Jay Sennett's Blog, page 9

Writing Exercise, or Journalism

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From the 3:00 AM Epiphany

(More exercises here.)

Journalism. Write part of a story in the form of journal entries. Everything that happens in the story will most likely happen between the entries. Make sure your readers can see the events offstage, but also present your journalist’s blind spots – she will not present the whole story, just parts of it. Your journal writer may not even understand the significance of the events until a few entries later – if ever. Keep all the entries close together in time (within a week or two). This exercise will challenge those writers who think there is no limit to realism: Make sure that the journal writer is still telling a story – showing as often as telling, revealing things about herself. In other words, you have to work just as hard in this exercise to choose the words of the narrator.

February 1

Such an asshole. I can’t believe he keeps asking me to do things that he says are related to my job. No. They. Are. Not. My job is a lot of things but it isn’t the things he says. Or maybe the things he wants.

What does he want? Who knows. I mean really, who can chart the asshole’s trajectory? I can’t. At least not his anyway. And it’s not like I even want to.

On a different note, I’ve been eyeing a new tie at Neiman’s. Tom Ford. Kind of James Bondish in Quantum of Solace. I know I shouldn’t get it. But I do think I deserve it. I’m working with the asshole constantly, after all, having to do his job and mine.

If I make two minimum payments this month, and don’t eat it out for the next thirty days, I think I can do it.

February 3

God he asked me again to do some shit that isn’t related to my job. And then he had the temerity to ask me, “well what do you think your job is?” and I said, “Not that!”

Doesn’t he know that everyone at work is laughing at him? That he is the joke of the department? He seems to think he can do whatever he wants because he’s sleeping with the Director.

Now. That is just heresay. But they do oggle one another in meetings. So there must be some merit to the rumor, right?

And he is so lazy. What does he do all day? I mean I’m already working on the 53,000 other things he’s given me to do, which, I want to point out, he should be doing since these are manager’s tasks I’m doing, and what does he do?

Go for coffee. A lot. Who takes orders from a barista? If anything, I should be giving him orders.

February 3

He just sent me an email telling me I’m to meet with him and the Director tomorrow. Good. I will be more than happy to tell the Director his precious little boyfriend protege doesn’t do a fucking thing all day except go for coffee.

I’m writing this at the mall. I’ve got that new Tom Ford tie in a box in a bag next to me and a coffee and a sandwich from the little shop next to Nordstrom. I didn’t eat lunch today and I didn’t go home after work. I stayed late at work.

I’m going to wear it to the meeting tomorrow, in my grey flannel suit. The asshole will probably be wearing some shit rayon/polyester/wool number he got from the Men’s Wearhouse on sale. With a matching tie/pocket square combo. God how can a gay  man be such a shitty dresser? I mean the whole thing defies logic. A lazy asshole and a shitty dresser.

February 3

I just have to say I look sharp in my new Tom Ford tie and my grey flannel suit. I tried it on before getting ready for bed.

The asshole will be suitably (haha such a good pun) impressed, I’m sure. Especially with his shitty suit and those fucking square toed shoes he keeps buying. Doesn’t he know the oughts are naught? God sometimes I impress even myself.

I know I could have bought the tie on ebay. But I hate waiting and sometimes those ebayers don’t ship stuff when they say they do. And I’ve been working hard and I really deserve this tie. So I bought it. And I didn’t buy lunch out today, either.

February 5

I’ve been so fucking pissed it’s still hard for me to write even now. I just got off the phone with my lawyer. He told me I need to sit down and write out exactly what happened at the meeting yesterday to the best of my recollection. I also need to print out any emails pertinent to my case. But I don’t know if I can because I don’t have access to that work email address anymore.

He was absolutely shocked when I told him they fired me. He kind of paused and said something, and I said, Excuse me and then he said Okay and told me I need to write everything down.

Well, here it is: I got fired because my now old boss is a fucking transphobic asshole.

On Proper Word Choice

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Learning to write is learning to make a series of choices. Which point of view, tense, genre and other decisions are ones we must make as we write fiction and nonfiction.

The fundamental building block of writing is the word.  A simple thing. Yet commit to a weak or lazy word and do it enough times and muddled, awkward and ambiguous writing results.

