|
Story
Resuscitation
At Luanne Armstrong's reading of an excerpt of her new novel, The Bone House, this
summer at The Nelson Fine Art Centre, she was asked by an
audience member how long it took her to write the novel. Armstrong laughed. She explained that she worked on it for a year and a half while
still living on the East Shore of Kootenay Lake. Then she moved to
Vancouver and the novel got neglected. A three-month retreat at Berton
House offered her the opportunity to finish The Bone House, but to her
dismay the very first task she had to tackle was not the glorious
tip-tip-tipping of glowing words piling up on her computer screen but rather the
muscle-grinding, sweat-dripping ardor of story resuscitation.
Armstrong went on to argue first for prevention, saying that when one is
writing a novel, nothing should get in the way of the work. And she means
nothing -- don't move residences, don't go to work, don't even eat if you don't
have to. Inattention could mean death. Of course, her tongue was in
her cheek. Wasn't it?
During the usual milling that takes place around the goodie table (which is
where you'll usually find me) at readings and writing conferences, I regularly hear other writers speak
of the trials and tribulations of resuscitating unfinished and neglected projects. And as
in the resuscitation of arrested humans, I would hazard to guess that the survival rate of novels or
short stories in full arrest is probably pretty low.
So first things first. Prevention. Luanne is right. Slug it
out, dammit. Get that first draft down, then you can put your corpus
of words in the drawer and neglect, ignore, disabuse it all you wish. In
fact, Holley Rubinsky (author of Rapid Transits and At First I Hope
for Rescue) would recommend a lengthy period of neglectful internment in said proverbial drawer,
which will lead to a freshness of vision when you finally get around to hauling
the corpus back out of the drawer and dusting it off with the sleeve of
your sweater.
But back to prevention. I have regularly whined to my partner, the
brilliant Christine Leman, that little snippets of time here and there in the
day were too brief to get any real (read 'serious') work done. However,
writing my novella "Blue Glass Pebbles" taught me that what is at
issue is one's mental engagement with the story -- the characters, their
ethical dilemmas, the themes, the settings, the research, and so forth -- so that
the moment one isn't having to pay attention on the job, or doing the dishes, or
bathing the mutt, one's mind automatically turns, nay leaps, to the story
at hand. Engagement. Focus. Agreed, it makes one a dull
conversationalist, however, it does get the mental fermenting done so that when butt
meets chair, even for brief snippets of time, the result is indeed glorious
tip-tip-tipping!
Engagement: see Cawford Killian's "project bible" on P 53 of
his book. To remain engaged in a project
--don't read fiction, avoid TV and movies
--read only project-related research,
books,
--project bible
--symbols (picture of Australopithecus
Afarensis/ Rita Moir's picture of connor and the stylized pewter buffalo)
Focus
Jesus of Montreal style of resurrection of dead stories--body parts/organ
donor for other stories. (Saul in Blue Glass Pebbles)
Like a number of other writers of my acquaintance, I have a novel in need of
resuscitation. I wrote 50,000 words, then threw them away. I wrote
another 30,000, then like Luanne, I moved. So I packed all the detritus of
the novel in a box and loaded the box into the Budget Rent-a-Truck, then in the
new residence I unpacked said detritus and placed it on a shelf. A
prominent shelf, certainly, but a shelf none-the-less. Then I wrote short
stories and dreamed of finishing the novel. I wrote a novella. I
designed a website. I went to work, periodically attempting to resuscitate
arrested humans.
As a paramedic, I know how much sweat and muscle goes into a resuscitation
attempt. Ribs get broken, there's often vomit; your shoulders ache from
doing compressions or your hands get sore from bagging and suctioning the
patient. But every once in a blue moon you bring somebody back.
I know it will be no different when I set out to resuscitate my
novel. It is simply going to be butt-ugly freakin' hard work.
But I know what to look for: the very breath of the story, that
initial, tiny spark of life that originally set my heart leaping with the desire
to write this story down. You know it, too, that spark -- a scene, a
turn of phrase, a feeling, a character, an image -- which shocked that story out
of nothingness and right smack into your own heart and brain and soul, so that
you became, even if briefly, a person possessed.
Recapture that spark. Then add the muscle of reading and research and
plain old-fashioned hard thinking, and the sweat of running around after your
characters as they hurl themselves in and out of trouble. It's hard work,
and nothin' but. Stay engaged. Don't move residences, don't go to
work, don't eat. <ig>
(765 words)
Back to Top
Rejection
[This is the answer to the question.]
Back to Top
Must Read
[This is the answer to the question.]
Back to Top
Cold Seat
[This is the answer to the question.]
Back to Top
Paper Cuts
[This is the answer to the question.]
Back to Top
Stories for Nothin'
[This is the answer to the question.]
Back to Top
Writer's Block
[This is the answer to the question.]
Back to Top
Where do you get your Ideas from?
[This is the answer to the question.]
Back to Top
Altered States of Consciousness
[This is the answer to the question.]
Back to Top
The
Cardiology of Story
My mother has this peculiarity of speech
she uses when speaking of a person who has had any one of a number of cardiac
problems. She says, 'He or she "has heart,"' which I finally
understood to be a kind of short-hand for 'He or she has "heart disease,"'
as if saying the word "disease" aloud might in fact bring about that
person's sudden and tragic demise -- a kind of cardiac equivalent to one's ears
burning when one is being talked about. (And certainly we writers know all
about the strange power of words....) In short, when my mother says
someone has heart, it's a bad thing.
In my third year of the Kootenay School of
the Arts' writing program, Rita Moir (award-winning author of Buffalo Jump and
Survival Gear) told me that my stories "lacked heart." Which is
not short-hand for "lacked heart disease," but rather metaphorical
English for that elusive something that transforms a good story into a great
story, that transmogrifies narrative into epiphany. In short, for a
story to "lack heart," is not only a bad thing, it is a tragedy.
The human heart, physiologically speaking,
is a complex organ prone to disease and victim of any number of atrocities waged
on it by its human host. We start laying down plaque in our coronary
arteries as early as age 10; we fail to exercise the muscle enough, so when we
find ourselves running for our lives, our heart simply can't keep up; we
get dehydrated or host an infection or put chemicals in our body the heart
doesn't tolerate well. Oh, and let's not forget trauma -- falling
off cliffs, crashing cars, skiing into trees, playing with bears, running with
scissors, and so forth.
But the heart also has a long metaphorical
history, believed to be the seat of human emotions. "A merry heart
maketh a cheerful countenance: but by sorrow of the heart the spirit is
broken" (Proverbs 15:13)
Back to Top
|