Exercise #31: How to Not Stop Saying the Thing You Shouldn't Say
Chris Bachelder, Robert Boswell, Nicola Griffith, Adrienne Celt, Eugene Marten, Arkady Martine.
Hi friends,
With the school year finished and my Refuse to Be Done tour more or less over, it’s finally starting to feel like summer break around here. (Not that Arizona’s 100-degree days are leaving any doubt as to the season.) As I’m writing this, I’m about to head to Michigan for most of June, first to see friends and have a little writing retreat in Ann Arbor, before heading to my hometown to see my family. In Ann Arbor, one of the people I’ll be staying with is Aaron Burch, who I’ve been talking writing with almost as long as I’ve been doing it. Lately we’ve been enthusing again about Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special, one of our shared favorite novels, and so I thought I’d write my essay and exercise about that book this month, as a way of being excited to hang out with him this coming weekend.
Otherwise, things are pretty slow here, after a busy few months! I do have one more public event this month, a virtual lecture at the Miami Book Fair, if you’d like to join me. Registration comes with a copy of Refuse to Be Done, so if you don’t have a copy yet, this might be a fun way to grab one.
As always, I hope your writing is going well, and that you and yours are happy and healthy. Be safe, be kind, and have fun with your reading and writing!
Yours,
Matt
What I’m Reading:
Spear by Nicola Griffith. I absolutely adored this new Arthurian adventure, which is not just smart and moving, but also gorgeously written. Some of my favorite sentences of the year so far were in this book, and I can’t wait to read more of Griffith’s fiction. (I ordered her Hild even before I’d finished Spear.)
End of the World House by Adrienne Celt. I loved Adrienne Celt’s latest, a smart, funny time loop novel about friendship in a time of apocalypse (climate change, global war, and capitalism here, among others), with the time loops promising possibility even as the future always feels unfairly foreshortened. My favorite of her novels so far.
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. I bought A Memory Called Empire right when it came out, but only just now read it. I'm only sad I waited: it's a fantastically smart novel, perfectly poised at the intersection of Le Guin & Iain M. Banks, two of my favorites. I ordered the sequel the second I finished and immediately dove in. (It’s also excellent so far.) I have a feeling I’ll be reading whatever Martine writes next, as soon as I can.
Pure Life by Eugene Marten. I’m so glad there’s a new Eugene Marten book in the world, and that it’s this good. There are a number of my favorite writers who I think of as building directly on the foundation that DeLillo put down, and Marten is one of the best of that group of descendants. (I’m working on an interview with Marten now, which should be out by next month. I’ll link to it then.)
Exercise #31: How to Not Stop Saying the Thing You Shouldn't Say
As I mentioned above, one of the novels I’ve spent the most time with in the past decade is Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2016, and a book I’ve now read at least four times, including again this past week. Written in an anthropological omniscient voice, the novel follows twenty-two men who have gathered annually for the past sixteen years to reenact the 1985 Monday Night Football play where linebacker Lawrence Taylor sacked quarterback Joe Theismann, gruesomely shattering Theismann’s leg in front of a national audience and ending Theismann’s career.
It’s a great book! I taught The Throwback Special in my novel-writing class the fall it came out, and I have a student from that era who still offhandedly refers to it as “that football novel I was so mad we had to read and that I ended up loving.” It is about football—or at least one particular football play—but it’s also about masculinity, about aging and nostalgia, about marriage and parenthood, about all the many small indignities and absurdities of being a person in the middle of your life, with your middle-of-life job and family, your middle-of-life body and mind. It is also not a particularly plotty novel. You might be able to boil the plot down to these four main events:
Twenty-two men gather in a hotel to reenact the Throwback Special.
That evening, the men hold a lottery to determine who will portray each player. There is pizza and beer.
The next day, the men share a continental breakfast, then one of them gives the other haircuts.
Finally, the men reenact the Throwback Special.
So if the plot is this simple—and it really is—then what gives the book its energy?
Most of the novel is made up of conversations between the twenty-two men or some of the other people occupying the hotel. Many of the conversations begin in a confessional mode: One man describes his not-joy, not-happiness, maybe-vindication at his entitled young daughter’s falling off a set of monkey bars and breaking her arm; a pizza delivery guy briefly joins the group to tell the story of the dissolution of his marriage, which begins with a class action lawsuit against an online dating site and ends with endangered birds being unnecessarily further endangered, plus a light dose of post-marital breaking and entering. A character’s dilemma about whether or not to choose Lawrence Taylor if his name is called first in the lottery turns into a meditation on race that’s among my favorite writing on the subject in any recent novel; a hunt for an HDMI cable leads to a lost-and-found room filled with an inexplicable number of objects, including a baby crib and too many scarves and maybe a minor sexual awakening. More than most novels I’ve read, the scenes are intensely memorable: I can remember almost every scene in The Throwback Special, even though very few of them are entirely events.
