How aware do I want readers to be that they're reading my fiction? I'd rather have readers, the short of it. The long of it is here, my most recent assignment for class... I told you this program is not as rigorous as most graduate degrees, right?
What I love about reading is getting lost in the narrative. Rarely so lost that I don’t stop often to count how many pages until the end of the book and estimate how many minutes, approximately, until I’ve finished the story. But there are those moments in narrative that I get so involved that I forget how many pages, how much laundry is piling up, how many emails I received since I started the paragraph. Even if the moment is as brief as a paragraph, a sentence, a word, there are those milliseconds that a spell is cast by the language, and all my other levels of consciousness for that moment are spent on the words in front of me. So I guess you’d say that I’ve bought the fictive dream. What I’d love to be able to do in my writing is cast that sort of spell. Then again, I’d love to be able to write a story like Amy Hempel’s The Harvest.
If I had any clue how to assert my own voice in fiction, I imagine it would be closest to the way Amy Hempel did in The Harvest. Her voice felt honest, confessional and straightforward. She told the truth of the story after the fiction had been done. She pointed out where truth fails fiction. What she told didn’t require seem to require the depth of knowledge about the story, the manipulation of the story, the artful planning of the narrative that Carver’s and Barthelme’s seemed to.
After I’ve written a story, it takes me a good amount of time, a workshop and several people explaining it to me just to figure out what the story that I’ve written is about and why I wrote it. That’s only a mild exaggeration. I have a hard time talking about what I’ve written and why. So how can I step out and manipulate the story one level further? About all I’d be able to do is step out and tell the reader the truth of the matter. For example, I could confess the main character of my last story is my brother and if I had kept his real name, I would risk him reading the story and kicking my ass. But the story itself is nowhere near as powerful as Hempel’s, so who cares that it’s about my brother?
It’s not to say I wouldn’t benefit from imitation. But it would only be imitation; it doesn’t feel natural to address readers. I don’t have any readers yet. Who would I be talking to? Right now, I’m struggling to get the story from my head onto the paper and then trying to figure out what is on the paper when it’s there. Maybe this will get me readers to talk to.