I’m editing a piece rejected by several journals. Each clunky word choice leaps out at me. My palm hits my face, repeatedly.  “Why did I ever choose that word? What was I thinking?”

Apparently I wasn’t. Which is why I chose poorly. Maybe I didn’t choose at all. As I reread this particular piece I sense I felt rushed, or worse, I neglected to care.

§ § § § § § § § § §

In Starting From Scratch Rita Mae Brown taught me the syntactic differences within English that arise from our two parent languages, Anglo-Saxon and Latin. The earthiness our language derives from the Anglo-Saxon while the action-oriented focus derives from Latin. Brown provides us with a partial list of our two language sources. Reading it I understood for the first time why in English we say both woman and female.

A woman is a lot of things a female is not. Yet each word describes something similar. Or does it?

Choose carefully.

S. I. Hayakawa wrote a beautiful manual of words. For years a Senator from Hawaii he started his career as a linguist (and also a journalist for the Chicago Defender.) His book Choose the Right Word defines, compares, and contrasts words of similar but not identical meaning—such as “infer” and “imply.”

Choose carefully.

§ § § § § § § § § §

Hannah Louise Posten’s “Modern Love” article “How a Kitten Erased my Partner’s Depression” recounts the salutary influence a kitten had on her boyfriend Joe, a man she loves dearly who suffers from sometimes debilitating depression. Of first encounter between the kitten and Joe, she writes:

But then I saw her sly green eyes holding his handsome sad ones, and it seemed as if there were fireworks and unicorns leaping, the aurora borealis descending between them. When the kitten tried to vogue, swoon and crab-leap sideways all at once, consequently tripping over her paws, I think Joe’s eyeballs may have rolled back into his head to reveal two glittery pink hearts pasted onto his sockets in lieu of pupils.

The next morning when we woke up, the first words out of Joe’s mouth were, “Where’s the kitten?” And the kitten’s first act, when she heard his voice, was to ice-pick her way up the quilt and jump on his face.

Vogue, swoon and crab-leap sideways all at once; ice-picked. If you’ve spent any time with a kitten, you know Posten chose well when she used vogue, swoon, crab-leap and ice-pick to describe the kitten’s actions.

Learning to write – and getting better at it – depends in part on your ability to choose the right word and use it at the right time.

Choose carefully.

 

We, The Narrators – Buddha in the Attic

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photo by Will White

Julie Otsuka’s Buddha in the Attic tells the story of Japanese picture brides. Women emigrated from Japan to America in the early 20th century to marry men they had seen only in pictures. Hence the term picture brides.

Otsuka could have chosen a more traditional first- person- singular or third-person-close point of view in which to tell this story. She instead chose an unusual, novel and, in my opinion, quite successful point of view: first-person plural.

Instead of I she gives us We.

What Otsuka achieves is spectacular. Buddha in the Attic reads like a non-fiction history book where the facts (“X percent of picture brides came from the Tokyo area. All experienced racism in some form….”) become characters. The historical fact and movement of the picture brides in their plurality become a kind of singular protagonist.

This is a book that each must read alone, I think. It’s that kind of experience. Saying “Oh, it’s about all the things the picture brides experienced” does little justice to the profound insights I encountered in the pages of Buddha in the Attic. It’s as if I became a picture bride myself yet also did not.

§ § § § § § § §

Otsuka’s epigraph describes her goal for her book. It is taken from Ecclesiasticus 44:8-9:

There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.

Buddha in the Attic serves as both an explication and memorial for the picture brides. But this isn’t a typical history of picture brides told thorough the story of the Akiko Tanaka or some variant. No. This story is about the thousands of women who left Japan for America. An individual’s story would lose so many of the complex, factual details of the brides’ experiences. So Otsuka deftly keeps the focus on the group.

Some of us were from Tokyo, and had seen everything, and spoke beautiful Japanese, and did not mix much with any of the others. Many more of us were from Kagoshima and spoke in a thick southern dialect that those of us from Tokyo pretended we could not understand. Some of us were from Hokkaido, where it was snowy and cold, and would dream of that white landscape for years. Some of us were from Hiroshima, which would later explode, and were lucky to be on the boat at all though of course we did not know that then.

