This week's novel is Ten Thousand Skies Above You, the sequel to A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray. I really liked the first novel in this series, and this one did not
disappoint. It was arguably even more enjoyable because I did not guess
the twist.
Marguerite's parents created a device called the firebird that lets a person travel across the multiverse, their consciousness inhabiting the body of their selves in that universe. Now Evil Tech Mogul Conley blackmails Marguerite into working for him. Her parent's grad student, Theo, is going through withdraw and on death's door after being possessed by a Theo from another dimension who kept using a possession drug all through the events of the last book. Conley fractures her boyfriend, Paul's, soul into four pieces and will give her their locations and a cure for Theo if she sabotages her parents' research in two detentions where they are close to inventing the firebird.
The worlds that they visited were once again fantastic in their originality. They were all so different, they were each like a breath of fresh air. There was the Warverse, where the world was at war, everyone worked for the war effort, and all the supplies went towards the war effort. The thing I liked about this one was that it was never fully explained. Internet is restricted and used purely for the military and history books are a waste of rationed paper, so Marguerite never finds out who is fighting who or why or how it started or how long it's been going on. Just as Gray doesn't get sucked into a trap of unbelievable science by not explaining things, she doesn't get sucked into unbelievable worldbuilding also by not explaining things. It works really well.
But most of the differences in the worlds Marguerite visits in this story are different because of her interpersonal relationships. She never visits a world where she and Paul are together romantically. This gets her doubting whether math really does keep bringing people together over and over in all the universes, and more importantly gets her doubting her theory that every version of a person is inherently the same in every universe. It also starts to really get into how horribly violating it is to have your body controlled by another version of yourself, and whether they should continue to travel to other universes. The ethical dilemmas are laid out very well as believable reactions to the situations Marguerite encounters. There's an interesting bit where Marguerite stars to really think about these ethical decisions and Theo is like, "I've been saying that the whole book. Did it really have to happen TO YOU for you to believe me?" Yes. It's a little selfish and embarrassing, but I totally buy it.
I'm looking forward to the final installment, where it looks like this will shift into horror.
***
Next week: Swamplandia! alligator wrestlers and swamp ghosts by Karen Russell.
May 30, 2017
May 28, 2017
Worldbuilding and Relatability
I recently saw a video of Jason Torchinsky of Jalopnik interviewing Jay Ward, "the man bat Pixar in charge of Cars." Cars is a franchise where all the characters are anthropomorphic cars and trucks and planes.
There are no humans around, and yet the Cars regularly refer to human things. They talk about food that a car wouldn't eat. Why would a character in a purely car society know that wasabi is spicy? Why would car society create Webber grills? Why do the cars have doors if there's no one to use them? How did cars develop a written language that doesn't consist of tread marks, and why do their languages, cultural costuming, and political boundaries align with our own?
Torchinsky has a long history of scrutinizing the holes of Car's world building and coming up with no prize answers, and what he generally comes up with are theories that humans used to exist but don't anymore or there is a human inside every car, giving it it's personality and soul.
Jay Ward is having none of this. He seems to think that these are nitpicky things and Torchinsky's constant questioning is both abnormal and detracting from any enjoyment of the movie as a good, popcorn having time. He addresses the interviewer's questions with a couple of good points. First, "You have to make the world in the film a relatable world. It's not a real world...but it's a believable one." The cars have to speak English because otherwise how would the audience understand them? Subtitles? The cars make jokes about wasabi and wear sombreros because the audience understands those references. Secondly, he says that they focused on picking cars that had great stories (using the example of the Jeep character that was in "the big one"). That car has a story, which we know (going back to the relatable point) and the story of that character is more important than the story of how car society works or the story of all of car history. They are picking their battles on the world building front and deciding to focus more on character than on detailed world building. He says, "And if you can relax your mind enough to enjoy the film...kinda relax and go with it."
But Torchinsky makes the point that when people engage with the film, when they like the film and want to think about it more, they start asking the same kinds of questions that he asks, and the holes in the world building become really obvious, really fast. So "relax and go with it" is set up in conflict with engagement with the movie--there's no way to enjoy it and think about it. (Of course there is, because sometimes worldbuilding holes are fun to get upset about or fun to try and rationalize.)
