The Joy of Stories

For many years, I’ve been allergic to narrative. To a large extent in my reading and almost without exception in my writing, I have avoided plot. When I set out to imprint my thoughts into the wet clay of language, they all come out embedded in one another, compressed to the density of the universe before the Big Bang. I end up with a singularity that imagines itself arriving before the beginning of Time. This can be difficult. I was the college student who reduced the history of western civilization to an index card before exams. It is native to me to live in an awareness of thick simultaneous layers of meaning, interpenetrated by a rich sauce, a sort of mental moussaka. This tendency must be apparent to readers of my Substack. My essays are born almost fully formed out of the oven. They are concise MRIs of the state of my consciousness at a given moment. I aim at 750 words and most weeks that’s more or less what you get. For many years, I have not wandered far from that format. Where some writers struggle to edit down from loose pages of writing that go off in different directions, my challenge has always been to ventilate my prose in order to release it from the grip of its epigrammatic density.

Photo by Yuheng Ouyang on Unsplash

In this narrow corridor that I have occupied, fiction has eluded me. I have written exactly two stories where something happens. But just now, Time is becoming of the essence, as they say. How much more will I have? It makes sense to me that I would feel a hankering for events that take place in Time and the capacity to express its passage in my writing. I listen to my three and a half year old great-granddaughter, Madelyn, “read” from her storybooks. Every sentence after wannaponnatime begins with either “then” or “but.” This happens then that happens. This was supposed to happen but that happened instead. Madelyn is fascinated by the progression of events and I’m warming up to it, as well. I especially appreciate her use of the word but which suggests the possibility of multiple outcomes, like the big boys do in literary hypertext. Maybe it’s because I’m her great-grandmother but I think multiple outcomes are hot stuff. What more do I need to know about fiction? A tiny kernel of an idea arrives like a speck of dust on my shoes and I travel with it wherever it wants to go for however long it takes. It’s much more like the unknowability of life than it is like my usual little prose poptarts that just need toasting when I take them out of the packaging.

Just now, a dust mote has come to me courtesy of a very old woman I know only slightly in Minnesota. I have begun to look for her in my imagination, a much breezier venue than the tenement of my essay writing. I find that I can be free with my character who is turning 96 as I am turning 80 in August. I can change my mind. I can get lost and lose my train of thought in much the same way as I lose my hearing aids. My character, Winnie, has memories from long ago that rise like steam in the kettle. Neither one of us is in a hurry because really where would we be rushing off to? The opportunity to sit still in my pink upholstered writing chair and study the way characters interact, explore their histories with one another, allow them to move backward and forward in time and invite them to talk to me when I need company is an unexpected blessing. My mother always spoke glowingly about the dead who visited her in her dreams. “He was so real,” she would say, speaking of her father who died in 1924. Isolated older people benefit from enriching their days with loved ones who drop in from the remote past, as well as people who arrive unannounced in the paradise of the imagination. In my essay writing, it’s all me all the time. I have to be sure that I mean what I say and can defend my point of view if necessary. What if I want to be someone else? What a joy it is to encounter story and just make things up, speak the truth of different characters and just allow the story to unfold. I am grateful to Scheherazade and Chekhov and Madelyn for their example and their encouragement.

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