Following the Bees

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

Two weeks ago—and it was a fabulous vacation, btw—I posted about Penelope Lively’s book Making It Up, with some observations about living out alternative lives in fiction.  What would have happened if…?

Writers are often asked where we get our ideas for fiction, and (like most questions we’re asked), there are as many right answers as there are writers.  Still, I’m always fascinated by the variety of responses—even within my own experience.

As sheepish as I feel admitting it, the genesis of the first story I wrote as an adult, the story that got me in the chair every morning to write for an hour before heading off to a job, the story that I took with me to grad school a year later, came from—here goes—a dream.

Why the sheepishness?  Not sure, but I guess that it’s that rule from grad workshops about never starting a story with a dream.  Yes, I know that the rule refers to the actual narrative structure (rather than the idea behind it), but still, something about dreams as creative fodder makes me think of shortcuts, of Bobby Ewing and the shower.

Still. It worked, didn’t it? I dreamed of a little girl in a party dress, running from a cloud of bees.  Why bees?  Why a frilly party dress?  Who knows.  Who cares?  What matters is that I couldn’t get the image out of my mind.  I woke up, scrawled onto a piece of paper dress, bees, and a day or two later started writing.  Who was this little girl, why was she wearing a party dress, and what was going on with the bees?

In answering those questions, I wrote “Bees for Honey.”  The story had no autobiographical parallel to my life, other than my having once been the same age as the narrator.  The next story I wrote, “The View from Below,” was about 95 percent autobiographical, despite what I later told my mother.  It was about the moon landing and a young girl’s (that is, my) wish that the astronauts would get lost up there, make a wrong turn. Grownups had already mucked up planet Earth—so went the girl’s thinking—and they shouldn’t be allowed to mess up the moon, too.  There was more to the narrative:  a mother’s drunkenness; parents’ failings; a wacky babysitter; shag rug.  But that conviction about the moon landing, that resistance I had felt to my family’s (and the nation’s) euphoria over the fuzzy image on the black-and-white TV in July 1969:  that fueled the story, same as the bees had fueled theirs.

While in grad school, I went rafting on the American River one hot June day.  The air temperature was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit; the water, snowmelt cold enough to merit the wearing of wetsuits.  That contrast interested me, lodged in my imagination in such a way that, on the ride home, sharing the car with an archeologist, I became especially curious.  The heat and cold had opened me up, a day on the river had relaxed me, so that I found myself fascinated with every tidbit the archeologist shared about chipping sites and filtering screens and centimeter-deep layers of dust.  When I got home, I made notes and, soon after, started “Away from Trees.”  Again, the story isn’t “about” archeology (it’s about grief), but archeology gave me a way in, a particular slant on a general topic.

I don’t have the patience to practice archeology or marine biology (“Falling”) or glass-blowing (“The Ruins”) or translation from the French (“Careful”), or the small motor skills needing for working with potentially lethal tools.  But I love writing about them, love their obsessive qualities and their metaphoric possibilities.

Why did that one dream about bees start a story, and why has no other dream since?  Why archeology, say, and not automobile design or plastic surgery?  I don’t know.   “You wonder about the strangest things,” my mother once told me, not in criticism as much as bemusement.  I could see her thinking, Who is this child I helped make?  And yes, my attention to the details that captivate only me has struck others as tedious, obvious, pedestrian, or just plain dull.  Not every story idea blooms into something worthy of readers’ attention.  Many promising beginnings—somewhere in my files I have twenty-odd pages about a cat breeder—have dwindled into nothing.  And others just haven’t found the right entry point yet.

What about you? Where do you get your ideas?

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In Another Life

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

My next post will appear Friday, September 7.

 If you’re in the neighborhood, mark your calendar for Sept. 13, 7 p.m.:  Why There Are Words, 333 Caledonia, Sausalito.  I’d love to see some of you there!

A few months ago, I stumbled upon Penelope Lively’s novel The Photograph.  I loved its sharp psychological portraits, its elegant and economic sentences, its going on for pages and pages in the minds of its characters (something I’m always trying to do without making my readers scream, “Action, please!”).

When I returned to the library to pick up another Lively novel, I chose—from the ten or twelve books on the shelf—Making It Up.  I was intrigued by the insistence, in the Preface and repeated at the top of the front flap, that “This book is fiction.”

