Question: How many stories are there?
I am working on another short story. I wrote it over a year ago, but it’s a slow burner that I’ve returned to frequently within the last year. After workshopping this story with our group for the first time it was suggested that there may be several different stories within this piece. It was certainly true that what I had wasn’t fusing. I began to question whether I should develop each strand as a story in its own right, but something about the elements of this story made me persist in trying to slot the disjointed parts together. Perhaps it was just stubbornness, but I felt I needed to understand why I had come to place this patchwork of parts alongside each other in the first place.
I think there were two things which occurred in unison, here. Firstly, the re-awakening of this story has coincided with reading Veronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea (2010). It inspired me to explore in my own writing the same sense of impenetrable isolation she created for her characters. Elements of my narrative broadly addressed this theme. Secondly, I admit it is also the need that I have to make the elements of this story work and a desire to chase the feeling; the one you get as a writer when a piece comes together. It’s an intuitive response. It’s literally, for me, a tummy-turn moment and it’s a bit like this:
I remember my primary school choir existed in two different strands who rehearsed their harmonics in separate ‘Blue group’ and ‘Red group’. As elements Blue and Red it never occurred to us to discuss with each other what we were learning. The only song we knew was the part we were taught, not knowing whether it was the melody or the harmony that we each carried with supreme confidence. Red and Blue rehearsed on different days and sometimes we could hear the intriguing, unfamiliar tunes of the opposite colour practising inside whilst we were outside in the playground. It was only in the latter stages of rehearsal for a performance that those parts were brought together, creating a collective sound we couldn’t have imagined, transforming the song we thought we knew into something mind-blowing-electric. And electric is the feeling I chase when bringing elements of my writing together.
So in this story I had dispersed events in different times. Let’s call them Red group: a particular comet, satellites orbiting, a little girl in a field, a secret, a car journey, a climb to the top of a hill. Blue group consists of the themes these events have created: loneliness, miscommunication, the awe of transitory phenomena, fertility, unrequited desire, a sense of pushing against the inevitability of time, beginnings and endings, certainty and doubt.
But here’s the thing. It was suggested that the disparate parts were suffering the White Noise they created by the inclusion of one fairly innocuous detail: the naming of the comet. Disconnected events in the story were either making sense in relation to the fixed point of the named comet, or holding to ransom events in the story to a particular sequential order. This named comet gave the story an immoveable historical reference. It had become a sticking point.
Olmi’s novella omits reference to any named place or time, which serves to underscore the disconnection created by the cocoon of the lives of the mother and her two boys, so that the characters seem to exist in someplace other, sometime nearby; not rooted but a place near to the reader’s own imagination. Without realising it, the innocent detail of the comet’s name was dictating the way the Red and Blue parts of my story slotted together. It seems in this case, the devil is in the detail. Once I removed the name of the comet, shifts in time became unbound by their original form, giving me freedom to reconstruct the elements of the story.
We discussed in a recent workshop to what extent we use thinking time in relation to our writing time. I can see how even when I am not writing, I am thinking about the writing. Making connections when drafting makes the processing time as important as plotting the details on paper. Circling around the physical scenes and the metaphors they contain, I have found a way to choreograph the events to tell a coherent story.
I’ve also learnt to appreciate how God is in the detail in the inclusion of fairly innocuous information, where a word or phrase or question in dialogue has also proved to work in a positive way, to assist in making connections between themes. The tiniest elements need thought and reconciling in order to earn their place, making them more poignant, more powerful, more resonant to the shape of a story. I have felt able to begin this story in a new place and construct a new ending. I’ve got the feeling and have acknowledged, stubborn determination aside, an intuitive belief that somehow I can make things fit.
Written for and published by the Unthank School of Writing 2015/16
Carrie Patten 