Story

what it isn't

Friends,

When I was a college senior tasked with producing an Honors Thesis, I presented to my committee of English professors a short story collection that I’d titled (don’t make fun of me) The Asymmetry of Heat.

The Asymmetry of Heat, I told the committee, was influenced by the Nouveau Roman (New Novel)—a mid-century French literary movement centered on shunning conventional novel structure—and equally influenced by a Gestalt psychology concept called closure. Closure is the brain’s tendency to “close” something unfinished—an incompletely drawn circle, for instance. Instead of acknowledging the circle’s missing piece, the eye will resolve the shape and make it whole.

I barely knew what I was banging on about and my stories were Robbe-Grillet knock-offs and one member of my thesis committee suggested I “marry rich,” but the point is, the idea of rejecting conventional structures, including (but not only) in stories, captured my imagination. I sort of believed that people had a responsibility to resist closing the circle. Our brains want the thing closed, but shouldn’t we instead embrace the discomfort of reality? I guess I was Ascetic, though only in theory. In practice, I knew nothing about the discomfort of reality beyond the fact that my roommate Julie and I lived in a two-level house and the weird guys downstairs, who named their pet bird after me, let strange men sleep in our laundry room.

That’s me, back in college, wearing a “Harvest The Sun, No Nukes” T-shirt, and carrying Julie on my back.

Twice the age I was then, I love comfort unabashedly. As I write this, I’m lying on my couch, wearing a bathrobe, my legs wrapped in a blanket, enjoying my Shiatsu back massager. But I still love plotless writing, or at least writing that excuses itself from the Aristotelian three-act structure. I love books composed of beautiful sentences in which nothing much happens, or in which all the action occurs cerebrally, rather than externally—That Night by Alice McDermott, Simple Passion by Annie Erneaux, The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier. I love the Carverian zero ending. I love characters, fictional or otherwise, who behave badly and demonstrate no growth: In The Book of Dahlia by Elisa Albert, for example, everyone keeps telling the protagonist, who is dying of a brain tumor, that positive thinking will be integral to her survival. She ignores that advice and remains negative and shitty to the end.

Likewise, I love travel writing that doesn’t tell a tightly structured story so much as explore an idea: Date and Time of Loss by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, Such Perfection by Chloe Cooper Jones, Goodbye To All That by Joan Didion. Even James Joyce’s Ulysses counts as structureless travel writing, and though I’ll never put myself through reading it again, I really loved that book.

Speaking of Joyce! Come study writing with me in Dublin!

Recently, I interviewed a CEO who regaled me with the “story” of his company. Of course, it was less a story than a thinly veiled advertisement: Behold the hard-scrabble beginnings, the blood, sweat, and tears of the rising action, the orgasmic climax of his success. I imagined him tying up the used condom in a neat bow, dangling it in front of his face to admire it.

When exactly did the business world change the definition of “story” to: a couple of broke dudes in a basement having a “crazy idea,” their era of toiling against the odds, their start-up swelling to epic proportions, and a splash of nostalgia for the salad years?

(I admit I’m using “business world” in a vague, non-committal, sweeping way, because I don’t exactly know what it is.)

This is the business world.

Not everyone has to be a hero, or even an anti-hero. In real life, most people are neither or both, depending on the day. Also in real life, satisfying closure often eludes us. In grief as we yearn for a different ending, or when stewing in anger, wishing we’d gotten in our comeback off the cuff, our brains do that filling-in-the-circle thing, but those fantasies bump up against immutable truth. Isn’t that bumping up the interesting part?

I’m not saying that all writing must mirror real life; I just don’t want the writer to do all of my work for me. If the writer leaves enough unsaid, my brain will continue working through the piece long after I’ve finished reading it.

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In the craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode, the writer Jane Alison advocates for deriving story structures from patterns found in nature—the spiral, for instance. How beautiful: not a circle that’s forced closed, but a line coiling around and around, moving farther and farther from its center.

In my opinion, the only story rule is: Don’t be boring. A boring story could benefit from a shot of classic structure, which does, after all, have tension baked into it, but it would likely benefit more from a deepening of the characters, the addition of granular details, a sprucing up of the sentences, and the writer’s connecting to a sense of urgency (why does this story need to be told?).

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A few years ago, my friend Peter mentioned that he still had a copy of The Asymmetry of Heat, probably the only existing copy. He had been lugging it around since college. But he’s moved a couple of times lately, so I’m scared to ask if he’s lost it. (He subscribes to my Substack and will probably let me know. Hi, Peter!)

I hope The Asymmetry of Heat finds its way back to me, but knowing Peter, who is usually high, and knowing life, which is usually messy, here’s a plot I find more plausible: I wrote the thing, it existed pointlessly for a couple of decades, and then, for no reason at all, it was gone.

Love,

Diana

P.S. Let’s go to Mexico! I’m teaching several classes in February at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference.

P.P.S. Here’s a prompt: Write about the smoothest, most uneventful travel experience of your life. Make us care.

P.P.P.S. What do you think makes a good travel story? Tell me in the comments!