"Is the Sky Ever Green?"

Office Hours

Hi everyone,

My new short story, “The Moron Factory” is out now in The Atlantic, in the print edition and here.

I recently did this interview with the incredibly intelligent, interesting, and talented Otis Fuqua for EPOCH Magazine. Thanks, Otis, for the care you took and the way our interview opened up my mind.

Now, on to our question of the week:

Hi George,

I hope this finds you well.

I have a question prompted by a connection between two stories... Chekov's Gusev, and a wonderful short story by the Hungarian writer Miklos Banffy, set shortly after the Trojan War.

Banffy's Helen, returned from Troy gazes across Spartan hills under a "steel-green sky".

Now, I am colour-blind, and when you can’t trust your eyes to see the colours, it’s the names that take on the meaning. Each colour word becomes its own story with truth but mystery at its heart.

Is the sky ever green? Is steel green, for that matter? I can perhaps see the steel and imagine that the green of steel is like the green of the sea’s peaks and may be but a flash of reflected light captured in its industrial production. But the sky? Why does Banffy’s Helen see this and what is not to be known here?

It’s there in Chekov too, at the end of the story Gusev, a green shaft of light pierces the clouds. I can see the scene, how the objects and people move, but that shaft of light brings me up short, though somehow in a good way, in a wonderful way. I am cast out of the story but instead of feeling frustrated it is a moment of joy.

Now... I suppose my question is not really about the colour green, nor about the sky, but about how you go about infusing your stories with the kinds of sensory details that stir both the mind and gives the heart. I certainly don't remember everything from War and Peace, but one moment of light glinting off the brass of a button on a dead-soldier's uniform stays with me. I have thought about that glint almost everyday of the nearly twenty years since I read it.

You've mentioned a number of times about heading toward specificity, but these kinds of moments feel like something else, something that goes beyond. Helpful though it is, something bothers me about that 'specificity' idea. Sure, be specific, but there are a thousand ways to be specific about the one view or the one moment, and that glint of light of the soldier's button seems to me to have tremendous power above the thousand other ways Tolstoy could have been specific about the uniform.

Is this something you're aware of in your own writing, is it something other than specificity?

Or, is it just that the sky is sometimes or somewhere green?

A.

Yes, thanks for this very interesting question.

For reference, here’s the passage from “Gusev” the questioner refers to:

Overhead at this time the clouds are massed together on the side where the sun is setting; one cloud like a triumphal arch, another like a lion, a third like a pair of scissors. . . . From behind the clouds a broad, green shaft of light pierces through and stretches to the middle of the sky; a little later another, violet-coloured, lies beside it; next that, one of gold, then one rose-coloured. . . . The sky turns a soft lilac. Looking at this gorgeous, enchanted sky, at first the ocean scowls, but soon it, too, takes tender, joyous, passionate colours for which it is hard to find a name in human speech.

I don’t know the story by Banffy (who is, I note, known as “Hungary’s Tolstoy”) but I suspect it’s in his collection called The Enchanted Night,” available in a new translation from Penguin Random House.

The question gives me, first, a chance to reiterate something important that I know we’ve discussed here before: writing well…is not all craft.

There’s also (and mostly): having a knack for it.

To be able to turn just the right phrase, at exactly the right moment, is an unteachable skill and, not only that, it is, let’s call it, unsummonable: we can’t simply will it to happen.

I wish we could, but we can’t.

In the end, we want a writer to do magic, there on the page, and it’s not really magic if it can be neatly explained or called forward at will, by invoking certain craft mantras, and so on.

So, that’s a pisser, but that’s also the game any creative person agrees to play.

And the thrill of it is that sometimes that magic actually does happen, for each of us, and in our own flavor.

I sometimes feel like someone who catches a fish once or twice a year, but those times are so thrilling, you’ll find me out by the lake every day.

I talk a lot here, as you mention, dear questioner, about specificity. Keeping this in mind helps me move a text from mushy to precise; it helps that text get grounded in specific moments (those “inflection points” we’ve been talking about re Tolstoy).

But, as in all things writing-related, if “specificity” starts getting worn smooth, as a concept, and thereby rendered not useful, we can just tilt the table a little, and look at it another way.

