From Fly Creek: Last novel column, I promise!

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May 5, 2011

From Fly Creek: Last novel column, I promise!

The Cooperstown Crier Mon May 09, 2011, 10:20 AM EDT

Two weeks ago I had great fun telling youabout Katherine Anne Porter’s appearance at La Salle College when, as a young Christian Brother, I was doing studies there. I loved recalling that appearance, not just a reading, but a stage performance as well. For that charmer, at the same age I am now, had by then created a persona of a southern doyenne, aging but still a coquette.

She hooked us all with it, and reeled us right in. Let me re-quote her answer when an audience member asked how she thought up and then developed the characters in “Ship of Fools.”

Her answer has become an explanation to me of how on earth I ended up with a dozen or so characters in a novel.

Miss Porter said, in sum, that she met most of her fictional characters by seeming accident.

“Ah am a lady of . . . a certain age,” she said, pausing to let us laugh gently, appreciatively, “and Ah have, of course, met many people in mah lifetime. But as Ah wrote ‘Ship,’ time and again Ah would be startled when characters just presented themselves to me, on fictional dry land and on shipboard, on deck and below decks.

“They seemed at first strangers to me, and Ah wondered where on earth they’d come from. But then Ah’d suddenly realize Ah did know them, sometimes from my distant past. Or Ah’d recognize in one of them, parts of three or foah people out of my past, merged together to present themselves as one.” She laughed gently.

“Ah did crowd that ship, didn’t Ah?” And we laughed again and even applauded.

I’ve heard other fiction writers say pretty much the same thing, but it was KatherineAnne’s description of it that had stuck with me for 50 years. (That has something to do, I think, with perfectly coifed, snow-white hair and a lithe figure in a dress of blue silk, and, of course, those fluttering eyelashes.)

And now I know, though I’m just a tyro fiction writer, that that phenomenon does occur.

Characters and situations just present themselves, and the big surprise is not just that they appear, but that they’re apt to what’s being written. Where do they come from and what calls them forth? As to the first point, mine had to come out of my head.

They got in there because we humans, somehow, seem to store in there every experienceof our lives, entrapping them somehow in that seemingly tangled systems of neural channels and synapses and such that make us thinkingbeings.

Most of all that stuff ends up in deep, deep storage, forgotten and irretrievable by the conscious mind. My image is of that vast, seemingly limitless government storehouse shown at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Somewhere down that endless main corridor and downone of hundreds of side aisles, somewhere in a crate among other crates stacked twenty feet high, is the hidden ark of the Covenant, safe from the hands of the Nazis or the villains of the moment.

That’s the way my past is stored. And I have no master chart just where any given thing is stored, or even any knowledge of what almost all of it is.

But what is it that, often to our surprise, suddenly trundles an open box out of storage and into our consciousness?

You’ve had it happen, I know, even in casual conversation. Some topic is developing itself, and suddenly and to your surprise you have a contribution that has presented itself.

“I haven’t thought of that for years!” you said. And you might not ever have thought of it again, had not something signaled it and called it forth. The something was in the conversation, a chance remark, a single word used by one of the other speakers. And without warning a box from decades ago opens and presents its contents. We’re amazing, aren’t we?

That’s what happens, I think, in fiction writing, and in a particularly intense way. There you are, communing with whatever you already have on paper, with the heady sense that you are creating a small fictional universe. (Granted, it may end up embodied in a slipshod piece of work that will repel all readers except you, but never mind that.)

You’re moving along onwhat seems a predetermined path when you’re stopped in your tracks. Something or someone has appeared alongside the way ahead and seems to be waiting for you. And, almost without your invitation, it steps onto your planned path.

If you’re first inclined to say, “Buzz off!” you don’t. For almost at once you realize that the new arrival belongs on the path, is part of the very substance of what you’re trying to do.

Now, that’s exciting! You still have freedom to shape and to place, but you’ve been given a gift.

And you don’t have to believe in Muses to see it as such.

For just as there is far more to reality than will ever be grasped by any finite human mind, there’s far more in your mind than you will ever be able to call forth.

But it’s there nonetheless, damn it, and it all contributes to every further perception you have, every further decision you make.

Fiction writing gives you a way to tap that huge store, at least a little bit of it. And what does it matter if you’re no Katherine Anne Porter or, better, Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor? It’s still great fun!

JIM ATWELL will have a new book published in August 2011.