7 CHAPTER SEVEN

Setting, Stillness, and Voice

A Quick Story on Voice

When I was twenty-four, twenty-five, a professor I was studying fiction with said I lacked “vision.” I had no idea what that meant. I wondered if the guy was a holy roller or something. Vision? WTF.

It took me years to figure it out.

Vision.

I studied other writers like a detective cracking a code of cipher. I observed, made notes: the hurt and armor of cynicism in Holden Caulfield; the narrative distance and protective wisecracks in the first-person judgments of Philip Marlowe; the grief and suffering in the works of Bernard Malamud.

Sherwood Anderson also resonated with me. He uses a telling voice and summary scenes to guide us through Winesburg, Ohio. His voice is a generous one—his characters are broken and he loves them, presenting them to us raw with all their faults and repressed feelings. His voice seeks connections: not so much as to carnal love, but to emotional love, communion, and understanding.

Just what is your attitude toward your characters and your fictional universe? Do you have a voice, a vision? I’m not talking about themes here, although literary critics will look to your voice to explain to your readership the themes of your prose (and that’s okay, that’s what they do). But as you compose and make word-to-word choices you are putting forth an attitude and breathing life into your work.

Personally I believe in affairs of the heart (that’s why in part I like a telling voice). Moreover, in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson, I love my characters and respect them. I want them to surprise me, not to be defined around one concept but to reflect the ambiguities and complexities of what it means to be human. I seek out prose that honestly explores, in an almost philosophical level of inquiry, what it means to be a human being.

Don’t worry about defining your voice yet, but as you write more and more stories try to understand your value system and just what it is that you as an artist stand for.

A Second Story

Years ago I had a gifted student, man could this cat write. He approached me after class. We had just workshopped a fine story he had put forward about fathers/sons and love and loss. Tears pushed at the corner of his eyes. He pointed to a paragraph that a student had made line edits on. “I think about rhythm all the time,” he said. “I deliberately mixed long and short sentences here for effect.” The original paragraph was four sentences long. The student critic had edited the prose to make the paragraph six declarative sentences. I told the student, I agree with you, I like your original impulses, choices. “Hey, you’re the final arbiter of your work. Keep it the way you want it.”

This little anecdote affected me greatly as a teacher. I won’t mess with your voice. I want you to find it. That’s what I believe. Just as I found my own, with hard work, you’ll find yours. Kurt Vonnegut once said that the goal of any creative writing professor should be to not get in a student’s way.

My Voice

I’m stating this to let you know I can define it. I’m not stating this to tell you what yours should be, but you should, in time, be able to define the emotional and technical properties of your voice. My voice is rooted in the Ernest Hemingway school of parataxis. I like declarative sentences (subject/verb/object constructions). I rarely start a sentence with a subordinate clause. I prefer Anglo-saxon words to Latinate words. I like hard consonant sounds. I use short descriptors to add beats, moments of tension between bits of dialogue. In terms of dialogue I prefer, in two-person scenes, to eschew tags if possible. For me, “said” is not an invisible word. Moreover, I’m not a big fan of “ing” sentence starts. I also like to use free indirect discourse as a way to create uncertainty in a narrative. But that’s me. I can define my likes. Can you?

Voice in Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep”

As I stated earlier, Chandler once joked that he wasn’t good at writing three–person scenes so his debut novel begins with three two-person scenes. But despite that shortcoming, Chandler establishes character/voice/attitude out of the gate (written when he was in his early fifties):

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

This opening establishes Marlowe’s wry attitude, his self-deprecating humor (the display handkerchief cracks me up), and a subtle reveal (he has a drinking problem, his way of escape from the pyrrhic, the cost of every quest he undertakes). Moreover, the threat of a “hard” rain underscores the violence, the “mean streets” down which this man must go. Finally, his quip about “four million dollars” establishes, via contrast, Marlowe as a hard-working, honest man, navigating his spaces in a world of privilege, entitlement, and excess.

