What I know about fiction: part 2 – science fiction, sleep and literary theory

Confusion

‘Confusion’ is what might happen if you think about literary theory in your sleep. I wasn’t actually asleep but drifting somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. It must have been in the morning, because I don’t drift off at night, just lie awake for ages and then it’s time to get up and I feel more knackered than when I went to bed. It must also have been a weekend, because I don’t get the time to drift awake during the week.

Anyway, somewhere in this liminal state, I was thinking about the distinction between metaphor and metonym – doesn’t everyone? Briefly, metaphor is a figure of speech that replaces one object with another object that is like the first object; metonym replaces one object with another object that is associated, or contiguous, with the first object. Contagious diseases, I decided are metonymic – they are passed by contact or contiguity. But what if they were metaphorical – diseases passed not between people who have been in contact with each other but who have something in common. It would have to be something shameful: it didn’t take long for my slowly wakening mind to think about ‘shy Tories’. What if everyone who voted Tory (shyly or otherwise) was susceptible to a disfiguring disease?

Once I’d woken up properly, I decided this was the ideal topic for a short story. I’d recently finished a collection of short stories by China Mieville, Three Moments of an Explosion. One story, ‘Keep’ provided a template.

In ‘Keep’, a soil scientist investigates a mysterious pandemic, the symptoms of which are a moat appearing around the body of any infected person who stays still for too long. Apart from featuring a female investigator, I don’t think my story has a lot in common with Mieville’s.

As a writer, I don’t strongly identify with, or prefer, any genre. Mieville belongs to the science fiction genre, and that seems a reasonable catchall for this story. When it was broadcast by Bandit Fiction as part of a podcast, it was described as ‘political body horror’, which is a new one (I think). Recent developments have given it a new twist, although I am duty bound as a sleepy literary theorist to point out that Covid 19 is a metonymic disease, like every other real one.

What I Know About Fiction: Part 1

The first in an occasional series of posts, in which I will briefly discuss one of my published stories, alongside a story from a more established author (which could be almost anyone) and what I think it tells us about fiction.

How Lucky You Are

This story is an example of how another writer, a pencil drawing, a creative writing cliché and working in an office can inspire a story.

I might add moving house to that list. When I moved a few years ago, packing my books reminded me of several that I hadn’t looked at for a while. One of those was Katherine Mansfield’s Selected Stories. This is a book I studied as an undergraduate, and although I enjoyed the stories, I had not read more than the few I needed to read for the course. The book ended up near the top of a box, and when I was looking for something to read while I waited for someone who was coming to do some work on the new house, it jumped into my hand.

I was very taken with the sparseness of Mansfield’s prose, which implies more than it states. In ‘Marriage à la mode’, for example, we read about a man visiting his estranged wife. They meet at a station and have a brief exchange:

‘He thought she looked so beautiful that he had to say something, “You look very cool.”

“Do I?” said Isabel. “I don’t feel very cool.”

‘Marriage a la Mode’ in Selected Stories, p.274

This, apparently meaningless, exchange is loaded with subtext. The real relationship between William and Isabel becomes apparent as the story progresses. Towards the end, the point-of-view moves from William to Isabel, and we learn of her real contempt for him.

There is an old creative writing adage, ‘show don’t tell’, which is something I’ve always struggled with. My prose can be very direct: I can try to show you something, but I default to beating the reader over the head with what I want to say. The few hours I spent with Mansfield showed (see?) me how to write dialogue that hints at what the characters really want to say, hiding the truth between the lines.

Round about the same time, I had a meeting in a pub (yes, I know) and found myself looking at some of the prints on the wall. One was a pencil drawing of a woodland scene – I haven’t been able to find the original, but this will give you the general idea. I noticed that the picture had four layers: the sky, the trees, a clearing and a group of figures at the front of the clearing. The trees and the figures in the foreground were drawn with solid lines; the sky and the clearing, on the other hand, were implied by the space in between the lines. This technique reminded me of Mansfield’s story, and I decided to try something similar.

‘How Lucky You Are’ was inspired by two colleagues. I observed their relationship from a nearby desk, and one of them told the team what she felt when the other wasn’t around. I only ever got one point-of-view, so I had to imagine the other. I realised that by switching between points of view and timeframes, I could achieve what Mansfield and the artist whose drawing I’d seen had done, leaving the reader to fill in the spaces between the words.