Exercise #10: Recursively Generated Wonder
Elwin Cotman, Daniel Heath Justice, Neil Gaiman, Jess Walter, Eula Biss, Brenda Peynado, Tim Horvath, Gary Lutz
Hi all,
It’s November 1 here in the U.S., and I know how fraught the next week is going to feel for many of us. As such, this month’s exercise is meant to be another way of encouraging you to take a moment to indulge in play and wonder, with the aim of creating a space for imagining otherwise (as Daniel Heath Justice says), and for fruitful and playful escape. (I don’t use escape as a pejorative term, thinking of it instead more like Neil Gaiman does, as a place of exploration and preparation: “Once you've escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn't have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.”) I hope you’ll have fun with the exercise, and that it might offer you another new way of drafting stories.
A quick note of general gratitude, as we enter election week: I’m sure many of you who read this newsletter have spent the fall volunteering for phone banks, text banks, canvassing efforts, and other get out the vote activities, among so much else: thank you all for the work you’ve done on behalf of all of us. Nothing has made me more immediately hopeful during an election than volunteering and participating alongside others, and I hope those of you who’ve done so recently have felt the same.
Finally, if you haven’t voted yet, be sure to do so on Tuesday!
As always, if you write something you like using the exercise below, feel free to tell me so. You’re also welcome to pass this prompt on to others, if you’d like, either by forwarding the email or sharing the link on social media. If you do, know that I appreciate it.
Be safe this week, be kind to each other, and good luck with the exercise!
Happy writing,
Matt
www.mattbell.com
What I’m Reading:
The Cold Millions by Jess Walter. I’m only about halfway into this so far, but new Jess Walter is always a cause for celebration. Set in the labor movement of early 20th-century Spokane, The Cold Millions is so far is absolutely engrossing, deeply timely, and full of wit. Walter is one of my favorite storytellers, a master of structure and voice, and I think this is going to be one of his best.
Having and Being Had by Eula Biss. Eula Biss is one of the nonfiction writers I most admire, and her newest finds her thinking through the ethics of living in capitalism while trying to be a parent and an artist. Her most personal book yet, its discussion of economics are most often rooted in her own particular life, but I found a lot of common ground here from which to think and feel through my own similar questions.
“The Touches” by Brenda Peynado. I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel about writing fabulism at the University of Houston this week, where I was put in conversation with Brenda Peynado, whose work I hadn’t read before. To get to know her in advance, I read some of her stories, starting with this 2019 story at Tor, which posits a post-pandemic future—one written before our current pandemic arrived. The story is really great, and I learned so much Peynado during our conversation. Her collection The Rock Eaters will be out in 2021, and I can’t wait to read it.
“The Tungsten Record” by Tim Horvath, published at Conjunctions. I love this new Tim Horvath story, about a moving relationship between two married researchers, unfolding amidst the search for intelligence life and the study of whale songs, set partly during our current pandemic. (Amazingly! Already!) A story that unfolds at the speed and scale of human emotions, while simultaneously reaching through time for the farthest stars and the deepest depths of the oceans.
Exercise #10: Recursively Generated Wonder
Recently, I’ve been thinking about how to translate writing tactics from one scale to another: In other words, can the structural tactics that work for shaping an entire story or novel be applied to the writing of sentences or paragraphs? Conversely, can I take what I know about writing sentences—all the syntactical, dictional preferences and techniques and tics I’ve acquired over the years—and use them to shape scenes or stories? Is it possible that there’s a greater sense of wholeness to be made by pursuing a tactic at multiple scales in one piece, shaping a story and its scenes and its sentences with the same techniques? Conversely, are there possibilities for tension and conflict that might be explored by purposely working at each scale with contradictory or seemingly incompatible methods?
Here’s an example: One of the ways I was taught to write sentences was by recursion, which at its simplest means to move forward by looking back, finding your next material in what’s already written. (I first learned about this tactic from Gary Lutz’s essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” which is still probably the best place to read about it.) When I’m writing this way, I stop often to study the last sentence I wrote, or the last paragraph or scene, asking myself what in that unit seems to be the most intriguing or exciting: What sounds or words or other elements seem unresolved or to still have energy, some source ready to be tapped in the next sentence? Once I find such an element, I take it and reuse it or remake it in a new sentence or a paragraph or scene. Then, when that second sentence/paragraph/scene is as good as it can be, I study it in the same way, looking for another element to carry forward or extend into a third.
One benefit of this method of composing is that if each new sentence is springing from some element of the one before it, then there's a good chance the entire passage will end up feeling whole and all of a piece: ideally, the passage ends up reading as if it somehow emerged entirely from the suggestive material of the passage's first sentence, despite any turns or twists or surprises the passage contains.
So how might we take this sentence-by-sentence tactic of recursion and apply it to the larger unit of an entire story? One method might be to aim for a story containing what I’m going to call recursively generated wonder.
