In the 16th in a series of posts from authors of 2018 books entered for The Story Prize, Ryan Habermeyer, author of The Science of Lost Futures (Louisiana State University Press), extolls the benefits of slowing down.
My wife is a self-taught seamstress. Somehow this factoid escaped me until after we were married. I came into the living room of our cramped apartment one day and found it a minefield of fabric bolts. At first she sewed little things: curtains, tablecloths, the occasional skirt. Over the last few years, she’s graduated to reupholstering couches and chairs, which should be required training in theological seminaries because reupholstery is a kind of resurrection—stripping the furniture to its frame and then painstakingly reconstructing it in a new fabric flesh. It’s a tremendous art and fascinating to watch.
And watch I do. I’ve grown accustomed to seeing my wife spend hours sitting on the floor staring at her fabric. Before she ever reupholsters, she’ll spread the fabric down the hallway or hang it over a door and just look at it: tilting her head one side and then another, folding and unfolding it, occasionally placing little pins in it as if she is Napoleon and the fabric is her map of Europe. One time, like a fool of a husband, I joked it wasn’t going to reupholster itself and she reminded me you can’t uncut fabric. “I’m seeing the chair,” she said.
This seems about the right moment to take a not-so-subtle metaphorical turn (bet you didn’t see that one coming) on the writing life and the upholstery life. With reupholstering, my wife often doesn’t really know where she’s going or how she’s going to re-fabric a particular chair. So she’s got to see it first--a kind of Platonic, idealized chair--before constructing the thing itself. She spends a lot of time staring, figuring out what she doesn’t yet know she knows. Donald Barthelme has extolled the virtues of not-knowing for writers, so I won’t rehash that here, and besides: It’s not not-knowing that I’m really after. It’s the looking. The pausing. The wondering. Imagining the story in the mind, tinkering with it, before giving birth to it with words on the page. A kind of daydream. I like to daydream stories. It’s preferable to actually writing (or revising) them, which I find exhausting and frustrating.
My wife’s upholstering has taught me to pause more when I’m in the thick of writing. Slow down. Look. Wait. Stare out the window. Wait a little longer. Wait for the words right. As Raymond Carver says, “That’s all we have, finally, are the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the right punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say.” What does that mean, exactly? I think of the opening to Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Circular Ruins”: “No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night.” Unanimous? Such a peculiar adjective, and yet a wonderful counterpoint to the story that unfolds which questions the fabric of identity and reality. Or, there’s Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”: “The world had been sad since Tuesday.” Really? Since Tuesday? The melancholy of that line punches me in the chest every time. Without it, I’m not sure I’d feel the angelic old man’s misery as much as I do. Or from Karen Russell’s collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove: “Samson was seventeen and had what Nal could only describe as a bovine charm.” I’ve never met a bovine personally, but when I do I will be invariably disappointed if it isn’t charming.
When I read fiction it’s not just characters and circumstance that should intrigue; I want the words to surprise, to startle, to provoke just as much as much as I want narrative leaps that bend the limits of reality. In fact, for those of us who traffic in fabulism—or magical realism, slipstream, surrealism, speculative, or whatever else the kids are calling it these days—having inventive syntax and diction (judiciously placed, of course) is of equal importance to me as a fantastical premise. It’s not just about turning a clever phrase. It’s about creating dynamic characters who, as Chuck Palahniuk says, speak with a “burnt tongue.” To create what I call sideways reality the words themselves had better compliment (or provide rich dissonance with) the impossible worlds we conjure.
Of course, sometimes meticulously plodding along at a snail’s pace is a bad idea. So write recklessly. Write mindlessly. Indulge every impulse. But don’t forget to pause, to lean back in the chair and just stare into empty space a little. It’s isolating, this writing thing, but don’t shy away from long bouts of silence. Slow down. Daydream. Wait for the right story to come along. In those quiet moments of waiting you’re likely to find seams to follow should the story come unstitched, as they so often do.
My wife is a self-taught seamstress. Somehow this factoid escaped me until after we were married. I came into the living room of our cramped apartment one day and found it a minefield of fabric bolts. At first she sewed little things: curtains, tablecloths, the occasional skirt. Over the last few years, she’s graduated to reupholstering couches and chairs, which should be required training in theological seminaries because reupholstery is a kind of resurrection—stripping the furniture to its frame and then painstakingly reconstructing it in a new fabric flesh. It’s a tremendous art and fascinating to watch.
And watch I do. I’ve grown accustomed to seeing my wife spend hours sitting on the floor staring at her fabric. Before she ever reupholsters, she’ll spread the fabric down the hallway or hang it over a door and just look at it: tilting her head one side and then another, folding and unfolding it, occasionally placing little pins in it as if she is Napoleon and the fabric is her map of Europe. One time, like a fool of a husband, I joked it wasn’t going to reupholster itself and she reminded me you can’t uncut fabric. “I’m seeing the chair,” she said.
This seems about the right moment to take a not-so-subtle metaphorical turn (bet you didn’t see that one coming) on the writing life and the upholstery life. With reupholstering, my wife often doesn’t really know where she’s going or how she’s going to re-fabric a particular chair. So she’s got to see it first--a kind of Platonic, idealized chair--before constructing the thing itself. She spends a lot of time staring, figuring out what she doesn’t yet know she knows. Donald Barthelme has extolled the virtues of not-knowing for writers, so I won’t rehash that here, and besides: It’s not not-knowing that I’m really after. It’s the looking. The pausing. The wondering. Imagining the story in the mind, tinkering with it, before giving birth to it with words on the page. A kind of daydream. I like to daydream stories. It’s preferable to actually writing (or revising) them, which I find exhausting and frustrating.
My wife’s upholstering has taught me to pause more when I’m in the thick of writing. Slow down. Look. Wait. Stare out the window. Wait a little longer. Wait for the words right. As Raymond Carver says, “That’s all we have, finally, are the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the right punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say.” What does that mean, exactly? I think of the opening to Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Circular Ruins”: “No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night.” Unanimous? Such a peculiar adjective, and yet a wonderful counterpoint to the story that unfolds which questions the fabric of identity and reality. Or, there’s Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”: “The world had been sad since Tuesday.” Really? Since Tuesday? The melancholy of that line punches me in the chest every time. Without it, I’m not sure I’d feel the angelic old man’s misery as much as I do. Or from Karen Russell’s collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove: “Samson was seventeen and had what Nal could only describe as a bovine charm.” I’ve never met a bovine personally, but when I do I will be invariably disappointed if it isn’t charming.
When I read fiction it’s not just characters and circumstance that should intrigue; I want the words to surprise, to startle, to provoke just as much as much as I want narrative leaps that bend the limits of reality. In fact, for those of us who traffic in fabulism—or magical realism, slipstream, surrealism, speculative, or whatever else the kids are calling it these days—having inventive syntax and diction (judiciously placed, of course) is of equal importance to me as a fantastical premise. It’s not just about turning a clever phrase. It’s about creating dynamic characters who, as Chuck Palahniuk says, speak with a “burnt tongue.” To create what I call sideways reality the words themselves had better compliment (or provide rich dissonance with) the impossible worlds we conjure.
Of course, sometimes meticulously plodding along at a snail’s pace is a bad idea. So write recklessly. Write mindlessly. Indulge every impulse. But don’t forget to pause, to lean back in the chair and just stare into empty space a little. It’s isolating, this writing thing, but don’t shy away from long bouts of silence. Slow down. Daydream. Wait for the right story to come along. In those quiet moments of waiting you’re likely to find seams to follow should the story come unstitched, as they so often do.
