Jay Sennett's Blog, page 10
September 24, 2015
The Big O: Mohsin Hamid
Original detail distinguishes an average writer from a good one.
An average writer might describe her character as poor. What does that mean? It depends, I think, based on what each of us brings to the word. Going without a cell phone and cable might seem like poverty for one reader while lack of access to fresh water might be poor for another.
A good writer, like Mohsin Hamid, describes his character’s poverty in exacting detail. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia charts the journey of a nameless man from rural poverty to corporate tycoon.
As a child he befriends a neighbor, a former bodybuilder now middle-aged gunman. The gunman teaches him a series of calisthentics designed to build his physique. The main character works out constantly but sees few results.
The gunman blames his diet. “You are not getting enough protein.”
An average writer might then tells us something vague like the main character doesn’t have much chance to eat protein because his family is poor. But Hamid is far from average.
“These are relatively good times for your family….Still, protein is prohibitively expensive.”
Those two sentences are good. Hamid, though, wants us to know exactly how expensive protein is for the child’s family.
“After debt payments and donations to needy extended relatives, your immediate family is only able to afford a dozen eggs per week, or four each for your mother, brother, and you, and a half-liter of a milk per day, of which your share works out to half a glass.”
Detailed, direct and unequivocal. I know what poverty looks like for the main character and his family. Hamid’s original detail makes the character and the book far more compelling.
How can you add original detail to your writing to make it more compelling?
September 21, 2015
Do This Exercise, or The Imperative
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In this exercise, we explore a tool Lorrie Moore used in Self-Help, the imperative.
Directions for the Exercise
From Brian Kitely’s The 3:00 am Epiphany.
Write a fragment of a story that is made up entirely of imperative commands, e.g. “Do this; do that; contemplate the rear end of the woman who is walking out of your life.” This exercise will be a sort of second-person narration.
Wordcount: 500 (+/- 10%)
Jay’s Attempt at the Exercise
Stare at the white woman, the one you think a moment ago you had a connection with. Hear “jackass.” Wonder if she just said that. Wonder how this thing between you two went bad. Think “What did I say?”
Watch her set her drink down on the table next to you, hard. See the drops of vodka (you got her drink after all), slosh over the sides and onto the table. Feel your face flush as conversations stop and people turn and stare.
Feel your cheeks burn as the other man who had been part of your threesome, which has, through no fault of your own you think, now become a twosome, stares down at his feet. Look at the man lift his head up, blink and turn from you like a colonizing white woman in any colonized land.
Learn from your friend on the car ride home what you did to that woman to piss her off. Hear him say, “You wagged her finger at her. And you cut her off.” Struggle to recall doing either of those things. Recall her lovely breasts, her beautiful cleavage, like pillows – a place for your head!
Laugh when your friend tells you you behaved like a sexist jerk. Laugh so hard you miss your friend’s street and now must drive him the long way home.
Say you find it hilarious to be called sexist. Say you can’t be sexist. Say you don’t have male privilege. Tell him you are a committed feminist.
Eye your friend’s now laughing face. Feel your face get red, again.
Say that what ever privilege you have can be taken away when they discover you have a vagina. Use airquotes with the word privilege.
Listen to your friend’s snort. Resist telling him to shut up when asks you how people perceive you when they don’t know you have a vagina. Refuse to answer his stupid question.
Miss the next best place to turn. Curse yourself under your breath. Hear him say, “At this point the freeway will be the fastest way home.” Shift into fifth gear to race up the onramp.
Continue to hear yucking coming from the passenger seat. Notice sweat on the steering wheel.
Mount a defense. Remind your friend of the countless transwomen who have been murdered because they were found out. Forget to remember they are mostly transwomen of color. Forget to remember you are not.
Remind him that it’s really scary to be trans. Remind him you can’t have male privilege because you’ve only recently become a man. Remind him you didn’t grow up being told you were the center of the universe. Remind him that your privilege can be taken away with EMTs, at the scene of accident. Raise your voice to emphasize your point.
