Courting the Place Where Anything Can Happen: Openness to the Unexpected
by Scott Elliott
One of the most dubious-sounding pieces of advice teachers of creative writing sometimes hear themselves offering their students is “make sure you don’t know where you’re going when you set out to write a story, essay, or poem.” This advice flies in the face of what younger students hear in their early writing careers about careful plans—maps, lists, outlines, and other devises and activities meant to help students chart exactly where they’re going, preferably in five neat paragraphs, before they begin the actual writing.
A host of writers have addressed the benefits of figuring things out as we go, of learning what we think as we write it down, as opposed to following a rigid plan. In his 1987 essay “Not Knowing” Donald Barthelme claims that “the writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.” And, further, writes Donald B., “The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.” [1] If the writer makes it up as he or she goes along, allowing room for unexpected events and for the crackle of pleasurable language moments erupting in bursts along the way, the reader will feel the writer’s pleasure in having taken the risk involved in not having a rigid plan and discovering the best unexpected words and actions as she goes.
I once heard the poet Donald Revel advise poets to be very careful to be careless when they set out to write poems, meaning, I think, that they should be careful to get themselves to a mental space where spontaneity is possible, that they should be careful not to be rote or predictable, that they should be open to flashes of insight, unexpected language that will only sneak past the would-be poet’s regular gatekeepers if the gatekeepers are standing down, not around to catch the “wrong thing” that might also be the brilliant unexpected thing. The poet should be in a position to surprise herself.
Short story writer Flannery O’Connor has similar things to say about symbols in a work of fiction– that they shouldn’t be planned in advance but should arise organically when certain details in a work take on a natural significance on their own as the work progresses. Of her story, “Good Country People” she writes,
“When I started writing that story, I didn’t know there was going to be a Ph.D with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about, and before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. I brought in the Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn’t know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out this was what was going to happen, I realized it was inevitable.”[2]
Raymond Carver, discussing how he reacted to the news that O’Connor and others didn’t know where their work was going when they set out to write, says in his essay “On Writing” that the knowledge that other writers worked this way came as a relief from the burden of feeling like he had to know exactly what he was doing when he set out. He writes
“it came as a shock that she [O’Connor], or anyone for that matter, wrote stories in this fashion. I thought this was my uncomfortable secret, and I was a little uneasy with it. For sure I thought this way of working on a short story somehow revealed my own shortcomings. I remember being tremendously heartened by reading what she had to say on the subject.” [3]
Robert Frost’s quote—“no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader”– also speaks to the relationship between not knowing what will happen in the writing and the effect this might have on a reader’s experience. Vladimir Nabokov once said of his own writing process that he writes in a way that will makes the hair on the back of his own neck stand on end. This will only happen when the writer is in the kind of livewire position of not knowing what’s going to happen next, when there’s room for the unanticipated, and this comes through the surprise of living an experience as we’re writing it.
Given the preponderance of writers weighing in on the importance of this surprise in the process, I wanted to say some words today about the zone one might try to enter in writing literary fiction, especially, as that’s my primary genre– (but this can apply to any genre)– where the best kind of unexpected surprises will be allowed to find their way into the work.
[Here, I would advise readers of this essay to read Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School” before continuing.] http://www.npr.org/programs/death/readings/stories/bart.html [4]
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“Barthelme can end this thing anyway he pleases. The essential work has been done. If the narrator begins making love to Helen, that’s good. If he declines, also good. The air is charged with meaning. It is everywhere we look. It seems he’s going to pass—he kisses Helen on the brow—but we sense that he and Helen may very soon be demonstrating some lovemaking, if only to one another, possibly in Helen’s sparse apartment. Everything has changed between them. Suddenly there is death in the room, but also life, and love. The reader is satisfied: so much has happened, in so short a time and in such an unexpected way. It could end with a simple line: ‘I looked at Helen, and she looked at me.’[6]
Saunders then goes on to praise the last move Barthelme makes: the perfect, funny, ambiguous gerbil, something we could not have anticipated, the delightful unexpected moments life can provide as a possible balm for the fact informing all stories—that we are alive and dying.