Later, in chapter three, when Marlowe meets Vivian Regan, Chandler further explores this theme of excess and his lead character’s distance from such a world:

This room was too big, the ceiling was too high, the doors were too tall, and the white carpet that went from wall to wall looked like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead. There were full-length mirrors and crystal doodads all over the place. The ivory furniture had chromium on it, and the enormous ivory drapes lay tumbled on the white carpet a yard from the windows. The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out. The windows stared towards the darkening foothills. It was going to rain soon. There was pressure in the air already.

Wow. My favorite moment here: “the enormous ivory drapes lay tumbled on the white carpet a yard from the windows.” Talk about too much-ness. This detail shows that Vivian lacks preciseness and control. No wonder there’s pressure in the air. And the judgment behind “dirty” and “bled out” is all you need to know about Marlowe’s protective armor, his distancing himself from the world he travels in. This is setting as voice. There’s an attitude here.

Writing Crime

Of course, crime fiction relies on attitude. We readers accept a certain kind of fictional contract: we’re always on our guard; we can’t trust the world we see unveiling before us; everyone is a suspect; everyone has something to hide and is prone to half-truths and lying to protect themselves or others. What clue will reveal the hidden truth?

In Georges Simenon’s Maigret Sets a Trap (translated by Daphne Woodward) he establishes the possibility of Marcel Moncin’s guilt with a detail that appears, possibly, just tossed away: “She had opened the glass-paneled door of a drawing room done up in a modern style which was unexpected in this old house, but which had nothing aggressive about it; Maigret told himself he wouldn’t mind living in a setting like this. Only the paintings on the walls displeased him, he couldn’t make head or tail of them.” The last sentence is the punch line, the clue. The paintings are a mess because they mirror the disordered mind of a serial killer. Moreover, unlike the distance in Marlowe’s voice, Simenon humanizes Maigret as a man who connects with the world and its simple comforts: “Maigret told himself he wouldn’t mind living in a setting like this.” He’s secure, moving about the arrondissements of Paris. The world is not threatening. Throughout the Maigret novels Simenon presents his Chief Inspector as enjoying the quotidian: drinking a beer, standing by a warm fire, going to the cinema, Saturday nights, with his wife, and walking with his wife in the evenings and sticking out his tongue to catch falling snowflakes. Again, this is voice. A vision.

Setting and the Triggering Neighborhood

In The Triggering Town Richard Hugo argues that you should avoid writing about your hometown but find a new town that inspires memory. The problem with your hometown is that the details are fixed and stable. You’ll have a hard time making a corn silo black if in your memory it is yellow. Or if I were to write about a high school custodian, Rusty, who was a drunkard, it might be hard for me to imagine him in a different light, a guy who in his downtime replayed classic chess games in his small cinder block office.

Okay, full disclosure. I don’t quite buy Hugo’s argument.

I’m more with the Bernard Malamud, John Steinbeck and Alice Munro school. Write toward what you know. Establish firmly a place as your own, but also recapture the spaces you have inhabited. These writers brought to life where they lived: New York City; Salinas Valley; rural Ontario.

Years ago I wrote a story, “‘Come on, You’re Dead’” that appeared in the pages of the Green Hills Literary Lantern and wound up being nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The story’s beginnings grew out of a setting exercise I shared with my students. When they write in class, I do too.

Anyway, here’s the assignment: re-imagine the neighborhood you grew up in (a city block; a trailer court; an apartment complex, a farm). Draw a map of the neighborhood, and label the various dwellings. I recalled a crescent I lived on in Toronto’s North York. The house at the end of the block featured a doctor with five children and a wife with an alcohol problem (I figured this part out later). She liked margarine, and thought it was better for you than butter. Next door was an Italian family, their father worked construction, and Mrs. Capitelli used to make homemade ravioli (the noodles from scratch—I stayed at her place sometimes after school when my parents weren’t yet home from work). Some of the lawns of the houses in our neighborhood weren’t sodded yet; other homes hadn’t had the drywall installed. There were four different patterns to the houses: a kind of suburban Levittown with spindly trees and fenced-in backyards. And I, with my Thompson submachine gun from the Marx Toy Company, played war games all the time.

