Summertime Reruns: The Joy Of a Slow Read

Maybe you have memories like mine, of waking to the delicious sound of voices at the kitchen table.

When I was a child my grandparents would come to visit, often at this time of year, and often arriving at night while I slept. They were retired, and always seemed schedule-less, beyond the basic schedules of grooming, coffee, meals and naps. Their days were all sabbaths, or so it seemed.

My mother would take time off from work when they came, so their gentle rhythms would, for a time, become our rhythms. When I woke, the voices coming from the kitchen were thoughtful and unhurried, filtered through chuckles and quiet pauses. I don't remember exactly what they talked about, but it seems like the topics ran more to the conceptual than the pragmatic. Politics, yes, but in broader terms. My sister and me, naturally, but about the sorts of people we were growing to be.

When we visited them it was the same, but at night, we would join them in the unfenced area between their house and those of two neighbors. We'd all set our lawn chairs under the clothes line, look up at the stars, and talk. My great uncle, who read a lot (I am getting around to talking about books), showed me constellations, and told me which stars were really planets, how unfathomably distant they all were. Curiosity and attention were my childhood luxuries, but in these slow moments, they became the order of the day.

I'm about a third into a book titled The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey. It recounts her observations of a common snail that lived in a terrarium beside her bed during her year-long convalescence following a mysterious illness.

It's not a page turner, not in the sense we usually mean. There are no heart-stopping moments, no smoking guns.

It is wondrously compelling. Reading it feels like listening to voices at the kitchen table, looking at stars with my great uncle who read a lot. Forced by an illness into an abundance of unstructured time, Bailey received a message to pass on to us, that each moment, each detail, the tiniest creature is fascinating if we take the time to look. I treasure books that remind me that time exists, and that there is enough of it to allow for curiosity and attention.

"Every few days I watered the violets from my drinking glass, and the excess water seeped into the dish beneath. This always woke the snail. It would glide to the rim of the pot and look over, slowly waving its tentacles in apparent delight, before making its way down to the dish for a drink. Sometimes it started back up, only to stop at a halfway point and go to sleep. Waking periodically, and without moving from its position, it would stretch its neck all the way down to the water and take a long drink."

Annie Dillard writes books like that. Her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is all the permission you will ever need to lavish time on each microbe of creation.

"It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God “set bars and doors” and said, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.” But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?"

There are other books that do the same. I pulled Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift From the Sea from my grandmother's bookshelf when I was twelve. A bit young, perhaps, to begin thinking what sort of adult one wants to become, but I began to think of it then.

"I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact—to borrow from the language of the saints—to live 'in grace' as much of the time as possible."

You may have noted that all these books are memoirs, not fiction, and for good reason. Fiction doesn't lend itself to leisurely exploration. Novels need things like conflict, suspense, and tension. Most readers, I'm told, skip over novels that are described as "meditative," or "contemplative." We want our stories to pull us through on a cord of anxiety. Yikes! Oh no! What will the character do now?

The only novel I know of that has managed to finesse the narrative arc in a voice straight out of those lawn chairs under the stars is Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. It's the reason I consider this the most perfect novel I've ever read, because its author understands so well:

"This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it." 

Now please tell us about the books that have inspired you to pay attention. Extra points if that book is a novel.

We love to read what you have to say.

Round-Table: Beginnings Written and Chopped

I fell in love with sumptuous writing when reading Annie Dillard's essays, An American Childhood. I find it oddly comforting that she understands what it is to fall in love with those first words we splatter on the page. Here's a quote from her book, The Writing Life.

Sometimes the writer leaves his early chapters in place from gratitude; he cannot contemplate them or read them without feeling again the blessed relief that exalted him when the words first appeared--relief that he was writing anything at all. That beginning served to get him where he was going, after all; surely the reader needs it, too, as groundwork. But no.

Ha! My first read-in-front-of-anybody piece was a short story for a creative writing class. It was a short story, right? My professor told me to lose most of the beginning and shave at least 4,000 words off. Ouch! I cut about 10,000 words off the front of Goodness & Mercy. But I kept those words in a file I titled, "Wonderful Words to Save." It's a lot easier to cut unnecessary words, if you tuck them away. I've actually used some of those wonderful words in other places. I'm wondering how the other Novel Matters ladies decide what to keep and what to cut, especially at the beginning of a piece.