This exchange gets at the heart of how Ward...doesn't get it.
I bring all this up because it's reminding me of a bunch of discussions about world building that I've seen recently.
Lincoln Michel recently wrote "Against Worldbuilding" for Electric Lit. His argument here seems to be "While worldbuilding is an important part of some types of fiction in a couple genres, it’s a largely counterproductive concept for most types of fiction". I think my main problem with this essay (aside from the condescending tones against people who worldbuild) is that he and I are using different definitions of "worldbuilding." He says, "In a perfectly executed work of worldbuilding, there would be no gaps in the world for the reader to fill in." Then he goes on to describe checklists for the author to fill in about the world's currency, building materials, and transportation would look like. He thinks that the author must know ALL OF THIS and EVERYTHING ABOUT EVERYTHING in order for it to be worldbuilding. Now, if we go with this definition, he's absolutely right. There's no need for me to know all of that if I'm writing a short story about a trip to an actual-existing-in-the-real-world ER or about taking my kid to the actual-existing-in-the-real-world pond to see the ducks. What are the main exports of the country I'm in?...You know, it's kind of sad that I don't know that, but would not matter much to those stories.
He says these check lists are for beginning writers so they can trick themselves or trick their readers into thinking they have a realistic, flushed out world. He compares it to the same kind of checklists that exist for characterization. What's your character's favorite color? What's their phone number? It's true: you don't need that. But sometimes if you're stuck, you can find something helpful looking at one of those. And maybe the better question isn't "What's their phone number" but "Whose phone numbers do they have memorized? Whose do they have on speed dial? Whose do they have on a post-it in the mess on their desk that they have to dig through to find four months later?" So the question isn't "What building materials do they use?" but rather if you're writing fantasy or magical realism or speculative fiction "Does the weird thing, the central conceit, you've thrown into the world affect building materials? No? Cool, move along." Or if you're writing about a setting that people may not be familiar with--a swamp, the Sahara, the basement of the astrophysics building at a research university, a Martian settlement--"Would describing the building materials help convey the spirit of the setting or provide a better understanding of how people interact with the buildings and with each other?"
I believe this second worldbuilding question is still worldbuilding, even if the answer is "No, this fact doesn't matter or add anything, so I'm not going to think about it ever again." Deciding what aspects of the environment or of history or culture are important to include in your story are important. Michel wants to call this "world conjuring" because...worldbuilding is for Tolkien nerds and he doesn't be associated with those people even to the extent of using the same vocabulary? I guess. It's unclear.
So this seems to fit with what Ward is talking about. Who cares what the wheat is for? Why are you getting hung up on details, that's not what this story is about!
These both remind me of "The Mercurial Worlds of the Mind," an essay by Matthea Harvey that I am not going to pretend I understand. She says
Michel says something similar. Why are you making up a new language that no one will understand? If the point is to have a language no one understands, something foreign that triggers the brain to think "I don't understand. I'm an outsider", then just make up some nonsense sounds and be done with it.
I think they have a point that the worlds we create have to be relatable, have to have something for the reader to latch onto as familiar. But I also think it's important to explore how the world you create is different, what affects your changes have, to give color and tone and a bit of tension. And I think it's important to be aware when the familiar and the strange openly contradict each other. Yes, I recognize a car, but I would not be able to recognize a car that was the product of a world populated and created only by sentient cars. The premise has made it unrelatable if we expand the world building.
There are no humans around, and yet the Cars regularly refer to human things. They talk about food that a car wouldn't eat. Why would a character in a purely car society know that wasabi is spicy? Why would car society create Webber grills? Why do the cars have doors if there's no one to use them? How did cars develop a written language that doesn't consist of tread marks, and why do their languages, cultural costuming, and political boundaries align with our own?
Torchinsky has a long history of scrutinizing the holes of Car's world building and coming up with no prize answers, and what he generally comes up with are theories that humans used to exist but don't anymore or there is a human inside every car, giving it it's personality and soul.
