The Bridge Back to Home
Episode 14: The Bridge Back to Home of the Winter of Different Directions podcast is now available and it's once again time to make fun of my mongrel scottish accent . . . Listen, if you haven't already . . .
"The Bridge Back to Home" is a story that I've had kicking around forever, or at least since I switched from poetry to literary fiction. (Little known fact: I published a fair amount of poetry in what are now mostly defunct literary journals. My influences then were Nicanor Parra, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, and the french surrealists. So how'd I get from there to realist short stories? That's a story for another time . . .) Anyway, parts of this story have been around for many years and many drafts. Parts of it, however, are new for this version.
The Story Behind the Story is that when I first started working on this piece I lived in an apartment beneath a couple who were always fighting. Lots of screaming and yelling, door slamming, and glass breaking. One night it escalated and he was clearly beating her so I called the police. They came an arrested him. A few days later her father and brother helped her move out. If you've listened to the story already, you know that what I just described is not the setting for the story. But it is what made me want to write the story. At the same time I was toying around with a bunch of material set in Scotland, trying to write something that captured the sense of history, especially the pagan overtones, that seem imbued in the walls and the woods, the bridges and the burns beneath them. So I took the scene of abuse I'd overheard and moved it to a Halloween bonfire in Scotland.
The problem has always been to build a story around that core incident. Some would say that the problem was that I was trying to do exactly that. Perhaps. I've lost track of how many different drafts this story has been through, but I have 21 completely different versions. Four of which have been through workshops in three different university's writing programs. The core scene is in short-shorts, and it's in a rough draft novel. In a version similar, but with a different frame, it's a story in an inwork collection of linked stories set in Scotland. Part of my attachment to this piece is that that core incident is the first great scene that I wrote. It opened up the possibilities of fiction to me. I more or less quit writing poetry after that.
Most of the early versions of the story were in the faux-memoir genre. I was trying to do a set-piece epiphany, with predictable results. Too sentimental, too melodramatic, trying way too hard to create meaning. This version has a darker edge to it. The narrator still has his regrets, his shame, but he's acted on it, is negotiating a truce with himself.
I've revised this story so many times that the techniques seem blatant to me now: the frame, the foreshadowing, the use of exposition as ammunition, the reordering of the linear sequence. But if you are into craft, they are worth a look. As an editor I'm always nagging about starting your story with a hook. The first sentence in this story is an example of what I'm talking about.
For better of for worse, it's recorded now—the final version. Give it a listen and let me know what you think.
Next up in the Winter of Different Directions podcast is "Gas Money," which some of you may have read already in Dan Wickett's Holiday Gift email, the EWNs HGM.
Thanks for listening and reading! Subscribe, spread the word, and keep the feedback coming.
"The Bridge Back to Home" is a story that I've had kicking around forever, or at least since I switched from poetry to literary fiction. (Little known fact: I published a fair amount of poetry in what are now mostly defunct literary journals. My influences then were Nicanor Parra, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, and the french surrealists. So how'd I get from there to realist short stories? That's a story for another time . . .) Anyway, parts of this story have been around for many years and many drafts. Parts of it, however, are new for this version.
The Story Behind the Story is that when I first started working on this piece I lived in an apartment beneath a couple who were always fighting. Lots of screaming and yelling, door slamming, and glass breaking. One night it escalated and he was clearly beating her so I called the police. They came an arrested him. A few days later her father and brother helped her move out. If you've listened to the story already, you know that what I just described is not the setting for the story. But it is what made me want to write the story. At the same time I was toying around with a bunch of material set in Scotland, trying to write something that captured the sense of history, especially the pagan overtones, that seem imbued in the walls and the woods, the bridges and the burns beneath them. So I took the scene of abuse I'd overheard and moved it to a Halloween bonfire in Scotland.
The problem has always been to build a story around that core incident. Some would say that the problem was that I was trying to do exactly that. Perhaps. I've lost track of how many different drafts this story has been through, but I have 21 completely different versions. Four of which have been through workshops in three different university's writing programs. The core scene is in short-shorts, and it's in a rough draft novel. In a version similar, but with a different frame, it's a story in an inwork collection of linked stories set in Scotland. Part of my attachment to this piece is that that core incident is the first great scene that I wrote. It opened up the possibilities of fiction to me. I more or less quit writing poetry after that.
Most of the early versions of the story were in the faux-memoir genre. I was trying to do a set-piece epiphany, with predictable results. Too sentimental, too melodramatic, trying way too hard to create meaning. This version has a darker edge to it. The narrator still has his regrets, his shame, but he's acted on it, is negotiating a truce with himself.
I've revised this story so many times that the techniques seem blatant to me now: the frame, the foreshadowing, the use of exposition as ammunition, the reordering of the linear sequence. But if you are into craft, they are worth a look. As an editor I'm always nagging about starting your story with a hook. The first sentence in this story is an example of what I'm talking about.
For better of for worse, it's recorded now—the final version. Give it a listen and let me know what you think.
Next up in the Winter of Different Directions podcast is "Gas Money," which some of you may have read already in Dan Wickett's Holiday Gift email, the EWNs HGM.
Thanks for listening and reading! Subscribe, spread the word, and keep the feedback coming.
Labels: Winter of Different Directions
