What happens when I try to write fiction

A pair of mannequins takes a short walk outside

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Recently I asked a published author what writing a short story is like.

If that seems like an odd question, you should know that I can’t write fiction. I’ve tried — oh I’ve tried — but it’s like squeezing the last toothpaste from the tube.

She said a story idea usually starts with a scene that she feels compelled to write down. Sometimes the meaning or significance is clear at once; sometimes it comes out in the writing. What if that first inspiration never appears? I explained my past struggles. She told me about the concept of “useful limits”: erecting a few constraints can paradoxically unstick creative writing.

I’ve long known that my fiction bone is missing — yet I’m always eager to try a new tactic, hoping I’ll prove myself wrong. I have plenty of conceptual ideas, that’s not a problem. A few months ago at dinner with a comedy writer who’s sold a script to Netflix, I relayed an old plot idea for a screenplay. She leaned forward. “Whoa. I’m surprised no one’s done that, it’s great! You should write it.” I told her my problem. “Just do it,” she said. But everything lies in the gap between idea and execution. As for just doing it, I have tried.

More recently I had an idea for a novel. It would be a mock-version of a form I find fascinating: collected remembrances of a complicated artist, a la Recollections of Virginia Woolf By Her Contemporaries (ed. Joan Russell Noble) and Bartók Remembered (ed. Malcolm Gillies). A fragmented bildungsroman that reveals a character through other people’s memories.

After the story writer and I hung up, I set myself a timed exercise. I’d write a brief recollection of a complicated-artist subject from the point of view of a fellow writing student. It would start with this sentence: “I met her at a workshop that no longer exists.” As far as constraints go, I felt these were pretty good.

*

Oh but those 15 minutes were painful. Nothing came on its own; it was all labored pushing. I was scraping the barrel for absolutely anything and naturally turned up only cliches. A group of workshop participants were “New England prep school” types who excluded the narrator with her Southern drawl. Everything was told; nothing shown. The preppers “walked around like they owned the place.” The subject of recollection was “the odd one out.” There needed to a revealing conflict so I had the subject parrot the narrator’s “twangy” accent and everyone laughed.

Look, I know about show-not-tell. I know other things too. I can deconstruct a text into a spear of romaine, a sliver of parmesan, an oily anchovy. I can parse the text’s constituents, see how they relate and how the ratios balance and how the dialectical hits — acid and base, crunchy and soft — merge and conflict. But I can’t make the salad.

Take that “odd one out” trope. How can I show that? This I asked myself while attempting a revision. What details, what actions and reactions, present that implication to the reader? Probably many fiction writers don’t even pose a question like this consciously, intuitively running right past it. For me, scrounging even a single idea was like trying to set a millwheel in motion with a flyswatter.

The end result was awful. I’m not naïve; I don’t expect every first attempt to sound promising. But there was no connecting thread of authenticity, no undercurrent of realism. Imagine a Sims player tackling landscaping: dropping a tree here, flowers there, a bush there — all constructed, all superficial, all arbitrary. There’s nothing organic beneath the effort; no natural logic tying the parts together. And in my case, I think that’s because I had no intuition for the situation I was creating.¹

*

Why was this so?

“Fiction writing,” AI tells me, “is basically directed mind-wandering with memory recombination.”

Well there’s an idea. I struggle with autobiographic memory — an understatement of a label, since it entails the failure to recall not just my life memories but also scenes from books I’ve read and films I’ve watched. I can’t even steal inspiration from fictional lives.

“At the neurological level fiction requires two things: the Default Mode Network to generate ideas and the Executive Control Network to organize and connect them.”

It continues: “You’re analytical; probably, your ECN is taking over too soon. Try this: Run a scene mentally for 20 to 30 seconds. The only prompt should be: What happens next? Just visualize it, don’t put it into words. Then write what you remember.”

OK, here goes. I close my eyes. Two people are in my kitchen. Two pale, nongendered adults who — what’s this? — are copies of each other with different colored shirts. They stand. Nothing happens.

I start again, this time outdoors. Anything might transpire outside! The mannequins are now on the sidewalk, and maybe this is interesting: it’s my childhood street. Daytime. Silent, empty. No birds, no cars, no people. Something needs to happen. I make them walk. Time is up. I report back.

“That’s a different failure mode than what I was assuming. You have imagery, but it’s static and non-generative.”

What then?

A new direction: “The fix is not to ‘relax’ or ‘write worse,’” it says, “you need to explicitly supply the missing temporal engine.”

I should start with actions (“she turns”; “he reaches”) instead of scenes, it says, and I should rely on memory recombination because pure invention is hardest for someone like me. Just one problem: my memory shelves are bare.

At this point, I end the experiment. Whether the words I’ve hammered out could be moulded into something passable or not, none of the scenes at any point felt alive to me, including that writing workshop of prep school kids. If it doesn’t even feel alive to the person creating it, what’s the point? The juice — in my case, a cliched collection of college students and synthetic figures staring blankly in a kitchen — was not worth the squeeze.

*

What happens next?

This. I record the experiment; draft up a case study; try to make sense of what I don’t understand through a kind of essay.

We will do what we will do.

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Recollections of Geneva Strong By Those Who Knew Her

Angie Martin:

I met her at a workshop that no longer exists. Ten of us gathered at this late summer retreat put on by our college for promising creative writing undergraduates. It was in the Hudson River Valley where I’d never been before at a grand mansion and I was the clear fish out of water. From the deep south and still resisting the urge to say “y’all,” not yet realizing that the point of writing wasn’t to sound like other people but to figure out how you sound yourself. Most of the others were rich liberal types who wore comfortable clothes and flip-flops and walked around like they owned the place.

She was the only other odd one out, and you’d think that would have allied us against the rest but she was so literally odd that I avoided her as if it might rub off. I was already at such a disadvantage in this group that I couldn’t add yet another handicap.

For instance she had this weird habit of impersonating the person she was talking to right in front of them. She’d repeat something back to you not just in words but the way you said it — and then say, yes. Like she never agreed with someone so much. Some people seemed to like it, find it validating or something but it was so goddamn weird.

There was a girl I really liked in the group. Jane. She always smiled at me unlike some of the others, who all seemed to know each other from the New England prep school scene. She was such a cool dresser and I was asking where she got her quilted jacket. It was after dinner one night at the tree stumps, where we’d go before bed. A thrift store, she told me, and she was talking about how it had all these quilted pieces and I told her about my granny who quilts. “She still sews quilts from scratch even in her 80s!” I said. And then Geneva who I didn’t even realize was there bursts out: still sews quilts from scratch in a twangy accent that was her version of the way I talked and then everyone started laughing, even though they didn’t even like her.

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The versions of me I can’t remember: autism and autobiographical memory

Setting the scene: how visuals and memory intertwine in autism

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Laura

1. Here’s a deeper confession. When I tried to imagine the artist-subject, I could imagine only myself. And when I tried to imagine the recollecting narrator, I could imagine only myself. Try as I might, I could not generate a separate consciousness with motivations and desires and shortcomings independent of my own.