In A Story Swamp? Try a Ghost Text.
Are you wading in the swamp of a project or looking for inspiration? I have ideas for you from Maggie Nelson, Barbara Kingsolver, Charles Dickens, and Lance Olsen.
Swamps are beautiful things. Filter systems for waterways. They help people escape from harmful places by sheltering them where others fear entering. Yet, when you feel like YOU are in the swamp of a book project, it does not feel like a beautiful thing all of the time. Our minds can be the alligators lurking in the swamp of a book project, two eyes blinking, the alligator or crocodile coming to swallow our enthusiasm for the book project in one swift bite. Sidenote: did you know that the Florida Everglades are the only place in the world where both alligators and crocodiles cohabitate?
Have you found structuring your story to feel, at times, impossible, like you are in a swamp of words? To me, the structure of a story is one of the most essential aspects of making a book and also one of the most nerve-wracking, because there are so many options. Options and the possibility of innovation beyond what options we can think of. When I have a soupy idea of my book’s concerns/narrative (and chunks of scenes and exposition), I start to get restless about not having the structure in place, lacking the container to hold it.
Today’s post is about what you might try if you are there, too, with a writing prompt at the end.
What Conversation Is Your Book Entering?
When I’m having this issue of the swamp, I first look at books that have companionship in terms of storyline and see what they do in terms of structure. I’m looking not to copy that structure, but to learn from it, and to learn, specifically, the conversation that has happened so far around the themes/ideas/plots that I see emerging in my book. I also am hopeful I’m finding something I DON’T like about what that book does, b/c then I know I’ll be doing something different in my own work.
Maggie Nelson’s “A Sort of Leaning Against”
To writers that are in this swampy stage—which could happen at any stage of the writing process—I suggest the comfort of Maggie Nelson’s essay “A Sort of Leaning Against” from the Tin House Craft Book (Amazon link with preview, Tin House link).
In this essay, Nelson confides that she always thought of herself as lacking in imagination:
Maggie Nelson: I don't really think I have much of an imagination at all, at least not in the traditional sense of making stuff up or feeling compelled by things that aren't there. Whatever imagination I have, I think it's a formal one: I have an intuition for form, for how form and content depend upon each other. I also have a strong sense of how ideas are things, how they can be arranged, synthesized, associated, and felt…
Who else to offer us writing encouragement than MacArthur Genius Maggie, who says she has no imagination? But what she does see as a strength, and what we can learn from, is her sense of structure:
Maggie Nelson: I see book shapes; I hear tonal juxtapositions; I hear music shepherded around the page; I imagine what kind of sentence or shape could or should house a particular idea.
How does she do that, structure? How does she know how to put things next to each other? She has a hack, a trick, an essential pillar for her books: a ghost text.
Try a Ghost Text
A ghost text, as she describes it, is a book that offers a shape for the story you are telling, often a text far afield from your own. For Bluets—her book that meditates on the history of the color blue, and heartbreak, among other things—she used Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigation. For The Red Parts, Peter Handke’s terrific, grief book about the loss of his mother, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is the ghost text.
How does she become haunted by these books but not create something derivative? She chooses a book that has significant differences from her own. Wittengstein’s book is a philosophical treatise, whereas Maggie’s book is creative nonfiction about blue— the color and the feeling. The genre is different and the themes are different and the authors have very different projects. In “A Sort of Leaning Against”, Maggie gives us specific details about how she borrowed:
Try a Disruption
But you needn’t go that far afield. In a grad class I taught six years ago, I invited Lance Olsen to chat with our group after we’d read and discussed his co-written craft book, Architectures of Possibility, a book that offers several interviews with working writers alongside chapters that advocate for experimentation. I still return to something he said in that conversation with the Miami University MFA students: “We teach the disruptions.”
He was saying, in essence, I think—feel free to add to this in the comments if you like, Lance!—that there is our sense of how stories should and do operate and then there are the stories that stand the test of time. We return to the books that did something different than what we expect stories to do. We teach and read what disrupted something!
The books that stand up are disruptions to the forms and storylines we’ve seen before. Sometimes it is a structure that is disrupted (Tristam Shandy breaking the fourth wall) and sometimes it is content (David Copperfield offering a searing social critique).
Write a Modern Retelling of an Older Book
What if we combine these two ideas, the ghost text and the disruption? What if you take a well-known, beloved book, examine its structure, and disrupt, or change, something about it, for a contemporary reader? I’m seeing this current trend in well-loved books like Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful to Little Women and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead to David Copperfield. Both recent books are described as modern retellings of older stories and what they offer both writers, I think, is the sense of writing alongside another author, of collaborating, especially when one gets swampy about structure.
The first part of Kingsolver’s acknowledgments pages says as much:
Barbara Kingsolver: I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield…in adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.
In Demon Copperhead, which I have two sweet pages left I’m saving for later today, Kingsolver creates an Appalachian boy, orphaned young, living within the contexts of Oxycontin, the presence of mining companies, and the problematic foster system, exploring how these contexts determine, or heavily influences the shape of a life, no matter one’s grit, one’s friendships, and such, which is a contemporary reshaping of Charles Dickens’ story. I’m from this region and so am particularly testy about portrayals of Appalachia, the early Oxycontin days, and women from Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and in the book’s case, Virginia. Kingsolver’s book did not raise my hackles and I love how she created the term the Mammaw house—little figurines out front, flags, and what I’ll add to this: a concrete goose on the porch and a small yappy dog inside.
Kingsolver leans closely in parts to Dickens’ book, but of course, she’s made a book all of her own. Both characters are marked by being born in the caul. Both characters speak very matter-of-factly in the openings:
Dickens’ David in the opening: “To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born…”
Kingsolver’s Demon: “First, I got myself born.”
Another intriguing thing about the Copper books is that they both have sensational plots. In Dickens’ case, determined by the serial aspects of books back then, when you sold chapters at a time, selling a pamphlet at a time, and therefore needed to keep readers eager to buy the next installment. I see how Kingsolver has a similar move in her story, entering new plot elements in each chapter. A pregnancy will shake one chapter, to be resolved into something unexpected a few chapters later.
A Writing Invitation - Find a Ghost Text, an Old Text, and/or a Disruption
For this week’s writing invitation, look for a ghost text for your book in progress or the book you’d like to work on during NanoWriMo.
Perhaps you’ll take the approach of finding a text in another genre or otherwise quite different than your own, like Maggie Nelson does.
Perhaps you’ll locate an older book, a classic, that could use a contemporary writer to put it in the situation of today or the future, as Napolitano and Kingsolver did. (And some of you writing out there are presently doing, wink wink!)
Or, think and write instead about how your book could be a disruption—in form or in content—to what has previously been published.
Or, do none of these, but instead, set your intention, turn on Freedom, and see what emerges from your unique, beautiful self and onto the pages.
In November, I will send out a daily encouragement for subscribers behind the paywall and weekly for all. If you’d like to participate daily but are experiencing financial precarity, just email me and I’ll give you access.
So find a warm or cool drink to treat yourself on this longest day of summer, the solstice, and give yourself the gift of this time of writing. More daylight today than any other this year to write within. May your words glide across the water by the oars of your belief.
Sending you all the love for your writing session,
TS
