Question: Where does the truth lie?
It has been interesting to consider recently how I may feel a piece of writing is finished, when perhaps it has only just begun. I’m thinking this might all be a matter of perspective.
I am working on a story about a woman, her husband and their children at the beach. It’s a story I had taken through every stage of drafting I felt I knew. But the recent process of workshopping has offered the opportunity to re-engage with this story, highlighting the value of critical interaction by exposing the story to new eyes. Workshopping has discerned the need to qualify point of view in the narrative and address language and register, but most significantly it’s the consideration of thematics which have offered me a route back in.
Ashley mentioned the notion of Brass Rubbing in relation to the final editing stages. By this he means that the more you draft, the more the story becomes clearer to you and realises itself. The reappraisals help to create fluency. I can see that the more I comb through the tangles in the narrative, the more new connections emerge and the thematics come into sharper focus. I have noted previously how the thematic connections become intertextual lines of enquiry between different stories I have written, but palimpsestic layers of enquiry through a process of Brass rubbing also reveals what is under the individual stories’ surface; the narrative texture.
Discovering texture in narrative themes seems akin to an artistic process of frottage, gathering the surface texture of objects, allowing the texture to be displaced from its original source and re-contextualised. This process serves to remind me of the freedom I have to construct the narrative as creatively as I choose in order to convey the story. I looked closely again at the narrative elements of my story; the protagonist’s subjective restriction and freedom, dreams and reality, beauty and revulsion.
The woman in the story sketches a scene. She is sat in the picture frame she creates, observing her environment and the people in it. She describes physical movement within the scene through a kite, a flag, birds and people, but she also explores her environment through the observation of scale; the sea, the horizon, the land and home someplace behind her. She contemplates her relationship to the people around her and the things she observes, which allows her to sketch the scene from different viewpoints. But the scene is also observed through conscious shifts. Through her thoughts, emotions and questioning, we are made aware of her feelings towards nature and nurture. The physical attributes of the scene, coupled with her contradictory points of view, puts multiple three dimensional views together in the creation of a fourth; her conscious mind.
This idea has fascinated me, because Ashley commented on the Cubist style of language in this story. For example, the Cubist notion of abstraction of a scene would be to break up different angles of looking and reassemble them. The strangeness or unfamiliarity that this provokes offers the same sense of contradiction that has become a train of thought in the narrative elements of this story and is echoed in other stories I have worked on recently. What I need to achieve is the choreographing of these multiple view-points; the protagonist’s ways of looking, observing and making associations.
Conscious thoughts in this narrative are like nature; ever changing, shifting, fluxing, reassembling, fusing into new form, just as shingle shifts on a beach, just as the shoreline shifts on which my protagonist sits, just as the cliffs behind her are slowly eroded. The line between the sand and sea is always changing, just as my protagonist’s thoughts are transitory. In the moment the story occupies, the woman in the story feels broken and she attempts to reassemble herself. These are the tensions I want to explore; the thematics which provoke contrast by means of metaphorical or conscious construct.
I am working through the multiple viewpoints just like the woman in my story and with the help of workshopping, I am occupied with qualifying the elements of the narrative by exploring each connection more deeply and asking myself, where does the truth lie? Picasso once said that ‘art is a lie that helps us understand the truth.’ As I rub the surface and see the form that continuous drafting reveals, as I break down the physical and conscious thematics and reassemble them, I can see that truth in a story is just a matter of narrative perspective; subjective, abstract and determined by a writer’s way of looking.
Written for and published by the Unthanks School of Writing 2015/16
Carrie Patten 