Time Dimension, Backstory and Keeping Stories Short

We recently had two short story manuscripts in my Fiction Craft Workshop that suffered from a problem I shall call "lack of time dimension." In manuscripts like this, the characters seem to enter the story and their scenes as newly hatched as baby chicks, appearing to have no memory of what has happened before in their lives, and with no expectations about what is coming. Time--both past and future--seems to exert no pressure upon them. As a result, these characters tend to come across as simpletons, or "Rain Man" types. They are able to react physically to the circumstances they find themselves in--sort of like a planarian worm from ninth grade science class. But they seem unable to anticipate things, or to remember what has happened five minutes ago. It sounds like I'm trying to be funny here, but I'm not. A shocking number of the manuscripts that I see in my workshops suffer from some form of this.

Obviously, this is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. We want to feel as if our characters are "real," which means giving them an immediate as well as a historical past, and an ability to imagine the future. However, often the solution can be worse than the problem if solving it means shoveling into the story an enormous load of backstory or summary narration, especially near the opening. This can easily bog a story down, and greatly increase its length.

What is interesting to me is that stories with very little backstory or grounding narration often can work just fine--if the depiction of character on the page is strong enough, and if the pressures of the past can still be strongly felt. A short story doesn't need to have tons of backstory in order to function. However, we need to feel the "time dimension" of the story--which is to say the pressures of the character's life building up from the past, and with the possibility of future consequence.

Let's take a look at a couple of successful examples from a master of the short story form, Tobias Wolff, from his collection, The Night in Question. There are two especially wonderful very short stories in this collection--"Powder" and "Bullet in the Brain," both of which illustrate the point I'm trying to make here. In "Powder," the backstory is minimal throughout. We get just brief chunk of it at the story's opening. Here it is:

Just before Christmas my father took me skiing at Mount Baker. He'd had to fight for the privilege of my company, because my mother was still angry with him for sneaking me into a nightclub during his last visit, to see Thelonious Monk.//He wouldn't give up. He promised, hand on heart, to take good care of me and have me home for dinner on Christmas Eve, and she relented.

And that's it. A small number of words, but note that we already have plenty of time dimension working--plenty of pressure coming at these characters from out of the past: Mom is already mad, dad is on probation, and he had better get the kid home in time for Christmas.

We also have lots of strong character active on the page right from the beginning. The kid who is telling the story is a cautious worrier type and his dad is the polar opposite--the kind of guy who will break the rules to catch Thelonious Monk. As the present action of the story unfolds, the father keeps the two of them skiing for too long while the weather worsens, risking not getting the boy home in time for Christmas. The boy frets. By the time the pair starts back, the mountain road is closed and the police have erected a barricade. Again, the past exerts its pressure upon them: The boy says that they should have left earlier. The father agrees. "She won't forgive me," he says, meaning the mother. "Do you understand? Never." The boy replies:

"I guess," I said, but no guesswork was required; she wouldn't forgive him.

I won't give away the ending of the story. Let's just say that the father takes heroic measures to get the boy home for Christmas, and the boy learns something in the process. The entire story runs just five pages in my paperback edition of The Night in Question, but it feels as full and complete as many longer stories I can think of.

The same is true of "Bullet in the Brain," where we meet Anders, a book critic who is late getting to the bank, right before a bank robbery commences. Again, the story opens with a minimal chunk of backstory, but with lots of character active on the page and plenty of pressure from the past in evidence. Here is Wolff's brief paragraph of grounding narration at the opening of the story:

Anders couldn't get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put in him a murderous temper. He was never in the best of tempers anyway. Anders--a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed.

Other than this brief history, Anders exists very much in the present moment of the story, as an irrepressible critic who cannot refrain from critiquing everything in his line of sight, including the bank robbery in progress. This has the effect of antagonizing the bank robbers, who eventually shoot him. Anders comes off as rather simple or foolish, and as having very little understanding of his fellow human beings, but he jumps off the page as a character who is very much himself and who is unable to resist his own worse impulses and the pressure of his past as a "savage critic."

Interestingly, another somewhat larger chunk of backstory does come into "Bullet in the Brain," but only at the very end of the story. As the bullet penetrates Anders' skull, time expands and Anders' life "flashes before his eyes," and we get an itemization of all of the things Anders does NOT remember about his past life, until we are taken back to a single original memory of a moment he DOES remember--the moment that has shaped his life. That is the moment Anders fell in love with language--back when he was a boy playing baseball, and he heard another boy speak in the vernacular of the game.

This second chunk of backstory comes in only near the very end of the story, and only as demanded by the action of the story. This is an important point to emphasize. Often my students feel that they need to get all of their narration in at the beginning of a story, as it is commencing. However, the most masterful short story writers, like Wolff, show us that backstory and grounding narration should be doled out more sparingly, as the story goes along--and only as it is required by the present action.