From this mapping and calling up of past memories grew an anti-war story (it didn’t start out that way) about me and the doctor’s son playing war and messing with stuff we shouldn’t have been messing with. A composite of my kid brother and younger kids in the neighborhood makes a memorable guest spot in the piece too. He wanted to hang with me and my pals and fit in, and that desire gets all of us in trouble. The story explored unsupervised children’s time and the dangers inherent in that. That wasn’t my initial intention in writing the story but no doubt that “vision” grew from the mix of my memories of then with my having been a relatively young parent at the time I composed the story. My daughters in 2004 were ages 17; 13; and 7. Ultimately, the story resonates a sad resignation and questions masculinity. Again, I didn’t start with an agenda or a theme, but that’s the undercurrent to what emerged through my triggering neighborhood memory. Try it. See what emerges for you.

Let me pump the brakes a second. I don’t want to be too dismissive of Hugo. I have used his advice for poets in The Triggering Town. I often go to Webster City, Iowa an hour down Highway 20 from where I live in Cedar Falls. I don’t know what draws me to it, but I find myself attracted to the town and I’ve used it to recall memories of various small towns and small cities I’ve lived in in Ontario: Norwood, Cobourg, and Peterborough. These places, combined with Webster City’s armory, local Rexall drugstore, diner with its open hot beef sandwiches and Willson Avenue spelled with two L’s have all figured in my creation of “Winsome” an imaginary town in upstate New York that features my two-fisted cab driver and drifter Eddie Sands. My Winsome has an armory, a small college on a hill, a community ice arena, a strange street named Polis, and a local drugstore/diner, Regehr’s, where you can still get an orange egg cream and a hot open beef sandwich.

Setting, Stillness and Voice

I’m a city boy. In On the Waterfront, Marlon Brando said, “I don’t like the country. The crickets make me nervous.” I’m with him. I don’t like the quiet of open spaces. If I’m on a farm house under a black sky and no neighbors around I worry that any moment In Cold Blood will unfold. When I visit my sister-in-law in Emporia, KS, I’m uneasy at night.

I love white noise, sound. I write and listen to music (hard bop jazz; 1950s rockabilly; punk), or play an old Leafs game in the background. I’ve never been one to meditate. The closest I come to relaxing and being in a quiet “zone” or flow is when I write or play my guitar (a Martin D-28).

But, if you want to possibly find, maybe, a hidden aspect of your voice—if you’re an enthusiastic, idealistic person—then try to lean into a moment of stillness. Pause the narrative storyline, stay in a specific feeling, and explore that feeling, see what associations it leads to. Allow that pause to take you somewhere lyrical.

The end game here is to seek and find some kind of wonder.

Don’t listen to Mr. Brando. Listen to the crickets. Invest in that sound. Where does that sound take you?

Ever just lulled about in the shower, feeling the water run over you, as your mind drifts to relaxing far off places? Ever just floated idyllically in a swimming pool feeling the sun on your face, but the brightness of the sky still present behind closed eyes? Or walked in the woods on a harvest moonlit night and felt a connection to something beyond yourself? Go somewhere quiet, and keep yourself open to whatever enters in. What awe or wonder stirs within you?

Many stories about youth contain such moments of intense feeling and connection. Here’s an example of intense stillness from Sue Monk Kidd’s powerhouse novel The Secret Life of Bees:

When I looked up through the web of trees, the night fell over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark. Lightning came, not jagged but in soft, golden licks across the sky. I undid the buttons on my shirt and opened it wide, just wanting the night to settle on my skin, and that’s how I fell asleep, lying there with my mother’s things, with the air making moisture on my chest and the sky puckering with light.

Setting, the Ekphrastic, and Edward Hopper

I love Hopper’s work. I’m a fan of Film Noir and the first time I saw a print of Hopper’s “Nighthawks” I resonated with the the painting’s noir vibe of alienation, loneliness, and destitution that glowed with a sense that here were real, hardscrabble people taking a brief respite from the city’s mean streets.

About four years ago I was visiting the Cincinnati Art Museum and found myself face-to-face with another Hopper painting, this time an original, hanging in their walls: “Sun on Prospect Street.” Painted in 1934. Here’s a facsimile:

https://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/art/explore-the-collection?id=11297054

I was mesmerized, staring at it from all distant angles, different distances, for close to half an hour. Suddenly the setting of the painting inspired a future story for me to write about two hit men sitting in a V-8 Ford, looking at that house, readying to kill a custodian.

