Patrick Ryan on How to Begin

In the 68th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Patrick Ryan, author of The Dream Life of Astronauts (Dial Press), discusses his approach to writing the opening of a story.

How I wish I’d written “Chef’s House” by Raymond Carver. Actually, that’s too greedy and grandiose. All I really want is to live one day of my life as the person who, that morning, wrote the opening to “Chef’s House.” That first paragraph!* We get it all in just a few lines: the present of those two characters, their history, their heartbreak, their hope. We get the urgency, the hesitation, the tone, the sound of their voices. We even get in microcosm the entire arc of the story that’s to come—though we aren’t sure that’s the case until we’ve finished reading.

I don’t find beginnings any harder to write than endings. Or middles, for that matter. But I have settled into a few guidelines for myself when it comes to beginnings. I try to start with a sentence you can’t really argue with. Meaning, a sentence that states a fact within the world of the story. And I endeavor to make that sentence involve an action—though that’s not always possible. It’s very helpful for the writer and the reader to get to a verb that has to do with the present action of the story as soon as possible.

Revising the first page is an ongoing process. If I write four sentences, chances are I’ve already revised each one of them a few times before I get up from my chair. I read out loud to myself all the time, listening to the way the words line up. I do that for a couple of reasons: I want the rhythm to work from one sentence to the next, and I want to clear away any confusion. Nothing that can be read two different ways is allowed to stand. (The only exception to that, of course, is dialogue. Miscommunication between characters often serves as the gasoline in a scene’s engine.) Anytime a writer sets out to be obscure—even for a line or two—I think it’s a misstep. Anything that causes the reader to pause, back up, and reread for clarity is a misstep. Writers should only count on getting one read out a reader.

A strong sense of character has to be in place for me before I can get going. I know there are plenty of great writers who start with a few words, add a few more, and before they know it, characters and situations emerge on the page. For me, nothing emerges without a grasp on the characters I’m writing about before I begin. I don’t take a lot of notes on them or sketch out their bios as a rule, but I think about them. I picture them. I don’t need an exact face; I need an exact sense.

All of that is there in the opening of “Chef’s House.” I’m in awe every time I read it. I’ll never knock an opening out of the park like that, but a person can dream, right?

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* The opening to "Chef's House" by Raymond Carver: 

That summer Wes rented a furnished house north of Eureka from a recovered alcoholic named Chef. Then he called to ask me to forget what I had going and to move up there and live with him. He said he was on the wagon. I knew about that wagon. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He called again and said, Edna, you can see the ocean from the front window. You can smell salt in the air. I listened to him talk. He didn’t slur his words. I said, I’ll think about it. And I did. A week later he called again and said, Are you coming? I said I was still thinking. He said, We’ll start over. I said, If I come up there, I want you to do something for me. Name it, Wes said. I said, I want you to try and be the Wes I used to know. The old Wes. The Wes I married. Wes began to cry, but I took it as a sign of his good intentions. So I said, All right, I’ll come up.

Jodi Paloni on Stranger Stories

In the 18th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Jodi Paloni, author of They Could Live with Themselves (Press 53), looks at stories that turn on the appearance of a stranger.

Some of my favorite stories are the ones in which the main character is minding his or her own sweet and sorrowful business when a newcomer arrives on the scene, some outsider, a stranger. The interloper isn’t always altogether unexpected, but in most cases, the impact of the “unfamiliar” is pivotal to the narrative arc. Three stories that readily come to mind are, “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, “Pharmacy” by Elizabeth Strout, and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates.

Strout's "Pharmacy": Prescription for high impact?

In each of these stories, the protagonist is completely drawn in by the secondary character. The secondary character becomes, in a matter of speaking, larger than life, while the main character becomes distracted from his or her interior conflict. The outsider provides what the story needs, but in the end, of course, the main character is the one altered.

In my own writing, first drafts tend to start out as twenty or more meandering pages in which my protagonist thinks back on some tragic event. While she is beautifully conflicted, she isn’t doing anything to alter her plight. That’s when I start to think about the higher-stakes situation, both actual and emotional.

Here’s my go-to list of the good advice I’ve been given…

1. Put a character in an opening scene where there’s no easy exit. See what happens. Whatever you do, don’t let her out. 
2. Don’t leave her alone for too long. 
3. Ask the question, “What if…?” Only add, “What if…in walks a stranger? 
4. Give the stranger a quality that juxtaposes the protagonist’s current state of being.

In “Cathedral,” a blind man, friend from the narrator’s wife’s past, becomes the narrator’s houseguest. It takes a non-seeing person’s literal limitations to expose the protagonist’s shadow side, his figurative inability to see. In “Pharmacy,” a pharmacist hires a twenty-something woman, new to town, to work by his side. Her freshness–––youth and optimism–––forms the mirror that exposes the protagonist’s struggle, a waning life alongside an embittered wife. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” the character traits in the antagonist are twisted and heightened to the extreme so that the protagonist, a teenage girl who is in acute want, can bump up hard against her alter ego.