For anyone who is struggling with this issue, I highly recommend reading all of The Night in Question. Wolff is a master of economy, and of keeping short stories short without letting them lose steam. Though often quite brief, his stories always feel robust and full of consequence--through the strong deployment of character and a full command of time dimension.

When Lightning Strikes

The other morning I was standing in the shower, water running between my eyes, when suddenly it happened: The right words arrived. I had been trying to write something, you see, and the words just hadn't been coming. Then, suddenly, there they were. The right tone, the perfect syntax, and a fluency of expression that I previously had been lacking. There was only one problem. I was standing in the shower. I shut off the water, stepped out of our ancient ceramic tub, swiftly wrapped myself in a striped beach towel, and left large splattery puddles on the hardwoods all the way down the hall to my office, where I stood dripping all over the paperwork on my desk while I jotted my captured prose on a legal pad in my illegible scrawl.

Oh, why couldn't I have waited? Well, if you are a writer then you already know the answer. If I didn't take the words down there and then, it was very likely that I would never get them back, at least not in that perfect combination.

The trouble, as I see it, is the human brain. We seem to be conscious of only about ten percent of what goes on in our own minds, and the writing seems to come from somewhere in the other ninety percent, singing up out of the depths of our gray matter almost unbidden, often when we least expect it. I have heard other writers refer to this as "taking dictation from the muse," and that's certainly how I experience it. Writers, of course, have long worried about the strangeness of this experience, of the writing coming from somewhere else, from somewhere outside the conscious mind, or even from "the muse." Shakespeare praised his "tenth Muse" in Sonnet 38, relinquishing any credit for his own words, saying, "For who's so dumb that cannot write to thee/When thou thyself dost give invention light."

But you have to catch the words when they come.

And so, like countless other writers who are suddenly inspired, I have found myself abruptly scrawling things on envelopes I was trying to address, or on the backs of shopping lists. Once I found myself scratching the back of a sheaf of birch bark with a sharp stick while I was out in the woods walking the dogs. (I had an uncle who showed me how to do this when I was a kid, along with how to scrape chewing gum off a certain kind of tree--which I don't recommend, by the way. It tasted rather nasty.)

Now, all of this is not to say that I don't sit down to write on a daily basis, to work on the things I mean to write, at home or in a coffee shop--Certainly I do. And that's usually the only way to get started. And frequently I get more out of myself in my daily writing stints than I had expected. I sit down just to "work for ten minutes," and find myself getting up from my desk two hours later. But I have to say that the real meat, the good stuff, the inspiration, often comes upon me at odd times, later in the day, or in the middle of the night, or in the shower. Or driving.

Or driving, dear lord.

Okay, can we talk for a minute here about what reckless drivers writers are? A young woman in my fiction workshop confessed this week to hitting a traffic barrel while taking notes. "No people yet," she said with a nervous chuckle. I laughed along with her, and it was the guilty laughter of conspiring criminals. I personally haven't hit anyone yet either, or actually run off the road, or hit a bridge abutment, but I can't tell you how many times I've raced down the road doing fifty or sixty while writing something on the steering wheel cap. Please don't tell the Department of Motor Vehicles. I don't do this with anyone else in the car--They'd think I was crazy. And they talk about kids text messaging while driving! Those kids have got nothing on most of the writers I know.

Lately, though, I have decided to turn over a new leaf. And technology has come to my rescue. My new iPhone has an app that allows me to punch the touchscreen and dictate a brief message to myself. So I'm trying to do that in the car instead of actually writing, since it's much safer. The shower, though, is still a big problem. You can't use electronic devices in the shower. I'd love to hear from other writers who have stories like this, and if anyone has solved the shower issue. Something about all that hot water really seems to get the words flowing. In closing, here for inspiration, is Shakespeare's wonderful Sonnet 38 in its entirety:

How can my Muse want subject to invent,

While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse

Thine own sweet argument, too excellent

For every vulgar paper to rehearse?

O, give theyself the thanks, if aught in me

Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;

For who's so dumb that cannot write to thee,

When thou thyself dost give invention light?

Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth

Than those old nine which rhymers invocate;

And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth

Eternal numbers to outlive long date.

If my slight Muse do please these curious days,

The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.

First or Third?--And How To Decide

In my teaching I have found that fiction writers often have trouble deciding whether to use the first person or the third person. This is especially the case when the material is autobiographical in nature. I usually find that a writer simply uses "whatever feels most comfortable," in terms of viewpoint, and this is not always the right choice. In my Fiction Craft Workshop this fall, for example, we have discovered at least two writers who were clearly using the wrong point of view, though it "felt right" to them. I say "clearly" because when these writers switched from first to third, or vice versa, the writing showed a significant improvement that the whole class could see.

This is not the first time that I have seen this happen in my workshops. So, what factors should a writer consider in deciding between first and third?