I heard a speaker say at a writers' conference that we need to open our novels exactly where the story begins. That may seem like an obvious concept, but sometimes we do forget. I know I do. We want to set the stage, so to speak, introducing the reader to the setting--macro and micro; and to the characters, giving plenty of background so they'll understand them better when the scene actually begins; and giving plenty of backstory so the reader will have a grasp of the conditions that led to the story that's about to unfold. Go ahead, write all that. Consider it a warm-up to the real writing. Because once you get past all that, once the stage is set, once the director is ready to call, "Action!", THAT'S where you want to begin, and not a moment before. I love nothing better than to pick up a novel I know nothing about, open to the first page, read a paragraph or two, and say, "Wait a minute. What?" Then go back and read it again because I'm completely lost. Well, that's how it should be. My daughter Mindy when she was growing up, would walk into the middle of a conversation, listen for a moment, and say, "Wait, start over," because she wanted to hear everything she missed. But getting into a novel is not like walking into a conversation. It's stepping into a completely unknown situation and MOVING FORWARD to find out what it's all about. The reader should have a plethora of questions about all kinds of things when she begins reading. And turning pages, one after another, is how she'll get answers. At least she will if the author knows what he or she is doing. Because it's the author's job to anticipate and answer those questions, to supply a satisfying experience for all involved.

The Joy of a Slow Read

Maybe you have memories like mine, of waking to the delicious sound of voices at the kitchen table.

When I was a child my grandparents would come to visit, often at this time of year, and often arriving at night while I slept. They were retired, and always seemed schedule-less, beyond the basic schedules of grooming, coffee, meals and naps. Their days were all sabbaths, or so it seemed.

My mother would take time off from work when they came, so their gentle rhythms would, for a time, become our rhythms. When I woke, the voices coming from the kitchen were thoughtful and unhurried, filtered through chuckles and quiet pauses. I don't remember exactly what they talked about, but it seems like the topics ran more to the conceptual than the pragmatic. Politics, yes, but in broader terms. My sister and me, naturally, but about the sorts of people we were growing to be.

When we visited them it was the same, but at night, we would join them in the unfenced area between their house and those of two neighbors. We'd all set our lawn chairs under the clothes line, look up at the stars, and talk. My great uncle, who read a lot (I am getting around to talking about books), showed me constellations, and told me which stars were really planets, how unfathomably distant they all were. Curiosity and attention were my childhood luxuries, but in these slow moments, they became the order of the day.

I'm about a third into a book titled The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey. It recounts her observations of a common snail that lived in a terrarium beside her bed during her year-long convalescence following a mysterious illness.

It's not a page turner, not in the sense we usually mean. There are no heart-stopping moments, no smoking guns.

It is wondrously compelling. Reading it feels like listening to voices at the kitchen table, looking at stars with my great uncle who read a lot. Forced by an illness into an abundance of unstructured time, Bailey received a message to pass on to us, that each moment, each detail, the tiniest creature is fascinating if we take the time to look. I treasure books that remind me that time exists, and that there is enough of it to allow for curiosity and attention.

"Every few days I watered the violets from my drinking glass, and the excess water seeped into the dish beneath. This always woke the snail. It would glide to the rim of the pot and look over, slowly waving its tentacles in apparent delight, before making its way down to the dish for a drink. Sometimes it started back up, only to stop at a halfway point and go to sleep. Waking periodically, and without moving from its position, it would stretch its neck all the way down to the water and take a long drink."

Annie Dillard writes books like that. Her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is all the permission you will ever need to lavish time on each microbe of creation.

"It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God “set bars and doors” and said, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.” But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?"

There are other books that do the same. I pulled Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift From the Sea from my grandmother's bookshelf when I was twelve. A bit young, perhaps, to begin thinking what sort of adult one wants to become, but I began to think of it then.

"I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact—to borrow from the language of the saints—to live 'in grace' as much of the time as possible."

You may have noted that all these books are memoirs, not fiction, and for good reason. Fiction doesn't lend itself to leisurely exploration. Novels need things like conflict, suspense, and tension. Most readers, I'm told, skip over novels that are described as "meditative," or "contemplative." We want our stories to pull us through on a cord of anxiety. Yikes! Oh no! What will the character do now?

The only novel I know of that has managed to finesse the narrative arc in a voice straight out of those lawn chairs under the stars is Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. It's the reason I consider this the most perfect novel I've ever read, because its author understands so well:

"This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it." 

Now please tell us about the books that have inspired you to pay attention. Extra points if that book is a novel.

We love to read what you have to say.

Standing on the Shoulders--Writing as Gift

Something in the chapter of Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott called "Giving" reawakened the reason I became a writer. Allow me to review, as briefly as possible, the legacy we join when we put pen to paper.

