By Katharine Coldiron Writers at all stages of their careers need help understanding where they’re going. Sometimes, when a writer gets stuck, a craft book can help unstick her. Many craft books offer general information about how writing works, or…
By Christina Ward-Niven There is so much to admire, craft-wise, in Don DeLillo’s classic novel White Noise: compelling, empathetic characterization; sharp dialogue; handling of theme through plot and subtext; a tone that consistently weaves wryness with heart. In this essay,…
Lucy doesn’t understand where I’m from and bends forward at me with a frown and shouts “where?!” when I say Pakistan, so at some point I started saying Atlanta, Georgia instead. And she doesn’t understand what I do for a…
Here’s a quick look at some of the great books out this week. Happy pub day to all! Keith Gessen, A Terrible Country Viking From Publishers Weekly: “In Gessen’s exceptional and trenchant novel, floundering 30-something professor Andrei Kaplan flees…
Since we launched in October, CRAFT has published 23 stories. Take a reading break this holiday week and enjoy some wonderful short fiction. Be sure to read the Author’s Note that accompanies each of the stories: each writer considers an…
LAST. Barney looked over to the far feedhole where Luther pitched hay slow and steady with his head down and it was the way he worked at everything. Light from the stalls underneath floated up like batter into the dark…
Novels almost always include multiple storylines. But when it comes to short stories, whether it’s due to the brevity of space, or the intense focus on the primary storyline, we often see stories that only travel one path. This tendency…
by Rebecca Makkai It’s hard enough to make our characters act, make them do and say interesting things. You know what’s harder? Well, lots of stuff. Coal mining, for one. Come on, writing is a pretty cushy job. But here’s…
Exploring the imagination of a character is a wonderful way to allow the reader insight into the way a character thinks and behaves. How characters behave with others—their actions and their words—can move a story forward and, of course, are…
Distilling a city to its essence is a fool’s errand, but Dublin in December tests the fool. It’s all magnified: wind-blown rain; the serious, northern-latitude darkness that drives pub traffic and tea sales; a high holiday looming that’s both hearty-Catholic…
In an interview with Frank Ormsby, the Belfast-born writer Ciaran Carson traces the similarities between mapmaking and poetry. “[A] map is only useful by how far it deviates from reality,” he says. “The perfect map would be reality, and therefore useless—the city as a map of the city. For a map to work, it has to use shorthand, or symbols, or metaphor, and in this it resembles poetry.”
It’s a beautiful analogy. Writing is mapmaking. Both seek a product that simultaneously stands on its own and conjures something larger, less skeletal than schematic. As the stories and maps we make will show, the city is another assemblage of tiny things given collective identity by virtue of their interconnection. Each component is both individual and of the crowd.
In writing this story, I was interested in exploring the ways people use group relationships and shared surroundings to justify, study, and contradict their own conceptions of self. Our environment becomes a stage for our actions. As such, the views people have of their world and their neighbors will reflect their own identities. The city becomes the composite of those impressions.
But belonging isn’t binary. The collective identity members of a group both shape and wear is inherently fraught. As the novelist Colson Whitehead writes of New York, “There are eight million naked cities in this naked city—they dispute and disagree.” That tension’s a rich narrative seam. In the gulf between viewpoints we learn a lot about our onlookers and the landscape linking them.
Naturally, these naked cities shift over time. The story’s premise—foreign students abroad, a few months into their program—affords a middle course between novelty, when details are most vivid and mysterious, and familiarity, when they’re commonplace and comprehensible.
Merging these points of view puts structural issues in play. Perspectives can’t be truly unified, of course, and to be enjoined they have to be stacked, another assemblage of tiny things. Scenes should move, and inhabiting five characters’ minds risks forcing hot-potato transitions. Rather than deepening understanding, jumping from person to person to person over the course of a few lines can have the effect of draining the story of any perspective at all. For that reason, I tried to make dialogue a rudder, steering the story between characters. When people speak, a little of their interior world comes out, deliberate or inadvertent, complete or fractured. These interactions are the building blocks of the group.
And the beauty of collective identity is that it develops a force of its own. To indulge the cliché, it’s a quality greater than the sum of its individual parts. In a story that’s nominally centered on five students, the biggest moment puts just three in view. Because the off-screen characters exist as members of the group even when the group is divided, their absence compels the others to action. What’s not there illuminates what is—and the narrative hinges, in the end, on something that doesn’t happen to one character inspiring another to make a decision.
Fiction can’t faultlessly recreate a city or a group of people. The deviation from reality is what matters, as Carson puts it, and this story’s schematic shorthand is the intersection of these narrative strands. As the details these characters absorb shade the outlines of their Dublins, it’s the act of interweaving these perspectives that serves to map each person, the city, and the group itself.
JACK NOLAND lives in Ridgewood, New York. He is a recent graduate of George Washington University, in Washington, DC, where he developed passions for fiction writing and public policy. His reporting on money in American politics can be found on the award-winning OpenSecrets blog. “Watershed” is his first published work of fiction.