Yell your are a feminist. State again – emphatically and righteously – that you can’t have been sexist. Spat through your clinched teeth, “I still have a vagina, after all.”
Your Attempt at the Exercise
Do this exercise, please. Providing supporting details, bits of characterization and plot points using the imperative is a challenge, yes? This exercise really made me think, and hard, too. Good luck.
September 17, 2015
You, The Narrator – Self-Help
Lorrie Moore writes brilliantly in the second person in Self-Help, her first collection of short stories. Her style and tone differ markedly from Jay McInerny in Bright Lights, Big City, even though both use the second person, in large part because she uses the imperative mood.
Do Verbs Have Moods?
English verbs have four moods: indicative, imperative, subjunctive and infinitive. Mood is the form of the verb that shows the mode or manner in which a thought is regarded (assertion, denial, command, doubt and so on) .
Imperative expresses command, prohibition, entreaty, or advice 1:
Don’t smoke in this building.
Be careful!
Don’t drown that puppy!
McInerny’s oft-quoted opening in Bright Lights, Big City is in the indicative mood. “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of morning. But here you are, and you cannot say the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, though the details are fuzzy.”
Moore’s How to Be an Other Woman
Compare Moore’s opening line in “How to Be an Other Woman”: “Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie. First, stand in front of Florsheim’s Fifty-seventh Street window, press your face close to the glass, watch the fake velvet Hummels inside revolving around the wing tips; some white shoes, like your father wears, are propped up with garlands on a small mound of chemical snow. All the stores have closed. You can see your breath on the glass. Draw a peace sign. You are waiting for a bus.”
Moore intermingles her use of the imperative with the indicative form to make assertions. The stores have closed. You can see your breath on the glass. You are waiting for a bus.
McInerny is telling us about You. Moore is telling You what to do.
From another scene in the story, where she advances the story using both the indicative and, imaginatively, the imperative.
_______________
“Who is he?” says your mom, later, in the kitchen after you’ve washed the dishes.
“He’s a systems analyst.”
“What do they do?”
“Oh … they get married a lot. They’re usually always married.”
“Charlene, are you having an affair with a married man?”
“Ma, do you have to put it that way?”
“You are asking for big trouble,” she says, slowly, and resumes polishing silver with a vehement energy.
Wonder why she always polishes the silver after meals.
Lean against the refrigerator and play with the magnets.
Say, softly, carefully: “I know, Mother, it’s not something you would do.”
She looks up at you, her mouth trembling, pieces of her brown-gray hair dangling in her salty eyes, pink silverware cream caking onto her hands, onto her wedding ring. She stops, puts a spoon down, looks away and then hopelessly back at you, like a very young girl, and, shaking her head, bursts into tears.
“I missed you,” he practically shouts, ebullient and adolescent, pacing about the living room with a sort of bounce, like a child who is up way past his bedtime and wants to ask a question. “What did you do at home?” He rubs your neck.
Both McInerny and Moore use the second person. Yet Moore’s decision to use the imperative changes the tenor of the story. Through it, Moore can play with the trope of the Other Woman and highlight the repetitive, habitual nature of a woman dating an adulterer. She uses the article “an” in the title, not “the.” This is a story for any woman who undervalues her self and her life. A how-to manual of sorts for every woman.
Do you think Moore’s use of the imperative works? How might you incorporate the imperative into your writing?
September 14, 2015
You, The Narrator – Bright Lights, Big City
Second Person Point of View
As part of the point of view (POV) series, we will review the second person point of view.
Second person POV uses the pronoun You. You can be either singular or plural and is used most frequently in American publishing in the self-help and cookbook genres. When authors use you instead of I or a third-person pronoun, you can have the effect of making the reader become the main character.
The second person point of view has another cool effect: The narrator is also the reader or the person the narrator is telling the story to (at least I think so. What do you think?).
Whether that works or not rests with the skill of the author.
To observe the differences between third- and second-person narration, we’ll compare Ernest Hemingway and Jay McInerny.