I think that many fiction writers default to the third person because this is how most mainstream and commercial fiction is written, including most mystery novels, thrillers, romances and historical fictions. Why is this the case? Well, with the third person you have an external narrator who can present a more objective/dramatic view. Great sweeps of history can be summarized, multiple characters can easily be seen acting and speaking from the outside, and the all-knowing narrator can describe and comment on the drama yet still move in to hear the characters' innermost thoughts. The third person is, in short, a more powerful way to write than the first person, where we are trapped inside the head of a single individual.

We also tend to believe, within limits, what the third person narrator tells us. The effect is that of an eavesdropper. The narrator is telling us about listening in on another character, and so we tend to believe what the narrator says. (Whereas in the first person when the narrator/character is making the case for him or herself, we tend to be more skeptical.)

So why use the first person at all?

Well, for one thing, the first person tends to solve a big problem that newer writers often have writing in the third person--namely, distance. Newer writers frequently have trouble backing off from their characters and seeing them from the outside, and so they tend to write exclusively "inside the head" of their main character. This is especially a problem, as I have noted, with autobiographical fiction where the writer identifies strongly with the main character. The effect, in third person, is that of looking from the outside, but looking only with laser-like focus at the inside of a single character. This creates a very claustrophobic feeling for the reader in the third person. If the writer switches to the first person, we are still inside the main character's head, but at least we are looking outward, at the fictional world, and the distance/claustrophobia problem is solved. This, by the way, is why you will note that many debut novels are written in the first person.

Another major reason to use the first person, instead of third, is tonal. Often when a writer has an ironical or satiric voice going, it can sound in the third person as if the narrator is making fun of the characters, and particularly of the main character. This strikes the ear of the reader as "wrong"--either because it seems like the narrator is failing to be impartial, or because it makes the reader ask, Who is this narrator who has all of these unfair opinions? There are a few writers, like Jonathan Franzen who can pull off a snarky third person narrator, but he is not for everyone, and most writers struggle with this. Again, though, putting an ironic voice into the first person often solves the trouble. See my related post on ironic tone in third person.

There are also certain kinds of narrative voices that are just naturally better in the first person. Unreliable or unsympathetic characters, such as Humbert Humbert in Lolita, are much better in first person because they allow readers to withhold judgment, which wouldn't be possible in the third person. A deep retrospective viewpoint is also often better in the first person, such as that in Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, and in most memoirs, where the main character is looking back over a long life and trying to make sense of what happened. Often these voices can be very reliable despite being in first person.

So which to use? Well, one thing I tell my students is that they don't have to "reinvent the wheel." There are many fine literary precursors that can help us to make an informed decision. So, if you have a morally questionable character trying to flim-flam his way into excusing his own behavior, like Humbert Humbert, you probably want to look at the first person. And if you have an elderly character looking back over a long life, you may at least want to try the deep retrospective "memoir mode" of first person. However, if you are writing a Tom Clancy-like thriller or other such commercial fiction, you are probably going to want to choose third and be prepared to move swiftly from character to character, just to stay within the bounds of your genre. And while there are exceptions, historical novels are usually written in the third person simply because it's hard to capture the sweep and scope of history without invoking the power of the third person narrator.

But what if you don't fall into one of these well-traveled paths? You are writing an autobiographical novel, and you are in a quandary. You like the third person because it gives you some distance from yourself, but first person feels more "authentic" to your experience. Well, the main thing--as with the students in my fall workshop--is not simply to "trust" what feels "comfortable." While this may be the way to go when you are first composing, your later drafts may need to migrate to a different point of view. If you aren't sure, you should probably try out both first person and third person for a chapter or two, and then show both writing samples to readers you trust. In my experience, good readers are likely to have a definite preference one way or the other.

I would love to get comments from other writers on their experience switching between first and third.

Kim's Craft Blog Has a Birthday!

That first post still shows up on my Blogger dashboard, with the date of 10/16/08. Exactly one year ago this past Friday, the day I began writing Kim's Craft Blog. It's hard to remember exactly what was going through my mind at that point. What did I think I was doing? I remember having the urge to write about the issues that were coming up in my fall writing workshops. And also feeling rather desperate to join the digital age, which seemed to be doing its best to leave me behind. I also think that I had some rather strange ideas about blogging before I actually started doing it, many of them quite silly and contradictory. With half my mind I would worry--feeling humiliated in advance--that nobody but my husband and best friends will ever read this, while the other half of my brain was imagining sponsors showering gifts upon my crystalline prose before I had penned a single post.

The actual experience of blogging has of course turned out to be quite different from anything I possibly could have imagined, and I feel grateful to have been able to experience it "from the inside." For one thing, blogging is a more communal activity than I otherwise would have understood--where the blogs and writers covering a given area have a constant conversation going on with each other, through reading each others' posts, commenting, and following unfolding events via Twitter and other social media outlets. Once you begin participating in this exchange of information, you very much have the sense of being caught up in a lively, fast-moving river of discussion, opinion and instant reaction, and I have found this activity to be quite addicting. I have to remind myself that I don't need to be participating at every moment. That it's okay just to "check in" from time to time and see what's going on.