§ § § § § § § §

This sentence blew my mind. “Many more of us were from Kagoshima and spoke in a thick southern dialect that those of us from Tokyo pretended we could not understand.” As I read it, my mind suspended the first-person plural. What I thought was “those women from Tokyo pretended they could not understand.” This subtle shift provided the traditional protagonist/antagonist found in fiction writing (and even non-fiction writing). I guess I needed a protagonist.

But Otsuka wants something far grander for us, which I think of as the fictionalized portrayal of a group experience.

So as I read Buddha in the Attic, I felt involved intimately with a group of women without names or faces. This sounds strange even as I write it out, which is why you must read this book to understand Otsuka’s accomplishment. We talk about the ability of fiction to enliven history. Otsuka accomplishes this and so much more.

In a manner both direct and surreptitious, Otsuka makes us both a participant and an observer of this particular historical moment. The first-person plural provided the point of view needed to accomplish this feat.

Writing Practice as Play

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Why is writing so serious? Put another way, why is it so hard for writers to play when we write? Janet Burroway, in her excellent, highly recommended, oft-assigned text, Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft describes how her creative writing workshop students experienced a class exchange with student choreographers.

The first time we came into the dance theater, we writers sat politely  down in our seats with our notebooks on our laps. The choreographer-dancers did stretches on the carpet, headstands on the steps; some sat backward on the chairs; one folded herself down into a seat like a teabag in a teacup. When they started to dance they were given a set of instructions: Group A is rolling through, up, and under; Group B is blue Tuesday; Group C is weather comes from the west. The choreographers began to invent movement; each made up a “line” of dance. They repeated and altered it. The bumped into each other, laughed, repeated, rearranged, and danced it through. They did it again. They adjusted. They repeated. They danced it through. Nobody was embarrassed and nobody gave up. They tried again. One of the young writers turned to me with a face of luminous discovery. “We don’t play enough,” she said.

Indeed. I can’t recall the last time I approached my writing as play. The next deadline, the next submission, the next essay lurks with cudgel in hand, ready to beat my nose to the grindstone. Keep calm and struggle on. Each sentence must participate in a larger goal or else why bother.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Ms. Burroway is something of a calm jester, directing the writing student back to a place we existed before we decided to be writers. Back when we delighted in “one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.” (Am I the only one who still adores Mr. Seuss? Such joy through playing with language!) She teaches us how to play again.

Like Natalie Goldberg she urges us forward using a combination of freewriting, focused freewriting, brainstorming and using the world. She writes:

Freewrite. “Either on a regular schedule or at frequent intervals, sit down and write without any plan whatsoever of what you are going to write.”

Focused freewrite. “Pick a topic and focus on it. Write for five or ten minutes, saying anything at all about it – anything at all – in any order.”

Brainstorm. “Start with the question What if…? Finish the question and then free-associate around it, absolutely anything that pops into your head-ideas, situations,  connections, solutions, and images, no matter how bizarre.”

Using the world. “A journal is not a diary. Your journal may include your own feelings and problems, but training yourself to observe the outside world will help develop the skills of an imaginative writer.”

Burrow has a much longer range plan for these prompts, trigger lines and ideas for “playing in your journal.” Indeed, in later chapters she takes us through the process of using these prompts to flesh out longer pieces, including an essay and short story (both about 15o0 words), three poems and one ten-minute play. Whether one chooses to pursue fiction or not, Ms. Burroway believes all forms of writing cross-pollinate. Playwriting, for example, teaches fiction writers about dialogue and spatial movement of characters; poetry about the density and sound of words.

Again, I highly recommend this book. If you can afford it, it is well worth the 60-ish dollars for the fourth edition. If that price is too budget adverse, consider a used copy, an earlier edition or your public library.

 

What is Writing Practice?

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A friend of mine is an internationally renowned jazz trombonist and a professor of music. He shared recently a set of trombone practice drills for lip slurs. A lip slur is a movement practice on a brass instrument in which the note changes without a corresponding change in a valve or slide. The practice set my friend assigned to his students increases in difficulty with each drill. Such practice sets increase a student’s tone and flexibility.

This all left me to wonder if we have such drills for writing. Seemingly we do not. We dress up our creative field with tropes of “writing cannot be taught.”

