Withholding Information
Hi, friends.
Hope you are well. It has been a busy weekend here. I’ve been trimming bushes, and laying carpet, and trying to renovate my life one chore at a time. Things would be so much easier if I would do a little bit here and there. And yet, I am not a person with this kind of personality. I don’t think I will be. Just as I will never be a morning person. Sometimes we have to accept who we are and learn to live with the problems we make for ourselves. In our professional life. In our personal life. In our writing life. There are other good things about us. And we should focus on these things.
Story.
I think this week’s story, Lauren Groff’s Ghosts and Empties, speaks to this. It’s a short one. Go have a read and let’s look at what she’s doing.
Craft tidbits.
I love a good sprawling sentence. Maybe it’s because I’m used to the circular way Southern people tell a story. Or maybe I just like they way they dress themselves up and demand we take notice. At any rate, we’re told in the first sentence, a long paragraph of a sentence, that our narrator has somehow become
a woman who yells, and because I do not want to be a woman who yells, whose little children walk around with frozen, watchful faces, I have taken to lacing on my running shoes after dinner and going out into the twilit streets for a walk, leaving the undressing and sluicing and reading and singing and tucking in of the boys to my husband, a man who does not yell.
Somehow. She knows the reason, and yet she witholds the why until the last third of the story. Perhaps she doesn’t want to give voice to it. Perhaps that would make it real.
Witholding information is one of mistakes I see my beginning writers make consistantly. I think they do this as a way to create tension. But the tension that they wind up creating is tension with the reader - not tension between the characters on the page.
But here, in Groff’s hands, the reader doesn’t feel cheated. One of the reasons for this, I think, is that the narrator is looking outward instead of inward. The neighborhood and its residents become the story she wishes to focus on. And this story is one of change. Of survival. The other is the level of detail that she gives on the sentence level.
She tells us more than once this neighborhood is imperfectly safe. Both dogs and humans have been known to attack. And yet, it is preferable to being at home. Because, let’s face it. The ones who hurt us can also be the ones who love us.
This is a quiet story. One that catalogues intrustions and secrets of others:
We have the homeless couple that takes shelter under the narrator’s house. The elderly nuns who live in the fallout shelter. The lady with the Great Dane who is likely ill. The overweight kid running on the treadmill. The therapist who has been part of a deadly love triangle.
The narrator seems to take pleasure in the problems of her neighbors. She envies the sisterhood of the nuns a little.
I’m the silent witness to fights that look like slow-dancing without music. It is astonishing how people live, the messes tey sustain.
As the story progresses, it begins to make sense. She’s silently measuring the worries of the world, of her neighbors against her own problems. Seeing messy lives unfold around her makes her feel less alone. She imagines that she could rescue them if she necessary. This too is the job of writers: fixing the problems we create for characters.
There is no direct dialogue here. Only summary dialogue, at the halfway point, between the narrator and her husband:
It’s too much, it’s too much, I shout at my husband some nights when I come home, and he looks at me, afraid, this gentle man, and sits up in bed over his computer and says, softly, I don’t think you’ve walked it off yet, sweets, you may want to take one more look. I go out again, furious, becuase the streets become more dangerous this late at night, and how dare he suggest risk like this to me, when I have proved myself vulnerable.
Though we don’t yet know the root of their problems, we begin to see the gravity of the situation. How dare he. Uh, oh. We feel as though we’ve just walked in on a conversation we’re not meant to hear.
This precision, this showing, the patronizing sweets, the withholding here is more intentional than the withholding we do when we first feel our way around a story. Here, it is more of an unfolding. It’s deliberate. Perhaps she is so angry that she can not admit what has happened.
Even though she keeps saying the streets are too risky, it’s old age that claims the life of a nun. The spurned husband who kills his wife. The otter who eats the swan babies. The government that raids the homeless encampment. The glaciers. Well. We know what happens there.
All of the lives lived here, all of the deaths over the years, have left ghosts everywhere. So too has the narrator’s marriage. She sees herself as a ghost, able to slip back into the house even as she’s walkint to tuck her boys into bed unseen, rifle through the dreams of her husband.
Perhaps she wants to pretend the streets are more dangerous than they are so that she feels that she is overcoming something she fears. Like staying in her marraige.
Finally, with help from the metaphor of the collapsed house and the worker who walks away from it, we find out the cause of her yelling. Her husband has had an affair. Is it confirmed? Or merely suspected? Long term or short, we don’t know. She doesn’t say. Perhaps, she doesn’t know either. Perhaps, she can’t yet bring herself to ask. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. There is a hole in their marriage. In the trust she placed in him. I think she hopes that she’ll be able to see things in a new light, if she can walk far enough, she’ll become transformed like the overweight kid. Or like the old oak who has been given new lighting:
its branches that are so heavy they grow toward the ground then touch and grow upward again; and thus, elbowing itself up, it brings to mind a woman at the kitchen table, knuckling her chin and dreaming.
Sparks.
Do you walk as part of the writing process? I do. I solve lots of problems with my feet. I’ve also found the beginnings to at least three different stories and one novel chapter. So, take a walk. Imagine what goes on behind closed doors. What routines they have. What secrets they keep.
Or. Have two characters that are angry with each other. Put them in the same room. But don’t let them talk about it.
Revision: I have heard Lauren Groff writes her stories long hand, begining again and again, balling up the drafts, until she gets it right. Have a spot where it’s just not coming together? Take a fresh piece of paper and begin again without consulting the current draft.
Other tidbits.
I shared a list of lit mags that are closing at the end of the month on my Instagram account last week. I’ll add a few more: Bayou closes May 1st; Bennington Review (no fee) closes May 8th; and Orca closes May 15th for speculative fiction and flash. All three are paying markets.
I often wonder how to help a writer hone their voice. Is it teachable? Is it something that just exists or can it be honed by time? Alexander Chee had a nice rumination on it here.
Now that the semester is whimpering down, I am going to be writing and writing and writing. For real. If anyone else wants some accountability while they tackle a project (big or small) in May, let me know. I’ve got a few spots left in my accountability group. It’ll be an informal zoom call each Monday in May to get you ready to tackle the page.
Okay scribblers, that’s it for this evening edition of writing goodness. Pencils up, pages ready, until next time~
Marsha