It's funny looking back at that first post, and to see how determinedly I was still addressing it to the students in my fall classes. You can see that I didn't yet have the confidence just to write to whoever might be reading online. I couldn't imagine that there really would be other breathing humans out there. Over the course of the past year I have discovered that there are indeed lots of other writers out there, many of them with their own blogs, and that, yes, there is an audience for a blog like this one. I rather belatedly came to understand the art of "commenting"--which I learned is a reciprocal sport. You are more likely to get comments on your blog if you have already been commenting on the blogs of others, and have been participating meaningfully in the conversation.

Somewhere along the way, I got far too busy and distracted with blogging to worry about trying to make it pay. While I certainly haven't been opposed to making money from this blog in principle, I have also found that I didn't want to compromise my opinions about the books I was discussing by accepting freebies, or to clutter up the aesthetic of my beach photographs with advertisements. Interestingly, the new FTC Rules are actually forcing me to revisit this issue by making me consider whom I link to and what my "disclosures" ought to say. Do I declare myself entirely nonprofit and influence-free? Or should I begin looking at possible sources of funding, such as Google Ads, donations, or becoming an affiliate for an online bookstore like Amazon? By December 1 when the new rules take effect, I suppose I shall have to decide. In a funny way, it feels like this blog is "growing up." Well, happy birthday, dear blog. I will be interested to see what the future holds.

iPhone: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mall (And Why Writers Need to Worry About The New Generation of Smart Phones)

My sole task last Wednesday morning was to buy myself a pair of pants at the mall. I generally avoid malls because they tend to give me a rash. However, I am also five-feet-two-inches tall soaking wet, and I was in need of some new jeans. And there was a store at a mall half-an-hour away from my house that was advertising the jeans I like in petite sizes. And so I decided to venture out in search of pants, taking along my new iPhone with me.

I am hesitant to mention the importance that my iPhone took on during this excursion out--Because even though I am one of the last people I know to get a smart phone, there are still those in whom the mere mention that I have a new iPhone excites resentment. I'm not showing off, though, really I'm not. When I got my new iPhone I only intended to enter the 21st century. It seemed, though, that I had entered something like the 23rd century. Here's how my day went:

I got in my car, fastened my seatbelt, and adjusted my visor. Now, which route should I take to the mall? My iPhone beckoned from the passenger seat beside me, where it sat tethered to the cigarette lighter because I had forgotten to recharge it. (They don't tell you that these smarties are always running out of juice). I hesitated. Go ahead, my iPhone said, ask me. Okay, I thought. Why not? I was rather pleased when the maps application suggested a path that was actually a bit shorter and more traffic-free than the one I'd had in mind. Good boy, I told the phone, patting it like a dog on a leash.

I made my way to the mall, found a parking space, and soon was in the store shopping for pants. Unfortunately the store was already out of petite jeans in the two colors I wanted. This is the trouble of needing a small size--stores just don't order very many. I tried on the same jeans in a different (and hideous) shade, and they fit perfectly. I wondered if the mother-company still had them in stock online in the nicer washes. Normally I would have asked the store clerk to check, but at this point I was sitting in the curtained dressing room, half-clothed and gazing at my bare legs which looked horribly white and blotchy under the mall lights. I didn't want to have to shout out, in that quavering dressing-room voice, "Hello? Is anybody out there?" Yoo-hoo, said my iPhone. I'm right over here, in your purse. We can figure this out. I opened the Safari app and Googled up the store's website. There they were. The very jeans I wanted, in the right size and colors. In stock. I dressed and asked the store clerk to order the jeans for me, since the website had said the store could arrange for free shipping.

As I stood by the register, holding out my credit card to pay for my new pants, I remember feeling vaguely distracted. This was all reminding me of something. It was reminding me of another small portable book that had all sorts of calm helpful instructions at just the right moment, when you needed them. That book had on its cover the words "Don't Panic." My iPhone was reminding me of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Only instead of decoding bad Vogon poetry, my iPhone had the ability to decode contemporary life, assisting me in finding things, helping explain the unfamiliar, and generally nudging me along. It felt as if I had entered a futuristic universe where I no longer needed to stumble about like a clueless boob, but where every quandary and question could immediately be answered. (Apparently I have not been the only one to have noticed this. There are now several Hitchhiker's Guide iPhone apps, as well as display wallpaper that says "Don't Panic.") In any event, I realized that Adams' sci-fi guidebook was now quite real, and was humming in my purse.

So isn't this a good thing? And what does all of this have to do with writing--This is, after all, a creative writing blog.

Well, it seems to me that, by providing a new and completely portable computer interface between us and our world, these smart phones are doing something unprecedented in human history--they are changing the way we perceive life in a very significant way. We poets and writers have always been concerned with how we perceive our world at the nerve endings. For no matter how futuristic we become, we still live in our bodies. And we writers still must reach our readers at the level of the senses. And so we must render the things that happen in our lives and in our writing at a physical level. So it is no small thing to have a major change in how the world comes at us.

