Interior/Exterior

Hello!

Welcome to the very first edition of IMPROMPT2!

The April 17 issue of The New Yorker included a short story by Laurie Colwin. Colwin died over thirty years ago, so it was a pleasant treat to see a piece of her writing. The story, “Evensong,” has a measured, curious protagonist caught in a brief love affair with a dear friend. It is a meditation on the knowable edges of the self, the degree to which others will always remain a mystery. It also, early on, employs one of my favorite moves in written fiction:

Look closely at that. Our protagonist first mounts her observations-slash-argument within narrative. “I stopped on the path…Louis seemed right at home…Furthermore, it was clear…I did not think it right.” There’s a sense of interiority in this paragraph: we’re in the protagonist’s mind, seeing the world through the lens she points. “I did not think it right” is a statement of posture, a value statement—but not a direct piece of dialogue. And yet, it’s followed with: “‘Furthermore, I am not a Christian,’ I said.”

“Furthermore”! The argument continues! But now, it is directly reported dialogue. So what, if anything, did she say aloud prior to that? The “Furthermore” makes sense to the reader, because we’ve been following the journey from her perspective. But does it make sense to Louis? Furthermore, does that matter?

This is the thing that only written fiction can do: leave us in the in-between. A story told on screen would have to make a decision about the difference between what is thought and what is stated to another. (Example, we wrote about the episode of Fleabag that pierced the conceit of the “aside” by having another character respond to it.) But on the page, guided solely by our point of view character, we must rely on her distinctions between the interior and the exterior, the inner monologue and the expressed opinion. 

Grace Paley made this move a lot, and I’ve certainly copied it. It’s extremely satisfying to smudge the boundary between what is said and what is felt—deployed smartly, it can increase the tension in a scene or between two characters. It can maintain an Impressionistic sense to a story, an emphasis on impulse and the difficulty of connection.

Sure, here we could do the most boring thing, decide whether or not the protagonist said any of her reasoning aloud. Maybe she did, and she’s merely summarizing for us in narrative. Or maybe she didn’t, and Louis knows her well enough to know how often she prepares her position in her head before speaking (since he certainly doesn’t seem to skip a beat). Or he did make a comment about that “furthermore” and our protagonist is sanding the conversation down to the more important bits. Me? I just don’t care.

What’s more, there’s so much deliciousness in the story that just keeps pointing us back to this idea about the uncertainty of knowing what’s really inside someone. The very idea of love affairs and religious experiences live at that permeable boundary between us and not us. It’s all that old stuff about the voice of God, the breakdown of the bicameral mind, the emergence of consciousness…what inside us is our own? What was placed there? Is the protagonist weeping at a Christian hymn because God wants her to, because it’s true? Or because something inside herself is plucked by the chords?

And when we turn that question to our intimates: what inside of them is ours? The questing for reasons at the end of the protagonist’s love affair takes her down similar thought pathways: can she ever know how the breakdown of the liaison happened? Can her former lover ever adequately communicate it even if he knew?

Writing fiction is creating worlds and creating people. Our characters can never be fully apart from us, because they are made of our ribs, our imaginations, our hatred. Our characters are animated by our decisions—just as the bicameral Greeks were animated by their goddesses’ actions. This is extraordinarily pleasing to me, the persistent lack of clear boundary between ourselves and our creations, between what is internal to us and what we place in the world. 

For your consideration:

What can leaning into this ambiguity bring to a difficult scene? Can you pinpoint a moment where this interior/exterior smudge can amp up the tension for the reader without necessarily changing things for the characters in the scene? (Bonus points if you do this without leaning on consciousness-altering props, like dreams or hallucinogenic substances.) More broadly: how are you flexing your Goddess muscle? How are your creations an extension of your curiosities and fixations? Can you bring that to the page in a way that generates depth and reader satisfaction?

Try this:

Place your protagonist in a scene with another character who’s got his own thing going on (his own internal monologue, his own preoccupations, his own agenda) and amp up the protagonist’s thought process. Try skipping around between musings in narrative and directly reported dialogue. What can be found there? What can be found if the other character doesn’t directly respond to the ambiguity?

From Allison:

I wrote about something similar a few years ago, as it appears in Matthew Salesses’s Dissapear Doppelganger Disappear. It’s this incredible mind meld that can happen when the line blurs between what is spoken and what is merely thought. Much like that Fleabag thing, a space is created for the reader to crawl into—and the jumble of brains becomes a wondrous something else.

Talk to us: 

Leave a comment to argue with our ideas or tell us how they might intersect with your own writing and observations. Or just share cat photos.

Something else entirely:

Who would like to hang out with Erin Kate at summer writing camp in Fresno, California for two weeks of sunshine, novel-mapping, and lots of one-on-one critique time? Just take a look at this incredible opportunity: The Novel: Mapping Your Project to Completion. (Scholarships are available and you don’t have to be a student to sign up.)

Or you can find Allison in just-as-sunny downtown Minneapolis (in July—it really might be sunny!) for Wordplay.