Why wouldn’t it be, I thought?  “It is anti-memoir.”  All the more intriguing, with all that statement implies—and what’s wrong with memoir, anyway?  Anti-memoir sounds so, well, anti.  “My own life servers as the prompt,” Lively continues; “I have … written the alternative stories.”

In eight stories, Lively introduces us to a piece of her biography:  the young girl who fled Cairo in face of the German advance during World War II; an early interest in archeology; a love of books; the early influence of Homer, made all the more compelling by her own first name’s starring role in the narrative.  After introducing us to the prompt, Lively then gives us the novelist’s re-working of what might have been, what should have been, what could have been.

In this way, the book provides a meditation on fiction, on the paths the imagination takes, on the deviations and wanderings.  How do we know when we’re on the right track?  The answer, surely, lies not in adherence to biography, since the demands of successful fiction are not the outlines of “real life.”  And yet, as much as Lively’s book got me thinking about the choices I make for my characters (and the endless re-thinking about those choices), I love how she girds her sophisticated reflection on narrative with the primal, elemental urge of any writer.  To get it right.

As Lively writes in the introduction to her version of Penelope and Ulysses:  “I seized on [Homer’s Odyssey] and its furnishings, and juggled them around to make a version that was personally satisfying and more relevant to my own circumstances.”  As a girl, reading the ancient story, she had found the “story line not entirely satisfactory.”  Penelope, for one, is not a beauty like her cousin Helen, and Odyssey has red hair and short legs.  “And that addiction to weaving is tiresome, let alone the shilly-shallying over the suitors.  Some reconstruction was in order, it seemed to me.”  Not only was I nodding as I read Lively’s words, but she’d made me laugh out loud (shilly-shallying over the suitors, indeed!).

To make a version that was personally satisfying and more relevant to my own circumstances.  Some reconstruction was in order.

Writing successful fiction needs more than that, of course, but I can’t think of a better motivating force.

Why do you write fiction?  What alternative lives have you lived out on the page?  What books have impacted how you think about story-making?

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The Many Faces of Mollie

Posted on August 10, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

When I was in junior high, I wrote stories about a girl named Kim Swanson.  I named her Kim because I wanted a name like “Kim”—popular, cute, perky.  I wanted to fit in, to belong.  “Lindsey” stuck out—I know, it’s a common name now, even a trendy one for a certain age group, but trust me, back then, I was the only Lindsey.  Well, Lindsay Wagner came along a few years later, but that just made for a lot of lame bionic jokes.

Kim Swanson attended a girls’ school in New England: Furst’s Girls School, run by a thin gray-haired woman named Miss Furst, straight out of Victoria Holt.  Kim had a gaggle of good girlfriends, a boy she liked and who liked her back (Matt, or maybe Mike), and long blonde hair.  She wore pretty, soft sweaters over her uniform.

I wrote about Kim in longhand on binder paper, in first person.  I have these pages somewhere, in a folder for the biographers.  You know:  Crittenden’s early work showcases her obsession with adolescent popularity, gothic romances, and World Book Encyclopedia.

Why World Book?  I used to spend hours on the shag rug in our den, poring over the entries for New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont. (Sorry, Massachusetts, for some reason you didn’t make the cut.)  I wanted to live in a town called Devon or Bristol, a town with a village green and trees that turned orange in October.  I was convinced that I’d been born on the wrong coast, where the sun shines too often and everyone is supposed to be fit and healthy.  So I put Kim in New England.  (No field hockey, though.)

I mention Kim because I’ve been thinking about how we project our own longings and fantasies on our characters.  Yes, at some point, they take on a life of their own.  Writers speak of characters’ refusing to do what we, their creators, want them to do.  When I mention this recalcitrance to my students, they always look a little worried, as if I’m going to suggest we all sit in a circle and hold hands and channel creative energy.

Here’s what I mean:  say we have a character named Eileen who needs to do something on the page.  We’ve been in her head too long and need to impose a little action.  Hey! Let’s have her go to the local bar and confront her ex!  We start the scene and get stuck at the door. It takes us two hours to write one paragraph in which she walks into the bar.  She doesn’t want to go there.  She has a mind of her own.  She has free will.  Another way to put it:  it’s not the right move for the plot because it doesn’t come from character but from authorial puppeteering.