To see how the iPhone has changed things, let's look at the very next thing that I did on Wednesday. After buying my jeans, I looked for a place to have lunch. "I have an app for that!" shouted my iPhone. And with a few finger dabs and swipes, I was reminded that there was a fine seafood restaurant just at the other side of the mall that I had forgotten about. Compare this to what I normally would have done--or, I should say, would have done before the advent of the iPhone. I would probably have drifted cluelessly towards one of the new chain restaurants that had opened at the mall since my last visit, gazing thoughtfully at the menus out front or at the other clientele, and trying to gauge whether the food was likely to be edible. Or I might have stumbled about the food court, sniffing for something that smelled good to me. Today, instead, I marched with purpose towards what I knew would be fresh oysters fried to perfection in canola oil. Lovely, right? Still, I marched towards this appetizing meal with a feeling of reservation growing in my heart.

There was something wrong with all of this, wasn't there? For no matter how gorgeous the oysters turned out to be, and they were sure to be very nice, I was still striding with purpose towards what I already knew. Towards a meal I had eaten before, and already knew the taste of. I was missing out on the possibility of novelty, of strangeness. And wasn't I losing out as well on a whole set of human experiences? Sure, I had probably negotiated my way around lots of frustrations and setbacks that day using my iPhone. But wasn't there also something to be said for getting lost, or stuck in traffic now and then? Or for wandering past restaurants, sniffing for the scent of fresh garlic? Isn't there something wonderfully vulnerable and erotic about sitting half-clothed in a curtained dressing room and calling out in a shy voice to a complete stranger for help?

It is the very act of navigating our world that creates our perceptions of it, and that makes life new and fresh and artful. The trouble with the iPhone and the other smart phones is that they feed us a world laden with an additional layer of interpretation. Life comes at us even more predigested than usual, so that we already know what's there before we get it. Everything is yet another layer removed from our senses, and from true art. The restaurant we already know, instead of the one that we discover. The new is always a risk, and is often fraught with confusion and disappointment--and that is certainly the case with the food court at the mall--But there is also fresh experience out there, that can reach us directly at the level of our senses. And we need to not let all of these new layers of technology isolate us from the visceral, the serendipitous, and, yes, even the awful. Otherwise, what would we write about?

What Is Omniscience (In Fiction Writing)?

The word "omniscience" is one of those terms of art that gets thrown around a lot in writing classes, with very little understanding. Since we are doing point of view this week in my Fiction Craft Workshop at the Cambridge Center, I thought I would write a post on how this word is used in writing workshops, and what it means. Generally speaking, "omniscience" refers to what the "narrator" or "speaker" knows in a third person story, particularly with respect to what's going on in the characters' heads. So that a "fully omniscient" narrator would be able to enter the thoughts and viewpoints of all of the characters in the story. A "limited omniscient" narrator would have access to the thoughts and viewpoint of only the main character.

This is where most craft manuals leave off, and if that's all there was to it, things would be easy and understandable. However, when writing fiction, we rarely work with either completely "full omniscience" or totally "limited omniscience," and our narrators tend, rather, to move in and out of character viewpoints. To take an example, in Empire Falls, Richard Russo employs what we think of as "a fully omniscient narrator" in that he enters the minds of multiple characters, and summarizes a great deal of information about them. However, at any given point in the novel, the narrator often moves up close into the viewpoint of a particular character, generally favoring a single character viewpoint within each scene, so that the viewpoint within any scene tends to feel "limited," even if the viewpoint is omniscient in the work as a whole. So, in Empire Falls, we tend to get more of Miles Roby, the main character, if he's in a scene, rather than the other characters. Or more of the interior life of Miles' daughter, Tick, if she's in a scene, rather than that of, say, her teachers or her friends. This being the case, the term "omniscient" often comes to refer to the range of motion of a particular narrator. Can the narrator visit the interior lives of many characters, or just one? Can the narrator see the past as well as the present? Can the narrator look into the future?

The term "omniscient" is also often bandied about to mean that there is present in the story a narrator who can report things like "it was very hot," without reference to a character viewpoint. Hemingway famously does this in his short story "Hills Like White Elephants," which is considered an "ominiscient" story even though the narrator of that story barely brushes through the character viewpoints at all. "Hills" is also said to be "omniscient" because of the narrator's strongly neutral and uninvolved (some would say heartless) tone. The narrator appears to have little familiarity with the characters, referring to them only as "the American" and "the girl," and observes them at a reserved distance, almost as if they were in a movie, and conveying little emotion or attitude about the melodramatic situation they find themselves in. (The girl apparently is pregnant, and the man wants her to have an abortion.) So, we can see that there can also be tonal and distance elements to a discussion of omniscience.

