Exercise #7: A Suddenness of Direct Address
Stephen Graham Jones, Sophie Mackintosh, Tracy O'Neill, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Aimee Bender, C.S. Lewis, Siân Griffiths, Denis Johnson, Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Hi all,
And just like that, it’s August—and also the six-month anniversary of starting this newsletter! Thanks so much for being a part of it. I really appreciate you letting me into your inbox once a month, and I’m so cheered by hearing from some of you about what you’ve written (and published!) starting from my exercises.
Here in Arizona, I’m ever more fully immersed in prepping for the semester ahead, where among other things I’ll be teaching a new course I scheduled two years ago, in what feels like an entirely different life, on Worldbuilding in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Despite all my sincere worries about return to campus this semester, I’m also glad to finally be teaching this class, where we’ll be reading some of my favorite novels and also building our own worlds as the semester progresses, designing them one writing exercise at a time. As anxious and nervous as a time this is, I’m truly looking forward to actually meeting them and beginning our work together. I know that part should still be great, because it almost always is.
A quick spoiler warning for this month’s exercise: one of the examples I use is from The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, which just came out. I don’t really think anything I say is a significant spoiler, but I do reveal more about the plot than what’s in the jacket copy, so if you want to go into that novel without any foreknowledge, maybe save this exercise for later. (Or cover your eyes and skip to the bold bit at the end where the instructions always are.)
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 it or sharing it on social media. If 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 Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender. A new Bender book is always a cause for anticipation and celebration, and The Butterfly Lampshade is fantastic so far. It’s an intently attentive novel, and Francie’s ability to dwell in both the everyday and the fantastical (and the fantastical elements of the everyday) is truly moving. (I’ll be in conversation with Bender for a virtual event at Third Place Books on Monday, August 3, if you’d like to join us to celebrate her book launch.)
Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh. I loved Mackintosh’s debut novel The Water Cure, and her follow-up Blue Ticket expands and extends many of the earlier book’s themes. Atwood comparisons feel inevitable when people write about Mackintosh’s work, but this book also made me think of Jesse Ball’s A Cure for Suicide, one of my favorite novels. I think they’d be great to read together, if you haven’t read one or the other yet.
Quotients by Tracy O’Neill. I was so impressed by O’Neill’s second novel, an ambitious systems novel about big data, terrorism, surveillance, adoption, and much else. Her dialogue is impeccable, I think, and it’s rare that a novel of ideas is as lyrically written as O’Neill’s is. There are a lot of pleasures here, and I think fans of DeLillo or Kushner or Spiotta will especially enjoy it.
“Slingshot” by Souvankham Thammavongsa, from her collection How to Pronounce Knife. (Available online at Harper’s.) I’m very slowly reading my way through Thammavongsa’s debut collection, and this story is absolutely my favorite so far. Honestly one of the best realist stories I’ve read this year.
Exercise #7: A Suddenness of Direct Address
Although I’ve long read in many genres and from many traditions, in the creative writing classes I took I was mostly educated in literary fiction, with much of the “rules” I was taught drawn from what I now recognize as minimalism and dirty realism: something like Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” might be a type specimen of what I read in most of my classes. (I was certainly taught it at least a half-dozen times in undergrad.) So I learned show don’t tell and no adverbs ever and so on, sometimes without any further explanation of why. Elsewhere I learned the concept of free indirect style, whose explanation finally allowed me to understand how to make close third person feel as alive to me as first person did, by using character-specific diction and syntax to merge the consciousness of the protagonist with the narration, more directly depicting psychology on the page.
I can write with all of these tools, and I love so many writers whose work is absolutely characterized by them, but more and more lately I’ve been thinking about other modes of narration available to me. As much as I admire the minimalist realism I was “raised” on, in the third person it rarely allows for the presence of a storyteller, a very particular kind of omniscient narrator often able to roam from perspective to perspective, and also able to directly address the reader to comment on some part of the story, without it becoming metafiction: this is a narrator who can also be a companion, a friendly presence for the journey ahead.
I’m not a good enough literary historian to know for sure, but I usually imagine this storyteller-narrator receding most in modes descended from the modernists and their attempts to depict consciousness more directly than previous writers had. But as savvy contemporary writers, we of course don’t have to make either/or choices about any of these things. One goal of this exercise is to look at some ways to have our cake and eat it too: an obviously present storyteller-narrator, to be added to all the tools of good free indirect style and/or close third person.
To begin, let’s consider a storyteller-narrator writing in a fairly conventional mode of fantasy storytelling, all while reserving the right to frequently directly address the reader. As part of a recent tour of books I’d loved as a kid, I’ve lately been listening to the audiobooks of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia on my morning bike rides, and today I reached a scene early in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where Peter, Susan, and Lucy Pevensie are hiding out in a cave with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver when they hear a noise outside—"the sound of jingling bells,” which they think might be the Witch’s sledge:
Mr. Beaver was out of the cave like a flash the moment he heard it. Perhaps you think, as Lucy thought for a moment, that this was a silly thing for him to do? But it was really a very sensible one. He knew he could scramble to the top of the bank among bushes and brambles without being seen; and he wanted above all things to see which way the Witch’s sledge went.
Perhaps you think, as Lucy thought for a moment, that this was a silly thing for him to do? In this moment, the narrator turns toward the reader and not only addresses them but also expresses a wonder about their mental state: What are you thinking, dear reader, in this moment, as Mr. Beaver leaves the cave? According to the traditions of writing I was first taught, this ask might “disrupt the dream” or might interfere with the suspension of belief necessary to stay inside a world of talking beavers—but in Lewis I think it does something else entirely. Here, it becomes an act of kindness and inclusion: What are you thinking in this moment? How are you responding to the events of the story? What are you feeling, wondering, worrying about?
