Writing In Between the Real and Unreal

So much of writing prose—fiction or nonfiction, real or unreal—for me, is about locating something ineffable and circling around it. All of writing deals in subjectivities and mysteries, and I think the most interesting material comes from locating mystery in our own lives. So, I begin each project, consciously or not, by identifying mystery in my life or in the world. When I was a journalist, this meant looking sideways at something I didn't completely understand, making a bunch of phone calls, and figuring out the explanation behind the phenomenon. When writing psychologically or socially realist fiction, this often means considering something about my own or another person's emotional landscape that puzzles me, and writing into that.

This kind of thinking, as I say, is universal to all writing, but I think it's especially useful when you're writing speculative or unreal fiction, or when your characters engage in magical thinking that is so intense as to cast their worlds in unreal lights.

I'm going to share a few specific prompts for you to play with what I think can help us access mystery, but first I want to offer a poem that exemplifies how mystery can appear in rich writing. That poem is “Alone” by Jack Gilbert. Read it twice.

After each reading, jot down a few notes in your notebook or in the margins of the poem. Bullets are fine; messy thoughts are fine! Some things may fall in multiple categories. This need not be exhaustive.

1. Write down what feels 'real' in the poem.

2. Write down what feels mysterious in the poem.

3. Write down what is definitely unreal (i.e. departs from our reality) in the poem.

Here's what I notice:

1. Real: Michiko is dead. There's a dalmatian. Man walking dalmatian, and all things around the walk (leash etc). Good morning. Soft ears. Grass. Speaker talks to dog.

2. Mysterious: A lady in a long white dress (odd? why?). Why the dalmatian likes the speaker and not other people. "She cares nothing about the mystery." Does the dog connect with the speaker or is it in the speaker's imagination?

3. Unreal: Coming back as a lady in a long white dress (rebirth is, in my worldview, unreal, though it feels distinctly real to the speaker). The dog understanding the speaker (magical thinking to the speaker).

Those are just my thoughts, written the way I speak to myself. If those three categories don't quite work for you, try on others, but the point here is to divide the concrete from the abstract in order to better discern how mystery manifests.

Now, one more exercise:

4. Consider which single phrases or lines pop out to you. Do these phrases fall under #1 (real), #2 (mysterious), or #3 (unreal)? Noticing where your attention goes will give you a sense of your own inclinations. Are you personally drawn to the physical and the material, or do you find those bits of the poem mundane? Do you admire the moments of mystery or find them obfuscating? Do you thrill at the moment the poems 'break' reality, or do you think they'd be better without them?

With that mode of reading in mind, here are a few prompts that I would recommend using to freewrite. Try doing these by hand. This style of prompt is inspired by the writing prompts of cartoonist and writer Lynda Barry and the novelist Dan Chaon, whose work I cannot recommend highly enough.

1. Image: What's an image from childhood that's clear in parts of your memory but blurry at its edges? (For example, I remember the living room in my childhood bedroom having a view of a tree, but I don't know what was right or left of that tree.)

• For three minutes, describe everything you can recall about that image. Draw it if you need to.

• For three minutes, write down what might have been visible just out of the frame. Think plausibly here. (For me, Tommy from next door might have been skateboarding down the street and stopping near the tree.)

• For five minutes, return to your childhood brain and imagine that child imagining what might be just outside the frame. (When I was five I believed there was a ghost in the tree because my brother told me the neighborhood was haunted.) Try to inhabit the emotional space of how you imagined and played as a child.

2. Memory: What's a story from childhood that you only partially remember? ( I remember my father taking me to the zoo one afternoon, but I don't remember how old I was or what we saw.)

• For four minutes, write down everything you do remember.

• For ten minutes, imagine what else might have happened that day, straying into fictional territory but remaining in plausible terrain. (For example, we might have brought my brother along, because he was always there, and he and I might have fought.) Sink into a scene if you end up finding one worth writing.

• Add on another five minutes and imagine a supernatural intrusion into that memory. It's okay—even good—if it's silly or campy. (Suddenly a two-headed giraffe appeared in the giraffe pen!)

3. Narrative: What's an odd fact in your family that you never really got an explanation for? (How come my family never really talks about that great-aunt of mine who appears to be excommunicated?)

• For five minutes, write down everything you know about the stuff around that fact (What have I heard about Great Auntie Kaveri?) For five minutes, make up an explanation in the third person.

• For another ten minutes, imagine you're someone in your family who believes in something supernatural or outside your reality (aliens, ghosts, or some other kind of thinking that seems magical to you). In first person or close third person, explain the family mystery through their eyes. (For example, my mother says Kaveri's astrological chart was off kilter with the man they married her off to, so . . . )

• For another five minutes, write a scene in which you have a conversation with that family member who's a magical thinker about this family mystery.

For me, this dance between autobiography and fiction, between the known and the imagined, and between the material and the mysterious, is what literature is all about. Finding ways to free up the parts of our brain that hold each of those is a crucial part of writing. Good luck!

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