Aurelie Sheehan Sneaks up on Plot

In the 64th in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Aurelie Sheehan, author of Demigods on Speedway (University of Arizona Press), details her tangles with plot.

Plot. What a nightmare! At least that’s the way it’s felt for much of my writing life. Early attempts at “putting plot into my stories” were like stuffing a turkey into a teacup or inserting pencils and rulers into cake.

I never had anything against plot in other people’s writing. I’ve always loved stories strong in plot. A good plot keeps me turning the pages. The prose has to be clean, the characters alive—but these elements alone won’t keep me reading into the wee hours. What needs to kick in is the what-happens-next reflex.

Alas, the what-happens-next reflex wasn’t occurring at my own writing desk. There, it wasn’t a reflex at all, more like the sound of electrical wires fritzing out. I comforted myself with proclamations. Writers into plot were like mechanics ginning up outlines stuffed with spy-craft and long-lost, wealthy relatives. But I did worry: Was I the stereotype on the other side of the spectrum, a pajama-clad watcher, forever not engaged with life?

Here are ways I’ve found to sneak up on the idea of plot and make it my own:

1. I read Jane Austen and began to think plot could be fun, rather than a curse.
2. I realized how profound cause and effect can be—that events and observations did not just hang out in a nether-cloud of time, but were irrevocably shaped by the when of the story. 
3. I read Joan Silber on time in fiction (The Art of Time in Fiction). Time in fiction is different than plot in fiction, but they are related. And time felt organic to me in a way plot did not. 
4. I decided, to heck with plot anyway. To some extent I decided this.
5. I found ways around it. For instance, I wrote a book where place replaced time—where the characters live near each other and their stories form not a plot but a constellation (in this case, the portrait of a city). 
6. I felt the tawdriness of shaping stories, the artifice that had felt artificial, melt away to reveal a kind of beauty.
7. I realized my limitations as a plot person and became a person who plots in her own way. In other words, I redefined plot so I could write one, too. It was a way of finding plot in my own stories.

These things helped, and I feel better about plot now, mellower. If the story of me and Plot were to be written, it would be a very gentle narrative, where the girl begins hating Plot, she has a fight or two with Plot and she breaks Plot’s elbow, and Plot breaks her chin, and then eventually they just stop fighting and go into a kind of Tai Chi tea party that lasts until the end of time.

Ready, Plot? Come on, now. Ready?

Aurelie Sheehan Comes Out of Hiding

In the 48th in a series of posts on 2013 books entered for The Story Prize, Aurelie Sheehan, author of Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories (BOA Editiions), parses the strange relationship between truth and fiction in storytelling.

When I was in college my teacher said, as teachers sometimes do, write what you know. Excellent idea. But at the time it also seemed essential to mask the origins of any given work. First of all, this was fiction, and so by definition an imagined world. Secondly, and probably more importantly, I found it necessary to the point of despair to separate characters or circumstances from their inspirations (especially if those inspirations were my father or mother or boyfriends I might have had—or myself). Thus brown-haired “inspirations” would find themselves blond in my stories, brown eyes would become, alas, gray or green, and people would up and move to New Jersey when they might have more likely come from Connecticut (had my garden not been one of pure Anxiety).

Fictional setting?
The Chrysler Building

This compulsion to mask was new. As a child, I didn’t write about myself, at least not consciously. I wrote about gods and monsters, and therefore didn’t require the shifty secondary move in which I made Ken “Joe” or Jenny “Kate.” My need to write out of reality, or let’s call it lived experience, came at the same time as an equally strong interest in hiding. I was sure my clothes, gait, musical tastes—the very expression I wore on my face—needed to be carefully crafted for impact, my interior tucked away.

Time passed. Novels were written. Chitchatting after readings, I’d find myself saying, “Like Alison, I grew up in Connecticut in the Seventies, though we are very different people,” or “As it turns out, I too worked as a secretary in a law firm in the Chrysler Building, but this is an imagined story.” Damn it, a full-on adult, and still the shiftiness! Yet I wanted to—I needed to, for legal reasons if nothing else—separate out from my characters. I used my own experience as inspiration, but the narrative details deviated from what I had actually lived. It was a value-added My Life; it was Me—with benefits. But was it me? No. Or yes? The ambivalence is, exasperatingly or intriguingly, obvious at the sentence level.

"Winona Bartlett, Win to her friends, might not have been the world’s best secretary, but her nature was such that serving, subservience, and coffee service came easily, and, in fact, she felt there was an inherent good in doing things well… "

I am not Winona—my name is Aurelie. I was a fine secretary (though a little bit roiling inside and a little bit going insane). My nature is such that those things do come easily—or they did—but there are other qualities too, that make up about 75% of me.

In my new book of stories, Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories, I wanted to work with this edge, this double life as fiction writer and reality revealer, more directly—hence these pieces are “fiction” but they are also “history.” For once I just grabbed what I wanted from my own life without apology. Doing this was useful, not because it got me any closer to writing a memoir or autobiography, but because shifting the paradigm broke the locks on some stories. The pieces in Jewelry Box are no more or less confessional or factual than the stories and novels that I carefully constructed not to be me. What changed, simply, was a sense of prerogative. I made liberal use of my life, finding or revealing or creating a passel of psychological, intellectual, and imagined states. I wrote what I knew (!), using the craft of fiction to tell my own stories.