[Kelley’s note: This post refers to an unpublished story that used to be available on the old website. It isn’t here right now. Maybe one of these days I’ll get it posted… it’s interesting now to me to look at it in light of “Dangerous Space.”]
I read “Shine” earlier this morning and it has stuck with me throughout the day. In trying to determine why, I found myself going back to the story, trying to find those pointed barbs that usually catch my mental attention when I’ve read something good that stays with me. However, this story doesn’t seem to have “points” that are meant to catch the reader (me) as much as it seems like an emotional road that travels from point A to B with a lot of fractional stops in between. There is an emotional movement to the story, starting in the realm of emotional panic (?) of realization towards an ending of acceptance…but then I continue to question myself, could it be an ending that is focused on searching? I loved the movement in the story but am wondering what she would be doing in the next week or the next month. Will she find something in her searching and singing or will she even recognize it should it come her way? (Is she capable of realizing it?) I suppose my question is, if you took this story any further, in what direction do you see it going? Or do you see any direction at all?
I liked it and thanks for posting it.
Christine
I’m glad you liked it. Thanks for letting me know.
“Shine” is the first fiction I wrote after Solitaire, and it reflects my search for the next thing â in writing, in life, in myself. Joanne’s older than Jackal; she’s wrestling not with the complexities of assuming an adult identity, but with the damage to our dreams and sense of self that seems inevitable as we live adult lives. In the two years after “Shine,” I wrote 16,000 words of one novel and more than 20,000 words of another⦠still looking for that next thing. I talked a little over a pint or two about wrestling with these books; and ultimately I had to step away from them because I couldn’t find my way past the pretty writing into something that was both risky and real for me the way that Solitaire was, and “Eye of the Storm” (the most recent story prior to “Shine,” written while I was working on Solitaire).
Walking away from 36,000 finished words (plus many, many more in draft) was not a happy experience. I wondered in public (somewhat indirectly) a year ago if I was even meant to be a novelist, and what I was really thinking was that perhaps I wasn’t meant to be a writer. There was a difference between doing (even doing well) and being that I could see but not touch, much the way Joanne came up against her own reflection in the rain.
And then came screenplays â and I fell in love with the form and thought, Okay, I’m a writer after all, but maybe not a fiction writer. And then I threw myself headfirst into “Dangerous Space,” the new novella for the collection, and it wasâ¦amazing. 25,000 finished words in six weeks and the only reason I stopped was my deadline. Unlike “Shine,” unlike the aborted novels, “Dangerous Space” is a story that makes me excited and nervous and itchy to have people read it. I think some people will find it eyebrow raising. I think some people will hate it a lot. I hope some people will find all the layers in it that I think are there, underneath the in-your-face surface.
When Matt Ruff talks about a writer walking the line of not embarrassing herself (in his blurb for the collection), I think he’s talking at least in part about this story â and no doubt some people will think I have embarrassed myself. And you know what? That’s fine. Because it’s the first fiction I’ve written in years that puts me right out there on the edge of myself as a writer, not because it’s so beautifully stylized, but because it is as transparent, as lacking in ‘style,’ as I could make it. And that, brothers and sisters, is where I want to be right now. I want to be writing pretty words that don’t show. I want you to mainline the story, to feel yourself inside the characters, have the experience of living with them jack right into your system and run away with your brain without you needing to appreciate how clever and articulate and wordcrafty I’ve been.
And now I’m just so in love with writing again that I can’t see straight. Words in my head all the time. It’s just astonishing.
Which means you may not see a story quite like “Shine” from me again, at least not anytime soon. It’s a good story, and there’s a lot of truth in it â it rings clear to me (see my essay with Nicola about writing if you want to know more about what that means) â but it’s a chronicle of a journey, not the journey itself. And right now as a writer I want a more direct experience when I write and when you read. I don’t just want to show you things: I want to put them so far inside you that you have to dig them out with a spoon (and there’s a little taste of “Dangerous Space” for you).
I hope that the sense of ’emotional movement’ you’ve described will always be a part of what I do. And as for your question about Joanne â well, if you have come away from the story wondering what she’ll do, caring about what choice she makes, then it’s your story now to continue as you see fit. I’ve talked before about my belief that once the story is out of my head and in yours, that I as the writer don’t have any particular authority over how you should read it. But if you’d like to know what I think, then here it is: yes to all of it. Yes, it’s acceptance. Yes, it’s searching. It’s Joanne acknowledging that this may be all she ever has of her dreams, so she’d better have it with all the gusto she can. And it’s also Joanne continuing to want the rest. Does the knowledge that she will never be a rock star keep her from being the best rock star she can be? I don’t think so.