Ernest Hemingway’s Jake Barnes
Jay McInenry references The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway in his 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City with the following epigraph:
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
All sorts of associations come to mind with this quotation. Hemingway’s first novel has been called the chronicle of The Lost Generation but one in which he claims his characters are survivors. Certainly the story of Jake Barnes is one of loss, dissipation and sadness. The carnage of WWI – the war to end all wars – lives around the edges of the story and in the body of Jake Barnes. He has had his penis – though not his testicles – shot off. With testes intact Jake’s body continues to produce masculinizing testosterone but no erection.
Jake seeks the love of Lady Brett Ashley. But he cannot accept the permanence of his injury nor that Brett cannot accept it, either. His inability to embrace his body as it is after war becomes the driving flaw of the story. Jake lives in an illusion.
Hemingway, by choosing third-person narration, seemed uninterested in whether the reader should want to be Jake.
Who would? Rather he wanted to speak about an entire generation of young men and women deformed by a war that need not have been fought, that everyone thought would never be fought and that render the mores of pre-WW1 Europe and America worthless.
Jay McInerny’s You
Of course, McInerny knew all this when he wrote Bright Lights, Big City. He might have employed the third person point of view just as Hemingway did. But McInerny, I think, was after another experience. He understood the lifestyle he himself had been living – working at The New Yorker and doing numerous lines of cocaine and being married to a model – was a lifestyle readers might want to experience.
Hence the use of the pronoun you. You snort the cocaine. You work for a persnickety ogress in Factual Verification in the hopes to one day write for Fiction. You tell no one your model wife has left you. You prefer to ignore reality, too.
In the following scene, McInerny describes You at his job at a famous NY magazine.
Already you feel a sense of nostalgia as you walk down the narrow halls past all the closed doors. You remember how you felt when you passed this way for your first interview, how the bland seediness of the hallway only increased your apprehension of grandeur. You thought of yourself in the third person: He arrived for his interview in a navy-blue blazer. He was interviewed for a position in the Department of Factual Verification, a job which seemed even then to be singularly unsuited to his flamboyant temperament. But he was not to languish long among the facts.
Each point of view has strengths and weaknesses. Would The Sun Also Rises have worked in using second person? I think not.
You have no penis. Nope. Not going to work.
Conversely, would Bright Lights, Big City work using a first- or third-person narration? Again, no. Had McInerny deployed either of those POVs, I think our narrator as a drug-addled, spoiled idiot would have tired us , and quickly, too.
Does You, The Narrator Work?
It does for me in Bright Lights, Big City.
I have had periods in my life when I did not languish long among the facts, especially when what has been true of the world and what I have wanted to be true of the world are a chasm’s-width apart. So I think you works as a narration tool if the writer can create a certain degree of empathy or affinity in the narrator. Plus it’s cool to imagine working for The New Yorker.
You is tricky. But there are no recipes in writing. As writers we slip into a boat, push away from the shore and begin to row to another shore we cannot even imagine, sometimes. We have to write, rewrite and maybe even start from the beginning, all over again.
Use the second-person point of view in your own work. Take a paragraph you’ve written in another point of view and rewrite in the second person. What happens? Does it work?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of second-person point of view?
September 10, 2015
Point of View in Writing
Point-of-View (POV) is a grammatical position through which you choose to tell a story. I say grammatical as a way to distinguish the different types of POVs.
A POV uses first, second or third person as a narrative structure. This assumes you will write a rather traditional work. Experimental writing may attempt to dispense with POV, which is to say the author has no narrative structure per se. They may still write using I/You/They, but those pronouns don’t function as part of the story’s scaffolding, but then again they just might. This is why experimental literature can be tricky with regard to POV.
So we will focus on more traditional uses of POV.
First person singular uses I.
First person plural uses We.
Second person singular or plural uses You.
Third person singular uses He/She.
Third person singular uses They.
Within third person there is third-person close and third-person omniscient.
Each structure has strengths and weaknesses. Each structure will allow you certain insights into your characters and your narrator (if you have one), but not others.
