The Authorial Voice
Hi, friends.
Hope you are well. It’s warming up here, summer is on the way and I am two exams and a week or so of grading from being my summer self, when I can turn all my focus to the page and finishing this novel. I am so ready. Who else is gearing up for Summer of the Finished Novel?
Story.
This week’s story is Two Nameless Women by Cristina Rivera Garza (who happens to have a new book of translated stories published by Dorothy).
Craft tidbits.
This week I wrote myself a note: Are there places where you’ve explained too much?
(Dear Reader, there are so, so many.) It’s a thing I know, but also a thing I periodically forget. When I am drafting, I have to get it all down. Every dot. Every detail. Usually I have a cluster of competing metaphors and must leave myself notes: pick one! Once I have all these choices down, I begin paring back and making my picks. I condense and condense and try to make it all look effortless. (It is not!)
Some of my over explaining, I suppose, comes from the day job where I explain the same things over and again. (How many words is our essay supposed to be? When is it due? How many sources do we need?) But reading isn’t the classroom nor is it the internet where people clamor all over one another to make their point. It’s a partnership. Our jobs as writers to lay down the dots with authority that allows and trusts the reader to connect them.
Trust that your reader is capable and that they want to do the work. The book that I’m reading right now doesn’t ask anything of me. It’s a fine enough book, I suppose. But it’s also easy to put down. The chapters are long and there’s a lot that could be cut. Nothing would be lost. It’s 500 pages! Every outfit and look and curtain color is accounted for.
That’s what I love about Garza’s story. It does so much without explaining too much, without too many details. It leads us along so ever so carefully and then ends with a punch.
We’re dropped into the story with the narrator. At first it is disorienting. We don’t know who these characters are, nor do we know their relationship. There is a bit of tension in the not knowing.
I could hear the water running as I inserted the key in the lock. I thought I’d find her right where she was: in the tiny bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, with her hands still under the stream of hot water.
“Look at what you’ve done,” the narrator says. For a moment we’re left to wonder what the exact problem is. Has she hurt herself? Had some kind of accident? But no. It’s nothing as terrible as we imagine it to be. We learn that it’s an older woman, probably a little senile. It is only the threat of an accident, an injury. She really shouldn’t be left alone as much as she has been.
“Their hands,’ she said. “They cut their hands.”
Again, we don’t know who “they” are. But we know there must be a connection here between her holding her own hands under the hot water and what she’s been thinking about but can’t quite relay. We are as confused as she is.
The narrator seems to know what she’s talking about though and so we trust that if we read on it will also begin to make sense for us.
A writing teacher might call this authorial voice. The trust that the writer establishes with the reader. As if to say, come along, trust me. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
And so we keep reading. We begin to understand that these two are merely neighbors. The younger one checks in on the older.
I didn’t know for sure how she spent her days, all by herself, locked in the labyrinth of her own head. I could read her activities in the traces she left behind: the television on, the door of the refrigerator open, a couple of knives on the counter.
They are connected by the building and their loneliness. The younger one takes the older one to the doctor. Her family doesn’t visit much.
I closed my eyes, like the old woman, and thought that I was perhaps as exhausted as she was. Or as lost.
It isn’t until the last paragraph that Garza ties everything together. There has been a series of murders in the city. The dead girls. This is what the old woman has been consumed with. Girls as nameless as the two women. This is why the kettle sounds like police sirens.
I thought about how they hadn’t even had the time to feel tired. I thought about how, had they been saved, had they survived, they could rest their legs on a thick leather of the ottoman in the middle of a lonesome room.
That ending. The gift of being tired. Of being lonesome. Goodness. The bare truth of it sticks with you far longer than any singular detail could.
Sparks.
Use an apartment building as the setting for a story. What might transpire between neighbors?
Or. Write about how the news enters into our lives. It’s something we worry about. Something we talk about. How might something from the news become a conflict between characters?
Revision. Where have you explained too much? Where might an absence of explanation make the story richer? Where might your reader want to do a little work to put things together?
Other tidbits.
Do you need to make more rules in your writing process? Aimee Bender thinks so. (I do too. I have famously been pretty Quaker-like in my writing process—as the spirit moves me. But in January I committed to writing every day. With the exception of a handful of days, 40 mins or more. It has made me such a happier writer and happier person. If you need a push, if you also want to commit to the Summer of Finishing What We’ve Started, if you need some accountability, let me know. One of my favorite things about coaching writers is dropping pep talks in your inbox.)
Perhaps you’ve got something finished and polished and ready for readers. It’s no-fee April at Willow Springs. Yalobusha Review is looking for experimental fiction through May 1st. Sweet has opened for poetry and CNF. Scrawl Place is a newish, paying venue for short work with a focus on place.
Ok scribblers. It’s a beautiful day to finish something you’ve started. Pencils up. Let’s go~
Marsha