Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
All the Stories Aren’t Real
In the stories I write, there is almost always peril, someone is in trouble, or there is grief and struggle of other sorts.
There is a woman, plucky and usually older, full of alternating self-doubt and bravado. There are men in my stories, but usually not for long. They almost drown or are busy with something overseas, so their personalities are fleeting. Typically, they are beloved but scant, thinly drawn you might say, if you were a short story critic. The women carry my stories in their backpacks, they act tough when they know they’re not, climb sand dunes and rescue drowning dogs, put hexes on neighbors, and swim across lakes in the dark.
I could gather all the characters together around my dinner table and we’d talk like we’ve known each other since kindergarten. That’s how familiar they are. How ‘mine’ they are.
On a dare, I wrote one story from a male perspective. There are no women in the story save a motel clerk who is, as you might guess, plucky but not older. The man is not in peril, except for being Black in an all-white Upper Peninsula town, but he is regarded as an oddity rather than a threat and manages to befriend a much older man tending his war hero father’s grave. I think I did okay with the story, but it is very short, an indication of how uncomfortable the stretch was.
All this is by way of saying – the adage ‘write what you know‘ can make for a fairly small fenced-in yard.
I remember reading a very long book about a geisha written by a man. I just looked it up. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. Not only is a geisha’s very personal and complex story told by a man, but he’s also an American man. How does a person have that ability, even with research and study, to get inside a character so utterly foreign?
Is that a skill or a gift?
That’s one question. The other is: if it’s a skill, do I have time to learn this magic?
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Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
interesting question to ponder. I remember that book very well and he really did seem get inside the head of that female character.