On Style
Hi, friends.
It has been a minute. Life has been throwing curveballs over here, as it is wont to do, but I’m back here with you, hoping you and your words are well.
Story.
I don’t usually read from two books at a time. But this week I’ve been teaching Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying in American Lit. I love it so much. It’s one of the few novels I enjoy reading again and again. And I’ve been reading Mira T. Lee’s Everything Here is Beautiful for fun.
Craft tidbits.
On the one hand, these books are similar. They are both multi-POV novels about family — the frustrations we have and the duty we feel. In both, every character, even secondary one, has very clear wants and clear obstacles. Though the reader must work to put the pieces together with Faulkner, they never have to guess about a character’s desires. I’d never noticed before how much he relies on repetition to show these obsessions. This is what we do, isn’t it? Carry our obsessions with us, think about them, speak about them even when they are tangential to the conversation. We bring it back to us. (Listen to how often people do this in conversations.)
But their styles are very different. Though Lee has multiple POVs, they are clustered together, 40-50 pages at a time, with lots of section breaks. (The first shift took me by surprise. And I wasn’t sure that I wanted to head hop after I’d been with one character for so long. But, I got used to it.) Faulkner shifts rapidly between characters. The chapters are as short as the famous: My mother is a fish chapter. None of them longer than 10 pages.
Lee’s primary mode of storytelling is dialogue. There are very few descriptions, especially in the first half. There is very little connective tissue from one scene to the next. Her sentences are very efficient and the story clips along quickly:
I returned to Providence. I saw the bungee-jumping financial analyst. I apologized, explained. He stared at his dinner plate, chewed his lamb kebob laboriously, his discomfort seeping through the silences. I did not see him again.
I tried to contact Lucia’s former psychotherapist, an astute young woman with whom I’d spoken several times after Lucia’s first break. “Lucia has remarkable insight. This is encouraging,” she said. Encouraging? “For prognosis. Because these kinds of illnesses are more often lifelong conditions,” she said. I didn’t believe her. Denial was easy, back then.
“Dr. Hassan no longer works here,” said the receptionist.
“May I get her new number?”
“Dr. Hassan moved to London over a year ago.” Click.
The line went dead.
That night I dreamed I was back at Third Uncle’s house. His room, odorous, like dirty socks. Third Uncle, stretched out watching Bonanza on the television, spitting watermelon seeds into a potato-chip bag. His short, stubby toes. Those thick, yellow toenails. The sound of his click-clicking teeth. Ah, Nu-er, come help your uncle. I watched in horror as the bunion on his left foot grew to the size of a small eggplant. I retched. High-pitched wails rang in my ears, like sirens. Shut up! yelled Third Uncle. Shut up with all your crying, wang-badan! I tumbled downstairs to the basement, found Ma crouched in the closet, eyes puffy and red. A door slammed. The baby shrieked. Give her to me, Ma. I’ll take care of her.
Weightwise, the dream is longer than any of the action. The call to her sister’s psychotherapist is longer than Miranda’s date. There’s more description. It’s serving double duty to let us deeper into her subconscious while also giving us a glimpse into their life when they first arrived in the States. Third Uncle is never named. But we see the power structure at play. It’s his house. They are reduced to the basement.
As someone who wants to describe everything—the restaurant, the seasons changing, the frustration my narrator feels after being hung up on—the efficiency is one to be admired. What is necessary? What is not?
Faulkner, on the other hand, gives into his long descriptions. This time reading it, though, I noticed that his paragraphs usually begin with a short, grounding, action-oriented statement before unfurling into his longer descriptions.
It begins to rain. The first harsh, sparse, sift drops rush through the leaves and across the ground in a long sigh, as though of relief from intolerable suspense. They are big as buckshot, warm as though fired from a gun; they sweep across the lantern in a vicious hissing.
Though there is some telling, and some philosophizing by the characters
Addie says: That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who had never had the pride…I knew that [love] was just like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.
Faulkner also shows their interior landscape:
Then I begin to run. I run toward the back and come to the edge of the porch and stop. Then I begin to cry. I can feel where the fish was in the dust. It is cutup into pieces of not-fish now, not-blood on my hands and overalls. Then it wasn’t so. It hadn’t happened then. And now she is getting so far ahead I cannot catch her.
This is Vardaman, a young boy, trying to understand his mother’s death. He doesn’t have the words. Not-fish. Not-blood. And he engages in a bit of magical thinking about death. If the fish isn’t in the dust where it was, then perhaps his mother isn’t dead after all.
Cash, the son who has labored to make the coffin and who has provided a list of reasons he made it on the bevel, is so worried that it’s not balanced that two of his chapters end with this obsession:
It wont balance. If they want it to tote and ride on a balance, they will have
It wasn’t on a balance. I told them that if they wanted it to tote and ride on a balance, they would have to
The sentences trail off. No punctuation. No conclusion. No one is listening to him. Reading Faulkner, seeing how he’s using language makes me want to be a better writer. To see where I can shape words into a lack.
Every book can teach us something about how to craft and shape our stories. What are you reading? What is it teaching you?
Sparks.
Faulkner’s inspiration for As I Lay Dying: “I simply imagined a group of people and subjected them to the simple universal natural catastrophes, which are flood and fire, with a simple natural motive to give direction to their progress.” Gather a family together. Give them wants. Give them obstacles. Who here doesn’t get along? Why? Then give them a catastrophe of some kind. How will this add additional stress?
Revision. Is your prose naturally spare? Overly descriptive? Do characters over explain themselves? Are they too quiet? Take an inventory of what you already have and then find spots where leaning in the opposite direction might make the section pop in contrast.
Or. Are you writing from multiple perspectives? Describe a scene from different points of view. What might one character see that other would not?
Other tidbits.
I took a class recently with Marie-Helene Bertino who offered this insight regarding structure: Stories that are concerned with WHAT happened, need to unfold chronologically. Stories that are concerned with WHY something happened, need to begin with the climax, and then track back to the events that lead to it.
If you are sweating the opening of your manuscript, Courtney Maum has a deep dive in her substack. Conversely, Rebecca Makkai has been looking at endings.
Maine Review has free submissions for Women’s History Month this week. Wigleaf is open until March 31 for flash pieces. Hayden’s Ferry is looking for writers and artists from the Sonoran Desert through March 31. University of Georgia Press is open to literary nonfiction books for their Crux series this week too.
Okay friends. That’s it from here. Let’s get those pencils up. Until next time~
Marsha