Contradictions interest readers. Employment of a stranger–––as shadow, as mirror, as anima/animus, the Jungian flip side of a previously unrevealed subconscious–––may bring on a full range of impact. But what intrigues me the most about the device is how the stranger, in the end, is not so very strange, but instead becomes something quite recognizable in the protagonist.

Elisabeth Doyle on the Smallest of Moments

In the 28th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Elisabeth Doyle, author of War Stories (Two Harbors Press), explains what she learned from reading Raymond Carver and her aim to combine the public and the private in her work.

What writer has most influenced your work? 

I suspect that I may not be unique in my choice of writers who have most influenced my work, but the answer for me is clear: Raymond Carver. I began writing seriously when I was in college—or at least, it was at that point that my writing began to mature. I wrote two or three stories during that period that received a good bit of attention, and one of them was awarded a university prize and published in a literary journal. Each of these stories revolved around “big” themes—my recollection is that one reflected an imagined rendering of the circumstances of my adoption as a young child—an entirely fictitious account of the circumstances of both my adopted and birth mothers. The other two stories also had larger, very defined themes and followed a more traditional story structure.

After writing those stories, I remember thinking: “What next?” Did every story have to revolve around a grand plot or event? If so, how could I possibly continue to generate or manufacture such events? I felt a great deal of pressure to continue to write a certain “kind” of story. Then I read Raymond Carver—I’m not quite sure how I stumbled upon his collections, but I read them voraciously, each one. They were a gift, and changed everything for me in terms of my understanding of what a “story” could be.  From Carver, I learned that almost anything can be the foundation for or comprise a story. A walk to the grocery store, a chance encounter with a stranger on the sidewalk… I saw that there are stories everywhere, in the smallest of moments, the subtlest of interactions. This realization liberated me from traditional story conventions and traditional notions of what “makes” a story. I continued writing, but in a more natural voice, finding stories in the smaller, more intimate moments. This freedom from convention, and the intimacy of voice, was—in my mind—Raymond Carver’s great gift to writers and to literature.

What inspires you? 

I have always been something of a duality, deeply interested in and moved by the real-life events taking place in the world around me, and also deeply committed to art and creative expression, which often reflects the internal world. In the “real” world, there are certain topics and interests that have informed my life since I was a child, and about which I continue to read voraciously: the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the Holocaust, and the war in Vietnam. In my fiction, these two sides of myself meet one another and come together, in stories that are deeply personal and which also touch upon a broader set of circumstances. (In War Stories, that “broader” set of circumstances is clear.) In a nutshell, then, I am inspired equally by external events in the world around me—including historical events—and my own life experiences. These two elements intertwine in my work, such that even in those stories that are related to seemingly outward events, such as war, the personal is always a factor; I use my own experiences to help me “find” the characters’ inner lives. 

Lucia Perillo on the Poetry of Raymond Carver's Prose

In the 14th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Lucia Perillo, author of Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain (W. W. Norton), talks about what we talk about when we talk about Raymond Carver.

In my morning procrastination ritual the other day, as I put off working for yet another hour, I pulled down my Library of America edition of the short stories of Raymond Carver, the black book with a stern blue ribbon to mark the reader’s place. In poking through the stories, I was reminded of how much I liked them, and I started thinking about why.

They are memorable, of course—like Flannery O’Connor’s stories, you notice that they fall easily into that “and then there’s the one about” mental retrieval system: the guy who smokes pot with the blind man, the fishermen who find the dead girl in the river. Flipping through the book, what struck me was how plain the exposition is, to the point of being almost banal. Why then do these stories lodge like thorns in the brain? 

Raymond Carver: A towering presence at Syracuse

In 1984, I went to Syracuse University (only because it was the only graduate school that accepted me) where Carver happened to be a towering and nearly silent presence in the English Department. I went as a poet and crossed paths with the great writer only occasionally, as he spent his time working in a house with a sign on the porch that turned visitors away. At that time he was trying to extricate himself from teaching but still he took over our poetry workshop whenever our professor was gone. People forget that the volume of his collected poems weighs about as much as his collected stories, and that he pursued both forms with equal diligence.

Carver’s being a poet gave him a facility with the metrical construction of his prose, and this is why, I think, the simple dialogue invades the mind with such force. Take these lines from “Why Don’t You Dance” (the one about the man who puts his furniture out on the lawn):


     The man came down the sidewalk with a sack from the market. He had sandwiches, beer, whiskey. He saw the car in the driveway and the girl on the bed. He saw the television going and the boy on the porch.
    “Hello,” the man said to the girl. “You found the bed. That’s good.”
    “Hello,” the girl said, and got up. “I was just trying it out.” She patted the bed. “It’s a pretty good bed.”
    “It’s a good bed,” the man said, and put down the sack and the whiskey.