Jay Ward is having none of this. He seems to think that these are nitpicky things and Torchinsky's constant questioning is both abnormal and detracting from any enjoyment of the movie as a good, popcorn having time. He addresses the interviewer's questions with a couple of good points. First, "You have to make the world in the film a relatable world. It's not a real world...but it's a believable one." The cars have to speak English because otherwise how would the audience understand them? Subtitles? The cars make jokes about wasabi and wear sombreros because the audience understands those references. Secondly, he says that they focused on picking cars that had great stories (using the example of the Jeep character that was in "the big one"). That car has a story, which we know (going back to the relatable point) and the story of that character is more important than the story of how car society works or the story of all of car history. They are picking their battles on the world building front and deciding to focus more on character than on detailed world building. He says, "And if you can relax your mind enough to enjoy the film...kinda relax and go with it."
But Torchinsky makes the point that when people engage with the film, when they like the film and want to think about it more, they start asking the same kinds of questions that he asks, and the holes in the world building become really obvious, really fast. So "relax and go with it" is set up in conflict with engagement with the movie--there's no way to enjoy it and think about it. (Of course there is, because sometimes worldbuilding holes are fun to get upset about or fun to try and rationalize.)
This exchange gets at the heart of how Ward...doesn't get it.
T: "There are bulldozers and tractors, and they're kind of in the role of bulls...The only reason one would keep a lot of livestock type animals would be either you're getting some product from them or an eventual slaughter, you're going to harvest them."...But who is the wheat for? He seems to completely miss that this is a problem for people.
W: "No, no, no! Tractors are used on a farm all the time. Lots of tractors on farms, harvesting the wheat."
I bring all this up because it's reminding me of a bunch of discussions about world building that I've seen recently.
Lincoln Michel recently wrote "Against Worldbuilding" for Electric Lit. His argument here seems to be "While worldbuilding is an important part of some types of fiction in a couple genres, it’s a largely counterproductive concept for most types of fiction". I think my main problem with this essay (aside from the condescending tones against people who worldbuild) is that he and I are using different definitions of "worldbuilding." He says, "In a perfectly executed work of worldbuilding, there would be no gaps in the world for the reader to fill in." Then he goes on to describe checklists for the author to fill in about the world's currency, building materials, and transportation would look like. He thinks that the author must know ALL OF THIS and EVERYTHING ABOUT EVERYTHING in order for it to be worldbuilding. Now, if we go with this definition, he's absolutely right. There's no need for me to know all of that if I'm writing a short story about a trip to an actual-existing-in-the-real-world ER or about taking my kid to the actual-existing-in-the-real-world pond to see the ducks. What are the main exports of the country I'm in?...You know, it's kind of sad that I don't know that, but would not matter much to those stories.
He says these check lists are for beginning writers so they can trick themselves or trick their readers into thinking they have a realistic, flushed out world. He compares it to the same kind of checklists that exist for characterization. What's your character's favorite color? What's their phone number? It's true: you don't need that. But sometimes if you're stuck, you can find something helpful looking at one of those. And maybe the better question isn't "What's their phone number" but "Whose phone numbers do they have memorized? Whose do they have on speed dial? Whose do they have on a post-it in the mess on their desk that they have to dig through to find four months later?" So the question isn't "What building materials do they use?" but rather if you're writing fantasy or magical realism or speculative fiction "Does the weird thing, the central conceit, you've thrown into the world affect building materials? No? Cool, move along." Or if you're writing about a setting that people may not be familiar with--a swamp, the Sahara, the basement of the astrophysics building at a research university, a Martian settlement--"Would describing the building materials help convey the spirit of the setting or provide a better understanding of how people interact with the buildings and with each other?"
I believe this second worldbuilding question is still worldbuilding, even if the answer is "No, this fact doesn't matter or add anything, so I'm not going to think about it ever again." Deciding what aspects of the environment or of history or culture are important to include in your story are important. Michel wants to call this "world conjuring" because...worldbuilding is for Tolkien nerds and he doesn't be associated with those people even to the extent of using the same vocabulary? I guess. It's unclear.
So this seems to fit with what Ward is talking about. Who cares what the wheat is for? Why are you getting hung up on details, that's not what this story is about!
These both remind me of "The Mercurial Worlds of the Mind," an essay by Matthea Harvey that I am not going to pretend I understand. She says
"The near invisible stilts are a wonderful metaphor for how our invented worlds never let us fully leave the world we live in. As Frederico Garcia Lorca put it, "the imagination is limited by reality: one cannot imagine what does not exist. It needs objects, landscapes, planets, and it requires the purest sort of logic to relate those things to one another. One cannot leap into the abyss or do away with terms of reality.""Ward says the same thing. Yeah, it would make more sense for the cars to not have doors, but the cars we know have doors, so that's how they're presented so that we can immediately recognize it.