In one of our recent text exchanges about our mutual admiration for The Throwback Special, Aaron Burch and I started listing all our favorite parts of the book, until Aaron finally said, “That’s how you write a perfect book without a plot: just have a brilliant amazing scene every 1-3 pages. Easy!” And Bachelder does make it look easy. But how does he do it?
Here’s part of the magic, as I see it.
In The Throwback Special, the engine of many of the most memorable scenes is a character saying something aloud that they probably know they shouldn’t say, that they wouldn’t say in their everyday lives, and that the other men in the scene do not usually want them to say either. But scene after scene, a character will for someone reason start to say the most embarrassing, shameful thing they have in them, and then they simply will not stop saying it.
In an essay on characterization called “How I Met My Wife,” Robert Boswell once wrote, “Put one character in your story who says precisely what most people know not to say.” What Bachelder has done, with The Throwback Special, is fill an entire novel with such characters.
Nate, for instance, seeks out Charles, a psychiatrist, to confess that he’s had an argument with his wife, in which Nate expressed a sexual curiosity his wife found upsetting. Sitting on a hotel bed surrounded by the other men, he explains: “What I said to my wife was that I was curious. That’s all I said. Sexually curious about them. And she acted like I had a big problem… Sexual curiosity is completely normal, right?”
One might, in this first moment, assume the worst of Nate, or at least worry that something more heinous is about to be revealed: who is the them in this confession? Charles, asking as if on our behalf, says, “It does depend to some extent on the object of your curiosity… About whom are you sexually curious, Nate?”
The women in the children’s books I was reading to our kids, Nate confesses to Charles, who specializes in eating disorders in teenage girls, not the anxieties of grown men. Before Charles can stop him, Nate goes on:
The illustrators made them, not sexy, I guess, but definitely feminine. I suppose technically speaking, these are not all human women I’m talking about. Some are squirrels or mice or rabbits, but they are female and they walk upright and they’re gentle, and in the drawings we see their housecoats and blouses and the definite suggestion of the female form. I wouldn’t say this about just any creature in the woods on a nature show. I’m not interested in animals.
It’s a funny confession, a probably harmless bit of fantasy, and it would be easy for Charles (and us) to let it go if Nate immediately made a joke of it and stopped talking. But instead—because this is good fiction writing—Bachelder ensures Nate can’t stop himself from getting it all out, deadly serious, digging deeper as he unspools his obsession:
I read the books to our kids, and occasionally I am curious about the women. Or the female animals. I didn’t say attracted to them. I didn’t say turned on. I said curious. The drawings are not indecent, and I would say my thoughts are not all that indecent, either. We have this old book that belonged to my wife when she was a kid. It’s my favorite. It’s about an elephant. There’s this scene in the book when the elephant is performing at a circus, and there is a crowd of delighted people in the bleachers behind the ring. And if you look really closely, Charles, you can see these women sitting in the bleachers. They’re wearing tight knee-length skirts, and they have nice figures, and they look happy. Almost ecstatic, Charles. The picture isn’t vulgar, but... it stimulates the imagination. I’ve read the book a thousand times. I notice the women behind the elephant, right? Big deal. I think about their sexual histories. I wonder what they like to do in bed, either alone or with others… And yes, these women are depicted at an elephant show, but we know that’s not all there is to them. We know they have a private life that is off the page, away from the circus. So that makes me a pervert? Their sexuality seems to me to be, I don’t know, part of them.
“It’s not like it’s something I would ever act on,” Nate concludes, and Charles, serving both as Nate’s pseudo-psychiatrist and our audience stand-in, thinks what we might all think: “He had no idea what that would entail.”
Charles tries to reassure Nate—“I’ve seen this before… You are processing this experience as sexual, but it is not”—but Bachelder doesn’t let Nate take this offramp either: “Yes, it is,” Nate insists, even as Charles says, “Your curiosity is not fundamentally erotic. There’s nothing wrong with you, except the normal stuff.”
“But I look at their breasts,” Nate says.
“Your mind,” Charles says, “strives to put these images and feelings in a familiar context.”
At this point, Bachelder concludes the scene as he does many other scenes in The Throwback Special, by refusing to reward a character’s confession with either catharsis or relief: “Nate suddenly seemed despondent,” he writes. “He would rather… have been diagnosed as an untreatable pervert than as someone who was just lonesome.”