The poet Carver surely planted the metrical firecrackers in this passage. There’s all the matched constructions (I’ll put what I hear as the accented syllables in capital letters): CAME down the SIDEwalk/SACK from the MARKet; CAR in the DRIVEway/GIRL on the BED.  There’s the two-beat phase, or spondee: THAT’S GOOD.  The phrase PRETty good BED becomes, in the man’s reiteration, another spondee:  It’s a GOOD BED.  And the spondee falls like a rock into the story’s pond.

This is why, throughout his oeuvre, the dialogue strikes us as so crisp, though it is forged from the simplest words. Carver’s sentences make use of a full metrical toolbox: inversion, repetition, and what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “sprung rhythm”—that is, the inclusion of more accented syllables than are naturally found in the language, in order to heighten the ordinary. And to control, through the writer’s eyes and tongue, our processing of it.

My favorite dialogue-exchange in the body of Carver’s work occurs not in a story but in the poem “What the Doctor Said.” It’s a hilarious piece, built mostly from dialogue, about a doctor’s telling a man that he’s dying of lung cancer. I’ll quote just the end, which is famous among Carverites:

I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong

The way I read that final line, it’s regular iambic, dah-DUM dah-DUM for five beats, and then a final spondee, SO STRONG (DUM-DUM).

With that double accent, the reader feels a little outrush of breath that can be painful, or audible, or both. When there’s a roomful of listeners you can even hear them going awhhh.

"Sincerely, Ray Carver"

In 1984, shortly after reading Raymond Carver's short story collection, Cathedral, I wrote a letter to him expressing my admiration for the story, "A Small, Good Thing." One moment in, particular, struck me as being incredibly vivid, real, "cinematic" (which I thought then was quite a compliment). It occurs in the emergency room of a hospital where a couple has taken their young son. The boy, after being struck by a car while walking home from school—on his birthday, no less—later goes into a coma. In the waiting room, the boy's mother encounters members of another family, who have brought another child to the emergency room. What amazed me was the feeling of intersecting narratives. And I could imagine a story about the second family, with this mother just passing through.

I was 25 at the time and had a different last name, Charny. (Long story short: My wife and I both changed our last names to Dark when we married). I sent the note I wrote to Carver care of Vintage and didn't expect an answer. It just felt important to send, no matter what. But a couple of months later, a handwritten letter with a Syracuse postmark arrived. I had just quit law school to pursue writing fiction, and getting a response from the great man himself thrilled me, almost seemed to validate my choice. I swore that when a fan wrote to me, I'd write back, just as Carver had.

The fiction writing career hasn't quite worked out for me—yet—some 25 years later. (I'm now double the age.) But the pursuit of it did, nonetheless, lead me in a direction I couldn't have foreseen. In 2000, I ended up choosing a posthumous Carver story, "Kindling," for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. It almost felt like I was returning a favor. In truth, the letter Raymond Carver wrote me, just as he was dashing off to the airport to catch a flight back home to Washington State, was a small act of generosity that I will never be able to reciprocate.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Collaboration

I gave my son The Library of America's recently released Raymond Carver: Collected Stories for his eighteenth birthday a few weeks ago. He had discovered Carver's stories this past summer while attending a writing workshop at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and Carver immediately jumped the list to become his favorite writer.

When I was a young man with writerly aspirations of my own, Raymond Carver's stories also made a deep impression--so deep, that I felt moved to write the author a letter about my favorite story from his 1983 collection Cathedral, "A Small, Good Thing." Weeks later, to my astonishment, I received a handwritten reply from Carver, cementing my attachment to him and his work. I've had cause to correspond with many writers over the years, but this letter remains particularly meaningful.*

"A Small, Good Thing" is also my son's favorite Raymond Carver story. As many readers know, it's a longer version of a story called "The Bath" that appeared in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Much has been made of Gordon Lish's strong hand in editing Carver's work on that collection. And questions have arisen about the importance of the edited versions in establishing Carver's reputation. In December 2007, The New Yorker ran the story "Beginners," which was Carver's longer version of the title story, along with an account of his conflicting feelings about Lish's changes and, online, a recreation of Lish's edits. The Library of America edition includes a section, called Beginnners, that presents the original manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that Carver submitted to Lish.

I've always liked "A Small, Good Thing" better than "The Bath," but I have to give Lish his due for his role in Raymond Carver's development as a writer and some credit for the critical reception What We Talk About When We Talk About Love received. Editors matter, and I'm sure other editors have (perhaps more quietly) played a significant role in a writer's reputation. Collaboration is an important part of the creative process and shouldn't necessarily detract from an artist's success. Here's an analogy I would make: Would the Beatles be the Beatles without producer George Martin? Yes, but Martin undoubtedly made a huge contribution that is impossible to separate from the band's lasting reputation. Would Raymond Carver be Raymond Carver without Gordon Lish? I have little doubt. With or without Lish's contribution, Carver is--and still would have been--a great short story writer. In any event, readers can now compare the different versions and see what they think.

* I'm not sure of the legalities, but maybe if I can sort that out, I'll post a copy of the letter some time.