Michel says something similar. Why are you making up a new language that no one will understand? If the point is to have a language no one understands, something foreign that triggers the brain to think "I don't understand. I'm an outsider", then just make up some nonsense sounds and be done with it.
I think they have a point that the worlds we create have to be relatable, have to have something for the reader to latch onto as familiar. But I also think it's important to explore how the world you create is different, what affects your changes have, to give color and tone and a bit of tension. And I think it's important to be aware when the familiar and the strange openly contradict each other. Yes, I recognize a car, but I would not be able to recognize a car that was the product of a world populated and created only by sentient cars. The premise has made it unrelatable if we expand the world building.
May 25, 2017
Modern Monsters, Episode 8: The Seal Woman
The Twenty Percent True Podcast
Season 1: Modern Monsters
Episode 8: The Seal Woman
Content Warning: This episode deals with an abusive relationship.
Stay safe.
For further reading: go here
The blog: Twenty Percent True
Twitter: @CaryAndTheHits
Facebook: facebook.com/twentypercenttrue
May 23, 2017
Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean Review
This week I read Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean: Stories of Imagination and Daring, a collection of short stories edited by Kristy Murray, Payal Dhar, and Anita Roy. I hadn't heard of this until I got it as a gift for my birthday.
This collection was a response to a wave of violence against women in India and Australia in 2012. Contributors were asked to re-imagine the world and push the boundaries of what girls were allowed to do. Then as an added bonus, the contributors were paired up, one writer from India, one writer from Australia. Some of them just bounced ideas off each other, traded stories, then went and wrote their own, while other teams collaborated on single stories.The result is a mix, a nice variety of dystopias, retold myths, sci-fi, and creepy fantasy.
These stories are all very short (the longest is 18 pages, and that one is a graphic story). It's a length I appreciate both as a reader and a writer. You can't get too much in there, you can't fit too many levels or story threads, but you can go into detail and get an emotional punch on one set piece, one idea. That said, some of the stories hit the mark better than others.
"Cat Calls" by Margo Lanagan, is wonderful. It made me cry. And it was positioned perfectly as the first story in the collection. A girl gets cat called by the same group of men everyday on her way to and from school. In this world, there exists a technology that retracts the last 30 seconds or so, sucking words back into the mouth of whoever said them and sucking the words from the brain of whoever heard them. It would be great for this cat calling situation, but this piece of technology isn't for poor girls and the main character can't have one. Instead, her friends stand up for her, shouting the words back at the men. The situation is real and relatable. Lanagan builds up the friendships, the emotion, and the fear, so at the climax is an honestly earned triumph. And I love, love, love that there's this piece of sci-fi technology, but it has no bearing on the story except that it's not there. It never appears. That's so cool on a craft level, and also says a lot about the socioeconomics of feminism.
"What a Stone Can't Feel" by Penni Russon was another stand out story. Vega's best friend Bonnie is dying and Vega has to deal with the loss of her friend and the fact that her super power can't save her: she can slip inside inanimate objects. There's a second plot where a girl with the power of flight finds out Vega has a super power and tries to befriend her. Russon does a fantastic job making the friendships believable through chatty dialogue and games about what object would you use to record a memory and other abstractions. Almost all the dialogue is light, the more somber moments left to the white space between sections. She packs a lot into the word limit like this, showing just snip-its before cutting away, each section short, and still saying a lot in the things that go unsaid.
"Memory Lace" by Payal Dhar was also excellent. In it, a slave is bought for a rich woman's oldest daughter, who teaches the slave to read and make lace, how to live a free life and replace the memory lace the rich woman bought with something they created. It's really cool commentary on expectations about gender, but it's hard to get into it without ruining it. Go read it and come back and we'll talk.
***
Next week: Ten Thousand Skies Above You, the sequel to A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray
This collection was a response to a wave of violence against women in India and Australia in 2012. Contributors were asked to re-imagine the world and push the boundaries of what girls were allowed to do. Then as an added bonus, the contributors were paired up, one writer from India, one writer from Australia. Some of them just bounced ideas off each other, traded stories, then went and wrote their own, while other teams collaborated on single stories.The result is a mix, a nice variety of dystopias, retold myths, sci-fi, and creepy fantasy.
