Stories followed by perceptive interviews with the authors. There's a focus on how life events became involved in the pieces and how, during rewriting, those ingredients somehow combined into a story.
- Path Lights (Tom Drury) - From "The New Yorker". A man walking his 2 (rather intuitive) dogs is nearly hit by a falling beer-bottle. He does voice-overs for adverts, and records audio-novels about Milo, a detective. Part of a recording session is presented. His wife works on a rather secretive Mars probe project. All she tells him is that "it's talking" (meaning, I suppose, that it's sending messages back to Earth). He tracks down the bottle-thrower (a troubled woman - God talks to her in dreams) using the techniques of Milo. At the end, at a Mars project party, he says "You tell me what you're doing on Mars, and I'll tell you why she threw the bottle."
The author commented that he'd been walking his 2 dogs when he was nearly hit by a falling beer-bottle. He was reading detective novels at the time, and wanted to use that style somehow. The most revisions concerned dialogue. The interviewer liked best the conversation between the narrator and the man who sold the beer-bottle. The interviewer's suggestion is that the core theme is "failure to communicate". The writer noticed during re-writes that there was an up/down theme, which influenced his editing. - Maintenance (Sussie Anie) - A man cleans in Ghana's biggest biolab. He talks (only?) to the security man. He tells his family stories about the experiments, the basement of body parts, etc. He learns Chinese. At knife-point poor townsfolk ask him about his tablet computer and want to know more stories. He want to earn enough money to move away. The security man tells him that a new cleaning robot could replace him. At work he causes a power-cut so thugs can raid the labs. He goes home, and also thinks he visits part of the lab where women - Hope, Pride and Guilt - beg him to take them away. His eldest tells him that they should go - there'll be time later for stories.
The author wanted to look at the role of Storyteller (to entertain and reveal - the main character is sometimes explicit about the requirements of the narrative) and at the contrast between reality (poverty and knives) and imagination. Earlier drafts had more purple-prosed world building. She reduced it to keep the story moving. She'd been reading Ted Chiang. - Bad Dreams (Tessa Hadley) - From "The New Yorker". Set in the UK, 1950s? A 9 year old girl (her 3rd-person PoV) wakes slowly in her room. Her family's asleep. She's dreamt that her favourite book, "Swallows and Amazons", had an Epilogue where the only character who survives to old age was the most boring girl. She gets up. Her mother does needlework so "you had to be careful where you stepped". She goes into the living room where "Gleaming, uncanny, half reverted to its animal past, the rug yearned to the moon" - and carefully upends some furniture. She goes back to bed. Her mother (her 3rd-person PoV) wakes and goes to the room. She thinks at first there were burglars. Then she thinks her husband (who's doing a degree while working as a teacher) had got angry, or had wanted to leave a message. In the final half-page section (3rd-person distant) at breakfast the child tries to stay in her room, wanting to read her book again from the beginning. The mother takes the book away. The parents kiss as usual before he leaves for work.
The author says that she'd had that dream, and at another time she'd secretly upended furniture while her parents were entertaining in the kitchen, her mother thinking for years that a particular guest had done it. She writes "Editing is normally about rhythm and length and so on. But it's not about putting in nuance; the nuance has to be there from the beginning, in the matter, in the core of the story". That said, she writes slowly, sequencially, her first completed draft close to the final version. The story's conclusions? Misunderstandings may lead to insights. Each day is a new beginning.
When I read the start of the final section - "A young wife fried bacon for her husband: the smell of it filled the flat" - I thought the wife would be the girl, grown up, and that there'd be some moral about controlled rebellion. - Ancient Ties of Karma (Ben Okri) - Less than 2 pages. A fable about 2 men (one young and cocky) duelling through time and various states of reality.
Okri reveals little use to me during the interview. - All Will be Well (Yiyun Li) - California. The narrator likes going to Lily's hair salon. She's the only English speaker there. We gradually learn the narrator's story - born in Beijing (though she tells Lily she comes from Amsterdam), an English lecturer who wants to be a writer, whose older son died in his teens. She's supposed to give the childcare school a comforting little note that they can read to her 2 little girls if, for example, she dies in an earthquake.
Her students complain that the books she tells them to study aren't about Real Life.
After multiple visits to Lily she pieces her story together. She was ethnic Chinese, born in Vietnam. Her parents fled. But she and Tuan, a Vietnamese boy, were in love. He pined for her. When recently they got in contact by phone he wept. He had a photo of her by his bed. His wife talked to her, saying the Lily was part of the family, that their 3 daughter were partly named after her. Lily asks if the narrator could make a movie of her love story.
At the end a former student mails her, asking why she'd been sad when telling the class that you have to be great to be good. The narrator's ashamed of herself for not even being able to "write a lying note to console my children".
Interacting lies, life, and fiction. The author had a similar hairdresser and her son died young. She thought that Lily's story serves as an education for the evasive narrator because it has an arc. - Bulk (Eley Williams) - The narrator, who works in a Natural History museum, joins a small group of people by a beached, dead whale. They mostly don't know each other. They each have stories and opinions - ways to face the unknown. One woman carries an urn. There are many quotable lines which sound like key phrases, not least the final "the morning's just-visible moon pulled the sea an inch inwards as if for a waltz". There are many contrasts between Nature (beautiful despite it all), Humans, and Artefacts; life and death. The narrator feels he should take control of the situation.
The author wrote that her narrators often have a crisis of faith or communication, and they they don't actively interact with others. Here she wanted the situation to force interaction. - To All Their Dues (Wendy Erskine) - 3 sections entitled "Mo", "Kyle" and "Grace". Mo has opened a beauty parlour - she used to work on phones where people wanted their Fortunes told. Her window's smashed. She's asked for protection money by Kyle. By the end she's decided to pay. Then we see Kyle by his brother's graveside (which has been defaced again), at a hypnotist/therapist for the first time (a humourous mismatch), then with Grace at a new restaurant. His style of speaking is great fun. In the final section we learn of Grace's religious childhood and how an early encounter with a rough girl (and her porn showing women) made her lose religion. She's unable to have children. She loves Kyle and decides she should be more high maintainance. She regularly goes to the new beauty parlour. She asks about the broken window.
The author says she writes first drafts maybe 4 times longer than the final version so that even minor characters might have had a complex backstory. She tried (unconvincingly, I think) to explain why Kyle and Grace are together. Ambitions and compromises.
I found the book useful - like a DIY workshop. Though I've read some of these stories before, this book made me read them more carefully - "Bulk" in particular.