Writing fundamentals can be taught. But perhaps this statement speaks to the willingness to learn. Musicians striving to become professionals understand the long and distant horizon they seek. No one, least of all the musicians themselves, believes musicians just happen, that it is a creative field that “cannot be taught.” All of us understand the time commitment and singular focus needed to succeed as a professional jazz musician.

In many ways we lack a similar understanding of writers. Norman Mailer once remarked that by the time he published “The Naked and The Dead” in 1948 at age 25 he had written over 350,000 words. Now, if having a book named as one of the 100 best novels in English resulted solely from word count, we’d all become Norman Mailer. We know that writing is more than word count or page count.

Writing well is ultimately about creative decisions. Knowing how to use second person may be helpful. But if I don’t know when to deploy it, what then? Writing well – and that is my goal for myself and I hope for other writers – requires skillful creative decision making. Change this word and not that one. Choose English words derived from Latin rather than those derived from German.

In addition to skill these decisions require control. The less skilled we are the more fearful we will never write well again. With the right kind of practice, I think, we lose this fear. We know how to create a particular effect. The question becomes is this the right effect for the story I want to tell.

All of this is nothing more than a call for writers to practice deliberately. Writing practice is deliberately practicing with the goal of becoming a more confident and skillful writer.

 

You, The Narrator and Participant – Sebastopol Sketches

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photo by Will White

Don’t believe anyone who thinks the second-person point-of-view began with Bright Lights, Big City. Well before McInerny was born, both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Leo Tolstoy used the second person.

Tolstoy used it in Sebastopol Sketches a series of lightly fictionalized vignettes from his time as an army officer in Sebastopol during the Crimean War. An Irish contemporary, William Howard Russell, covered both the Siege of Sebastopol and the Charge of the Light Brigade for the Irish Times. Russell’s articles covering the Crimean War were amongst the earliest journalistic writings about  the Crimean War in particular, and war in general.

In Sebastopol Sketches, Tolstoy seeks something different from Russell. He used his wartime experiences to write fictionalized accounts of the war.  By adopting fiction rather than nonfiction or a journalistic style Tolstoy could deploy a variety of tools not available to a journalist. “Sebastopol in September” I found particularly fascinating as Tolstoy used the second-person point of view to make the reader both the narrator of and participant in an officer’s experiences during the war. He took the facts of Russell’s war journalism and placed them firmly in the realm of emotions. In the following passage Tolstoy describes the sensations of being in in the path of mortar and cannonballs.

Once again the sentry will shout ‘Cannon!’, and you will hear the same shrieking sound, followed by the same slap and showering of earth; or he will shout ‘Mortar!’, and you will hear the even whistle of a mortar shell, a sound that is quite pleasant and not at all easy to associate with anything very dreadful; you will hear this whistling sound come nearer and nearer in an accelerating crescendo, and the you will see a black sphere and witness the shell’s impact against the earth, this palpable, ringing explosion. Then shell-splinters will fly whistling and whinging in all directions, stones will rustle through the air, and you will be spattered with mud. You will experience a sensation that is a strange blend of fear and enjoyment. [pg. 55]

Not content with making us the narrator, he occasionally uses the honorific “your honor” to describe both you as the participant in the scene as is it unfolds and you, the narrator. We become both the narrator and the participant of this sketch. Neither Bright Lights, Big City nor How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia have another character address the narrator by name or title, which makes Tolstoy’s effort more memorable for doing so.

‘To the Grafskaya, your honour? Step right this way, sir,’ come the voices of two or three retired seaman who are climbing out of their skiffs to offer your their services.

You choose the skiff nearest you, pick your way over the semi-decomposed carcass of a bay horse that is lying in the mud beside the vessel, and make your way to the tiller.

Tolstoy’s words are memorable even today. His skill at using the second person and the crafty way he slips in the occasional address to him/us make this sketch quite outstanding. By far it is the best of the three sketches. “Sebastopol in September” offers an excellent, concise use of the second person as both the narrator and participant and memorable original detail. This is an excellent text to study both for point of view and memorable detail.

 

The Art of Revision

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All writing is rewriting. We must find a revision process that works for us. Over time we may adopt or more strategies that make us create the best possible work.

