My beginnings. Let me show you them.
May. 6th, 2008 02:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceI don't talk much about process here, let alone structure, because I don't have the analytical approach to my own work, any more than I do to other people's. It's why I can tutor but I can't teach: I have a realm of practice and experience, and no theory at all.
However, even to someone as unstructured as I am in my approach, some things are obvious. My stories - many of my stories, most of my stories - tend to start the same way, with an abstract or dogmatic assertion ("The dead don't go away") followed by a paragraph of discursion ("They inhabit other people's lives, fragments of our own"). And then there's a line-break and we start again, introduce main character, setting, so forth. It's almost operatic: we have to have an overture, before the curtain goes up.
This is something new, that I'm poking at gently; and it's such an extravagant variation on that theme, I thought I'd drop it in here. With [self-mockery in square brackets].
---
TRUE NORTH, by Chaz Brenchley
[a beginning:]
There’s a point - a thorn, perhaps, a cardinal thorn? - missing from the compass rose. A fifth quarter, another direction, somewhere worse to go. It stands at an angle to everywhere else; its scripts are undeciphered, its maps incomprehensible from here. You’d need to be there, standing in its different light and looking back. If you could bear to.
It doesn’t have a name; at least, we don’t have a name for it. How could we fit a label to something that we can’t describe, that we can’t even point to? We know it’s there, is all. I know it; so do you.
It’s that place in your head that you can’t quite bring yourself to look at, the step beyond, into the dark and on your own. It’s where the monsters come from when you’re a kid, that sidle under your bed and wait to grab you. Every child knows it’s only ever one false move away, one moment’s inattention: a blink or a breath at the wrong time, a word in the wrong ear. Adulthood is learning resolutely to look away, to give it no credence, pretend it isn’t there.
We’re good at that. As a race, as a species, we’re very good, but only once we’re adult. That’s why it tends to take the children.
[So far so good. Let's have another beginning:]
City is as city does, always. City is a spirit, sui generis, something more and far more than a tendency, a propensity to gather. We think we build our cities to suit ourselves, but you could say that entirely the other way around. City draws us in, to fill its empty spaces. We’re a city people now, evolved to suit.
[Uh-huh. What d'you reckon, one more before the curtain goes up? With a sudden shift of voice?]
If you want to be left alone, come to the city. Everyone knows that, bone-deep. Surround yourself with strangers, they’ll act like insulation, guard you from your friends.
I did it the wrong way round, came here for the company, but city did its thing regardless and here I am, alone.
You were the company I came for, and this flat is a hollow thing without you. So am I. And I have no right to protest it; of course you had to leave me. That is understood.
And what has happened here since you left, here and elsewhere, everywhere, to me: that may be vengeance or it may be an appeal, or it may be something I cannot measure in a language I do not speak, but for sure it is an act of bitter irony.
That too is understood.
[Okay, that'll do. Raise the curtain.]
When we met, you and I, it was in another world. Softer, kinder, though we couldn’t see it then. Dark and true and tender is the north, and we thought this was it, we were there.
---
I have friends, colleagues, frowning demi-gods who will tell me that this is all throat-clearing, and can go. I have no arguments to offer, except that sometimes every cough and shuffle, every hesitation and delay is still a part of the storytelling, and hence of the story, and can stay.
However, even to someone as unstructured as I am in my approach, some things are obvious. My stories - many of my stories, most of my stories - tend to start the same way, with an abstract or dogmatic assertion ("The dead don't go away") followed by a paragraph of discursion ("They inhabit other people's lives, fragments of our own"). And then there's a line-break and we start again, introduce main character, setting, so forth. It's almost operatic: we have to have an overture, before the curtain goes up.
This is something new, that I'm poking at gently; and it's such an extravagant variation on that theme, I thought I'd drop it in here. With [self-mockery in square brackets].
---
TRUE NORTH, by Chaz Brenchley
[a beginning:]
There’s a point - a thorn, perhaps, a cardinal thorn? - missing from the compass rose. A fifth quarter, another direction, somewhere worse to go. It stands at an angle to everywhere else; its scripts are undeciphered, its maps incomprehensible from here. You’d need to be there, standing in its different light and looking back. If you could bear to.
It doesn’t have a name; at least, we don’t have a name for it. How could we fit a label to something that we can’t describe, that we can’t even point to? We know it’s there, is all. I know it; so do you.
It’s that place in your head that you can’t quite bring yourself to look at, the step beyond, into the dark and on your own. It’s where the monsters come from when you’re a kid, that sidle under your bed and wait to grab you. Every child knows it’s only ever one false move away, one moment’s inattention: a blink or a breath at the wrong time, a word in the wrong ear. Adulthood is learning resolutely to look away, to give it no credence, pretend it isn’t there.
We’re good at that. As a race, as a species, we’re very good, but only once we’re adult. That’s why it tends to take the children.
[So far so good. Let's have another beginning:]
City is as city does, always. City is a spirit, sui generis, something more and far more than a tendency, a propensity to gather. We think we build our cities to suit ourselves, but you could say that entirely the other way around. City draws us in, to fill its empty spaces. We’re a city people now, evolved to suit.
[Uh-huh. What d'you reckon, one more before the curtain goes up? With a sudden shift of voice?]
If you want to be left alone, come to the city. Everyone knows that, bone-deep. Surround yourself with strangers, they’ll act like insulation, guard you from your friends.
I did it the wrong way round, came here for the company, but city did its thing regardless and here I am, alone.
You were the company I came for, and this flat is a hollow thing without you. So am I. And I have no right to protest it; of course you had to leave me. That is understood.
And what has happened here since you left, here and elsewhere, everywhere, to me: that may be vengeance or it may be an appeal, or it may be something I cannot measure in a language I do not speak, but for sure it is an act of bitter irony.
That too is understood.
[Okay, that'll do. Raise the curtain.]
When we met, you and I, it was in another world. Softer, kinder, though we couldn’t see it then. Dark and true and tender is the north, and we thought this was it, we were there.
---
I have friends, colleagues, frowning demi-gods who will tell me that this is all throat-clearing, and can go. I have no arguments to offer, except that sometimes every cough and shuffle, every hesitation and delay is still a part of the storytelling, and hence of the story, and can stay.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 02:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 06:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 03:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 06:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 03:57 pm (UTC)Well, all right, so it's not for every taste, any more than Wagner is, or Berg, or Bach.
9 paragraphs, pretty short some of them, and setting scene in a way that more concrete descriptions would do in a greater length, and much more tediously.
I mean, we have environment (and scene, which are siblings but not identical twins), and some characters, and a Situation, and a loss foretold, and the hook is really set, at least for some of us.
But then, I like opera.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 06:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 04:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 06:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-20 07:59 pm (UTC)There is a rhythm here that catches me, and I find myself coming back to read it again, slower, just to savor the sound. Lovely stuff, this, and I hope one day to see more.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-20 09:16 pm (UTC)