So, Anyway, Back to Writing

The novelist who transforms truth–immutable, uncompromising, and displeasing as it is–to extract from it an exceptional and delightful plot, must necessarily manipulate events without an exaggerated respect for probability, molding them to his will, dressing and arranging them so as to attract, excite and affect the reader. - Guy de Maupassant, 1888

After all the emotional intensity of the last few weeks – the holidays and the post-holiday burn-out and the rest of life needing to be dealt with, it is good to get back to my real life. And, more importantly, my writing life. I have been thinking about the story I want to write for the next Level Best Books anthology and that is a good thing. There is a convention among writers that you write 10 words for every one that appears on the page but you probably think a hundred before you get to writing those 10.

I have been in the company of some very good writers these days thanks to a wonderful new book, The Art of the Short Story: 52 Great Authos, Their Best Short Fiction, and Their Insights on Writing, editted by Dana Gioia and R.S. Gwynn. I picked it up at the library (how can anyone not LOVE the Sawyer Free Library?) but I think this is going to be one of those I have to buy.

Reading writers write about writing is like warm honey on my soul because I virtually always know what they are talking about, can completely identify, even if I can’t articulate it as they can. This book is delicious because each chapter consists of a short biography complete with photo (I realize in looking through it how many faces I have never seen before) followed by a short story or two and then an essay or interview with the author on some aspect of writing. Some of the stories I have read many times before, some are new to me. All are welcome.

Last night I re-read Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace which I have probably not read since high school. The story, quite simply, is about Mathilde, a beautiful but poor young woman who is married to a respectable, middle-class man who loves her but simply cannot give her all she longs for. He manages to wangle an invitation to a ball thinking this will please her but it just creates more problems. She needs an appropriate gown, then she needs jewels - finally she borrows a diamond necklace from her rich friend. The ball is wonderful and she has the time of her life but at the end of the evening, in her haste to leave lest her new admirers discover she has no fur to wrap up in, she runs through the streets and loses the necklace. Her husband is able to replace it but at great, great sacrifice – they must reduce their circumstances even more, give up their help. She must work hard and live in a hovel until they can pay off the debt of the diamond necklace.

When Mathilde re-encounters her wealthy friend a few years later her friend is shocked at how haggard and ill-kempt she is and Mathilde confesses the whole story only to discover the original necklace was a cheap paste one and all her work and sacrifice was unnecessary. It is, quite simply, a cautionary tale about the foolishness of vanity and, after I read it, I thought how in de Maupassant’s time it was probably quite shocking.

I loved the quote (above) from his essay because it is something I often think about when I write. A thing happens and the writer begins to think about it–not the specific details of the thing but what brought it about, what the meaning of the thing was and what other consequences it might have yielded. And as the writer’s mind entertains these notions the story begins to reveal itself.

Today life is quite different than when de Maupassant wrote The Necklace but still, there are those events, simple though they may seem, in life that contain a kernel of something larger. It is the writer’s job to show up at the page and let the larger truth come out.

Thanks for reading.