The narrator, an adult presumably speaking to a child—Lewis clearly subtitled the novel as “A Story for Children”—is interrupting the story to ask the reader for their own thoughts and feelings. How important this ask might be, in a book for children, who might be rarely asked such things! Rather than pushing the reader out of the story, this direct address can become an invitation in: this is a story that, in this way at least, takes the reader’s feelings and thoughts and other responses seriously.
Even now, thirty-plus years since I first read Lewis, I immediately liked him more in this moment: I wasn’t only being shown or told, I was being asked—to act within the story, to be with Lucy, to share her reactions or to have a different reaction all my own.
In additional to addressing the reader directly, other modes of interacting with the reader and with a book’s characters become available to the storyteller-narrator. For example, one of my absolute favorite novels of 2020, The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, begins as such:
The headline for Richard Boss Ribs would be INDIAN MAN KILLED IN DISPUTE OUTSIDE BAR.
That’s one way to say it.
Ricky had hired on with a drilling crew over in North Dakota. Because he was the only Indian, he was Chief. Because he was new and probably temporary, he was always the one getting sent down to guide the chain. Each time he came back with all his fingers he would flash thumbs-up all around the platform to show how he was lucky, how none of this was ever going to touch him.
Ricky Boss Ribs.
This is such a small sample of the novel’s prose, but perhaps you can already hear Jones’ storyteller voice as it appears here, especially in that second short paragraph, which contains a sarcastic knowingness, as well as invitation to add your own skepticism: the narrator knows the headline of Ricky Boss Ribs’ death isn’t wholly correct, and he wants you to know it too. Ask questions, such an insinuation demands. Don’t accept the official story so easily.
The Only Good Indians is propelled by a revenge plot, where a creature who becomes known as Elk Head Woman returns to life ten years after four men illegally hunted her herd, killing her and her child. For most of the book, Elk Head Woman appears in the third person, known more by her actions than by any appearance in scene. But as the novel enters its second half, Jones suddenly turns toward her and addresses her directly, in a rare second person passage:
The way you protect your calf is you slash out with your hooves. Your own mother did that for you, high in the mountains of your first winter. Her black hoof snapping forward against those snarling mouths was so fast, so pure, just there and back, leaving a perfect arc of red droplets behind it. But hooves aren’t always enough. You can bite and tear with your teeth if it comes to that. And you can run slower than you really can. If none of that works, if the bullets are too thick, your ears too filled with sound, your nose too thick with blood, and if they’ve already gotten to your calf, then there’s something else you can do.
You hide in the herd. You wait. And you never forget.
In the Lewis example, we see a storyteller-narrator turn toward the audience in direct address; in the Jones, we see a similarly agile narrator speak instead to a character, temporarily abandoning the third-person to converse with one of his own creations. (Talking about the second person always gets a little weird—it’s also possible to read the Jones chapter simply as the kind of second person that’s really a first person POV, what Siân Griffiths calls “The First Person Once Removed.” But I’ll ignore that complication for now.) One of the interesting effects of Jones’ choice here is that in the chapters that follow, when Elk Head Woman again appears in the third person, once again mostly an unfathomable supernatural creature, the “conversation” between the narrator and her remains with us: once we’ve been granted access to her interiority more directly, she’s infinitely more complex than she had been previously.
To me, it also felt, ever so slightly, like the narrator taking sides, an interesting choice in a book so much about responsibility and guilt, and whether redemption or forgiveness is even possible. I’m not sure that’s exactly right either, but I haven’t been able to shake the feeling since finishing the book. It’s something I’d like to explore further sometime.
So how can we put these different tactics to use? We might begin by trying determine when and where they might work, in our own fiction.
Therefore, your exercise this month is to first write a flash fiction or a scene for something longer entirely in the close third person POV, using all the tools you normally would in that perspective. I’d say you’ll need at least 500 words to really make the next part of the exercise work, but feel free to write as much as you like. The goal is to make as complete an action or scene as possible, in order to give the next move a strong foundation to push against. (You could also do the next step with something you’ve already drafted, as a radical revision tactic.)
Once you have this scene written, go back through the scene and find some place where you can powerfully break into direct address in either of the two ways discussed above:
You might address the reader, as in Lewis example, inviting them explicitly to wonder further about something that’s occurred or to wonder about something might have instead. You might also question their expected reaction in some way, pushing against what might be the expected reaction of a certain audience: Nafissa Thompson-Spires does this brilliantly in the title story of her collection Heads of the Colored People, for instance.
Or you might address the character, as in the Jones example, either giving them a new way to manifest on the page (in the “first person once removed” way, for example), or by conversing with them directly about the events that have occurred in the scene so far. What is the relationship between the storyteller-narrator and the character, and how can that be revealed or complicated by direct address?
The most tempting place to put this direct address will be at the end of the story or scene, but try to embed it somewhere else first. You might get more oomph out of these modes of direct address if the story returns to its usual mode afterward, as The Only Good Indians does.
That said, one of my favorite examples of turning toward the reader comes at the end of Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” whose drugged-out narrator concludes his tale from inside a vision or a dream, turning toward not just one reader but to a crowd of perhaps every potential listener, assaulting them with his final utterance, right where an epiphany might have been expected to go:
It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
Good luck! See you next month!
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Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House/William Morrow in Summer 2021. 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.