I returned to college full-time when I had a husband (Mr. Wonderful) and two school-aged children. I enrolled as an English Literature major and Education minor. The experience revealed a bull-dog tenacity I hadn't known I possessed that served me well. Tenacity is exactly what it took to dig into the literature of the Enlightenment, and Literary Criticism, and The History of the English Language.

During my final semester, I was required to take senior seminar, a tight group of twelve literary disciples who sat at the feet of the English Department's high priest, Dr. Crowell. Very intimidating. Fortunately, the topic was Women in Literature. Eureka! Something I could get my teeth into.

We started, of course, at the beginning of recorded female writings in the Middle Ages, the likes of Julian of Norwich and later Queen Elizabeth. Women's creativity was still quite suspect, unless you were the queen, and attributed to witchcraft and sorcery. You can see how discouraging that would be. Julian wrote of her visions--some I find very inspirational--and Elizabeth focused on the political and the rhetorical. In short, writing as an expression of the female experience was limited to topics of religion, and if you were the queen, you admitted to being a "weak and feeble woman" with the heart and stomach of a king. Even the queen had to hedge a bit.

The Enlightenment wasn't much better for women. Women were expected to focus on affectations and getting married but not getting old. A few--the Blue Stockings--broke away from the pack. I researched Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and her story of literary accomplishment is impressive and heartbreaking. She started translating classics as a child in her father's library. She became parlour amusement for her father and his friends. Later, she wrote dense political satire in iambic pentameter that was ridiculed for its female weakness by the likes of Alexander Pope. Eventually, she wrote her daughter, telling her that education for women was of little use. Ugh. You may better recognize these names from the Enlightenment (approx. 1800s): Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Brontes, Mary Shelly, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and all paid a high price for creativity.

The Turn-of-the-Century (the last) female writers were a confused lot, intransigent in their decisions to embrace society or to forsake it altogether--read that: marriage or spinsterhood. They saw no middle ground, because there wasn't one. A classic story in this genre is Kate Chopin's "The Awakening." Also writing at this time were Sarah Orne Jewett and Edith Wharton. Marriage or creativity? How many of us could make that choice?

The Modernists (1914-1939) female writers saw a turning of the tables. The men called the quarter century an "Age of Anxiety," but--with some notable qualifications--female writers expereinced an era of exuberance. Women finally gained the right to vote in the U.S. and they were entering into ever-increasing professional fields. Life was changing with the advent of new technologies--radio, nickelodeons, airplanes, and the automaobile. And WWI gave men the sense of being helpless rather than heroic. Enter the Modernist female writers we love and the experimentation they reveled in: Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein (love may not fit Ms. Stein, but you have to admire her verve), Virginia Woolf, Isak Dinesen, Katherine Mansfield, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Zora Neale Hurston. Still, mental illness (i.e. Woolf's plunge with a pocketful of rocks) and controversy marked the period.

According to the the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, contemporary writers (1940-1984) "wrote out of a double consciousness; on the one hand, a newly intense awareness of their role as female artist who had inherited an increasingly great tradition, and on the other hand, a newly protective sense of their vulnerability as women who inhabited a culture hostile to female ambition and haunted by eroticized images of women...contemporary writers were consistently struggling to define the cultural forces that had formed their personal and artisitic identities." In the midst of that milieu Eudora Welty, Mary Sarton, Shirley Jackson, Doris Lessing, Flannery O'Connor, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, and Joyce Carol Oates emerged as pacesetters for generations of women writers to come.

Soon after our class read about Sylvia Plath putting cookies and milk out for her napping children before sticking her head in an unlit gas oven, I asked my professor, "Are there any writers in the female literary canon who liked being married and didn't consider suicide?"

"We'll read her next," he promised.

And so we did, Annie Dillard's An American Childhood. I could have kissed Annie. If given the chance to stalk her, I will. Her book of essays assured me that a writer could grow up in a happy family, collect insects, eat snow off mittens, look for monsters during flashes of lightning, and still be a brilliant writer.

I'm old enough to remember the advertising slogan (for Virginia Slims cigarettes?) that announced, "We've come a long way, baby!" As female writers we have, but we stand on the shoulders of all the brave women who dared to expose themselves on paper, and, perhaps, to be burned at the stake for doing so.

We are wired as humans to be open to the world instead of enclosed in a fortified, defensive mentality. What your giving can do is help your readers be brave, be better than they are, be open to the world again.--Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

You must, must, must read Lamott's chapter "Giving" in its entirety. Her words refreshed my resolve to empty myself for others. Having reviewed the women of literature, are you ready to join their legacy, to not squander what took centuries to earn, the freedom of our words and stories? Do you see your writing as a gift to your readers? How does that influence what you write? How does the act of giving your art change what you are willing to surrender in order to write?