Upon returning to my oldest daughter’s home in Deer Park I quickly wrote a first draft in a white heat. Here’s the first seven paragraphs of “Bend of the Sun.” Note how Hopper’s imagery inspires my choice of imagery, a feeling of stillness, and a voice dipped in the sensibilities of Noir’s lost-world losers (and I use the term affectionately):

The window was open just enough to let in the cool night air. But it was no longer night time. It was day, and everything was yellow, and the window was still open.

“Place is deserted. The whole goddamn street.” Donnie was nineteen or twenty with hands the size of cinder blocks and a face full of licorice fuzz. A dotted black line withered across his upper lip. He had been in Gloucester for a week, studying patterns of their target. “Slavini always opens it at night. Closes it in the morning. Must still be asleep.” He leaned against the passenger door, a porkpie hat nonchalantly tipped against his kinky hair.

“It’s Sunday. Everyone’s at church, and he sleeps.” Wingels, unlike Donnie, had small hands. He often wore women’s-sized gloves because he liked tight-fitting clothes. They made him feel secure.

“Not that church.” Donnie pointed up Prospect Street to the two curved cornices rising above rooftops and trees. “Greek church.” He tapped heavy fingers along the dash. “They got them Greek lines.”

“You Greek? The Othello of Greeks?”

Donnie laughed, low gravelly. “I’m from Waterloo, Iowa.”

“I don’t want to know where you’re from—” Best to keep their backstories their own.

The genre of ekphrastic poetry comments on the art piece that has inspired the poet’s vision or aesthetic response, as in Keats’s magnificent “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” But in “Bend of the Sun,” Hopper’s painting was a trigger, a tool that took me into another world without the meta commentary. I don’t acknowledge Hopper directly, but his art is in the story’s DNA, providing a noir vibe and scaffolding of mis-aligned details: daylight and a church Sunday, and not night, to commit a murder; an empty street with the bend of the sun and no witnesses; a Catholic community with a Greek church; two hit men, one Black, one white, one young, one older, one wearing a porkpie, the other women’s gloves.

From there things for these two just get darker, more defamiliarized, as the story leans into themes of abuse.

Case Study #6: “Ghost Town”

I absolutely love Sarah Cypher’s story. It is a master class in the use of setting for conveying nuance and vision.

Queer couples live in constant danger. Unwarranted threats and undercurrents of dismissal can occur at any time. And this story, set in Oakland, on the fringe line between gentrification and the run-down parts of town, captures that threat. On their block drift Cheetos bags and Swisher Sweets and Jolly Rancher wrappers. Around their neighborhood lurks violence: “The week before we closed escrow, a twenty-one-year old woman was found stabbed to death on the next corner, by the liquor store.”

Moreover, neighbors try to fit our narrator and her wife Andrea into a heteronormative box: “‘What? What? Where are the men?’ he cried helpless. ‘Your husbands?’” He can’t grasp or refuses to grasp that these women aren’t sisters but wives.

Cyphers then layers the images of death and decay inherent in the setting to hang like black crepe above the characters’ narrative arc. The setting begins to represent or mirror the “rough patch” in the relationship between the two women. It enriches the darkening mood as the women argue over the possibility of having a child and settling in or moving away from the neighborhood.

And in the story’s final turn Cyphers even takes stillness to a dark place. As opposed to my earlier focus on awe and wonder, here stillness represents loss and resignation: not eating a final meal of mac and cheese, baking loaves of bread. The Ghost Town now inhabits the relationship between the two women. Andrea leaves to return to Texas. Will she come back? By story’s end she’s a haunting specter, a fading memory.

The story’s final paragraph, the rebuilding of the neighborhood school, is a haunting call back to the childless couple theme and a kind of presence/absence, children breaking through the womb-like glass:

The dog seems up for it. So we head to the next block and take in the new yellow fence, the white corrugated walls, the fresh concrete, the play structure in a perfectly deserted courtyard. The tufts of pampas grass are so fresh the dirt is still black around their base. All the classrooms overlook the playground; all their windows are brand new. Their glass still bears the factory stickers and adhesive warnings, waiting to be peeled away by so many little fingernails.