We writing teachers often use "Hills Like White Elephants," usually towards the beginning of the semester, simply to show our students that when writing fiction it is possible to see our characters both from the inside and the outside, and that they have the option of getting out of their characters' heads. Most aspiring writers tend to use the third person in a very close way, writing from a limited perspective inside their main character's viewpoint, becoming trapped in the main character's head and knowing only what the main character knows. This gives the writing a very claustrophobic feel. And part of solving this problem lies in getting these writers to back up and see the world from a broader "narrator's perspective," and to describe their characters from the outside as well as the inside.

Confused? Don't be. The thing to understand is that "omniscience" is a very squishy term, as used in writing classes and workshops, and comprehends many related concepts, such as distance and tone. In the end, omniscience is really about establishing the narrator as a separate presence in the story, that of the story teller or speaker, with its own attitude, voice and tone. Speaking of Richard Russo--Russo has written a wonderful essay on the merits of omniscience that came out of a lecture he gave at Warren Wilson in the winter of 1990, called "In Defense of Omniscience." You can find Russo's essay in the wonderful fiction craft anthology Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life (U. Mich 2001, Baxter & Turchi, eds). Here is an excerpt, where Russo discusses the earmarks of omniscient narration:

Omniscient narration, then (at least full-blown omniscience), exhibits the following traits. It looks at characters from the outside but can "see" inside, directly into thoughts and feelings. It transcends time and space. The omniscient narrator can be in as many places as he or she needs to be and possesses knowledge of all moments--past, present, and future--and is free to reveal it. . .. And, finally, there is always a narrator, a voice that embodies a clearly defined attitude, an authorial pose, a consistent and recognizable way of seeing and understanding.

Interview With Novelist Margot Livesey-The House on Fortune Street

Kim's Craft Blog is delighted today to present an interview with novelist Margot Livesey. Livesey's latest, The House on Fortune Street, is a feat of fiction pyrotechnics, smoothly weaving four character viewpoints, two male and two female, into a tightly-knit page-turner revealing deep secrets over many years. Our interview delves into the writing craft involved:

Kim: Welcome, Margot. I thought The House on Fortune Street an extraordinary piece of work, balancing perfectly as it does four distinct character viewpoints, two of them male, one in first person. I wondered if you could comment on the challenges of writing a multiple viewpoint novel, and how you kept one character from taking over (which is what usually happens with my students who try this).

Margot Livesey: I actually found it harder to balance the points of view in my last novel than I did in this one. In Banishing Verona I went back and forth between two main characters and I was always worried that they weren't equally compelling and interesting. But in The House on Fortune Street I let each character have his or her say, tell his or her story, before I moved on to the next one. That said when I got to the end of the second section, which is written from the point of view of Cameron, I realized that the bar was quite high. I hoped there was enough mystery surrounding his daughter, Dara, to make the reader keep turning the pages.

Kim: The first two character viewpoints were written from a male perspective, and you made it look easy. However, writing across gender lines is something I have struggled with in my own writing, and I know how hard it is. Do you have any advice for female writers writing from a male perspective, or vice versa?

Margot Livesey: Crossing gender lines is tricky. Of course part of the trouble is that readers unthinkingly assume that characters, especially first person narrators, share the gender of their authors. Then too, and I think this is especially true of women writing about men, readers are very quick to second guess us. Would a man/woman really think/feel that, they ask, when we're clearly crossing over? My advice is to try to establish the gender as early as possible, to make sure other characters respond to him/her appropriately and, if you are having your character acting or feeling in a way that contradicts gender stereotypes, perhaps find a way to comment on it. Mark knew that his love of sewing was unusual. Harriet had rebuilt the engine of her car three times and was used to being teased about her fuchsia nail polish.

Kim: I noticed that, although most of the book was written in third person, you switched to first person for Cameron, the most unsympathetic of your characters--the one who, like Lewis Carroll, expresses his yearning for young girls through photography. Could you talk about why you made this choice, and what first person allowed, in terms of flexibility, that third person might not have.

Margot Livesey: I worried that readers might leap to judge Cameron, and I thought that this would be less likely to happen if he addressed the reader in the first person; if he was telling us all the bad things he'd done and judging himself quite harshly. I love writing in the third person - I think it's a wonderfully flexible point of view - but because what Cameron does is so morally questionable I found that writing in the first person was the only way I could show certain key emotional moments in his life without immediately condemning them.

Kim: Another thing you say in your liner notes is that the structure of The House on Fortune Street has to do with the revealing of hidden motivations over decades. Could you talk about that and whether you think this is a common narrative strategy for novelists.

Margot Livesey: I don't know if I can speak for the ambitions of other novelists but I do know that I wanted to write a story that happens over many years--where the past keeps bobbing up in the present--and at the same time I didn't want to write a long novel. Two dear friends, Andrea Barrett and Joan Silber, are both masters of narrative summary and I've learned a lot over the years from reading their work. They can each cover a decade in a single, fascinating paragraph. I've tried to follow their example.

