The Burden of Originality
Hi, friends.
Today I want to talk about the burden of originality and how this notion trips us up sometimes. As writers, we like to think that we are extra smart, creating these characters and scenes, coming up with all of these ideas. This puts us at odds with discussion of craft where in book after book tells us that there are no new story ideas. There are plenty of books that reduce every possible story down to X number of plots. Maybe this is a comfort for you, easing the pressure of getting things just right. Of feeling overwhelmed by trying to invent something new. Or maybe it stresses you out, makes you question what it is with your life.
I hope it doesn’t. In either case, people remain desperate for stories. Story is the basis for human connection. There are just as many craft books that explain how we’re wired for it. Just listen to how many stories creep into your life on a daily basis - through song, through media, checking in on friends or neighbors. Beginning, middle, end. It’s a way that we make sense of this world.
Story.
I have two short stories for today: Explaining Death to the Dog by Susan Perabo (which I’m happy to have found a copy online, though this copy is inexplicably upside down and an exam for some class. If you have access to Project Muse, it has a much cleaner copy) and Sleeping by Katherine Weber.
Craft tidbits.
The heart of both of these stories is the same - the absence of a baby. The loneliness that this absence creates. In both cases, the death takes place off the page. The unsaid is doing a lot of work in both of these stories.
In the case of Sleeping, the cause of the absence is not exactly spelled out. It is quite possible that there was never a baby. And it is this strangeness, this sense of the uncanny that drives the story. We realize something is off from the beginning when Harriet is given the instructions:
Absolutely, please don’t look in on the sleeping baby because the door squeaked too loudly.
Okay. Well, that’s not too terribly strange. It falls within the realm of possible. But then we learn that the sitter they’ve hired doesn’t have any babysitting experience. (Though, when I think back upon my first babysitting job, I also think, my God, what were those people thinking?? I was 12, maybe 13, and they had three children under the age of 5. Real, crying children, all of them. Sometimes I would go to the mall with the mother and stroll them around the fountain and food court while she shopped and invariably people would ask me if they were mine. What!?!)
Naturally, Harriet wants to peek at the sleeping baby.
She wondered what Charles looked like. She wasn’t even sure how old he was.
But the door is locked. The dread builds with each of these details. He has a name. But there are no pictures of him in the house. She’s already read the mail and leafed through a photo album. And then we learn that she doesn’t even know the Winters, that the husband approached her at the swimming pool. You get the sense that this is a one time gig, that they’ve gone through so many sitters already. In the end, you feel for Mr. Winter, and Mrs. Winter too.
They gave her too much money and didn’t ask her about anything. Mrs. Winter seemed to be waiting for her to leave before checking on the baby. Mr. Winter drove her home in silence. When they reached her house he said, My wife. He hesitated, then he said, You understand, don't you?
Harriet says yes, of course, she understands, but does she really? Can anyone? The ambiguity of the situation seems to suggest no. Questions remain.
The Perabo story is a first person narrative, from the mother’s point of view, though the focus is on others - Stu, Todd, friends and family - creating a distance from the grief and loneliness that she’s experiencing.
Then the party ended. Guests cried the last of their tears at my front door, said “what a waste” for the thousandth and final time, and made their separate ways back to their separate lives, lives that sailed along quite smoothly despite the absence of the infant who they had been mourning for a good seven or eight days.
We get no sense of how she has been mourning. And now she has all of this time on her hands. And Stu, the German shepherd, is confused.
I found him upstairs, in the baby’s room. The room was empty, except for one chair. Todd and the relatives had cleaned it out on the day of the funeral because they said it was just too sad to look at. They stashed the crib in the back of a stranger’s car and carted it away, hid the dolls and mobiles behind cobwebs in the basement.
They, again. The narrator has limited agency. It’s a choice that Perabo is making - to keep the grief at arm’s length. To focus outward on the dog instead of inward. Though we do understand that her trying to explain things to him is a way to explain things to herself.
When she wakes in the night to the sound of a crying baby that isn’t there she says:
I didn’t have the courage to touch him, to wake him up and force him to share the grief, to try and explain to me why I might have heard the baby crying when the baby had been dead for over a week. I lay back down next to him and started thinking about the simplicity of a dog’s mind. I tried to think of a way to explain to Stu just exactly what was going on.
Nature too is out of sorts.
It was May and the natural order of things said it should have been warm and bright. But the natural order of things was wrong, so it was ugly out.
As the story progresses, we learn more about her and Todd. She’s a worrier. He’s a fixer. Each going through the motions of grief on their own.
So what does any of this mean for us? If there are no new stories, then our job as writers is to come at our stories about love and loss from different angles as both of these do. To try and find a new clothing, via new forms or language, for old tales. To take what is familiar, and render it less so.
Consider the painting above. Chair, window, door. Nothing terribly new there. You see these every day in your own house. And yet. There is something beautiful in the way the light warms the room. In the billow of the curtain. The simplicity of the scene. The absence of everything else.
Sparks.
Borrow the Winters from Sleeping. Write a story about them. What happens when they are alone at the end of the evening? Imagine Mr. Winter trying to get Mrs. Winter out for the evening. Imagine Mrs. Winter’s day to day. What truths do they keep from each other? What do they try to convince the other of?
Write a story about loss. Use the form of a list. Keep it under 300 words.
Revision. If you are working on a book or a memoir, what is your nightmare review? Who are you afraid you’ll be compared to? If a short story or essay, what are you afraid people will get wrong? What’s worse: being misread or not being read at all? Where are you being too fancy? To abstract? Get all your fears down on one side of the page, and then on the other, brainstorm what it is you could add (or subtract) to counter these fears.
Other tidbits.
Several journals just opened for submissions recently: Timber is looking for experimental work through May 5. Five South and Chestnut Review are open all of March. Oxford American is open for debut fiction until May 15. (They are also looking for an Assistant Editor if that’s your jam.)
Someone on twitter had the brilliant idea of pulling a novel off their shelf, when they get stuck, and reading the corresponding chapter number that’s giving them a headache in their manuscript.
Speaking of no new stories, want to hear about the experience of reading the slush pile for a lit mag and what they routinely see?
Okay scribblers. That’s it for now. Pencils up. I believe in you~
Marsha