These stories are all very short (the longest is 18 pages, and that one is a graphic story). It's a length I appreciate both as a reader and a writer. You can't get too much in there, you can't fit too many levels or story threads, but you can go into detail and get an emotional punch on one set piece, one idea. That said, some of the stories hit the mark better than others.
"Cat Calls" by Margo Lanagan, is wonderful. It made me cry. And it was positioned perfectly as the first story in the collection. A girl gets cat called by the same group of men everyday on her way to and from school. In this world, there exists a technology that retracts the last 30 seconds or so, sucking words back into the mouth of whoever said them and sucking the words from the brain of whoever heard them. It would be great for this cat calling situation, but this piece of technology isn't for poor girls and the main character can't have one. Instead, her friends stand up for her, shouting the words back at the men. The situation is real and relatable. Lanagan builds up the friendships, the emotion, and the fear, so at the climax is an honestly earned triumph. And I love, love, love that there's this piece of sci-fi technology, but it has no bearing on the story except that it's not there. It never appears. That's so cool on a craft level, and also says a lot about the socioeconomics of feminism.
"What a Stone Can't Feel" by Penni Russon was another stand out story. Vega's best friend Bonnie is dying and Vega has to deal with the loss of her friend and the fact that her super power can't save her: she can slip inside inanimate objects. There's a second plot where a girl with the power of flight finds out Vega has a super power and tries to befriend her. Russon does a fantastic job making the friendships believable through chatty dialogue and games about what object would you use to record a memory and other abstractions. Almost all the dialogue is light, the more somber moments left to the white space between sections. She packs a lot into the word limit like this, showing just snip-its before cutting away, each section short, and still saying a lot in the things that go unsaid.
"Memory Lace" by Payal Dhar was also excellent. In it, a slave is bought for a rich woman's oldest daughter, who teaches the slave to read and make lace, how to live a free life and replace the memory lace the rich woman bought with something they created. It's really cool commentary on expectations about gender, but it's hard to get into it without ruining it. Go read it and come back and we'll talk.
***
Next week: Ten Thousand Skies Above You, the sequel to A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray
May 21, 2017
To Tall Tale or not to Tall Tale
The last several months, I've been itching to write tall tales or fairy tales. I want to capture some of the story telling, the oral traditions, that I grew up with. But I've been having a lot of trouble doing it, and it's taken me an embarrassingly long time but I think I've articulated why I'm having such trouble.
A common feature in fairy tales, one of the techniques that signals that you're reading a fairy tale, is that the characters are flat or archetypal. The description is minimal to the point of only describing the setting in terms of "the woods" or "the castle", only describing characters as "lovely" or "sad", and only noting when colors are white, black, or red. No turquoise. No articulated conflicted emotions. No settings the reader doesn't already have a picture of. The bulk is left to the reader's imagination, allowing them to cast themselves as the main character and the setting as their home town.
These makes for good short tales and fables, but not so much for full novels, especially not the kind I write with introspection and description and world building. A novel where the characters don't get flushed out would be almost impressive in how the author managed to avoid it, and I would find it dull if it went for long stretches without a character to latch onto.
I've been wondering if fairy tales and the kind of thing I usually write are mutually exclusive. I can write my own short fairy tales, but I wonder if I can incorporate them into a novel without fundamentally changing one or both of the forms, without stripping them of what attracts me to them. I can do a novelization of a fairy tale with all the tangents and back story and character growth and world building that I love to write, but I don't know how to do that without losing some of the lyricism, the dream logic, and perhaps some of the magic that draws me to fairy tales.
Right now, I'm working instead on characters telling stories--kind of a "Big Fish" thing. I like this because part of what makes tall tales so engaging is that the storyteller puts themselves into the story, casting themselves as a hero, and part of what makes them so interesting is to see how the stories they tell interact with or deepen their character. My grandfather once found a rare, exotic butterfly on his trumpet plant in his back yard. Just opening and closing its wings. He called the Dallas Zoo and a zookeeper came out to his back yard, thanking my granddad profusely for finding the escaped butterfly.