A very important reminder: the use of I, you or he/she does not necessarily make a work first-, second- or third-person POV. You may have to read for many paragraphs to determine the narrative structure. As a writer you can use this to your advantage.
The first-person singular allows you to provide all manner of insights and thoughts of your narrator. Holden Caufield narrates “The Catcher in the Rye.” We know what he thinks and feels, and that’s it.
Attempts to describes the internal thoughts of other characters fails as a first-person POV. I cannot know another person’s thoughts unless they choose to share them with me.
The first person plural, though rarely used, can place an individual narrator within a larger group of family, friends or community. Julia Otsuka uses it well in her novel, The Buddha in the Attic as does Joan Chase in During the Reign the Queen of Persia.
I could have written “I will be sharing these texts with you in the next few weeks.” But I didn’t. I chose to use the first-person plural instead. What changes when I use we instead of I? How might that impact your writing?
Second-person singular and plural is a fascinating and unique strategy through which to structure your work. Second-person works have been around a long time. Both Leo Tolstoy and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote short stories using the second person. More contemporary works include Self-Help by Lorrie Moore and Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerny.
You swear you won’t ever write a story using second person. But you have to admit there are distinct advantages to it. Whether it’s writing one of the earliest forms of you-are-there reporting in Sebastopol in December (Tolstoy), a very chilling tale in The Haunted Mind (Hawthorne) or the very distinct distance between what we believe to be true about ourselves and what is actually true (Moore and McInerny), the second person intrigues you. The trick is knowing how to best take advantage of its effects.
Third-person close. Third person close can almost pass as first person. The intent of third person close is to follow one particular character and no other. The story is told from that character’s perspective. J.K. Rowling did it to great effect in Harry Potter. Everything is told from his perspective using third person.
Third-person omniscient. Used in romance and thriller genres. Peruse the web and you’ll find writing gurus who tell you, “don’t get into the head of more than one character in any scene.” Whatever.
Know the rule then break it as you need to. The why determines the how in writing. You might decide to have each paragraph in one chapter told from a different character’s point-of-view. Excellent. I’m happy to read on, as long as the why makes it worth my while.
The suspension of disbelief is overrated, I think. Of course it’s a construct! I will happily read any POV, even several in the same paragraph (and yes, we’ll be talking about how Mohsin Hamid does this in How to Get Filthy Rich in Asia).What I value more as a reader is a writer’s execution. I say go for it.
Think about some of your favorite works of literature. Which POV (or POVs) did they use? How might you use some of this in your own writing?
Point-of-View in Writing
Point-of-View (POV) is a grammatical position through which you choose to tell a story. I say grammatical as a way to distinguish the different types of POVs.
A POV uses first, second or third person as a narrative structure. This assumes you will write a rather traditional work. Experimental writing may attempt to dispense with POV, which is to say the author has no narrative structure per se. They may still write using I/You/They, but those pronouns don’t function as part of the story’s scaffolding, but then again they just might. This is why experimental literature can be tricky with regard to POV.
So we will focus on more traditional uses of POV.
First person singular uses I.
First person plural uses We.
Second person singular or plural uses You.
Third person singular uses He/She.
Third person singular uses They.
Within third person there is third-person close and third-person omniscient.
Each structure has strengths and weaknesses. Each structure will allow you certain insights into your characters and your narrator (if you have one), but not others.
A very important reminder: The use of I, you or he/she does not necessarily make a work first-, second- or third person POV. You may have to read for many paragraphs to determine the narrative structure. As a writer you can use this to your advantage.
The first person singular allows you to provide all manner of insights and thoughts of your narrator. Holden Caufield narrates “The Catcher in the Rye.” We know what he thinks and feels, and that’s it.
Attempts to describes the internal thoughts of other characters fails as a first-person-POV. I cannot know another person’s thoughts unless they choose to share them with me.
The first person plural, though rarely used, can place an individual narrator within a larger group of family, friends or community. Julia Otsuka uses it well in her novel, “The Buddha in the Attic” as does Joan Chase in “During the Reign the Queen of Persia”. We will be studying these texts in the next few weeks.
