self in my words, I have to spend a lot of my time figuring out why I behave the way I do, and then I have to figure out why others behave the way they do. And the trap here (that writers, including me, fall into all the time), is assuming that I am somehow the reference point against which behavior ought to be measured â that people who don’t behave like me should be expressed as deviating from the norm. This leads to preachy writing and cardboard characters, people who would only âbe normalâ (i.e. âlike meâ) if they were smarter or kinder or whatever. (I’ve talked about this in context of white writers describing the skin color of non-white characters.) This passes for character development in a lot of writing, but I don’t think this is enough either.
When I was studying American Sign Language and Deaf culture, I learned a concept of âDeaf center,â which means that if I really want to understand the language I have to understand where it comes from: I have to do my best to understand Deaf experience not in terms of my hearing background, but in its own terms. I have to take myself out of the center of the universe, and become a witness of the experience that is happening to other people at the center of their universe.
One thing that really helped me with this was a lesson I learned from my mom when I was very young, and my parents were active in the civil rights movement in Florida. She told me that when African-American people described their experience, I should always start by assuming their experience was true for them. It took me until adulthood to understand that what she was saying was not âeveryone tells the truth.â What she was saying is that everyone tells their truth, and it might not be mine. I remember being at prep school and telling upper class white students that our phones had routinely been tapped when I was growing up, and they didn’t believe me, because it had never happened to them or anyone they knew. And rather than admit the world was different for me than it was for them, they asserted that I had a âwrongâ perception of the world.
This makes for frustrating experience, but potentially interesting writing. When characters conflict, worlds are colliding.
I do think that fiction can reveal much about the writer, including some things that might make the writer feel vulnerable or exposed. The thing is, most readers never know what those things are. Many of the moments or perceptions or behaviors or attitudes that characters express in my stories are not mine at all, or at least not as written. No one but me (and often Nicola) knows at what moments in my fiction I am deliberately showing my self, opening my world to the view of the reader. That’s fine with me. Fiction isn’t memoir, even when it’s true.
I’d be interested to know what you and others here in the virtual pub think about all this (from a writing or reading perspective). And if I haven’t answered your question, please let me know.