When I started writing fiction two decades after Kim—I took some time off, but that’s the topic for another post—my first story took place in a fictionalized Watsonville, on an artichoke farm.  The narrator, Mollie, a nine-year-old girl, lives with her parents next to the McDonough family, who—in addition to artichokes—raise bees.  The McDonough daughter, Merrill, has disabilities, and during the course of the story, Mollie betrays Merrill in order to get in with the popular girls at school.   (One of whom I named Kim.)

Mollie, of course, is I (for you grammarians out there), and I am Mollie. I’ve never lived in Watsonville or played in artichoke fields or had a disabled friend.  But I know about nine-year-old girls.

When I took this story to grad school and showed it to my thesis adviser, along with other work, she wrote me a note.  I have one question: Are all these narrators Mollie?   

She had a point.  All the main characters in those stories came out of the same part of myself.  They think about things that I, at one point, have thought about.  Their circumstances vary from mine, but they’re all introspective and, for the most part, passive.

I’ve learned since to write trouble-makers, to access not only what I would do or think but what I would never do or think or what I would love to do or think but don’t have the guts (or the pathology).

Case in point:  Eileen.  She’s a major character in my novel and, as a member of my writers’ group pointed out, “so different from you.” Or, as another member suggested, maybe my reluctance to make Eileen too dangerous, too screwed-up, is a way of protecting the real-life model for Eileen.

Worth considering. Eileen does not navel-gaze.  She takes action, often misguided, risky action.  Yes, I’m more comfortable writing thinkers, not doers.  But fiction needs action.

Lately, Eileen’s been coming more easily, often surprising me on the page.  And if all else fails, I can try changing her name.

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If At First…

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

I’d like to share some good news.  Yesterday, I heard from an editor at a literary magazine that the revision of a story I’d sent them made the cut.  “We loved it!” she wrote.  Contract in the mail.  Wow! Yay! Yippee!  And Phew!

It’s not always easy to share good news—and on a blog: Will it look self-congratulatory?  Gloating?  Self-promotional?  Slow down, I tell myself; it’s not as if I won the Pulitzer.

Still, acceptance of short literary fiction is no easy feat, and the fact that it’s taken me almost an hour to write the two brief paragraphs you just read—I had to shower, change the bathroom towels, do a load of laundry, and make the bed, right?—speaks to more, perhaps, than my reluctance to, as my mother might have said, “toot my own horn.”

So why write about it here?

Gratitude, for one thing.  To my writers’ group, to the editor who gave me a second chance, to the process itself (as torturous as it can feel).  You see, the editor had seen (and turned down) an earlier, briefer version of the story, a story I’d been submitting against my better instincts (more on that in a minute), and she’d asked for more.  I sent another story.  She said No again, but with a surprising twist.  Upon further thinking, she and her colleagues would like to publish the first story, but was I open to making some changes?

You bet.  Not only that, but I had a longer, fuller version already written, a version I’d put aside a year ago because I couldn’t figure out how to make it right. My writers’ group had asked for more development of and insight into the narrator’s marriage and occupation.  M pointed out a key metaphor that didn’t quite hold together.  A asked why the narrator, with her obvious lust for a certain character, hadn’t acted on it.  Others didn’t quite get why the betrayal at the heart of the story mattered so much to the narrator’s current life.  I pondered their comments.  I knew they were onto something.  I moved sections around, I made cuts—and then I got drastic. I turned the story into a frame tale, summarizing pages of  present-day narrative into two brief paragraphs at either end of back story  I told myself  that we didn’t need all the material about the narrator’s attraction to a man not her husband, her work making stained glass, her hovering over her daughter’s budding independence.

Oh, yes we did.  My writers’ group had recognized this, intuitively, and I’d known they were right. But I’d felt impatient to finish the thing, to send it out.  And in my impatience, I’d nipped the story in the bud.  I’d sent it out, though, and received a series of nice rejections.  Until this most recent.

So I dug out the earlier, longer versions—a dozen or so of them—and read, made notes.  Turns out, I’d cut some good stuff—and now, with a year’s distance (and the interest of an editor), I saw patterns and changes that fell into place.  Here’s the amazing thing:  I didn’t even need to look (much) at those earlier versions.  I had it in my head.  The changes were relatively smooth to make, and (here’s a first) fun.