I could have written I will be sharing these texts with you in the next few weeks. But I didn’t. I chose to use the first-person plural instead. What changes when I use we instead of I? How might that impact your writing?
Second person singular and plural is a fascinating and unique strategy through which to structure your work. Second-person works have been around a long time. Both Leo Tolstoy and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote short stories using the second-person. More contemporary works include “Self-Help” by Lorrie Moore and “Bright Lights, Big City” by Jay McInerny.
You swear you won’t ever write a story using second-person. But you have to admit there are distinct advantages to it. Whether it’s writing one of the earliest forms of you-are-there reporting in “Sebastopol in December” (Tolstoy), a very chilling tale in “The Haunted Mind” (Hawthorne) or the very distinct distance between what we believe to be true about ourselves and what is actually true (Moore and McInerny), the second person intrigues you. The trick is knowing how to best take advantage of its effects.
Third person close. Third person close can almost pass as first-person. The intent of third person close is to follow one particular character and no other. The story is told from that character’s perspective. J.K. Rowling did it to great effect in Harry Potter. Everything is told from his perspective using third-person.
Third person omniscient. Used in romance and thriller genres. Peruse the web and you’ll find writing gurus who tell you, “don’t get into the head of more than one character in any scene.” Whatever.
Know the rule then break it as you need to. The why determines the how in writing. You might decide to have each paragraph in one chapter told from a different character’s point-of-view. Excellent. I’m happy to read on, as long as the why makes it worth my while.
The suspension of disbelief is overrated, I think. Of course it’s a construct! I will happily read any POV, even several in the same paragraph (and yes, we’ll be talking about how Mohsin Hamid does this in “How to Get Filthy Rich in Asia”).What I value more as a reader is a writer’s execution. I say go for it.
Think about some of your favorite works of literature. Which POV (or POVs) did they use? How might you use some of this in your own writing?
August 24, 2015
Gone Reading
I work every day except for two or three months of vacation when I travel and generally don’t work at all. I read very little during the year, and when I go away I take a big valise full of books, books that I didn’t have time to read. – Simone de Beauvoir
I will be taking a two-week scheduled break to spend time with family, friends, gorge on tomatoes, revel in the last weeks of summer and, like de Beauvoir, read.
The newsletter returns Thursday, September 10 with a multi-part series on point-of-view. This series will cover the usual first- and third-person omniscient and close points-of-view plus the less used first-person plural and second-person points-of-view. Choosing a point-of-view is one of the most important decisions a writer can make. I look forward to sharing with you excerpts from some great books and reading your feedback on this exciting series.
Please relish these last weeks of summer.
August 20, 2015
Ursula Le Guin’s Advice: There Are No Recipes
The process of rewriting can be difficult. When you have loved a particular essay as much as I have loved the one I am now rewriting, the act of cutting something can be agonizing.
Making Something Good
Writer Nancy Jean Moore asked Le Guin, “How do you make something good?”
If Le Guin were an internet writing guru I suspect she would have offered up advice like “show, don’t tell” or “write what you know.” Le Guin would have then followed up with a proposal to buy her ebook/course/one-on-one coaching sessions.
We might have said yes to the offer. We were inexperienced and scared and wanted a prepackaged recipe for success. Le Guin knows this:
Inexperienced writers tend to seek the recipes for writing well. You buy the cookbook, you take the list of ingredients, you follow the directions, and behold! A masterpiece! The Never-Falling Soufflé!
Le Guin, however, is an actual writer, not a writer who writes about writing, which is what so many internet gurus are. Le Guin has written the Left Hand of Darkness, a book published in 1970 with characters who are neither male nor female, and the Earthsea series for children. So when she says there are no recipes for writing, she knows what she is talking about.
But alas, there are no recipes. We have no Julia Child. Successful professional writers are not withholding mysterious secrets from eager beginners. The only way anybody ever learns to write well is by trying to write well. This usually begins by reading good writing by other people, and writing very badly by yourself, for a long time.
