This picture is by Arthur Rackham, one of my favorite artists.
My story "Selkie Stories Are for Losers" is now at Strange Horizons. And there's a podcast!
The story starts like this:
I hate selkie stories. They're always about how you went up to the attic to look for a book, and you found a disgusting old coat and brought it downstairs between finger and thumb and said "What's this?", and you never saw your mom again.
"Selkie Stories" is about abandonment and loss and storytelling and love and fear and emigration and working in restaurants and lutefisk. It's set in Madison, Wisconsin, where I live. I actually adore selkie stories, which, according to my main character, makes me a loser. Selkie stories are tragic; they oppose the "happily ever after" of many fairy tales. This is one of the reasons I love them. But, as my main character points out, if your life is going to be a fairy tale, you don't want it to be this kind.
In terms of writerly-crafty stuff, I'm happy with this story. It is the first of three of my stories to use present tense and small blocks of text (the other two aren't finished yet). There was also one before them, but I don't count it because it is HOOOORRRRRIBLE. It will never be published, but stay marooned on my computer where I can look at it and go "EW! I cannot write," which I do quite often--not sure why and not really interested in finding out.
I started using present tense with "Honey Bear," when I got sick of paying attention to this idea I'd picked up somewhere that sf stories should have a "traditional" style. I know, I should never have paid attention to that in the first place. But anyway, "HB" is still pretty linear plot-wise, except for a flashback. The stories I'm writing now are a bit more circular and tangled, and have smaller pieces. They do have plots. I am concerned about losing plot. I think it's because there is something about plot that is not totally congenial to me. But I know that the stories I enjoy have plots, so I am wary of letting them go altogether.
Interested in how I started this by saying "In terms of writerly-crafty stuff..." Why "writerly-crafty"? Why so cute? Why does it have to be like quilting? And then why did I just say quilting? Is this some Mennonite-related reaction where your passion always has to also Do Something, like use up leftover cloth and make a practical object that keeps you warm? Also, quilting is what women do. There is definitely a demure note in "writerly-crafty" that suggests a gendered subtext: don't mind me, I'm just over here in the corner doing my writerly-crafty little project. It sounds like self-deprecation, but it's also a kind of attempt to escape, I think. To escape what? Attention? To escape attention by drawing attention to oneself? Or to draw attention while acting as if one is really trying to escape attention? "My quilt is so beautiful! But never mind, the important thing is that it's perfect for the guest bed!" Why does the subject of writing have to be surrounded by all these maneuvers? What is so shameful about it?
5 comments:
I find plots more congenial to read than to write. I think it's to do with my reader side wanting to know what happens next, while my writer side just wants to hang out with the characters.
Anyway, I thought the narrative in the story hung together just right.
I usually don't like selkie stories, miserable things that they are, but this one has a completely fresh emotional charge and I did like it.
Thank you.
And you've pretty much summed up how I feel about plot. Pleasant to read, but often a burden when writing. I do like reading things where the plot is kind of buried or subdued, like W.G. Sebald's work. But if the book is long and really going absolutely nowhere, it has to be stunningly written for me to stay with it.
Maybe if I can make my writing more stunning I can give up plots altogether...
Thanks again.
I was going to write that I like plots that lurk in the background like ninjas. :-)
Sometimes I feel writing fights with plot. Might be some kind of tussle between linear and planar time effects.
I was talking with a friend yesterday about whether you even could write something without plot, I mean something in which no plot could be discovered, even lurking in the background. Wouldn't the reader just come up with a plot somehow? We have such a tendency to think in stories that even if you thought you were writing without plot you might not be, or anyway your work wouldn't be received that way. People find all kinds of plots in Tender Buttons, for example.
A lot of my favorite writing fights with plot. I think I am more interested in time condensed into an instant of experience, than in time unrolling in action.
I admit I don't find plot in Tender Buttons, but it's interesting that people do! I get more of a texture out of it.
I don't know how much has been written about the experience of time in literature. Quite a bit, maybe? Perhaps the fact that reading always takes place over linear time means that all instantaneous or gestalt effects are going to be, how can I put it -- infected with time? Which makes for a ... a *something* in writing that resists the pull of linear time? I know I'm supposed to think of a better word than 'something'. A thingy.
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