Monday, December 8, 2014

A glimmer of insight through the fog

When I can achieve that 'doll' frame of mind, it is really a wonderfully simple inner life. The news of the day starts to fade in its importance. I often float through the day oblivious to the outside world; not so much 'in my head' as without much news worthy, noteworthy thought.

Naturally, the doll frame of mind comes and goes. I do have to attend to worldly issues and it occurred to me that I best get in touch with someone at my academic institution to ask when class starts for my last subject in the MA. A senior tutor replied to my inquiry and took the opportunity to remind me that she'd like to receive a story for the Institution's magazine. How do I to tell her that I have been in 'doll mode' for the past few months and have not written a thing, except one unsuitably smutty story? Hmmmmmmmm

It was time to get back to putting words down on the blank page. Without a clear idea of where I was going I had a go but was soon distracted onto other sites (e.g. tumblr). I deleted the page and settled down for the night. Would my head ever focus again?

Through the doll haze, for several weeks now, even a short story has seemed such a huge ask. When I read I normally have a pencil at the ready to mark what I particularly love, and a note book to write down thoughts that come to me as I read, to explore in story form sometime later.

Nothing. I've done nothing that I know works for me, except to one day have this inkling, this sense that Richard Flanagan's various points of view that he uses in The Narrow Road to the Deep South - to shift from the mindset of an Australin prisoner in Burma during WW11 to the Japanese Colonel's perspective, from Dorrigo's inner landscape to that of his wife, or his lover - gave the story a richness that I wanted to explore in my own writing (although I wouldn't attempt anything as challenging). I told myself that inklings are worth something. 

I've been watching for free lectures from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and felt compelled to send for Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage. His talk affected me in some indiscernible way and I wanted to read his latest story. With a glass of white wine in one hand and his little book in the other, some vague reminder of the writer's life returned to me. More than that, the uncomplicated nature of the sentences gave me hope that it wasn't necessary to write particularly poetically to tell a story well. There's not a metaphor to be had in the following paragraph, save the first sentence, and yet it has us thinking, draws us in.

Beauty is a warping lens. He had the kind of looks that are always greeted by grins and handshakes, extra glances, stares held for a moment longer than usual; a smile and a face not easily forgotten. Even the way he held a cigarette, or leaned over to tie his shoe, had a certain masculine grace that made you want to sketch him. What a distorted, confusing way to live. To be offered jobs and rides and free drinks - "It's on the house, sweetie" - to sense a room changing as you move through it. Watched everywhere you go. To be someone people long to possess, and to be used to this feeling; to be wanted so immediately, so often, that you have never known yourself what you might want.

Thirty something pages later we learn that Holland was once the lover of Buzz, the 'friend' who has come calling regularly and befriended Pearlie. Holland wants him back and is prepared to broker a deal with Pearlie.

After Flanagan's ambitious tale of the lives of the men who helped with the building of the Burma Railway under sufferage this is a deceptively simple story of a marriage. I was instantly pulled into it.  I found myself interested in the construction of single sentences, in putting myself in the author's seat and imagining how Greer orchestrated the tale. I was starting to think like a writer again.

Responses to the novel have been mixed. Some readers adore the book while others have complaints about being deceived (by omission) for a time that Pearlie and Holland are black. It occurred to me what a long and hard road it is to write fiction. One reviewer even said of Flanagan's brilliant saga that a 'red camelia' occurring a few times during the book was a 'literary devise' that she found too co-incidental. My goodness, but we are picky!

Of course, Hemingway had this idea that we must write only what is 'true'. Jim Carrey spoke to a room full of creative arts students in recent times and told them that the creative and performing arts industry was the last place on earth where they could write and act out what is 'true'.

'What's your truth?' I often ask myself, and particularly as recently as this weekend when I read a long post by another tutor of mine who called for stories for a new world; the kind of stories that poeple are searching for now to help them live their lives better.

If, for me, the correct answer to that calling is to write stories about finding connection, my characters must first experience disconnection, alienation and confusion. Dorrrigo (based in part on Weary Dunlop) never does find the sort of connection he seeks, except in times of crisis. He's a man that needs a crisis before he can 'step up'. Holland, for all his beauty in action, as typified in the above paragraph, is deeply disconnected. Gay and living in the 1950s in America, a quiet marriage to Pearlie is a good place to hide, but not one that allows him to feel much of  a connection to her or anyone else.

I spent far too long talking this morning to a friend after my exercise class. She puts on a brave front but she's had considerable concerns to bear over her life. I've often wondered at how she hasn't journeyed into the land of despair, rather than remain forever forbearing. Finally, she wanted to share with someone that her step-daughter has competed with her for her father's attentions for the past 32 years and that she hates her. I hope my shock at her use of the word wasn't visible.

It finally sunk in. It's not just me that's complicated. We're all complicated, all flawed. This is why the character arc is so essential because innately we know this about the human race and stories need for central characters to learn something so that we can learn something; so that we have an opportunity to be better than we are.

Yes, Dorrigo let his opportunity to find that connection in his life pass through his fingers, but we say to ourselves, don't we, that we must never do that ourselves; that we won't make that mistake?

I've written down these thoughts as they have come to me so that I can return to them, before they fade away. In doll mode, thoughts do come sometimes, and then they very quickly fade away...

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