How does this all function as “plot”? Part of the reason The Throwback Special builds momentum as it goes is because even though Bachelder’s scenes come to tidy resolutions, his characters’ desired emotional responses rarely manifest. The emotions that prompt the men to talk remain unresolved, even as individual conversations reach their end. There is a sense that the men are missing their chances, or else that they are incapable of actually helping each other. Whatever each of these men are searching for in this ritualistic annual gathering, it remains elusive, up to and beyond the end of the novel, their communal contentment appearing only once and only briefly, during the eating of the continental breakfast, a moment which only the narrator sees as significant:
Unbeknownst to the men, this was what they came here for, every year. They were enjoying their morning, but they did not realize it. The good moments, it is true, were always this way, interstitial and unacknowledged. They craved occasion, but did not understand it.
In an interview at The Brooklyn Rail, Bachelder said that in recent years he’d discovered that he prefers to write in “a vertical mode—a kind of deep burrowing into consciousness and scene,” as opposed to hurrying onward to the next thing. In another interview, he elaborated on a similar idea:
I think there are writers who attempt to propel and writers who attempt to arrest, and I think there are readers who prefer to be propelled and readers who prefer to be arrested. Obviously, I would prefer to arrest and be arrested, perhaps in part because in everyday life I feel so inattentive and scattered. Fiction can focus my attention, slow me down, make me more mindful and aware.
In the scene summarized above and in others, Bachelder shows his talent for exactly this kind of arresting, drilling down into a character’s psyche and then keeping drilling until he finds the truer idea under the first thought, the joke beyond the premise, the sadness under the discontent. Notably, this is more often done in dialogue than in thought. Often the listeners express a wish that the confessor would stop talking; the confessor never does, until he reaches some kind of exhaustion or turn or jump to another level. As in a good joke, you sense in many of these conversations a build toward a punchline; but the punchlines in Bachelder’s scenes are rarely only humor. There are plenty of jokes—he’s a fine comic writer—but his jokes are almost always doing double work: not humor then sadness or tenderness, but humor and sadness or tenderness.
Okay. Time to put all this into practice.
Your exercise this month is to write a single scene (or a complete flash fiction) in which a character says something they shouldn’t say, or reveals something they shouldn’t reveal, or tells a story that the other characters in the room would prefer they didn’t tell. Perhaps it’s a secret that shouldn’t be shared. Perhaps it’s an observation that, while true, is in some way unkind or impolite to people in the room. Perhaps it is something that everyone in the scene has known for years but no one has ever said aloud, after which it will be impossible to go back to pretending whatever the people in the scene were pretending about themselves.
Once your character starts saying this thing they shouldn’t say? Keep them saying it, for as long as you can, while the rest of the scene unfolds around their saying-and-not-stopping-saying.
The kind of story you’re looking for your character to tell is the kind of thing that often gets tagged in a first draft as a hesitancy: I almost said, we begin; I thought about saying, we have a character think. Instead of holding back, make the character say the things you might not in real life. These kind of speeches make scenes go by making a scene, in almost exactly the way I was taught not to as a child: everyone is looking at you, a parent might say, as you act out. Fair enough. But a character acting out is good for fiction, so set them loose: we want the reader’s attention, and this is one way to get it.
I’ll note that there are lots of ways to write this kind of scene, but Bachelder’s The Throwback Special often reaches interesting places by making the thing that should not be said be about the person who’s saying it. In other words, characters confess, rather than accuse; they risk their own ridiculousness, instead of ridiculing others. It’s easy to blow up someone else’s reputation or esteem or comfort; it’s something else to risk your own.
As you do this, some other guidelines:
Remember Bachelder’s distinction between propelling and arresting, and then lean toward the latter. In other words, don’t rush out of your character’s confession or speech, but stay with it, extending it, finding the deeper levels it contains. Don’t let the speaker go internal; keep the words coming out of their mouth, where others can hear them.
Other characters in the scene will likely offer the speaker off-ramps from the conversation, places the speaker could stop in relief; they may try to stop the character with speech or action of their own. For as long as you can, have the speaker refuse to take the easy way out; most of the time, have them double down instead, escalating rather than retreating.
Consider using the omniscient voice, so that you can also inhabit the listeners’ POV. Try to reserve interiority for the listeners, rather than the speaker; that will create interesting contrasts, and it will give the speaker nowhere to go but more speech, more dialogue, more saying what should not be said.
What you’re trying to reach here is the moment where the story becomes something other than what it started out as: an absurd story goes straight, a funny story goes sad, a romance becomes a tragedy. The punchline that is a joke that tells a truth. We’re looking for the story behind the story: the real reason the story is being told, which so often isn’t the reason the speaker started telling it.
Good luck! See you next month!
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Matt Bell’s novel Appleseed was published by HarperCollins in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, is out now 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, Esquire, 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.
Hi Matt, Great post, as always. I've just started Pure Life and am really enjoying it. Who else would you include in the group of DeLillo descendants?