I was also very interested in having the reader be wrong, or at least make the wrong assumptions, and then change her mind. So I hoped that most readers would cast Abigail as the bad, pretty friend in the first half of the book and then, when they get to her section, realize that matters are much more complicated. Maybe it's part of getting older that so many of the stories going on in my own life keep changing as new information shows up. I wanted to mirror that process in a novel but still tell a complete story.

Margot Livesey's acclaimed novels include Eva Moves the Furniture and Banishing Verona. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. Born in Scotland, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches at Emerson College. Catch Kim's Review of The House on Fortune Street on Blogcritics.

The Pitfalls of Working at Home

I took a break from my writing just now, and went downstairs from my home office for a cup of tea. The kitchen was in a terrible state. Banana peels and peach pits moldered in the sink. My husband's scraped bowl, saucepan and wooden spoon languished nearby, a glue of morning oatmeal drying to them. Well, this was bad enough. But there were also no less than eight dirty coffee mugs, half of which had previously sat in Steve's car for a month in the summer heat. And we won't even delve into the condition of the floor. Let's just say, two dogs and a teenager equals lots of spilled juice, tracked in dirt and leaves, drool.

You would think that being the mother, spouse and co-proprietor of this mess, I would show at least casual interest in rectifying the situation. We are not talking about a toxic waste dump here. How long would it really take for me to clean up the kitchen? I could take ten minutes to empty the dishwasher, tuck in the mugs, and soak the bowl and pot. I wouldn't even need to do all of it now. I could, for example, quickly broom up the worst of the dog hair and save a good floor-mopping for the weekend.

But I won't do it. I take a firm stand. Here's why:

I, like many Americans these days, work from home. Upstairs in my office resides a small but thriving operation that involves writing, blogging, teaching and freelance editing. And I am here to say that you can't lift a finger to clean up. Don't do it. It's a slippery slope. If you get even a little momentum behind you, you could waste a perfectly good hour scrubbing the kitchen that could be spent far more productively on your real job. Physical work like cleaning feels far more satisfying on any given morning than the more cerebral kind that awaits the modern worker at her computer. (Oh, those pumping arm muscles working up an honest sweat!) It's easy to get sucked in. For a tiny trip to the kitchen for a cup of tea to turn into a major scouring spree.

Still, I never fail to feel guilty for NOT cleaning up. Haven't we all been taught that Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness from our earliest days? Clean your room; put your dishes in the dishwasher. If you try to ignore dirty dishes, even for a worthwhile project, you will probably be treated to the admonishing voice of your mother inside your head. You are sloppy, dirty, irresponsible. Let's face it kid, you're a slob.

This morning, though, I had some kind of a breakthrough. As I stood surveying the disaster that is my kitchen, I realized that the voice inside my head wasn't my real mother. My real mother, who is now deceased, would have been far more interested in the essay I was writing upstairs than in the dirty dishes inhabiting the sink, bless her. No, the voice I was hearing in my head was my own corrective mental script that I had internalized somewhere along the line, telling me I was a bad person. Where did it come from? Who knows. We all have that little voice carping inside our heads, don't we? But I had, I realized, the power to turn it off. If I concentrated. "Quiet," I told the voice. "I'll get to the kitchen later this afternoon. When I'm done working."

Instantly, I felt better. Was that all it took?

I felt a twinge of satisfaction as I turned my back on the crowd of fruit flies I could imagine already beginning to form on the banana peels in the sink. Without a second look, I lifted my mug of hot tea from the stovetop and started back up the stairs to my office, giving myself a little mental pat-on-the-back as I went.

Good girl, I told myself. Way to go.

The End of Summer; Kim's Fall Schedule

Here we are, at the end of summer. I have just washed up in my office after three weeks at the beach feeling as tangled as that seaweed that lands above the high tide mark after a storm. I am leathery-tanned, freckled, shiftless, and beach tar stuccoes my heels. I have no excuse for my lack of blogging this past month other than sheer laziness. And that sand dune of things on my desk that I've been ignoring since June--well, let's just hope there are no crabs in there to bite me. I'll find out soon enough. My brain is already telling me it's time to get back to work before I feel quite ready, my thoughts churning ahead like ocean waves to remind me that I'll be teaching again in just a few weeks. 

So, here's my fall class schedule at the Cambridge Center: I have two writing workshops currently enrolling, both of which will commence in late September. The first is my Fiction Craft Workshop, where we will cover point of view, narrative distance, interior thoughts, approaches to character, movement through time, and handling sentiment. This class is equally useful for fiction writers and for memoir and nonfiction writers who write in fully dramatized scenes. The other class I will be teaching is the Creative Nonfiction Workshop, which is specifically about memoir and creative nonfiction. This is a very dynamic area of writing at the moment, and we will discuss all of the latest controversies as well as covering skills specific to memoir and nonfiction. If you are interested in either class, please contact the Cambridge Center for Adult Education in Harvard Square to sign up.  I have provided a link to their website.

And beginning next week, I will be back blogging again on a regular basis, assuming I can dig my way through this dune of paper on my desk. 

