Office Hours

Crossing the Wires

Before we launch into today’s question, I wanted to mention that over behind the paywall we’re about to begin our discussion of a wonderful story by the Italian writer Maria Messina. We’re also going to have a chance to discuss the story with its translator (and Story Club member) Elise Magistro. Please join us over there, if you’re inclined.

Q.

I can't thank you enough for that series of CommComm discussions: not just the posts themselves, but the thoughtful, thorough, interesting answers to people's endless questions. I was amazed to see today's Pastoralia post because after that monumental task I figured you'd probably need (and you definitely deserve) a month or two off. Maybe even more.

So I hesitate to say this, but...

...if at some point you're weighing up possible post subjects, there's something you mentioned during one of those discussions that I'd love to read more about:

”I often find myself talking, to my students, about "crossing the wires."  Maybe I'll post about this in the future.  But basically, for some reason, most of us will, in the early phases of a story, have several interesting elements that aren't having much to do with one another.  We're busy putting each element on its feet but then....they have to interfere with or interact with each other in a non-trivial way.”

This exactly is what I struggle with most. All other things being equal, for my own selfish (albeit grateful) reasons, I'd like to cast a vote for something, sometime, about this.

Thanks so much for all the help you've given us all so far. And again, I hope you'll take all the recovery time you need after that CommComm ultramarathon.

A.

Right – so, this “crossing the wires” idea comes from another idea, or aspiration, really: everything in a story should be part of an organic whole.  Everything in a story (the characters, the settings, the voice) should be cross-talking coherently.  (Is this ever completely true?  No.  But we can dream.) 

So, ideally, as in real life, every element of the story has a relation to every other element.  And the story seems to know, or display, that.  And the reader feels it.

What can happen in early drafts is that we sometimes put up scrims between those elements – they can’t get at one another.  It’s as if each element is existing in its own airtight chamber, not connecting with the other elements.

Or, say: there’ll be current in one wire, and current in another.  Those wires are running along in parallel through the story, but they’re separated and insulated.

The challenge is to peel off the insulation and get those two wires to cross.

To go back (briefly, I promise) to CommComm: Giff is a religious fanatic.  Rimney is a guy devoted to his sick wife.

Now, I might have dedicated many pages to “developing” the details of Giff’s religious beliefs – how he came to be a Christian, how he reacts in different circumstances, and so on.  Likewise with Rimney.  (Does he ever get lonely?  Has he ever had an affair?) 

But, in a sense, this is all, in story terms, pretty static stuff.  We already “have” the ideas “Giff = religious” and “Rimney = dutiful.”

It feels like escalation when we get these two guys talking (fighting).  The sparks fly, so to speak, from the crossing of their respective wires.  This feels like escalation, in part because it was unexpected. Unexpected but natural; it came naturally from who they were (from the energy in their respective wires).  But: when they started fighting, I was surprised, at first – I hadn’t seem it coming, and it felt like a distraction from the “real” story. 

But, of course, “surprised by his own story” is a good state for a writer to be in.

A lot of this wire-crossing will happen very naturally, just by putting two characters in the same room. (Although even then, we have sometimes have to make the effort to get them to meaningfully engage, and not just stay two separate, solipsistic creations.)

But there are other, mechanical, things we can try, especially near the end of a story.

For example, we might just scan through the list of characters, trying to quickly imagine what they think of one another (even if they’re never in the same scene).  Once we’ve done this, and we go in for another pass, we might, knowing more about these relationships, find small tweaks to make to the dialogue, that will make things move lively and three-dimensional. 

We might even find places where we’ve been blocking an obvious move by a character.  Say that, during our scan, we realize that Anna’s mother resents her success as a singer.  Why is that the case?  It leaps into our mind: Anna’s mother was a singer too, when young, but had to quit, to have Anna.  Now, at the big recital, this gives Anna’s mother a certain presence.  She is not just “mother, at recital” but “jealous mother at recital, mourning her lost dream.”  This might, in turn, create a moment, after the recital, for Anna’s mother to react where, now, in the current draft, she’s just standing in the crowd of well-wishers in the dressing room. 

We don’t have to do this – but considering it (even if we reject it) is part of the finishing process, let’s say. It contributes to that feeling that “every element has a relation to every other element.” In this phase, we’re aspiring to move our story from a two-dimensional drawing to a three-dimensional, even holographic, system.

It’s also sometimes helpful (it will sometimes jar something loose) to go through the story in the mind of each of the characters, even the non-central ones, just…to see.  I don’t do this consistently, not at all.  But sometimes it helps me ferret out certain logical questions.  (What is Character B doing, while Character A is giving his big speech to the reader on page 19?  When Character B comes back, how is she different from when she left?  And so on.)

We shouldn’t approach any of this as if its obligatory; it’s more like creative due diligence, or a last-minute inspection of the troops before a critical battle, or (less grimly) a quick trip through our pre-party house, trying to make things even incrementally more joyful for the coming guests.

We might (in the same imaginative, exploratory spirit) try to summarize for ourselves what role each character plays in the story – what essential work he or she does – just to see if we can help him or her do it a little better.  (“Giff’s stubbornness causes Rimney to feel he has to kill him,” might then cause us to ask: “Have I done enough to indicate the extent of Giff’s stubbornness?”) 

This is another way to identify places where our pre-existing idea of the story may have put up some scrims that need to come down.

Another thing I’d mention in this spirit: I sometimes see, in student work, places where an admirable tendency toward understatement (in the name of anti-banality) can cause something to be vague, or under-indicated.  I remember a wonderful story from a few years ago – beautifully written, very moving – but, in the workshop afterward, it developed that we all had the same question about a simple fact of the story (whether or not a particular character had been abused as, in places, the story seemed to suggest she had).  This was, of course, an easy fix, and the blurriness had come from the writer’s desire not to be too on-the-nose or literal.  (The writer knew the answer to the question, i.e., knew what she’d intended.)  But this omission was undercutting the power of the story – at critical moments, it really mattered whether the abuse had happened or not. 

This was a case where there was a wire (the notion that some abuse had occurred) but the exact nature of the current through the wire was uncertain. 

So, part of this “crossing the wires” idea is, first, to make sure the basic facts of the story are clear to the reader.  My contention is that a story never benefits from what we might call Writer-Imposed Blur (WIB).  We sometimes mistake WIB for ambiguity, which is something we might want in our story (i.e., “the quality of being open to more than one interpretation”). 

Sometimes, a good way to cross the wires is just to let a character say or ask what any person would say or ask in that situation (i.e., what the reader would say or ask). As mentioned, we sometimes feel this frankness to be too “on-the-nose” — too mainstream, non-literary.  We’ve somehow come to associate a certain feeling of narrative withholding with Literature. 

But if we want our stories to be powerful, they have to be honest.  This is an essential element of escalation: that moment when the story turns to address exactly what is on the reader’s mind, thereby building a sturdy platform on which the story can ascend.

P.S. Also wanted to let any of you in the Bay Area know about this upcoming event with the glorious theater company Word for Word, who’ll be doing their version of my story “Home” at Z Space, from April 5 - April 29th. What they do is so original - they do theater-style readings of the work, verbatim, to great emotional effect. I always love what they do with my stories, so much.

More details here.