I’m grateful to my writers’ group for their honesty, and to this editor for giving me a second chance.  And to a study I heard cited a while back, a study that prompted me to send out the second story after hearing No on the shorter version of the first.  The study found that women writers, after rejection, tend to stop sending out work, even if the rejection is full of encouragement and invitation to send more. We women tend—and this is a generalization, remember—to retreat.  Men, on the other hand, don’t hear “no.”  They keep sending work out.

Publication is not what it’s all about, of course.  I wish more writers worried less about getting published (or getting an agent) and more about making their work the best it can be.  I’m one of them, of course.  And oh so relieved I saved those earlier versions.

What valuable insights have you gained from the unpredictable world of submitting?  Have you ever had a piece published that you should have spent more time on?  Is publication always a good thing?

 

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It’s Only A Dream

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

When I was in third grade, my class took a field trip to Kirby Cove, a small rocky beach just west of the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge.  To get there, we had to walk—or in my case, slide—down a steep dirt trail. I don’t remember it as a trail at all, but a horrifying sheer, wide fall of hill, brown-red and slippery with pebbles.  I was a klutzy girl, all arms and legs, with my center of gravity somewhere, as my younger and more agile brother once put it, above my forehead.  I was rather in shock that our teachers expected us to get ourselves down this hill.  Couldn’t I stay on the bus and read?

No, I couldn’t.  So I slid down on my butt, in the plaid seersucker shorts I wore.  (It was a rare hot day or I’d have been in Danskin pants.)  When I got to the bottom, the thin fabric was ripped, my Carter’s underpants rust-red from dirt.  All in all, a recipe for huge, indelible, elementary-school misery.

Why had we gone to Kirby Cove on a field trip, anyway?  Who knows.  I recall no lesson, no educational takeaway—nothing—of that field trip but the excruciating slide down the hill and my mother’s face, a few hours later, when she picked me up at the school parking lot and saw my shorts.

Last night, I dreamed of that day.  In the dream, I was staring at a narrow rocky ledge and wondering how I’d get across it.  In the dream, I recalled those shredded seersucker shorts.  In the dream, I imagined that if I were a lizard, I could negotiate the precipice quite well.

About ten years ago, I fell into a deep trench of despair.  For more than a year—I can point to the day it started but not, exactly, to when it lifted for good—I existed at the bottom of a place out of which I thought I’d never, ever climb.

Every now and again, I dream that I’m back there.  The dreams are vivid, unrelenting, heavy as lead.  There is no pushing out of them.  When I wake, in that split second of waking, my entire being suffuses with relief.  Thank God.  It was just a dream.

But why?  Why am I dreaming of that place?  What are dreams like last night’s telling me? My beloved husband sleeps beside me, a re-financed mortgage keeps a solid roof over our heads, my students just handed in the best work yet of the term.

Let’s see.  Here are two possibilities:  yesterday, I attended a requiem eucharist—a funeral  I wept at the hymns and the homily, in mourning of the generous, strong woman who’d died, but also of my mother, my father, my brother, everyone I’ve loved who has died.  A funeral service alone, however uplifting the final hymn, however ever-present the message of resurrection, could make me dream of loss and despair.

Possibility #2:  a few nights ago, I listened to my writers’ group say that they were ready for something to happen.  On the page, in my novel.  This didn’t come as news; I knew myself that it was time for some action, time for the characters to act out.  I just wasn’t sure how.  My readers made some wild suggestions—lose the point of view of one character, have another character do something tawdry out of desperation.  Not so wild, as we thought and talked about them.  Well worth considering, and trying.

But here’s where I freeze up.  I have, stashed in computer files, umpteen versions of this novel, earlier incarnations of the characters’ thoughts, interactions, behavior.  Considering something new—something large-scale and new, not just a different word here or a tighter syntax there—throws me.

Think of it as fun, one of my group said.  An adventure.  Maybe this will be the piece that makes everything fall in place!

I’m the girl, remember, who wanted to stay on the bus rather than go down the hill. What if I fell?  What if I hurt myself?

My dream answers the question.  Yes, you’ve been hurt.  We all have.  You survived.  Put yourself back on that precipice.  Slide on your ass or crawl like a lizard—you may rip your pants, but you’ll get where you need to go.  And, maybe, just maybe, you can make your characters get up and run, slippery pebbles be damned.

What dreams have recurred for you?  What risks do you need to take in your writing?

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