Horizons: Indoor and Outdoor Stories

For the first two thirds of my life I lived by the sea. I grew up with horizons, and now as I’m preparing for a new workshop and course I’m about to run over the next few months, it’s got me thinking about the impact of place on the imagination, my own, a character’s, and in general the place of place in fiction and non-fiction. I like an horizon, and for a large part of those years in which I lived by the sea, I could see the horizon from my window.

For the past seven years I have lived in a flat in London that looks out onto a sort of horizon. And by horizon I mean a lot of sky and the ability to see into the distance, to the point where it feels like the sky meets the earth. I remember a friend who was into astrology said something once about horizons and Sagittarians. I like being a Sagittarian. It sometimes feels like a stroke of luck, like being born with some talent! I like that Lucian Freud is a Sagittarian, and that the three painters I’ve been writing about (more or less since I moved into this flat with an horizon), are also Sagittarians. My friend said that we are people focused on horizons, that we reach for one, get it, and then look for the next one. Like we always need an horizon in sight, always need to strive, reach, or almost reach, because you can never really reach the horizon, and then we aim for the next one. Maybe that’s why I prefer to write short stories, or maybe not prefer, but do. Maybe that’s why I do write short stories, those creations of manageable horizons (or do I mean boundaries). My characters never want grand things. As Kurt Vonnegut says: every character has to want something, even if it’s just a glass of water. Although maybe my characters pursue love as if it was water. And they were in the desert.

I spent quite a bit of time in the desert in the 1980s. Not a huge amount of time; probably about six months, day after day of rust-red horizons, burning sand, an horizon that if you stood still long enough would blow towards you and bury you.

Thinking about place, I think about outdoor stories and indoor stories. A quick run through of some of my stories in my head and I realise that even when the stories don’t happen at home, they happen inside a room, a lover’s room, a café, a bar, a kitchen. Some happen in parks. A couple on the beach. And suddenly that bit of advice I once got from the poet Ann Stephenson about my work: too much sex, she said, and not enough geography. And sex is, on the whole, an indoor story. But I know that what she meant by “geography” was really a sense of place rather than the great outdoors. I have always loved writing description, but I think she shocked me into loving it even more.

The question is, how often do stories happen outside enclosed spaces. Outside the confines of a room, a car, a cabin on a cruise liner, a hut in the woods? Even of the story is outside, isn’t it more often than not happening between four walls? I’m excited about exploring this questions, looking for stories that are completely in the outdoors, in a forest, on a raft, in places where there is nowhere to retreat to, at least not for the duration of the telling.

Leaving the Ordinary Behind

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Tim Winton’s brilliant novel Breath and I was thinking how this scene is so much about writing, about taking on the big scary story, about writing alone in your room and loving it because you have gone somewhere you never thought you could or would, discovered things about yourself or your characters. Pikelet and Loonie and Sando have just been surfing the big waves at Barney’s.

from Tim Winton’s Breath

Heading home from the first day at Barney’s, bone-sore and lit up, we relived the morning wave by wave, shoring it up against our own disbelief. By common assent, Loonie had caught the wave of the day. It was a smoker. I was paddling back out through the channel when he got to his feet. The wave reared up, pitched itself forward and simply swallowed him. I heard him scream for joy or terror and could only see him intermittently as he navigated a path beneath the warping fold of water. He was a blur in there, ghostly. When finally he shot out and passed me, he looked back at the weird, dilating eye of the wave and gave it the finger.

Geez, I wish we had a camera, he said afterwards, as we chugged back through the forest. It was too good. Shoulda got a photo.

Nah, said Sando. You don’t need any photo.

But just to show, to prove it, sorta thing.

You don’t have to prove it, said Sando. You were there.

Well, least you blokes saw it.

My oath, I said.

But it’s not even about us, said Sando. It’s about you. You and the sea, you and the planet.

Loonie groaned. Hippy-shit, mate.

Is that right? said Sando indulgently.

Orright for you. You got plenty of shots to prove what you done. Honolulu Bay, man. Fuckin A.

All that’s just horseshit, said Sando. It’s wallpaper.

Easy for you to say.

Sando was quiet for moment. You’ll learn, he said in the end.

Loonie beat his chest there in the confines of the Kombi cab.

Learn? Mate, I bloody know!

I laughed but Sando was unmoved.

Son, he said. Eventually there’s just you and it. You’re too busy stayin alive to give a damn about who’s watchin.