The poet Theodore Roethke said it: “I learn by going where I have to go.”
Keep Alive and Write
I’ve chased a guru a time or two. Signed up for some online classes with varying results. Whether or not the classes improved my writing, I can’t say. But I can say the classes revealed to me an almost desperate need to get better as a writer. As I read more and harder writing, I now know how incredibly awful my writing is.
There is no way through except to keep reading and writing and tolerate the shiite I write. Desiring an easy way through this affliction to write won’t make it so. And I’ve tried.
I’ve dangled the carrot of a MFA program in front of me, more than once. But I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s not the money even.
An MFA program, in the words of Siddhartha Deb, would not be my friend. Deb continues:
You know that writing is a political, ethical thing and that you will have to look outside the professional world of both N.Y.C. and the M.F.A. in order to keep that vision of writing alive. You know (James) Baldwin’s words, and you repeat them to yourself every day. “Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say.”
No recipes. No advice. Find a way to keep alive and write.
What Keeps You Alive?
Writing these newsletter pieces about the how of writing keeps me alive, and honest, too. By promising to deliver something to you twice a week, I force myself to write and to read. And I’m creating something I need, rather desperately it seems, a place where writing is more than just starting (ala Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art) and more than just finishing. It’s about striving and sweating and suffering through tremendous periods where all I am managing to do, in the words of Stephen King, is shovel shit from a sitting position.
Thank you to each of you who has responded personally to my newsletter articles. I appreciate your thoughtfulness and time so very much.
In closing, what you are doing to keep alive and write?
August 17, 2015
Reading Exercise: The How of Language
The how of language, argues Sven Birkets, is the sentence. 1 This makes sense. Each writer uses sentences to create a certain style or vibe. If the author has skill, the vibe may be unique. An author with skill can also create a recognizable voice, where she can reveal what she thinks about the world.
I’ve read several novels and (a memoir) recently, all with a first person point-of-view (POV). Yet Mathias Enard’s Zone, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans offer distinct narrators simply by how they construct their sentences. Yes, Bechel’s book is a memoir. But her sentence construction, even without the tremendous graphics that accompany her sentences, can teach us something about voice and control and the how of writing.
When I read, I try to ask myself what the author has done to achieve a particular effect in me. Some things I ask myself, in addition to POV, are: What tense does the author use? How about punctuation? Does he use long, elliptical sentences or short ones with punch? Active or passive verbs?
Such studies can result in more tools I can use in my own writing.
What follows are the first several lines of each book. I would say sentences but Enard’s book is one long sentence broken up into nine chapters.
Each captures my imagination in some way. Enard’s stream of consciousness used by a character coming to terms with a brutal past contrasts with Bechdel’s relatively short sentences, controlled and tinged with sadness (but that may be me). Ishiguro’s style choices – longish, elliptical sentences – work well as he pursues philosophical questions about the nature of memory, family and friendships.
The Zone, by Mathias Enard 2
everything is harder once you reach man’s estate, everything rings falser a little metallic like the sound of two bronze weapons clashing they make you come back to yourself without letting you get out of anything it’s a fine prison, you travel with a lot of things, a child you didn’t bear a little Czech crystal star a talisman beside the snow you watch melting, after the re-routing of the Gulf Stream prelude to the Ice Age, stalactites in Rome and icebergs in Egypt, it keeps raining in Milan I missed my plane I had 1,500 kilometers on the train ahead of me now I have 600 still to go
Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel 3
Like many fathers, mine could occasionally be prevailed on for a spot of “airplane.” As he launched me, my full weight would fall on the pivot point between his feet and my stomach. It was discomfort well worth the rare physical contact, and certainly worth the moment of perfect balance when I soared above him.
When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro 4
It was the summer of 1923, the summer I came down from Cambridge, when despite my aunt’s wishes that I return to Shropshire, I decided my future lay in the capital and took up a small flat at Number 14b Bedford Gardens in Kensington. I remember it now as the most wonderful of summers. After years of being surrounded by fellows, both at school and at Cambridge, I took great pleasure in my own company.