Lessons on Truth from Novel X

What a great start to the year--a guest post by Ariel on Monday that reflected what we intuitively know about a great book but she put into words: "Character and Plot and Setting and Theme slip away with time. But I can pull any book from that shelf [of keepers], dust off the cover, flip to a favorite passage and tell you exactly how it made me feel. And really, that’s all that matters in the end." If you missed Ariel's post, backpedal a few days to enjoy her passion for a good read. And then, there's Katy's post on Wednesday that left us gob-smacked as she gave voice to her astonishment, the true calling of the novelist, according to Annie Dillard. Thanks, Katy.

At the end of Katy's post, she said, "Truth is what happens underneath, and how it resonates like a great voice through a vast impossible mouth." And that's our job as fiction writers, to tell the truth.

I gave this a lot of thought. I know excellent fiction is truer than life, but what goes wrong when it isn't?

It just so happens I finished reading a novel for my book club a few days ago, and I couldn't quite put my finger on why it left me flat. I'm not going to tell you the title or author. The Novel Matters writers are looking forward to reviewing novels in the coming months, novels that matter for their craft and for "the way it made [us] feel." This novel (Novel X) was a worthwhile read, to be sure, but not one that gob-smacked me, so I'm only using my reading of the novel as a jumping off point for our discussion.

I must say that the author did an amazing job of plunking me into a landscape and culture of intense contrasts and unequaled beauty--the mountains of Kentucky--with exceptional skill, so much so that his words set my heart longing for a place I'd never been. And his descriptions--oh my.

But the read was dissatisfying, despite the plethora of 5-starred reviews the book received. (The novel read more like a memoir, which should read more like a novel, but that's a topic for another day.) I think my dissatisfaction came down to the question of truth. John Truby says in his book The Anatomy of Story: "...You must give the hero desire. Desire is what your hero wants in the story, his particular goal...Desire is the driving force in the story, the line from which everything else hangs."

In Novel X, the hero wants what she already has, and that would be a fine desire to structure a story around, if the author had created obstacles to the hero keeping her family and home, but there weren't, not really. And that's not truthful. We are all driven by desire, and we all fight against an army of obstacles to obtain those desires. This is the very reason we read novels. We want to see the hero struggle toward their desires, just as we do, sometimes failing, perhaps being betrayed, always being sidetracked, and frequently a bit misguided.

What I'm suggesting is that a big part of "the truth that happens underneath," as Katy said, is desire, and the stronger the desire the stronger the obstacles and the more satisfying the story when that desire is met, or traded in for something higher, more noble, or holy.

Perhaps Novel X's hero's lack of desire hit me because I'm guilty of this flaw. Not that I lack desires. I'm a zoo of desires! But it's scary to embue my hero with a desire that will take him or her places that make my skin itch, or toward a thicket of obstacles with no discernable path. It's a process, for sure. Here's a recent conversation I had with my latest hero-in-the-making to demonstrate my point:

Me: So, Reece, what do you really, really desire?

Reece: For the last year to go away.

Me: That's not going to happen. I wish it could, for your sake, but then we wouldn't have a story to tell. Think about it. What do you desire? What are you willing to die for?

Reece: I want my family back.

Me: Your ex-husband is married to another woman. Maybe you should desire something else.

Reece: You asked me what I would die for.

Me: So I did. What's your first move?

Reece: Isn't that your job? I could use some direction here.

Me: Well...uh...you probably shouldn't have had the affair.

Reece: Are you sure you're qualified to write this story?

Me: This isn't getting us anywhere. Tell me about your parents. Why are you back home?

Reece: My mother's crazy, always has been, and she's finally driven my father away. She can't live alone, just can't.

Me: Let's see, you're a divorced adultress who wants her married husband back, and you're trying to save your parents' marriage. I suppose there are kids involved. This is getting messy.

Reece: You're the one who asked about desire.

Me: So I did. Let me get back to you.

As you can see, Reece and I have some work to do. This piece of the story--the hero's desire--is so very important that I'm willing to revisit it many, many times. Without a strong desire and plenty of obstacles, I don't see how we can say our fiction is truthful. This is where our heros find their motivations, after all.

What about you? How important is desire when conceptualizing your hero and his/her story? Are there other story elements more important to establishing truth in a novel? If you've read a Novel X--let's be nice and not name it--what was missing?