This orientation toward the act of writing unseats knowing in favor of intuition, planning in favor of spontaneity, and following a map in favor of discovery outside the map’s boundaries through the process of writing.
How do we get to that place where we have a riveted reader and we can do anything we like? What does it mean in the act of writing to give ourselves room to not know so that we may benefit from the surprising developments that might arise from this orientation?
One way of getting into this zone might come through living as much as possible in the world of the story we’re writing, moment to moment and close to the action, concentrating on furnishing the concrete, specific details necessary to help readers experience what the characters are experiencing rather than the broad outlines of the story, though we keep these in the back of our mind. Flannery O’Connor has said that writing fiction is a dirty job and that if you scorn getting yourself dirty it’s not a grand enough job for you. A lot of the trouble in fiction comes in finding inventive ways to get onto the page what “really” happened instead of what one thinks should happen, getting to the perfect concrete, sensual details that help conjure an experience rather than the convenient abstractions that merely gesture at, or, worse, falsify the experience.
A good example of the strange, unexpected, close-to-the-ground, or, in this case, water, kind of detail we discover if we’re writing close an experience shines through in Stephen Crane’s 1897 story “The Open Boat.” Crane writes,
“There was a long, loud swishing astern of the boat, and a gleaming trail of phosphorescence, like blue flame, was furrowed on the black waters. It might have been made by a monstrous knife. Then there came a stillness, while the correspondent breathed with the open mouth and looked at the sea.
Suddenly there was another swish and another long flash of bluish light,and this time it was alongside the boat, and might almost have been reached with an oar. The correspondent saw an enormous fin speed like a shadow through the water, hurling the crystalline spray and leaving the long glowing trail.” [7]
Imagine how much emptier this scene would be, how it would fail to help us experience the moment if Crane had written merely “the correspondent saw a shark going by the boat.” The writer who can remind us of the magic of feeling like we’re living an experience, by echoing the way we take in that experience through the senses, the writer who can find the right sensual details that echo the superabounding richness of experiences afforded by a human life does so, not through grand, abstract ideas, but by paying attention to his or her own life and then by furnishing the concrete sensual details, the language to help readers live those moments. We hear the shark and see the phosphorescence, or at least I do, even though we’re tucked up in bed with a book miles from the sea.
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Perhaps some of this anxiety, especially if it’s paralyzing close to the outset, can be alleviated if we acknowledge that spontaneity doesn’t necessarily mean spur of the moment. Getting something right may take a lot of time and emerge through tasks assigned to the writer’s subconscious mind to get him or her to the place where she or he can relinquishing conscious control of a scene to the subconscious logic, a buried intuitive hunch that reveals itself as the best choice. It may be that a dream, like a message from beyond, will point the way after an initial draft is already complete. There are many cases of writers completing a manuscript and setting it aside for a span of time in an attempt to gain the objectivity necessary to judge its fitness. It may take years to achieve the perfect inevitable, unexpected direction.
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Anton Chekhov once defended himself against the charge of immorality in a letter to his friend book publisher A.S. Suvorin as follows:
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Another aspect of this distancing should involve letting our characters make mistakes. Charles Baxter’s essay from his 1994 book Burning Down the House “Dysfunctional Narratives, Or Mistakes Were Made” warns against protecting characters or letting our protagonists be mere victims in our stories instead of flawed and complex, three-dimensional human beings. Baxter suggests that fiction can only remain vital if it is willing to let characters make interesting mistakes and to suffer the consequences of those mistakes. Overprotecting our characters, letting them be mere passive innocent victims, could be seen as a species of control on the writer’s part, as opposed to the messy carelessness and not-knowing beforehand that will lead to more interesting situations and fictions in which the reader has the sense that anything could happen. [10]
Just as a protagonist who makes interesting mistakes can give a short story the push it needs into the zone where anything can happen, so to can a strong antagonist (or seeming-antagonist) upset a reader’s comfort level, upend their confidence that they know what will happen next. If the writer is keeping close to the action, zoomed in to what’s happening on the page with no dominating preconceptions about what might happen so that it’s as if he or she is living it, the writer will feel as the antagonist feels, see the world through Iago’s or Roskolnikov’s eyes and the reader will sit up and take notice, perhaps recognizing the less beneficent and flawed parts of themselves.