As an example of the effect I’m describing, let me offer Elwin Cotman’s “The Son’s War,” published first at The Offing. (A couple caveats: “The Son’s War” is a longish tale—thirty pages long in Cotman’s collection Dance on Saturday—and even a summary of it would likely overwhelm this newsletter. Similarly, I’m not saying this story was actually drafted by the method I’m going to describe—but I do think it’s possible to imagine writing one like it by my method.) It’s one of the best new stories I’ve read recently, and it had my attention from the very beginning:
Dig, if you will, the picture… The king’s son lived to create. By an early age he had mastered botany, chemistry, all the realms of physics. Every moment he could steal from the duties of his father’s house, he built automatons: insects, sea creatures, animals that walked and crawled and flew. No sooner did an idea climb down his brainstem than it found realization in his hands. So as not to waste time debating materials, he created from whatever he had on hand, be it fungus or dirt, even his own dandruff. He built like he had mercury in his blood, like he would die if he stopped, and who knew? Perhaps he would have. Soon he’d filled his father’s house with inventions. Smells as green as spring and blue as winter rose to the forked-beamed rafters, all his creation. Nearly every sound and silence came from him. Foreign dignitaries visited the king’s house, ostensibly on diplomatic missions, in reality to witness the wonders they had heard of.
From the material of this fantastic opening, Cotman extends what he’s made, generating new wonders from old. In the next paragraph, the inventor son moves from his father’s house into a house of his own, bringing with him the king’s gift of “a diamond stone and a jade stone, both the size of a fully grown person;” from these, he carves “two women as beautiful as his eyes had seen”:
He gave them advanced AI brains and ruby hearts that sparkled through their translucent breasts, the better to refract light into their cadmium veins. He sewed boots and dresses for them. Sharp in feature, lean in build and bearing the color of their jewels, they lived to serve him. These courtiers he named Diamond and Jade.
As the son begins to train Diamond and Jade, other people flock to his house, where he solves their problems with new permutations of his inventions, as well as setting out to subdue local warlords with Diamond and Jade as his enforcers and courtiers. Eventually he establishes a domain of marvelous invention all around him, with “the great tinkerers and scientists of the age… coming to his house”:
With him, they made singing nightingales. Rain made of bark. Hills woven from human hair. Alongside alchemists and mathematicians, he rewrote the mysteries of the universe as formulae. He worked with doctors to heal diseases. He built telescopes for astronomers to view distant galaxies as easily as they could their own fingerprints… The son of the king never stayed at court for long, wishing to spend his days inventing new flowers and insects to couple with them. He rode through dream-meadows of white-stemmed and white-petalled roses, of genetically engineered purple hibiscus. People thronged the avenues to sing him songs of greeting. He held audience and listened to their problems. He bred crab-elephants for transportation and neo-trees for lumber. For entertainment he devised festivals. His people loved him.
As “The Son’s War” progresses, the inventions and ideas and circumstances from the story’s earliest pages recur, often in new scenarios—the neo-trees from the end of the previous paragraph, for instance, are later given as tribute to the “monkey kings”—and the story becomes a swaying tower of wonder, Cotman stacking so many surprising elements on top of each other, with very little waste. Without spoiling too much, I can say that the story’s plot leads ever onward toward a climactic fantastical battle, where many of the animals and vehicles and weapons used for warfare are drawn from or built upon the more benign wonders of the earlier pages. Here the extrapolation of the story’s earliest inventions into its later splendors and horrors creates a sense of progress and of the passing of time: “The Son’s War” is jam-packed with fabulist inventions and circumstances that have never existed in our world, but even the most unexpected often seem plausible in the context of the story, given how they’ve emerged from the story’s first elements and premises.
Again, I can’t say that Cotman was explicitly working in any recursive method—probably he wasn’t, in fact—but reading “The Son’s War” (which you absolutely should) might serve as an example for how writing such a story might end up. Before beginning this week’s exercise, you might trace the progress of different elements of Cotman’s through his story: What recurs from paragraph to paragraph or scene to scene? How do the recurring elements change or morph or produce new elements? How does an element become exhausted, and what replaces it when it does?
This month, your exercise is to write a story beginning from a first sentence containing a single wondrous element, as wondrous an object or creature or event as you can imagine. Then, to write your second sentence, reexamine the first, searching for a still-resonant aspect of that initial wonder that can be brought forward to generate another. Keep doing this until you’ve written at least a flash-length piece of fiction, perhaps 750 words or so, in which every consecutive sentence contains its own wonder born from the material of the sentence before it.
There will necessarily need to be other aspects to these sentences than just the wonders, because the plot probably isn’t in the wonders themselves, but in how you arrange them in either harmony or conflict. You may also find that your progression of sentences feels a little too similar in some way. If that happens, try either rewriting or revising using a similar technique, but this time try to also add in what Gary Lutz, in his essay "The Poetry of the Paragraph," calls the swerve: "One way to get a paragraph going boldly," Lutz writes, "is to set a single sentence in motion and then let each of the coming sentences challenge or overturn or reformulate the one before it, in a procedure that is not one of addition or accretion but instead a revisionary process; each new sentence breaks away from, or reconstitutes, its predecessor."
To apply the swerve to recursively generated wonders, try the exercise again, but this time create new wonders that “challenge or overturn or reformulate” the ones before them. This will put each new wonder in conflict or contrast with its predecessor, perhaps leading to a different and more energetic kind of wholeness than recursion alone can provide.
Finally, if you find either of the above approaches restrictive or stiff or unsatisfying, you might just need to work at a different unit of sense. Try again, this time creating your recursions and swerves not between sentences, but between paragraphs and scenes. You might find this gives you more breathing room, leading to a more natural-feeling style (and almost certainly a longer story).
Good luck! See you next month!
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Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House/William Morrow in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.