What If Your Pages Were a House, Not a Road?
Using place to propel readers and structure your prose
The late Alice Munro once described short fiction as a house: “A story is not like a road to follow. [...] It's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like.” This quote immediately spoke to me, because it wriggles out of linear thinking: In Munro’s definition, short fiction is not a straightforward, chronological line. It’s a floor plan, rife with possibility.
Suzanne Scanlon, author of Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, introduced me to Munro’s quote this summer. On my morning off from work, I’d wandered into her public lecture on place and narrative structure at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. In a lecture hall full of attentive writers, Scanlon shared her own process in drafting her memoir. Committed draws on Scanlon’s own experience as a young patient in a psychiatric ward, while examining “crazy chick” narratives throughout literature. Scanlon was interested in building the book around the rooms she’d been locked up in – rooms that as a writer, she was now locked out of, since she could no longer access them, except in her memories. She described going to find the now-closed New York State Psychiatric Institute, and staring up at it from Riverside Drive, trying to locate the room she’d been in twenty years ago.
“Think about spaces where you have insider knowledge,” she told us. “But where you can also view the space as an outsider. Play with that.”
As someone who loves to wander, here’s where my ears pricked up: “Narrative propulsion is not only about linear plot. It can occur through a quest. In one room, new questions are raised that can be answered in another room – which leads to wandering.”
Writing Prompt: Wander and Pause
Inspired by Scanlon, during a drizzly 24-hour layover in Boston, I went and found the home my parents lived in when I was born. It’s a red brick house at the end of a dead-end street in Brookline, and though I don’t have any personal memories of it, it’s come to have mythical resonance in family lore. I sat on the curb and described what I saw, as precisely as I could. A neighbor in running gear came out and gave me an odd look, then jogged off. A drill started up at a nearby construction site. And as I kept paying attention to the house, looking up again and again from my notes, a funny thing happened: It seemed to wrap itself in layers of secrets until the place, still fundamentally unknown to me, resonated with near-magical significance. The house was offering up questions and inviting me on a quest.
Seek out a place that has significance for you – physically, ideally, or if can’t, find a picture. Describe the space from the outside. Then, switch to what only you can know about it. See what happens.
Things We’re Reading
Mary Gaitskill on her increasingly odd healing journey in Granta: “The intensity of it seemed in retrospect something inexplicable, like a sudden opening in the sky with an outpouring of visions.”
Sarah Thankam Mathews’s portrait of the novelist Garth Greenwell in Vulture: “The contemporary cultural tendency to conflate writers’ lives and their novels is like seeing a barrel of oil and an oil painting as the same.”
Opportunities
The Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship with One Story mentors writers without advanced degrees in English or Creative Writing - closes October 9
Masters’ Review - Novel Excerpt Contest - closes October 27
Blue Mesa Review and Michigan Quarterly Review both have open reading periods until Nov. 1
Fellowships including cost of travel are available for the Writers in Paradise conference in late January in Florida - deadline Nov. 1