Mate, said Loonie, straining to maintain his bravado. I don’t know what language you’re talkin.

You’ll be out there, thinking: am I gunna die? Am I fit enough for this? Do I know what I’m doin? Am I solid? Or am I just… ordinary?

I stared, breathless, through the broken light of trees.

That’s what you deal with in the end, said Sando. When it’s gnarly.

How does it feel? I murmured.

How does what feel?

When it’s that serious.

You’ll find out.

Like, I mean, twenty feet, said Loonie subdued now.

Well, you’re glad there’s no stupid photo. When you make it, when you’re still alive and standin at the end, you get this tingly-electric rush. You feel alive, completely awake and in your body. Man, it’s like you’ve felt the hand of God. The rest of it’s just sport’n recreation, mate. Give me the hand of God any day.

Shoulder to shoulder in the cab, Loonie and I exchanged furtive looks. There was something of the classroom about Sando, the stink of chalk on him when he got going, but my mind was racing. I’d already begun to pose those questions to myself and feel the undertow of their logic. Was I serious? Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary? I’ll bet my life that despite his scorn Loonie was doing likewise. We didn’t know it yet, but we’d already imagined ourselves into a different life, another society, a state for which no raw boy has either words or experience to describe. Our minds had already gone out to meet it and we’d left the ordinary in our wake.

You Can’t Force It (Metaphors, Memories and Insights)

A story needs to go places. Even on the level of the sentence, a story needs to go places, and by places I mean unexpected places. Huge twists and turns, perhaps, but what I’m thinking about are little surprises along the way, like a turn of phrase, like a metaphor, a simile. Like: “Claudio… has been making passes at Clay like a Roman cafe waiter with a schoolgirl on a junior year abroad” or “Tall and thin, with skin the colour of an old penny and a face as angular and humourless as that of a Byzantine saint” or “the doors make a heavy prosperous sound when they slam, like a vault closing”.* Metaphors or similes that delight, that make us smile, that don’t eject us out of the story, but make us feel the writer has left this metaphor in the story to entertain us. As writers, we have to feel good about our metaphors, proud of them.

The other thing is flashbacks. Memories. More often than not it’s awful when a writer says something along the lines of “And suddenly he remembered that…” and you land up feeling that this memory has been put in there for some purpose, for some backstory purpose, and not because it emerged with integrity out of the telling. Flashbacks have to feel like something that could not be repressed, that they appeared at this very moment in the story because they had to, there was no other choice. “Suddenly…” is never a good way to start a sentence.

I’ve been thinking that in a short story, one flashback is often enough. More than one and it becomes a story with flashbacks, about flashbacks, about the past, and not what’s happening in the now of the story. Of course, some stories are about the past. Some stories are a flashback.

I like a story that has a moment of realization, a point in the story – often towards the end – where the character learns something, where a kind of epiphany happens. Stories like that are satisfying. Satisfying in the way that a pub at the end of a long walk is satisfying, or home. An insight is something to carry into the future. Flashbacks are about the past, and metaphors are about the now of the telling, the sentence that is unfolding before us on the page, like a carpet unravelling, like a wave receding to expose what is there on the sand.

Memories, insights and metaphors are the moments of a story’s virtuosity, the moments when a story does a little trick, a dance. We are surprised. We are amused. Sometimes they leave us breathless. One precise insight, one bubbling-up memory, one good metaphor and the story is lifted to a higher plane.

An exercise: Take a story you’ve already written. See if you have all three elements in it. Is there a memory that expands the range of the story? Does it take us to a different place? Somewhere geographically different, further away. Does it make the story bigger, help it cover more ground? And is there an insight at the end of the story, a realisation, a moment in which the character (and the writer, too) understands something? Then have a look if you can change that realisation, make it the opposite of what you thought it was going to be, and see how that changes the story.

And the metaphors and similes? How many of those do you have? Follow some of your sentences and see where you can add a metaphor at the end, a metaphor that will allow you to play a bit, that allows you to follow your imagination. Be literary. Be the kind of writer you admire. Entertain yourself. Metaphors take practice, the practice of letting go, of seeing where your imagination carries you. You can’t force a metaphor. Or a memory. Or an insight. You have to let go into the story to let them emerge. You have to, as a friend of mine says, be your own typist. Take dictation from your subconscious.

* all quotes are from the stories in Andrea Lee’s Interesting Women. And yes, out of context, a metaphor/simile can sound odd.