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This is, perhaps, why fiction that wishes to make a narrow political argument is not as successful in a literary sense as literature with no detectable political agenda. In politically motivated fiction that does not pay enough attention to building its world and characters, no matter how correct and righteous the cause, we’re aware that the deck is stacked in favor of one side against another and this bias leaks into every scene, infects the characters who may begin to seem like puppets for ideas rather than characters a reader can credit, characters who act as the complex, contradictory people we know.
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The argument against too rigid a plan is also not an argument against great care in the expression the closer we get to a finished story, essay, or poem. To bring any moment off, to give it the specification necessary to help readers feel they’re living it, we need, to quote Nabokov again, “the precision of the artist” in the language, line by line, word by word.
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To push back against myself a bit more, I’d like to say that the long battle that is writing a novel, with a coherent central narrative question (or questions) goes better with some kind of a plan, lest the would-be novelist wander years off course. One of my teachers in graduate school would say to would-be novelists that you can get from New York to St. Louis without a map but it will take you a long time and that you might as well have some kind of a map. I would say to would-be novelists that in undertaking the writing of a novel some kind of plan is advisable, but this doesn’t cancel the importance of spontaneity in language and in characters’ actions line by line.
Earlier in this talk I mentioned the short story “What Happened During the Ice Storm” by Jim Heynen. Forgive me if you’ve read and studied this one before, but I think it might furnish a second good, short example of a story, though a less postmodern one, that enters the zone I’m talking about. Let’s read it. http://my.hrw.com/support/hos/hostpdf/host_text_201.pdf
Just as George Saunders notices the way in which Donald Barthelme has his readers right where he wants them and can do whatever he wants by the penultimate moment of “The School,” I would argue so, too, does Jim Heynen bring readers into a place where he can do anything he wants in the penultimate moment of this more traditional realist short story. [14]
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[1]Barthelme, Donald. “Not Knowing.” Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme. Ed. Kim Herzinger. New York: Random House, 1997. 11-24
[2]O’Connor, Flannery. “Writing Short Stories.“ Mystery and Manners. New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1969, P. 100
[3]Carver, Raymond. “On Writing.” Fires. New York: Vintage, 1989. 28-39
[4] Barthelme, Donald. “The School” Sixty Stories. New York: Penguin, 1981. 309-12
[5]Saunders, George. “The Perfect Gerbil.” The Braindead Megaphone. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. 175-85
[6] Ibid.
[7]Crane, Stephen. “The Open Boat.” The Story and Its Writer. New York: Bedford/St. Martens; 8th edition, 2010. 271-86.
[8]Nabokov, Vladimir. Interview. Toffler, Alvin. Playboy Magazine. January 1964.
[9] Chekhov, Anton. Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters. Rosamond Bartlett, Ed. New York: Penguin. 2004.
[10]Baxter, Charles. “Dysfunctional Narratives, Or Mistakes Were Made.” Burning Down the House. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press. 1997. 27-50.
[11]Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily” The Story and Its Writer. New York: Bedford/St. Martens; 8th edition, 2010. 314-42.
[12]Szymborska, Wislawa. “The Terrorist, He’s Watching.” View With a Grain of Sand. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company. 1993. 108-9.
[13] Boswell, Robert. “Narrative Spandrels”. Bringing the Devil to His Knees. University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor: 2001. 138-146.
[14]Heynen, Jim. “What Happened During the Ice Storm.” You Know What is Right. North Point Press. New York: 1985.