Time is my personal friend in the rewriting process. I tend to fall in love with whole passages, sometimes whole pages, of a particular work. When I am too close to having finished the work I cannot bring myself to excise them. Even when I should, I do not.

Six months or two years later the difference in my feeling for the work surprises me. “Boy, this is crap!” This over text I fawned over at first completion. What I need to do to improve the text leaps out at me. “How could I have missed that?”

Emotions do that to me. The writer curries favor with the editor. The editor knows to wait. With time my emotions drain away. The editor fills the void with precision and excision.

In this series on the Art of Revision I want to share with you how I might improve one of my own texts. It’s all good and well for me to write some words and detach them from a process of revision used as an example.

Here I offer a concrete example of revising a text.

The Original Text

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” Frederick Buechner

I walk towards my mailbox, stop, open it and pull out my mail. There seems to be more of it than I expect. A slight woman hurries behind me towards the elevator.I pull out flyers and catalogues and a credit card bill or two. The elevator doors open. Still more mail appears. The requisite time elapses and in the back of my head I know that the doors will close without me. If I dally longer, I will have to wait.

So I close and lock the mailbox door and dash to the elevator in three long steps. At 73 inches I had always been a tall woman. The distance is nothing for me. But the width of the door opening only allows me to insert my hand to push in the emergency closure device open. I push harder than I realize. The slight African-American woman raises her head to stare at me.

Absolute terror fills her face.

“Don’t be afraid,” I want to say. “I’m not the man you think I am. I used to be a woman six months ago.”

In 1996, about six months or so before my thirty-second birthday I began hormone replacement therapy. I injected soluble testosterone every two weeks. Within weeks wispy locks of hair sprouted over my face. Muscles burst forth on my chest and shoulders. I ate for two people most days of the week.

Most importantly, my voice deepened. I needed these changes. For years my body and I disagreed with one another. Inside I felt like a man. Outside, my body said, “No, I’m a woman.” My body trumped whatever I felt and knew inside myself.

For years – in fact most of my life – I wanted to inhabit a body that felt male to me and also seemed male to the outside world. Until I mustered enough gumption to make the necessary changes to have my outside match my inside, I nurtured deep and abiding fantasies about living as a man: dating, dressing, ease of movement through public places, an end to the interrogations I endured from strangers when my voice – then high pitched – revealed what I tried to hide beneath male clothing and silence.

The Rewrite

For years – in fact most of my life – I wanted to inhabit a body that felt male to me and also seemed male to the outside world. Until I mustered enough gumption to make the necessary changes to have my outside match my inside, I nurtured deep and abiding fantasies about living as a man: Dating, dressing, ease of movement through public places, an end to the interrogations I endured from strangers when my voice – then high pitched – revealed what I tried to hide beneath male clothing and silence.

In 1996, about six months or so before my thirty-second birthday I began hormone replacement therapy and injected soluble testosterone every two weeks. Within weeks wispy locks of hair sprouted over my face. Muscles burst forth on my chest and shoulders. I ate for two people most days of the week. As my voiced deepened, my body no longer felt like it betrayed me.

All the physical changes delighted me. For the first time in my life I felt in a kind of hard-fought agreement with myself, a kind concordance of interior and exterior. This agreement brought with it a series of unexpected consequences, which I had not foreseen nor had other female-to-male transsexuals warned me about.

§§§

(Ed: This version ought to be in the past tense.)

I walked towards my mailbox, stopped, opened it and pulled out my mail. There seems to be more of it than I expected. A slight woman hurried behind me towards the elevator. Flyers for pizza, catalogs for stuff I couldn’t afford, a credit card bill or three leapt out at me like caged dogs confined too long in a too small space.  The elevator doors opened.

Still more mail appeared. The requisite time elapsed and and I knew the doors would close without me. If I tarried any longer, I would either be forced to wait for the elevator or ascend three flights of stairs. Neither option won.

I closed and locked the mailbox door and dashed to the elevator in three long steps as the doors were all but closed. With a forceful push of the safety door edge, the doors clanged open.

A slight woman raised her head to stare at me. Only then did I become cognizant of the grey fedora and trench coat I wore. Absolute terror filled her face.