Another way I've been playing with it is to have tales interjected throughout as explanation or even exposition. "Why does this happen? Why does this matter? Well, let me tell you a story..." It gives some voice, some humor to info dumps, making them more engaging.
A common feature in fairy tales, one of the techniques that signals that you're reading a fairy tale, is that the characters are flat or archetypal. The description is minimal to the point of only describing the setting in terms of "the woods" or "the castle", only describing characters as "lovely" or "sad", and only noting when colors are white, black, or red. No turquoise. No articulated conflicted emotions. No settings the reader doesn't already have a picture of. The bulk is left to the reader's imagination, allowing them to cast themselves as the main character and the setting as their home town.
These makes for good short tales and fables, but not so much for full novels, especially not the kind I write with introspection and description and world building. A novel where the characters don't get flushed out would be almost impressive in how the author managed to avoid it, and I would find it dull if it went for long stretches without a character to latch onto.
I've been wondering if fairy tales and the kind of thing I usually write are mutually exclusive. I can write my own short fairy tales, but I wonder if I can incorporate them into a novel without fundamentally changing one or both of the forms, without stripping them of what attracts me to them. I can do a novelization of a fairy tale with all the tangents and back story and character growth and world building that I love to write, but I don't know how to do that without losing some of the lyricism, the dream logic, and perhaps some of the magic that draws me to fairy tales.
Right now, I'm working instead on characters telling stories--kind of a "Big Fish" thing. I like this because part of what makes tall tales so engaging is that the storyteller puts themselves into the story, casting themselves as a hero, and part of what makes them so interesting is to see how the stories they tell interact with or deepen their character. My grandfather once found a rare, exotic butterfly on his trumpet plant in his back yard. Just opening and closing its wings. He called the Dallas Zoo and a zookeeper came out to his back yard, thanking my granddad profusely for finding the escaped butterfly.
Another way I've been playing with it is to have tales interjected throughout as explanation or even exposition. "Why does this happen? Why does this matter? Well, let me tell you a story..." It gives some voice, some humor to info dumps, making them more engaging.
May 18, 2017
Modern Monsters, Episode 7: The Take down of the Gargoyle Containment Unit
The Twenty Percent True Podcast
Season 1: Modern Monsters
Episode 7: The Take down of the Gargoyle Containment Unit
facebook.com/twentypercenttrue
May 16, 2017
Magic for Beginners Review
This week's book is Magic for Beginners, short stories by Kelly Link. This one comes from a magical realism recommendation list that I didn't bookmark and now have no way of finding ever again.
There are nine short stories here, so let me give you an overview of a couple of them. In "The Faery Handbag," a young woman is charged with keeping track of her eccentric grandmother's handbag, which holds the refugees of the village where she was born, but the girl's best friend takes it to lose himself in the handbag when his life takes a turn for the worst. In "Stone Animals," a family trying to recover from the wife's infidelity and the husband's inability to prioritize his family over work, buys a house that is eerily haunted, possibly by rabbits. In "The Great Divorce," a man and his wife are getting a divorce and take a last family trip to Disney Land, only the wife is a ghost who he met and must talk to through a medium, and their three kids "take after their mother" meaning they're also ghosts. "The Cannon" is a transcript of an interview with someone...who is in love with a cannon? It's stream of consciousness and the main character changes throughout the interview.
I liked that in several of the stories, it's possible that no magic is happening at all. In "The Faery Handbag,"it's possible the grandmother is lying about being two-hundred-years-old from a village that no one's heard of, and her husband isn't aging slowly in her handbag but rather ran out on her or wasn't ever her husband, and that the best friend too the midnight bus out of town. It's possible that the handbag idea was a lie the grandmother told to a child and that the young woman is now using the same lie. It's possible in "The Great Divorce" there are no ghosts and it's a huge scam set up by mediums. In these stories it's like you get two stories in one, one with weird magic and one with people who invent weird scenarios to make their lives easier.
But overall, these were not my favorites. Often there are ideas, sometimes a lot of ideas piled on top of each other in a single story, that don't go anywhere, that don't add anything to the other ideas or the themes of the story. There's a cool concept and I'm waiting to see where Link goes with it, and the answer is nowhere. I feel like I need a book club to dissect these with me so we can figure out what the painting of the woman with the apple was about, or why Soap is obsessed with zombies or why he kidnapped a kid. I don't get a lot of what's going on and it makes me feel stupid, and I don't like feeling stupid.