We might talk, instead, about narrative alertness.

What makes a great line? (Why is that Tolstoyan glint-moment so unforgettable?)

And, along with that question, I want to raise another: what (for you, for each of you) makes writing more workable? Less stressful, less mystical, less ornery?

For me the answer to both of these questions has to do with a simple idea: all qualities of prose begin with the fact that reading occurs in a linear fashion. We read one line, which preps us for the next and…the next one comes, and lands on us, and we are either pleased, neutral, or displeased.

Our job in rewriting is to be full-mindedly “in” the read, so as to know where our reader is, so as to know what should come next (what will delight her the most).

A line, in this view, is always a reaction to the one that came before (or, probably more correctly, to all the text that has come before).

This may feel like weak tea, and hard to implement, but I really do, on a daily basis, take comfort in it.

I can’t will myself, in some general way, to “be a better stylist” or “write something like that glinting-button bit in Tolstoy,” and it’s doesn’t help much to admonish myself to “be the very best writer you can be!” but I can attend to the above practice. I can try to read my work-in-progress with alertness, in hopes that those things, and all other good things, will flow out from that practice naturally.

And that, someday, one of those good lines or images will occur.

When they do occur, I’ve found, they often do so unsummoned. They just happen/pop into my head/arrive unbidden. That’s because (I think) writing is primarily reaction (reaction to what I already have). So, writing a good line is exactly equal to having an authentic reaction to what’s come before. It’s less active, maybe, more receptive.

And here we arrive again at that simple truth: it all has to do with talent. It really does. Because, of course, this person “reacts” differently (more originally or surprisingly or attentively) than this other person.

But for any one of us, regardless of our talent level, getting ourselves into that state of receptivity is, I think, the thing.

And I’d argue that this (getting ourselves into a state of receptivity) is a powerful practice for “real life.” It’s the practice of asking: “Where am I right now, and what the heck should I do?”

We got what we got, in terms of talent, and, yes, for sure, we can improve it, but even then we will still be constrained by that “what we got.” Craft is what we do to lure our talent out into the open, and find out how good it is.

Craft is also trying to learn how to tilt that talent you’ve got, so as to get the most out of it. We might find (as I’ve found) that to write this sort of story makes your talent brighter, whereas that sort of story…not so much. (I think here of rotating a prism to get the strongest beam of light.)

I find it strangely relieving to say to myself now and then, like Popeye: “I yam what I yam.” And somehow I always mentally add to that (and I have no idea why): “And that is all I’ll ever be.”

I like working in that mode, as opposed to, you know: “I know very well what I am and I am unlimited, and shall now endeavor to prove it!” (Too much pressure.)

No: better to feel that I am doing my best, trying to see if I have anything to say, and offering it up rather humbly, like: “Is this anything?”

As for colors…

Color, in prose, can function as a reminder of the way things actually are, that puts us more firmly in the made-up world. (Someone writes a precise description of the color of, say, the bark of a redwood tree.) But it can also serve what we might call a startle-function, exactly because the description is not what we expected.

We might recall here all of those mentions, in The Iliad, of that “wine-red sea.” Or, we might imagine someone writing something like this: “As I crossed the purple field of grass…” This might stop us for an instant. “Purple grass?” And then we try, because we are such good sports, to picture, or otherwise justify, a purple field of grass, and sometimes (especially if there is a shred of perceptual truth in the adjective) it might put us into the imagined world even more firmly – the act of “pausing to picture” having done that trick.

It raises the question, of course: what color are things, anyway? All color designations are approximate and too-discrete – like picking a crayon from a 12-crayon box. Real color is continuous and exists along a gradational spectrum. Colors, combined, create new colors, and so on. That is, our visual abilities are too exuberant for mere concepts of color.

It might also be the case that certain colors, the expected identifiers, can get worn out. Is “green grass” different from grass? Well, sometimes. Sometimes grass is tan or grey or frosted with white. That’s why a phrase like “winter-browned grass” is evocative - we’re moved, as we read, from the expected (“grass is green”) to a higher-order specificity (“Not always, not in winter, and we are, here, in this story, in winter”) and somehow that snaps the mind to attention.

What do you think, Story Club? Any thoughts about how to write good lines, about color, about anything at all?