Building a Mystery*

I've been half-joking for a long time that I have to write a mystery novel at some point. This is not only because it's the one genre I've read steadily since adolescence (hat tip to Dame Agatha), but because my initials plus my husband's last name make a marvelous nom de plume.

Thing is, though, I think I've actually got one going. And it is really fun to jump into a project that's so tangible after years of revising a literary fiction novel, because the structure is so much of what matters here. It feels like sitting on the floor surrounded by legos, all perfectly designed to snap into beautiful alignment. Perhaps more than in the genres where I've previously worked, there are conventions here, clear expectations for both writers and readers, a prescribed way of interacting around and within the text. There's a release in leaning on these things as I consider where and how the deaths will happen, the clues that will remain, and the motivations of the hapless narrator swept up in it all.

(Not that genre conventions guarantee success. There are some horrible lego creations out there, which is where this metaphor breaks down: I built many of these tottering, unrecognizable creations as a child before I got bored and went off to make up plays with my stuffed animals. I've always had a longer attention span for stories.)

I'm also fascinated not by what writers do in spite of genre conventions but what they manage to do because of them. At their best, they have an intense focus on time and place, both literal and figurative. Gillian Flynn is the obvious writer to point to in this particular moment, and I loved both Gone Girl and Dark Places for their tight plotlines along with their social commentary and sharp observation.

I've got a time in mind; I've got a place. I've got a small, insular community with all sorts of denziens, some well-intentioned, others not. I've got at least a couple of suspicious deaths, and I've got a narrator who doesn't fully realize what she's gotten herself into. Not a bad place to start.

*Why yes, I did come of age in the '90s. I even went to Lilith Fair when I was 16.

On to the Next

I've been giving a lot of thought to my next project, another novel, as of yet untitled. I've been sitting back, mostly, doing some research, and just generally shoving things into my brain in the hopes that they will soon boil over. 

In the meantime, a preview:

Los Angeles, 1939:

I wrapped them so carefully. It was the least I could do, it was all I could do, and so I tucked their little limbs tightly against their bodies and swaddled each one up tight in the newsprint, so tightly that they might still believe, at least for a few moments longer, that I still held them close. We cry when we are born—I did, I’m told. My first did not; she was too young, but the second wailed. It was a painful cry. He was shocked, I think, shocked and outraged at the world he’d been forced into so abruptly. That first maternal embrace is just a salve, an attempt to make up for what’s been lost. But the world never again provides that level of comfort, nor safety. At least I did not lie to them and tell them that it would. Every embrace outside the womb is a failed attempt to slip back inside.

I've heard men say all sorts of things about children, about women, about women giving birth to children, but what they say is easy to laugh away. Their words are soap bubbles, glossy and chimerical, gone with the faintest gust of wind. They mean nothing to me, and though they may not be aware of it, their words mean little more to themselves. Self-righteous posturing over brandy, with no real danger of ever having to mean it.

Women, though. What women say can wound me, although I don’t know that I’ve ever let on, not in decades. They can judge me, and I know it; anyone who has lent her body to another and then, after that painful, joyful indignity, gone on to watch it toddle out into the world knows more of life than me.

But I wouldn’t have been allowed to watch; the brandy-men wouldn’t have had it. And while they know nothing, they own everything, tyrannical children banging away with their toys. And so I sung them into drowsy, laudanum-laden sleep—for I am not a heartless mother—just once, only once, before laying them into their trunk bed and firmly, quietly, closing the lid.

Repost: A Manifesto

“It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.”

From Blue Pastures, by Mary Oliver

My college professor, perhaps my favorite, one who led me to write in such a way that my own writings, unbeknownst to me until far later, dovetailed uncomfortably with her own life, assigned her students this passage from Blue Pastures. Mary Oliver is never a bad way to begin a course on writing, but I can’t help wondering now, ten years later, whether she was intentionally frontloading us, giving us tools and information that would not come to fruition until, aptly, just now.

Let me explain: we were good writers, all of us, in a freshman year non-fiction writing class. We knew how to put together a sentence; we knew how to construct a line that would knock the socks off of our high school English teachers. And this knowledge had brought us to where we were, curled up awkwardly in stiff wooden chairs around an enormous wooden seminar table, deep in the bowels of institutional intellectual history--not far, in fact, from where the brave new psychologists of the 1950s had found that people not unlike us would shock others until the point of near-death if the man in white coat said so. That happened just around the corner, down a flight of stairs, back when the building had been the psych department.