“Don’t be afraid,” I wanted to say. “I’m not the man you think I am. I used to be a woman six months ago.”

Writing Exercise, or The Unreliable Third

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From Brian Kitely’s The 3:00 A.M. Epiphany: Write a fragment of a story from the POV of an unreliable narrator – third person limited (or attached) narration. This is a deliberate misuse of the more objective third-person narration. 500 words.

My attempt:

Sindra pulled the fire alarm but not before she shot the man – her father – dead. The click, click, click of the empty cartridge had ceased her efforts, unexpectedly and regrettably. She would have continued happily had she more bullets. Endings were never her strong suit anyway.

The idea to pull the alarm came to her when she heard people mumbling and screaming outside the man’s door. They are so done! The thump of the body slumping to the floor interrupted her flow to the door. Damn him! He was always interfering with her style.

“Get the fuck out of my way!” She flashed her now useless gun. The man’s minions cowered and ducked and two of them fell to the floor. Sindra strode to the alarm pull, turned to his fan club, pulled the bar down, pointed the .38 at the man’s number one fan, the one he had been banging for years, and shouted “run.” The single-action plastic bar with the words “pull down” written in red snapped in Sindra’s forefinger and thumb.

“I’m glad your dead motherfucker,” she said, back in the office, standing over the body. “And I’m glad I’m the one that did it.” His right arm flopped down to the floor from the force of her kick.

Steadying herself against the desk she thought about the first time he touched her and all the times after that and the secrets. Oh the goddamn secrets!

No one could know. She was a bad girl if she told so she kept quiet. She kept quiet when her mother or her boyfriend asked why she was so sad. She kept quiet when he would sneak off with her to the family bathroom at the mall and it would all be over in five minutes. And she kept very quiet when their very last five minutes together created a difficult situation – that’s what he called it – nine months later.

Sindra worked up a large pool of saliva in her mouth. Perfect! The globular, gooey mass hung from his right eye. “There won’t be anymore difficult situations now will there motherfucker?” She began applauding herself and bowing slightly to an imaginary audience.

“Does she do that a lot?” The psychiatric tech asked the nurse.

“Several times a week.”  Sindra stopped for a moment, as though a window opened between her and the two psychiatric hospital employees and somehow she and the two staff dwelled together in the same three blinks of reality. The window slammed shut. Sindra went back to applauding.

“She experienced a psychotic break several years ago. Sort of left and never came back. Used to get a car load’s worth of visitors every week. Now she gets just one.”

“That guy that visits her every week?”

“Yes, her father.” Sindra’s hands stopped mid-air.

“He’s been coming every week for five years. And every week for five years Sindra sits in front of him and rocks herself and hums. Even the doctor told him there was no point in visiting anymore.”

Sindra chortled to herself.

 

Do This Exercise, or The Unreliable Third

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From Brian Kitely’s The 3:00 A.M. Epiphany: Write a fragment of a story from the POV of an unreliable narrator – third person limited (or attached) narration. This is a deliberate misuse of the more objective third-person narration. 500 words.

My attempt:

Sindra pulled the fire alarm but not before she shot the man – her father – dead. The click, click, click of the empty cartridge had ceased her efforts, unexpectedly and regrettably. She would have continued happily had she more bullets. Endings were never her strong suit anyway.

The idea to pull the alarm came to her when she heard people mumbling and screaming outside the man’s door. They are so done! The thump of the body slumping to the floor interrupted her flow to the door. Damn him! He was always interfering with her style.

“Get the fuck out of my way!” She flashed her now useless gun. The man’s minions cowered and ducked and two of them fell to the floor. Sindra strode to the alarm pull, turned to his fan club, pulled the bar down, pointed the .38 at the man’s number one fan, the one he had been banging for years, and shouted “run.” The single-action plastic bar with the words “pull down” written in red snapped in Sindra’s forefinger and thumb.

“I’m glad your dead motherfucker,” she said, back in the office, standing over the body. “And I’m glad I’m the one that did it.” His right arm flopped down to the floor from the force of her kick.

Steadying herself against the desk she thought about the first time he touched her and all the times after that and the secrets. Oh the goddamn secrets!

