Hope you enjoyed
Episode 6—Single Malts of the Olympic Peninsula—of the Winter of Different Directions podcast.
Listen, if you haven't already. This is also a good story to read along with as you listen, so check out the
published version over at
Word Riot. With its focus on stream-of-consciousness it's more of a writer's story than a reader's story. By that I mean I was more focused on mastering the technical aspects of the narrative and its language than I was making it a good read (or listen), so those of you into craft and technique will have fun digging into this one. That said, the written and audio versions are symbiotic. As with all of my stories, after about the second draft, I read aloud, over and over, as I edited and revised. So the audio version brings to life the tonalities, the emotions, even the word play, which is particularly important given that this story is trapped inside the character's head. Likewise, seeing the language on the page, if you've only listened to the story, should deliver plenty of surprises.
When I had this story in workshop everyone assumed it was autobiographical, but actually it is one of the least autobiographical and the most
manufactured of the stories I've written. So . . .
The Story Behind the Story . . . The core story line—Gregory bailing on an AA meeting and drinking and driving his way through a storm to Forks so he can avenge his father's fist; along with the general characterizations, attitudes, and backstory—are a composite, albeit filtered through the demands of the story, and modified to meet the story's needs, of people I met and conversations (
complaints) I overheard back when I had a landscape design business. Spent a lot of time with construction workers then and they were a hard drinking bunch; fucked up in more ways than one; and the sense of those guys has always stuck with me. With "Single Malts" I tried to get inside one of those composite heads.
The story was a long time building from conception to completion. First working title was "I Want a Name When I Lose," which drew from the Steely Dan song "Deacon Blues," and its lyrics:
Drink scotch whiskey all night long and die behind the wheel/they've got a name for all the winners in the world/I want a name when I lose. And in the rough draft stage, Gregory driving drunk and listening to "Deacon Blues" was just one short scene. The story at that time was basically scene-driven, realistic, and with a lot of flashbacks. But, I don't know, with that structure the story just never seemed to gel; too deterministic, too driven by the original idea.
For another story, and at Darrell Spencer's urging—and if you like short stories and haven't read his work . . . he's the only writer to have won
both the Flannery O'Connor
and the Drue Heinz awards for his short story collections—I had been trying to ditch interior monologue and learn
free indirect discourse. So Spencer turned me on to Dorrit Cohn's
Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. And I spent some time studying that book and its sources while also experimenting in my writing with the various modes. Eventually I sat down to tackle the rewrite of "Name When I Lose" with the intention or recasting it in
free indirect discourse. Some influences should be mentioned, which might help you understand the literary conversation this story is trying to take part in: James Joyce's
Ulysses, particularly chapter eight, "Lestrygonians;" Virginia Woolf's
To the Lighthouse; Stanley Elkin's "Her Sense of Timing" from
Van Gogh's Room at Arles; and Colum McCann's "Step We Gaily, On We Go" from
Fishing the Sloe-Black River. All of those were points of reference for the kind of texture and use of language that I wanted my revised story, now called "Single Malts of the Olympic Peninsula," to express.
One point on craft: With this type of narrative, it is easy for the language to lose itself in the stream, so one of the techniques I used to both ground the language and express character, was to adopt some tropes. In this case, it is the varieties of single malts, the tasting notes; carpentry tools and associated lingo; and the botanical names of plants. Scotch, woodworking, and plant names are core to Gregory's path through life, so the language of those three permeates his consciousness and acts as a filter through which he perceives and
expresses. As you listen to (or read) the story, notice how often he describes things using the language of single malts, woodworking tools, and plant names/characteristics.
As you might imagine, given the technical challenges of
free indirect discourse, this was not an easy story to write, nor was it much fun. Just too grueling. I finally had to
go to the Olympic Peninsula to get it done. I rented a room for three days at Lake Quinault Lodge and then, after hiking through the rainforest and writing down pages of descriptive detail, I locked myself in the room for three days and didn't come out until I had a complete draft of the story in
free indirect discourse. That was not the last draft, of course, just the one that made the story.
So that's
The Story Behind the Story for "Single Malts of the Olympic Peninsula." Next up in the Winter of Different Directions
Podcast will be "My Summer Vacation."
Thanks for listening and reading!
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