But now it was the English department; the psych people had moved over, appropriately, to the base of Science Hill (always aspiring to be taken seriously by the hard scientists running down towards Commons from the nuclear labs), and we were there, at least twice a week, with our essays printed out and phrases turned and barely tamped-down egos. (The tamping would come, more fully, later on, after the towers crashed down and took the economy with them.) And we sat there, discussing Mary Oliver, as though we knew what we were talking about. My professor read her favorite passages as though the words had a taste to them, and we listened, nodding, professing awe at how she had gotten it right, just right.

Except. We had no fucking clue.

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Gratitude

From the most recent To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast comes Aaron James, who, while talking about the subject of his recent book, made one of the more profound statements about artists and the larger world that I've heard (any transcription errors are mine):

Often the big mistake [artists make] is not realizing how grateful they should be to larger society for giving them the gift of creative opportunity, without which they would have never achieved or been successful. I mean, artists who have to fend for food all the time, or fend off foreign armies, or whatever, aren't going to get a lot of art done. But many of them, when they are successful and produce great artworks, everyone's very grateful for that, and then they sort of just take credit for it, you know, I did it. And then they think even more should be coming to them, or something like that, [in addition to] the great benefits that they've already got.

I usually do feel pretty grateful to get to do what I do in the way that I do it, but after this gentle reminder I'm overflowing--thank you to everyone, especially the people whom I don't usually think to thank, from the road builders to the pilots to the food safety inspectors to the nice people who remove our trash. It also makes me think of Obama's much-maligned comment about the collective power of community--and the need to appreciate every level of specialization that makes our world, and our own individual endeavors, possible.

I won't argue that it's the best of all worlds in which we live; I've read too much Voltaire for that. But in the spirit of gratitude, I appreciate a whole lot of people these days, people whom, whether they realize it or not, allow me to carry on with my peculiar obsession. I hope to be able to pay it back, or forward, one of these days.

A George Saunders article--but not that one

There's been a lot of buzz online about the New York Times' recent piece on George Saunders in honor of The Tenth of December, his most recent short story collection. And while I read that article a couple weeks ago and enjoyed it, I don't actually remember all that much about it, save for his description of being on a plane that was quite likely to crash. (What can I say? I'm a mildly nervous flyer who lives abroad.)

However, I absolutely adored this other George Saunders piece in Slate, an author-editor book review that's a conversation between Saunders and his longtime editor, Andy Ward. Fellow Stockholm writer Angela Mi Young Hur sent this one my way, and it's definitely worth your time. (No matter who you are, if you read this blog at all, ever, I can guarantee the time-worthiness.)

Saunders is a devotee of the short story form, pointing out that "...at least three of the stories in this book were 'novels' until they came to their senses. That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief." We don't have this in common, him and me; I wrote short stories in grad school, because it seemed as though that was What One Did (and they were way easier to discuss and review in workshop), but they couldn't make me like it. Nor could they make me particularly good at it. However, he goes on to talk about knowing when a piece is done, and it rings so very, very true for longer pieces as well:

I have an internal standard for when a story is done that I can’t really articulate. Maybe it’s just: I know it when I see it. Or: I know it when I don’t see it. It has something to do with making the action feel undeniable. There’s a feeling I get when (in the rereading) the language passes over from language to action: What was mere typing before starts to feel like something that has actually happened. So that can take a while and it’s not just about the language—it’s also a structural thing. If the story is tight and all the scenes are necessary, it helps me to understand what the current section is supposed to be doing—and hence I can know when it’s right and done.

People say this over and over, but there's just this feeling of rightness that comes when things begin to fall into place of their own accord, and this man, as any of you who've read his stories knows, is pretty good at getting his work to that place. He's also very good at talking about that work. So I'll finish with his words:

Part of the process of moving on and doing more work is to regard all past stories as these small clay rabbits you have made and brought to life, which you loved very much during that process, but which then go running off across the barnyard into the mist, with your blessing. So no favorites. I just feel slightly fond of them all.