The story of my PhD, Part 5: Future
This is Part Five of the story of my doctorate—the who, why, when, what, and how of it—based on questions from readers on this blog, Facebook, and Twitter. It is in five parts:
Opportunity: How I became a PhD candidate even though I had no degree
Decision: Why I wanted a PhD
Choice: How I chose my subject/university/supervisor
Experience: What challenges (personal and academic) I faced and how I solved them
Future: What impact a PhD may have on my writing, and more
For context you might want to read the PhD thesis first, or at least the abstract. If you have further questions, use the comments.
Future
Will the study undertaken and understanding reached on the way to getting a doctorate change my fiction? Yes. It already has.
Twenty years ago, just before I wrote The Blue Place, I wrote a novella, Season of Change. It wasn’t bad. I sold it to an editor for a tidy sum. I pulled it from publication. I explain why in an essay, “As We Mean to Go On,” that I wrote with Kelley:
True fiction rings pure and clear when you flick it, like a crystal wine glass. If it’s flawed, it doesn’t matter how good it looks, it doesn’t matter whether the prose gleams or the metaphors are as perfect as circles: when you flick it you get nothing but a dull buzz.
[…]
[The novella] was a very personal piece—about a woman who is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis—and I thought it was both brave and beautifully written. (I always think that about a newly-finished work: My baby really is a genius!) I handed it to Kelley, beaming. She read it, looked troubled, and said, I don’t think this works. I frowned. I stayed calm. I asked why: was it the imagery? The character? No, no, she said, they were fine. What, then? She frowned and said she needed to think about that. Two days later, she was still thinking: she was sorry, but she couldn’t pinpoint the flaw; I’d papered it over so well she couldn’t find it, but it was there. The story didn’t ring quite true.
At this point we’d been living together seven years. I trusted her. So I took the novella apart looking for the flaw. I held it up to all the bright critical lights I could bring to bear; I hefted it, emotionally, and found it pleasing; I ran through the phrases in my mind, and I couldn’t find anything wrong. Not a thing. I agonised: I believed Kelley, but I couldn’t find the flaw. Maybe she was wrong. So I sent it to a magazine and by return mail got a contract, for what at the time was a princely sum, and a letter of fulsome praise. I signed the contract and cashed the cheque. But I felt uneasy, as I usually do when I rationalise. That unease grew, and grew, and grew, until one day about three months after I’d sold it, I took the novella out of a drawer, and flicked it one more time, and listened, and heard a sickening buzz. I still didn’t know what was wrong with it, but clearly something was, so I returned the money and told the editor I was very sorry, but I was pulling the story. Why? he said. I don’t know, I said, but it’s not right.
Now, of course, I know what the problem is—but it’s taken me years to figure it out. And one day I’ll rewrite the piece, only it won’t be a novella, and everything in it will be different.
It took a few years to get around to the rewrite I’d imagined; the novella would become a short story, I decided, “Small Dog Theory;” there would be no genre elements. Along the way I had realised the novella wouldn’t work because the ending epiphany was a narrative prosthesis. This is a term originally developed by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder to describe literary or visual narratives that use disabled people as a metaphorical opportunity. (Read a fuller explanation of both the term and how it applied to my novella in Disability: Art, Scholarship, and Activism.) But a year ago, even though I thought I had figured it out and was ready to rewrite, I hadn’t and I wasn’t. I tried, but with each new sentence I grew more and more reluctant, more convinced that I could not, should not, change that final image. That image, narrative prosthesis or not, was the emotional point of the story. I could not shift it. I let the whole thing drop.
It turns out, that was not the problem. Writing my thesis helped me understand what was. In all my previous fiction I norm and centre the Other: my protagonists are queer women but the story is not about being a woman or being queer. Being a woman and being queer are normal to me, uninteresting as story material so I exclude the bits about being a woman and being queer that other writers might build a story around. In terms of being a queer woman, all my novels and stories are focalised heterotopia. The new novella is focalised around a queer woman, Mara. In those terms it, too, is a focalised heterotopia. But this novella does not norm the disabled Other. The narrator, Mara, is diagnosed with MS and becomes disabled. The story is about becoming disabled, and how Mara changes. In terms of disability, then, it is not a focalised heterotopia; it is a Coming Out story.
Coming Out stories have never interested me. Once I had read the lesbian classics as a teenager (Rubyfruit Jungle, Confessions of Failed Southern Lady, Kinflicks) I found them eye-rollingly predictable.1 Why would I write one?
It’s much easier to weigh choices when one understands those choices exactly. Until I had words for what my fiction usually does I could not describe why and how this novella deviated from that. All I knew was that it did, and that deviation made me uneasy. Once I understood that deviation, though, all I had to do was decide whether or not the novella was worth pursuing on its own terms. It had been on my radar for 20 years; something about it was necessary to me. So, yes; I decided it was worth three weeks of trying to find out.
Once I had submitted the first draft of my thesis to my advisor I had some time. Instead of turning to Menewood, as I had planned, I had one last shot at the novella. The headline is: It worked. I ended up with a much longer piece—still, officially, a novella—So Lucky, with the same final image that had been a narrative prosthesis but now was not. It’s still a disability Coming Out story, though. It will be published as a book in late spring 2018. More on that another time.
◻︎
The PhD, then, has already changed my work: So Lucky would not exist if I had not nailed down, exactly, how my fiction works. The question now is, Will my new-found clarity lead to change on my work-in-progress, Menewood?
No, I don’t think so. When I first began the critical review process last year, I became self-conscious about my prose, because I was taking it apart to see how it worked, and I was learning how to stick to a rigid argument-evidence-analysis writing schema. I’m no longer doing that; I no longer feel self-conscious. Now I just feel clear. How long will it take me to write Menewood? That I don’t know. It’s will be a very large book, longer than Hild. But I have a feeling it will go more quickly than it might have before the PhD. Watch this space.
◻︎
Will having a doctorate change the non-writing aspects of my life? It might. I still want to do some teaching, and I’m still interested in the research project I discussed in Part Two on the pay bias in publishing. (If there are any MA or PhD students out there who need a project, talk to me.) Possibly the biggest change the PhD might bring, though, is in the steadying of my interest in critical writing.
I’ve always reviewed and written critical essays. I want to do more of that. I also have a couple of more blue-sky critical essays I’d like to tackle, on the pleasures and perils of cross-reading (maybe of ventriloquising as a writer—writing from a stance that’s not your personal experience, whether race or gender or sexuality or disability), and how climate change has influenced myth down the ages. Then there are those nothing-to-do-with-narrative history pieces I’ve been itching to write for an age (except, of course, everything is narrative: everything is story) about immigration, culture change, and climate change. I’d also like to write more research-based pieces on disability.
Beyond that, I’m getting more and more interested in audio. My first new audio project will probably be reading my own thesis, because many people a) need audio to access the written word, b) just plain want it and find it convenient. And I do love to read aloud. I’m a writer; I want what I create to be as widely accessible as possible. In the 21st century, audio is very much part of that. After my thesis there are other audio projects lining up but I’ll talk about those closer to the time.
In other words, as my mother used to say, my eyes are bigger than my stomach—though even she admitted I have a pretty big stomach. So once Menewood is finished, things may get interesting around here. Stay tuned.
1 I enjoyed Tipping the Velvet but that, too, followed the classic lesbian coming-out structure: First love with a bisexual woman; heartbreak; weird sex-for-pay; meeting an older woman who is too twisted by her privilege to be a good match; and finally mature, womanly, perfect love.