The strands don't come together. It's not like all the things going on are different facets of the same problem (which when done well, is so beautiful it's one of my favorite things about literary short stories) or that they all come together in the end. In a lot of stories there isn't really an end, not really a conclusion. In "Lull" there's a story within a story within a story, all of which are cut off before the conclusion because they've run out of time. Maybe there's a reason for this, but...these make me feel so stupid. I shouldn't post this and air my stupidity in the breeze for you all to see.
I think this makes me so twitchy because these are issues I've struggled with in my own writing. If I'm writing a story about a yeti, I have to ask, "why does this character have to be a yeti? What does being a yeti bring to the table and what themes can I build or highlight with that?" If I have a cool idea, a neat premise, I'll stress over "okay, but then what happens?" It feels like Link didn't do this. Maybe she's freed herself from the stress or the "have tos" and writes what she wants to write, and it doesn't matter if there's a point to everything or if there's a reason or a why. But this is such a sensitive topic to me right now that I can't get past the feeling that she just didn't do the work.
***
Next week: Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, a feminist anthology of short stories.
There are nine short stories here, so let me give you an overview of a couple of them. In "The Faery Handbag," a young woman is charged with keeping track of her eccentric grandmother's handbag, which holds the refugees of the village where she was born, but the girl's best friend takes it to lose himself in the handbag when his life takes a turn for the worst. In "Stone Animals," a family trying to recover from the wife's infidelity and the husband's inability to prioritize his family over work, buys a house that is eerily haunted, possibly by rabbits. In "The Great Divorce," a man and his wife are getting a divorce and take a last family trip to Disney Land, only the wife is a ghost who he met and must talk to through a medium, and their three kids "take after their mother" meaning they're also ghosts. "The Cannon" is a transcript of an interview with someone...who is in love with a cannon? It's stream of consciousness and the main character changes throughout the interview.
I liked that in several of the stories, it's possible that no magic is happening at all. In "The Faery Handbag,"it's possible the grandmother is lying about being two-hundred-years-old from a village that no one's heard of, and her husband isn't aging slowly in her handbag but rather ran out on her or wasn't ever her husband, and that the best friend too the midnight bus out of town. It's possible that the handbag idea was a lie the grandmother told to a child and that the young woman is now using the same lie. It's possible in "The Great Divorce" there are no ghosts and it's a huge scam set up by mediums. In these stories it's like you get two stories in one, one with weird magic and one with people who invent weird scenarios to make their lives easier.
But overall, these were not my favorites. Often there are ideas, sometimes a lot of ideas piled on top of each other in a single story, that don't go anywhere, that don't add anything to the other ideas or the themes of the story. There's a cool concept and I'm waiting to see where Link goes with it, and the answer is nowhere. I feel like I need a book club to dissect these with me so we can figure out what the painting of the woman with the apple was about, or why Soap is obsessed with zombies or why he kidnapped a kid. I don't get a lot of what's going on and it makes me feel stupid, and I don't like feeling stupid.
The strands don't come together. It's not like all the things going on are different facets of the same problem (which when done well, is so beautiful it's one of my favorite things about literary short stories) or that they all come together in the end. In a lot of stories there isn't really an end, not really a conclusion. In "Lull" there's a story within a story within a story, all of which are cut off before the conclusion because they've run out of time. Maybe there's a reason for this, but...these make me feel so stupid. I shouldn't post this and air my stupidity in the breeze for you all to see.
I think this makes me so twitchy because these are issues I've struggled with in my own writing. If I'm writing a story about a yeti, I have to ask, "why does this character have to be a yeti? What does being a yeti bring to the table and what themes can I build or highlight with that?" If I have a cool idea, a neat premise, I'll stress over "okay, but then what happens?" It feels like Link didn't do this. Maybe she's freed herself from the stress or the "have tos" and writes what she wants to write, and it doesn't matter if there's a point to everything or if there's a reason or a why. But this is such a sensitive topic to me right now that I can't get past the feeling that she just didn't do the work.
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Next week: Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, a feminist anthology of short stories.
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