The Novella: This and That
Wraxtiorre
proclaims itself to be the most haphazardly written. Does it possess
the kind of unity that a novella (in the Henry Jamesian sense) should
have? Is it too contemptuous of reader expectations to be studied
seriously? Is it a valid effort of meaningful metafiction, or just a
romp? In the first footnote, I admit freely (and not shamefully) that
I realized very early that it would have to be re-written, but went
ahead and wrote it out to its conclusion. I kept asking myself,
"Why?" I knew that the narrative voice I was writing with was
flighty, inexperienced, and strongly lacking in style or polish. I
knew that the story deserved a better treatment than I was giving it.
But I needed to write it out, not just to get it out of my system, but
merely so that I could say I had written a novel, and also so that I
would be working on the revision of a complete text--not something
that hadn't yet been written the first time it was worked out. When I
completed it, I knew very well that it was way too short to be
considered a novel. (I grew up in the days of when a novel was
something that required a bit of arm strength to pick up). But,
unlike "Int Dat Cute?" or "Footprints on the Wall," I had no idea what
was supposed to happen next in the story as I was writing it, and that
gave it an energy I didn't want to lose by stopping in order to revise
or rewrite.
In "Int Dat Cute?," I built the story according to the Rule of
Threes (in the course of storytelling, the object or subject of
consternation should be presented to the reader on three separate
occasions before the story's climax), and enforced a fast-paced
narrative style on myself, so that it was very tightly constrained,
structured, and contained only the events which told the story--
because I knew exactly what needed to happen in it. In "Footprints,"
I again built the story on a set of events that I knew needed to
happen in it, but chose to embellish the narrative with unrelated
details and a subtle narrative style which was a risky choice of slow,
methodical pacing built by alternating sentence structures which (I
have been told) defies speed-reading. But in "This and That," I
avoided style, mostly because I wanted to find out where the story
would go. Yes, I intentionally followed the story instead of building
it.
I also played lots of tricks that that I knew would make an editor
reject the manuscript merely because I dared to try them. One glaring
example is the long passages of inactivity in Chapter Eight. When
they tell you, "Show don't tell," they don't mean show inactivity
instead of merely reporting it! But I said, "No!" If the characters
are gong to take charge of the story and piss off the author by doing
nothing for two pages, then the two pages of inactivity need to be
there. But that was one of the most obvious tricks. The more
challenging tricks were the constant interactions with reader
expectations and assessments. I delighted in the thought that I was
writing a story which seemed to be anticipating the suspicions of an
intelligent reader, which proffered a carrot under the reader's nose
only to yank it away at the exact moment the hungry reader lunged at
it. The whammy begins in the second sentence of Chapter One, and
continues throughout. In fact, I take the effect of metafiction one
step further in the latter half of the novella by making the story
comment on the defiant nature of the narrative. Yet another
metafictional trick which was not perpetrated until the story's
publication in Mangled Doves is the publishing staff's defiant act of
deleting the content of Chapter Four. The "Note from the Publishing
Staff" which was attached to the end of the text of Chapter Four as a
narrative joke is now the only content in Chapter Four.
As I persistently wrote through to the end of the story, I began to
think about rewriting it, and had the haunting idea that this sketch-
quality piece of writing needed to be published before the novel which
contained its rewrite. Now, after four childhoods of continuing
revision, that first step has now occurred.
Wraxtiorre
yet, the content of Chapter Four is included in the Appendices.