The Online Poetry Portfolio

Most of my published poetry has not been available on the web, and so I have spent the past couple of weeks creating an online poetry portfolio. I was only going to post ten to twelve of my poems, so this didn't seem like a huge undertaking--but the whole enterprise turned out to be far more complicated than I had anticipated--And so I thought that I would share some of what I learned.

I started out looking at websites and blogs kept by other poets--to see what they were doing. There's plenty out there. If you want to get an idea of exactly how much, take a look at the blog of Ron Silliman, who lists many poetry websites and blogs in alphabetical order on his left sidebar. There are hundreds and hundreds. Looking at them, I began to feel a bit queasy--How was one to fight one's way through all of this? It seemed rather overwhelming. I ended up looking at a fairly random selection of sites, as well as websites and blogs people alerted me to on Twitter.  

I have to say that I found many of the poetry blogs and websites I looked at rather unsatisfying--mainly because they tended to clutter up the poetry with blogging, comments, blogrolls, link lists, embeds of interviews, podcasts and readings, and a shocking amount of advertising. Of course, one has to find a way to tie a poetry portfolio in with the rest of the online world, whether through blogging or links or social media. Still, the effect was often quite jarring. I found that what I wanted was simply to be able to read the poetry in peace, and for a consistent aesthetic to come through. 

The sites I liked best provided a spare, uncomplicated presentation of the author's work--separate from all the blogging, links and advertisements. Also, I found that I appreciated a strong visual element to go with the poems, which surprised me, because previously I would have said that I found visual images too distracting. But I think, upon reflection, that visual images help us to slow down on the web, where we tend to read far too quickly, with a kind of almost electric frenzy. This made me consider the question of what constitutes a "literary experience" online, and what it takes to engage the digital reader at a high level.

In the end, my own poetry portfolio ended up being a lot like an artist's online portfolio--which usually consists of a simple presentation of images, a bio, and a guest book. In my case, I'm using a blogging platform for my portfolio, and so the "comments" section below each poem hopefully will allow conversation, as appropriate. In short, I began to think of the ideal online poetry portfolio as combining just a few aesthetically consistent elements--just the poems, photographs to go with them, a bio, links to a website or blog, and a place for readers to respond.

There were more challenges as I began putting up the poems up on the blog platform, and to pair them with photographs:

First, there was the issue of picking the poems. I had originally intended to put up just published poems, because I had read in various places that many literary journals won't take poems that have already appeared online. However, when I put up a selection of only my published work, I began to realized that most of these poems were at least two years old, and some of them had been written as long ago as my MFA program--(I graduated from Emerson in 2001). So if I didn't include at least a few of my newer poems, the portfolio would be completely out of date, and wouldn't be representative of my work today. This, in turn, meant "sacrificing" some of my best new work to the cause of the portfolio. I had to bite the bullet, and put up some of my favorite new poems online, understanding that this probably meant giving up the idea of ever seeing them in literary journals. This was rather sad--but has had the salutary effect of spurring me on to write a flurry of new work. Posting work, even in draft, has a kind of finality to it--which allows one to move on. I ended up with a total of eleven poems in the portfolio, seven of them older published poems, and four new poems.

The final big challenge came in pairing the poems with visual images. This turned out to be much harder than I thought it would be. I am used to pairing pictures with text, since I regularly have to do this for Kim's Craft Blog. However, pairing photographs with poems is a whole different can of worms. Much of what happens in poetry has to do with mood and tone, and so merely trying to find a literal image suggested by the poem usually fell flat. It was far more important to capture the emotional tone of the poem, even if the photograph had nothing whatsoever to do with the subject. 

Also, the mental pictures created by a poem always have "the power of the imagined image" about them, and trying to reduce these to a literal image took away some of the magic.  Where I did use an actual image from a poem, it was always in an oblique way that suggested something consonant with the tone of the poem. So, for example, there is a lamp in my poem "Four AM"--but the lamp in the photograph I chose was a Tiffany-style lamp which, when illuminated, looks like stained glass and suggests the "churchy" feel of the poem.

That, finally, was the key to finding the right images--to look for an oblique image with the right mood and tone, rather than a strictly literal image. And so, for example, for my poem "Thumbprint on Estate Papers," the images of tractors and swinging dresses I tried all failed, but the rippled sand image captured both the ripples of thumbprints and plowed furrows, and the wistfulness of the mood in the muted sand colors. And for my poem "Unknown"--a rather mysterious little creature--the images of wedding dresses and bare hardwood floors I tried failed, and I ended up instead with a summer glade in the forest, set about with shadowy trees, which seemed to match the moody, summery strangeness I was after. 

In most cases, I have to say, I couldn't tell if an image would work or not until after I tried it, and the ones that failed often surprised me. There is room for comment after each poem in the portfolio, and since I'm not a trained visual artist, I'd love your thoughts on how I did with the photographs. Happy reading--here's the link:

                     Kimberly Davis/poems