The Fiction Itch
Reading for fiction writers
by Tony Eprile

A fiction writer and frequent insomniac, I read both a large number and a range of literary works, with forays into mystery and spy novels. So, I read for all kinds of reasons: pleasure, distraction from the tasks and activities of the day, an induction back into the world of words, and sometimes for a reminder of the techniques of craft. Regarding the latter, there is a small group of books and/or writers that I return to continually, whether for my own brush-up skills or as a teacher, trying to keep the whole body strong by working on a particular muscle set.

For the connection between a writer as a whole person and how that manifests in her writing, I go back to Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, which I use as a template to look closely again at her stories. The memoir is divided into three parts—“Listening,” “Learning to See,” and “Finding A Voice”—and that very structure is a reminder of the most important facets of our process as writers…a process we recapitulate every time we write. The memoir begins with the young Welty listening to the striking of clocks: the mission-style oak grandfather clock being answered by a smaller clock in her parents’ bedroom, followed by the sound of a cuckoo clock (with weights on long chains from which her baby brother once tried to suspend the cat) in the dining room. Welty remarks how good it was “for a future fiction writer, being able to learn so penetratingly, and almost first of all, about chronology.” (p.3) From the start and through Welty’s carefully chosen words, we are drawn into the way that writers apprehend the world, while being reminded that writing is first of all about time—how characters occupy and move through it, how the reader perceives it.

With the memoir as lens on Welty’s Collected Stories, particularly the lesser known tales, I’m more attuned to how listening and time relate in her stories, how Welty herself slows down time to focus our attention. In “A Visit of Charity,” a young Campfire Girl hopes to earn points by visiting an old-age home but instead finds herself caught in a place of surreal horror, gaining awareness of the fleeting nature of youth and the slow, savage, undifferentiated days of old age. “There was loose, bulging linoleum on the floor. Marian felt as if she were walking on the waves, but the nurse paid no attention to it. There was a smell in the hall like the interior of a clock. Everything was silent until, behind one of the doors, an old lady of some kind cleared her throat like a sheep bleating.” (p.113)

Childhood perceptions are what turn most of us into writers, but how to recapture the feel and ways of seeing of that time? David Mitchell does it through control of voice, a different regional voice from that of Welty, as his Black Swan Green is set in Worcestershire, England, in the early 1980s. His 13-year-old narrator, Jason, voices his discontent in a mix of poetic aperçus and slang that is partly of his day and location (“How ace was that?” p.15) and partly his own creation (he refers to his stammer as “Hangman.”) Language is how we make the world, Mitchell reminds us, with lines like: “My billion problems kept bobbing up like corpses in a flooded city. Mum and Dad at lunch. Hangman colonizing the alphabet. At this rate I’m going to have to learn sign language.” P.15

William Trevor is another whose craft appears to be effortless but easily rendered visible. Like an artist drawing negative space to create a portrait, he supplies the background that illuminates his characters’ personalities. In “Child’s Play” (After Rain), we learn how two children absorb and re-create their parents’ infidelity through their wanderings in the boy’s house when his mother is out (“Among other items of interest they found letters, some written by Gerard’s mother to Rebecca’s father, some by him to her ...” p.59), and through their mocking reports about “their weekend visits to the two who had been wronged.” In Trevor’s hands, a quiet street scene is enough to give us a sense of impending violence and conflict, though the description might appear bucolic on the surface. He also is a master of the dropped-in phrase to capture atmosphere and personality in the midst of description. In the story, “The Piano Tuner’s Wives,” we’re quickly introduced to the tensions that surround a widowed piano tuner marrying the woman who had long loved him.

“‘Well, she got the ruins of him anyway,’ a farmer remarked, speaking without vindictiveness, stating a fact as he saw it.” (p.1)

As a teacher in graduate MFA programs, I’ll sometimes find myself urging a student to read a story or novel that I admire but don’t love, since that particular work demonstrates an aspect of craft technique. These are the Guides. Then there are the Lovers, works read for the sheer pleasure of it all. And then there are those, like the works above, which are both.

Books referenced in this piece:

• Eudora Welty. One Writer’s Beginnings. 104 pp. Harvard University Press. 1998; and The Collected Stories. 648 pp. Harvest Books. 1982.
• David Mitchell. Black Swan Green. 294 pp. Random House, NY. 2006.
• William Trevor. After Rain. Viking, NY 1996.
  

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A two-time recipient of NEA Individual Fellowships, Tony Eprile is the author of The Persistence of Memory, a NY Times Notable Book of the Year and Koret Jewish Book Award winner. He currently teaches at Lesley University’s low-residency MFA, and has taught at the U. of Iowa Graduate Writers Workshop, Northwestern U., Williams College, Bennington College, and elsewhere. He is married to ASJA member Judith Schwartz.