No one could know. She was a bad girl if she told so she kept quiet. She kept quiet when her mother or her boyfriend asked why she was so sad. She kept quiet when he would sneak off with her to the family bathroom at the mall and it would all be over in five minutes. And she kept very quiet when their very last five minutes together created a difficult situation – that’s what he called it – nine months later.

Sindra worked up a large pool of saliva in her mouth. Perfect! The globular, gooey mass hung from his right eye. “There won’t be anymore difficult situations now will there motherfucker?” She began applauding herself and bowing slightly to an imaginary audience.

“Does she do that a lot?” The psychiatric tech asked the nurse.

“Several times a week.”  Sindra stopped for a moment, as though a window opened between her and the two psychiatric hospital employees and somehow she and the two staff dwelled together in the same three blinks of reality. The window slammed shut. Sindra went back to applauding.

“She experienced a psychotic break several years ago. Sort of left and never came back. Used to get a car load’s worth of visitors every week. Now she gets just one.”

“That guy that visits her every week?”

“Yes, her father.” Sindra’s hands stopped mid-air.

“He’s been coming every week for five years. And every week for five years Sindra sits in front of him and rocks herself and hums. Even the doctor told him there was no point in visiting anymore.”

Sindra chortled to herself.

 

You and She, The Narrators – A Hybrid Form

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photo by Will White

Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a coming-of-age story using an unusual hybrid point of view. Unlike a traditional second-person point of view or the very common omniscient third-person point of view, Hamid adopts both a second-person and third-person omniscient point of view, often within the same chapter. A bold move, a unique move and a move I am not sure works.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia tells the story of You from the rural village of his birth to the unnamed bustling city of his elementary and high schools to his time with the Idealists on through his rise to corporate king of the world. Mohsin uses the self-help genre to examine notions of the self, success and the extent to which we can ever transcend our childhoods.

Mohsin’s philosophical threads combined with a masterful ability to describe the details of extreme poverty make the book memorable. Where he stumbles, I think, is his use of the third-person point of view. As I’ve said elsewhere, all novels require suspension of disbelief, even novels purporting to be in the realist genre. The compression of time is but one example of how realist authors require us to suspend our natural disbelief in order to follow the story. So it isn’t his multiple uses of different points of view per se that is the problem.

Mohsin’s story fails, in part, because his use of the third person seems clunky. In his case, because he is a genius storyteller, it seems lazy, as though he dispensed with the challenge of writing the entire novel in the second person because he had more important sentences to write. As I learned when I wrote 500 or so words using the imperative, restricting myself to one point of view presented enormous challenges, challenges Mohsin seems unwilling to pursue.

An example: our protagonist endures a punishment at the hands of a cruel teacher.

Most of you (note: this is the second person plural) have in the past been punished by your teacher. You, as one of the brightest students, have drawn some of the most severe punishments. You attempt to hide your knowledge, but every so often bravado gets the better of you and it comes out, as it just has, and then there is hell to pay. Today your teacher reaches into the pocket of his tunic, where he keeps a small amount of course sand, and grips you by the ear, the sand on his fingertips adding abrasion to the enormous pressure he applies, so that your earlobe is not only crushed but also made raw and slightly bloody.

Besides the odd intrusion of the second-person plural at the sentence’s start, this paragraph follows a second-person point of view. So far so good.

But then Hamid decides to explain yet another level of nepotism alive in our protagonist’s community, which would be really cool in the second person. But Hamid dashes off a few sentences in the third-person omniscient.

Your teacher did not want to be a teacher. He wanted to be  a meter reader at the electric utility. Meter readers do not have to put up with children, work comparatively little, and what is more important, have greater opportunity for corruption and are hence both better off and held in higher regard in society. Nor was becoming a meter reader out of your teacher’s reach. His uncle worked for the electric utility. But the one position as meter reader this uncle was able to facilitate went, as all things most desirable in life invariably went, to your teacher’s elder brother.

Here what Hamid wants to tell us takes precedence over how he tells us. It is far easier to provide this information using the third person than it is in the second person. I’m not sure it works.

What do you think? Does Hamid’s hybrid approach work, especially when he moves from two different points-of-view within the same chapter?

Have read other books that does something similar?