In Search of Monkeys and Bananas

I'm often asked what's the biggest problem I see in my graduate students' work, and the answer, hands down, is the inability to tell a story. My grad students generally write well, and they usually show some concern for character, but they often display an indifference to (a contempt for?) story, which strikes me as unwise. People who can sit at a bar and tell a story quite well end up freezing when they are in front of the computer. Or they forget that story is essential to fiction writing.

Part of the problem is that my students think too abstractly. A friend of mine wrote her undergraduate psychology thesis on the way adults group objects versus the way kids group objects. The adults group the apple with the banana, while the kids group the monkey with the banana. Which is another way of saying that kids are more natural storytellers than adults and that adults who write need to train themselves to think more like children again. Flannery O'Connor says this very eloquently in her wonderful book of essays MYSTERY AND MANNERS. In it, she argues, among other things, that a writer needs to cultivate a certain amount of stupidity. She also points out that the world is full of smart people who know how to write something that makes a point, that has an idea, that contains a theme, but when they sit down to write fiction what they produce is dull to the point of being deadly. Storytellling, O'Connor argues, is not about themes, arguments, points, or grand ideas, and if that's what you're interested in, then fiction is too humble for you.

My students get in trouble because they aim too broad, and so what they produce doesn't resonate as much as it could. It's not that there aren't ideas in good fiction. It's that the writer doesn't think in terms of ideas; the ideas come in through the back door, through the characters, who presumably, if they're thinking people, have ideas. Fiction is always about using the particular to get at the general; it's not about thinking about the general and using the particular to illustrate it. Tim O'Brien isn't writing about the Vitenam War, Toni Morrison isn't writing about African American women, and John Updike isn't writing about the suburbs. The critic may believe they are, but that's not how the writer thinks. The writer thinks in terms of specific people and specific situations and she writes a specific story about them--so specific, in fact, that it couldn't be written about anyone else.

Take Lorrie Moore as an example. Her story collection LIKE LIFE might be described, accurately enough if a little glibly and reductively, as being about smart, funny East coasters who are marooned in the Midwest and who use humor to keep their loneliness at bay. Or her story "You're Ugly, Too" from that collection could be described, as Deborah Tannen has described it in her bestselling book YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND, as an illustration of how men and women speak a different language from each other. But you can be sure Moore herself doesn't think about her work that way. In the case of "You're Ugly, Too," you can bet that Moore is interested simply in her characters--in Zoe, who is single and living in the Midwest, and who arrives in New York for her sister's Halloweeen party where she is being set up with a man dressed as a bonehead. I know this without having to ask Moore, because she, like any good fiction writer, isn't interested first and foremost in big, brimming ideas, and she's not out to make a point. She understands that monkeys belong with bananas.

Comments

[Richard Lewis]

Thanks for these posts, Joshua.

When I started taking writing seriously (after years of dabbling), one of the best pieces of advice I received -- the sort of advice that firmly plants your feet on the right path -- was from a colleague who said, "Forget the fancy poetry stuff, just tell the damn story."

[Tamara]

One way I try to keep myself on track with my writing is to post messages at my desk, in my notebooks, near my reading materials, etc. reminding me to "focus on the story." So much of what we learn about writing, once we start really trying to do it, is clinical, technical stuff, and while that's important, "story" is what is most often lost. It seems I had less trouble remembering this before I studied creative writing in a university setting.