Quite a difference, yes? No particular choice is a wrong one except when the sentences work against the themes and characterizations pursued by the author.
What do you learn from your favorite authors and/or books when you write out the first few lines of each text? Anything you can incorporate in your own writing?
Show 4 footnotes
Sven Birkets, “What Remains,” AGNI Magazine, 69, 2009, 1-8. ↩
Mathias Enard, The Zone, trans. by Charlotte Mandel, (Rochester: Open Books, 2010), 5. ↩
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (New York: First Mariner Books, 2007), 3. ↩
Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans (New York: Vintage International, 2001), 3. ↩
August 13, 2015
How to Read Like a Writer
Reading like a Writer is a Writer’s Secret Weapon
When we read like a writer, we read to learn about how to write better.
Yes, we may read for understanding to better comprehend an author’s ideas, but more than that we read to understand what choices an author has made to tell the story and why. What overall structure has the author chosen? What tense did she use? What impact, if any, does the setting have on the novel? Does the author use satire or irony? If so, how?
As we read, we note the choices authors make. Then we can ask ourselves what happens to a favorite text if the author had made different choices. Holden Caufield would have been a very different character had J.D. Salinger chosen the elliptical, indirect style of Kazuo Ishiguro.
Reading for reading’s sake versus reading for writing’s sake is like admiring Coco Chanel’s fashions compared to possessing the knowledge and skill to design and sew a dress yourself while riffing on some of Coco’s tricks. Writes David Jauss:
“[R]eading won’t help you much unless you learn to read like a writer. You must look at a book the way a carpenter looks at a house someone else built, examining the details in order to see how it was made.” 1
The Unreliable Narrator in When We Were Orphans
Let me share with you an example from a book I love. Christopher Banks narrates Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans. As a child both of his parents disappeared within weeks of each other while he and they were living in Shanghai.
Banks goes to great lengths to tell us a great number of times that his loss has had little impact on him. He is fine. But with great skill Ishiguro begins to undermine Bank’s narrative. An old school friend refers to Banks as “odd bird” during their time at school. Banks takes great offense at this remark. He believes himself to have been outgoing, cheery and so like other boys at school.
Another person claims Banks was a moody, withdrawn child, especially after his parents’ disappearance. Again, Banks is incensed, quite deeply actually. We begin to notice that how Banks sees himself and how others see him are quite different.
Indeed, in one telling scene, we see how far apart they are.
Banks is at wedding reception. The brother of the groom approaches him and apologizes profusely for the manner in which many of the guests have been treating him. Banks claims these people are his friends and has not taken any offense. Again the brother of the groom apologizes and tells Banks he is going to confront his abusers. Banks again claims they are his friends and that nothing is wrong.
Ishiguro’s Choice Influences His Characterization
Ishiguro chooses skillfully to never show us any of the actions or utterances of the guests. We know the brother is incensed. He is in fact quite offended by their behavior. And we know that Banks’ says repeatedly nothing is wrong. But we have no idea who said what to or about Banks.
In this scene Ishiguro has shown us the increasingly profound unreliability of Banks’ narration.
Ishiguro could have chosen to show us some of the behaviors in question. But that would have allowed us to know with certainty that Banks is a troubled and broken man. And that would have ruined the mystery at the heart of the story.
The central mystery of the story is not what happened to Banks’ parents but what has happened to Banks, and, as we begin to see how damaged he is, whether he has any hold on reality at all.
Ishiguro might have also shown us the disparity between Banks’ awareness of himself and how others perceive him through another scene. That might have worked, too. The key is that he chose not to relate any specific actions, behaviors or statements of the guests.
My takeaway of this scene is a new tool that will allow me to show an unreliable narrator or unreliable character in a natural and convincing way. This is one example, I hope, of how reading like a writer can improve your writing.
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David Jauss, “Articles of Faith” in Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1989) ↩
