Family Ties

Exercise Your InkTank

Many writers find writing about their families therapeutic—they’re able to exorcise their demons or honor their angels, so to speak, by putting the stories down. Some writers write about their families out of a sense of obligation—perhaps they fear the stories will die if they don’t tell them, or that the stories will remain unjustly suppressed. Some writers write about their families simply because it’s good material, and some do it because it’s simply material, and some writers do it because they can’t help it. Why do you write about your family?

It might be a good idea to spend some time meditating on the why before you begin to address the how because the answer can have a pretty significant impact on your approach.

There are (at least) two issues that make writing about family very difficult for some:
1. Telling the truth—or your version of it—can get you into trouble with the people you love. Or, even those you hate, or feel ambivalent about, I suppose. Even if you’re estranged from your family, you’re still connected. When it comes down to it, you have to make a decision: what is the value of telling the truth to you? If it’s worth potentially upsetting a few people, do it. If not, do something else. Either way, be as honest as possible. Whatever that means.

2. Telling the truth—or your version of it—does not always make for good storytelling. Just because your Mom (an absolute saint!) helped you through that awkward knee-boots phase doesn’t mean she’ll make for an interesting character. Nor does the fact that your terror of uncle explodes your pet frogs when he visits mean that he will make a compelling character. Characters—even characters who are also real people—have to have dimensions in order to be interesting to readers. The same standards of storytelling that apply to all of the other kinds of writing we investigate apply to family stories too.

Too Close for Comfort
Proximity can really mess up storytelling. Family is often hard to write about because it’s so close. But it’s also for this reason that family so hard not to write about. Wedging in a bit of distance is one way of getting around the interference. Whether you decide to go public with your family narrative or not, give a distancing technique a shot and see what happens. Here are a few to try today. Pick one and go:
Assume a collective perspective—a “we” perhaps.
Assume the perspective of a non-family member, an invented character.
Assume the perspective of an actual family member, who is not you.
Apply the tone and language of a fairy tale to the story.
Begin by writing seemingly innocuous moments instead of the big flashy ones.
Others you’d like to suggest?

It's Magical

Exercise Your InkTank

Gabriel García Márquez: “My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic.”

One of our earliest impulses as storytellers is to fantasize. We imagine alternate worlds in which the seemingly impossible can happen or we imagine the entry of impossible elements to our own world. The magical realism so popular in literature today is not so different. It’s a kind of writing that performs a variation on a basic rhetorical maneuver: it melds the “real” with the “unreal” in order that one may reflect certain properties of the other in a meaningful way. By the end of Márquez’s short story, “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,” for example, the old winged man manages to seem more humane than the humans who trap and torture him; the “unreal” element casts a critical gaze on the “real” elements of the story. And in Percival Everett’s “The Fix,” the addition of the “unreal” element into the “real” world—a man who can fix anything, including death—has the effect of turning the “real” world into a disturbingly unreal and comically overblown place. Both stories can be read as kind of social critique, but the messages they may seem to convey aren’t as straightforward as you might think—they can’t be reduced into simple morals or lessons. At the same time, the sense that these stories aim to tell us something about ourselves is palpable. We’re compelled—directed by the storyteller—to think about the stories after we’ve left them.

It’s one thing to recognize how magical realism works and it’s another thing to pull off the trick of convincing readers to suspend their disbelief when fantastic or absurd elements come into the storytelling. After all, a good reader is a critical reader—one engaged enough with the story to ask the logical questions. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re attempting the absurd:

o All worlds, no matter how fantastic, have rules and boundaries. Once you establish rules, you can’t change them without jeopardizing your own authority as the storyteller.
o You’d be surprised how far you can get by simply adopting an air of authority in your writing. If you effectively treat a fantastic element as though it’s entirely ordinary in the world of the story, your readers will follow you. Or, if you simply predict their concerns and questions—perhaps by embodying them in an incredulous character—you’ll be able to assuage their concerns. Failing to answer pertinent concerns will loosen the story’s grip on the reader.
o Persuasive details need not be directed solely at the physical. In fact, leaving a little room for the reader’s imagination to become involved can enhance the world of the story dramatically. Many writers rely upon familiar (or traditional) stories to fill in the blanks for them.
o Choose your mysteries wisely. If readers feel as though the storyteller is withholding pertinent information, they’ll begin to lose trust. Always reveal, never conceal.

Let’s Get Fantastical

Many writers complain that they can’t write magical realism because they can’t think of anything interesting or fresh enough to write about, or because they can’t write about fantastic elements convincingly. Here’s what I have to say to that: Many of the most effective stories in this genre begin by depicting the ordinary and the everyday astutely. When they veer into the extraordinary, we may not expect it, but we’re inclined to follow because they’ve already established their authority. Even if you don’t trust your imagination to create something effectively “unreal,” you can probably trust yourself to recognize the real. Begin with what you know and then allow yourself to stray into the unknown. Let’s start with an average, everyday moment (one we’ll think of together) and then gradually introduce an “unreal” element.

Quickness

Exercise Your InkTank

Calvino says that “a story is an operation carried out on the length of time involved, an enchantment that acts on the passing of time, either contracting or dilating it.” As surgeons, what kind of tools do we have with which to operate on time?

1. Modal writing allows us to talk about how things generally are. This creates the impression that time has passed, even if it hasn’t in terms of the progression down the page. We may begin in-scene, for example, and then talk modally about the consequences of that scene as they’ve played out generally for the characters. A short paragraph of modal writing can stand in for a few hours, days, or even years of time. It keeps readers at a bit of a distance, though, and I’d advise avoiding long passages of modal writing.

2. Simple time expressions allow us to move forward in large or small increments. Later that year, Wednesday, at 4 p.m. that evening—that’s all it takes at the opening of a paragraph or section to set your readers in time.

3. Space breaks can be used to suggest movement in time with the proviso that it’s a mistake to assume that your readers will know exactly how much time has passed after the break. It helps to rhyme events, as Calvino phrases it, if you’re using white space to signify the passage of time

4. Economy of expression is an idea that Calvino treats exceedingly well in his essay. The idea is that every detail has a necessary function in the plot. For many of us, that’s easier said than done. It helps to think of the details you’ve imagined as the negative space around the story. Your investment in imagining the world of the story will be communicated in the authority with which you are able to write about it.

Let’s do the Timewarp

Let’s begin where the excerpt of "The Feathered Ogre" leaves off and work together (or alone, if you’re so inclined) to create a fairy tale that employs some of the enchantments on time that we’ve discussed here today.