World Building

“Painting Globe” by MR LIGHTMAN. Photo courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

Today my job is to turn away from a finished draft, a fully realized world and the music of its language still singing in my head, and turn to a new book, the nub of an idea with a world yet to be built. And I’m like a little kid again, reluctant to do my work. Because it’s hard. And yet I do want to do it, and so I have to remind myself that it’s time to think about a different place, a different time, not the one I just wrote about, that I’m still in love with and want to turn back to, where I know what the forest smells like, for example, and how the people talk, and . . . now stop that, I have to remind myself. Time to think about this dull, grey, unformed place, that isn’t yet. This egg of a world. So how to start? By giving it a little color. Lay down some streets, and a map of the city, maybe. What’s it like in there? And then some history. What story do the people tell themselves about the past, about their lives? And then the people. Who’s there? And what will happen to them? What troubles them, what troubles the whole place, and what can they do about it? That’s the beginning of it, maybe. Or tomorrow I might have a different answer.

The Thoughtful Story

Photo courtesy of Freedigitalphotos.net, by Evgeni Dinev

Dara Horn, author of the beautiful novel The World to Come, wrote a fascinating article in the New York Times Sunday Book Review last week about Jewish fiction writers, and why there seem to be so many of them. Though I don’t write fiction about Jewish topics or for specifically Jewish audiences, I did find her essay intriguing, because in it she talked about Jewish culture’s fascination with memory, with reliving the past through ritual, and the Jewish tendency to live life soaked in the past, keenly aware of history. As this fascination with preserving memory and freezing life is also the novelist’s task, there tend to be quite a few Jewish fiction writers.

As Horn says:

“Writers and believers live their lives haunted by the same question: What happens to our days once they disappear? The objective fact is that each day that passes is lost forever, as forbidden to us as the dead. But prayer and fiction offer a different answer. Those lost days still live among us, written in each person’s hand, turned into stories.”

I was thinking along the same lines last week, when I wrote about Ursula LeGuin’s carrier-bag theory of storytelling. She describes the Hero of traditional stories as a look-at-me-as-I-kill-and-vanquish protagonist. He’s the one who always made her feel defective as a human being, unbent on murder. And yet thinking about what she said, it occurred to me that while that killer-hero story is very prominent in the classics – clearly the Greek myths come to mind – I have another heritage, that of the Jewish history story. Jewish history has its share of conquering heroes. But it also features a different kind of hero, especially post-exile, when the Jewish people found themselves in the Diaspora. This is the rabbi, the thinker, the teacher as hero. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, makes this point in some of his writing. Jewish history has a wide range of heroic figures – warriors, martyrs, thinkers, prophets, mystics, judges, even particularly tender or self-sacrificing parents and children, who people legends of survival amid persecution. These varied characters fit well into LeGuin’s carrier-bag, and maybe that’s why I like the theory so much. I like stories about thinkers, perhaps because my cultural story – the story of Jewish history – told me that thinkers are heroes as much as anyone. And they didn’t have to kill something to earn the title, either.

 To read Horn’s full essay: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/books/review/articles-of-faith.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

Spears and Bags

Recently I reread a favorite essay, Ursula LeGuin’s The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction. I have a copy of it in a compilation of essays by women science fiction writers, Women of Vision (1988, St. Martin’s Press, edited by Denise Dupont). In it, LeGuin argues that too many story writers labor under the impression that the story has one kind of “right” structure – a very male structure that resembles a spear. It’s the story of the Hero, his hunt, his quest, his adventure, and it zooms forward from conflict to climax and then it’s over. That story, and the human being it puts at its center, the male conqueror, for a long time made her feel like a very peripheral part of the human race, as she puts it, “extremely defective as a human being or not human at all.” Stories, after all, create the norm, and if we see ourselves as comfortable in the dominant story, we’re normal, and if we don’t, we’re not. Thinking about this, she proposed a different kind of story, in which story structure becomes, not a spear, but a carrier-bag, a basket where ideas and relationships and events get stored, and brought home, and searched for meaning:

A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

A novel, then, can have conflict, but it will have it along with plenty of other things, including, she notes, harmony.

From the moment I read it, years ago, this essay struck me as a brilliant reimagining of not only story structure, but our cultural story as well. I’m a big fan of both kinds of stories – both the spear structure (who doesn’t like a good adventure?) and the carrier-bag structure. My favorite kinds of writing merge the two, because I like to see something happen in a book, some obstacle overcome, but I’m not a huge fan of the traditional hero, too uncomplicated, too single-focus to be real. I like thoughtful characters, who think their way through life. The best people I know do that in reality, why shouldn’t books mirror that kind of person? Action stars don’t much interest me, I’m always second guessing them in my head (would they really do that and not be considered psychotic in real life?) or wondering about their families, the people left at home. Or thinking, after the spectacular explosion that ends everything, about the people who were just walking by and got caught up in it, and what happened to their husband or wife, waiting at home for them to joke over supper, or take a walk in the park? And what happened to them all, not just tomorrow, when the medals get passed out, but ten years from now, when other things have claimed people’s attention. What’s life like, in other words, beyond the moment we see? Maybe this is why LeGuin’s essay resonated with me so, and still does.