Dealing Myself a Story

Here are some notes on the latest subscription story.

The first step in writing “Mrs. Maeger’s Garden” came yesterday morning when I drew three cards from Mark McElroy’s The Bright Idea Deck.  My goal was to write a short-short story using the structure that Ben Nyberg teaches in One Great Way to Write Short Stories.  Some of my readers will be familiar with “Daddy,” my short-short of 238 words, which is a stripped-down version of this structure.  (“Daddy” is one of the stories appearing in the Symmetrina “The Train There’s No Getting Off,” which was published in Polyphony 5.)

In “Daddy,” the first paragraph shows the narrator to be in a cheery, hopeful mood and he and his wife walk to the doctor’s office to ascertain whether the wife is indeed pregnant.  In the second paragraph, he gets the news that his wife is indeed pregnant.  In the third paragraph, on the walk home, he sees all the same things he saw in the beginning, but they seem threatening and sinister, and he holds his wife’s hand too tightly.

To put Nyberg’s structure in abstract terms, the first scene of a three-scene story establishes the life momentum of a character, the life path that he is on.  The second scene shows the character experiencing something that could be life-changing.  The third scene shows the character on a different path from the one he started out on, proving for the reader that scene two did, in fact, change the character’s life.

My plan was to draw three cards.  The cards, in order, would instruct me in what my three scenes were to be.

The cards that I drew were: Experience (IX Trumps), Achievement (6 Red), and Confrontation (5 Red).

So my character would start out as a person on the path of experience.  The figure on the card has gray hair, and on his wall are many honors and degrees.  He’s a senior person in his field.  Probably an academic.  Or an artist.  I have too many artists and academics in my writing, I think.  That’s my frame of reference, and the card reinforced it.  Well, when you are a senior academic, you get to call the shots.  That’s one of the rewards of experience: you get to work on your own terms.  You can, for instance, take on fewer students.

The middle card, Achievement, shows someone winning an award.  A medal.  That might be my protagonist, winning an award.  Or he might be one of the other figures, perhaps the man who appears to have been left out, passed over for the honor.

The last card, Confrontation, shows conflict at the scene of a traffic accident.  So the story will resolve with my protagonist picking a fight or getting in someone’s face.

My initial formulation:  An academic or scientist has earned the right to do his work independently.  At long last, he's on his own, able to call his own shots.  In the middle of his story, his life is disrupted by great success.  He wins the Nobel Prize or creates the astonishing invention.  He should be happy.  Paradoxically, meeting with success makes him realize the value of the very thing he has tried to free himself of: students.  The award by itself is an empty legacy.  He needs to have successors.  So he goes and confronts the person with whom he had to argue before in order to be freed of students.  Now he has to argue to have new students assigned to him!  The fact that he is confrontational in the end suggests, for the sake of symmetry, that he should have been confrontational earlier.  So he had to fight and argue to be free of students, and now he fights and argues to have some assigned to him.

The next step in composing the story was to take a long walk.  I took the cards along in my pocket and periodically took them out and looked at them.  I liked the basic movement of the story, but I didn’t like having an academic as my protagonist.  I considered making him an industrial researcher.  The people working with him wouldn’t be students, then, but subordinates or junior researchers.  I considered the various fields of science in which he might work.  I kept mulling the idea, retelling the story to myself.  Maybe he didn’t have to be an academic.  Or he was an artist who had been teaching for years and was now finally able to paint or sculpt as much as he wanted to in his retirement.  He wins a big juried art award, the award he always saw as the pinnacle for an artist like him, and is dissatisfied afterwards.  Now he craves teaching.

No.  It still wasn’t right.  I walked home planning to consult the Deck to determine my character's profession.  I could draw individual cards until one suggested the right profession.  On the way to the front door, I walked through our landscaped yard...

A gardener!  The grumpy gardener who hates having kids in his yard is almost a cliche, but this story gives it a new spin, a resolution that goes beyond the grumpiness.  And the gardener, I decided, is a woman, not a man.  This way, the story will be about her desire to nurture and protect.  The gardener is a childless woman whose nurturing energies are directed at her garden.   If I were to draw out the time period of the story enough, then the change of heart in the gardener would happen across generations.  The protagonist's softening would reflect the way that hard parents often soften as grandparents.  Even adults who don’t have children can soften emotionally in this way.  I could have the character win an award for gardening, and I could express the emptiness of the award by demonstrating, how she unsuccessfully attempts to hold on to the feelings that come with winning a prize.

Now the story was this: A woman who has no children of her own is a picky gardener.  She drives children out of her garden.  Hers is not a garden for playing in!  Then she wins a garden prize and is delighted at first.  But the award turns out not to be satisfying.  She wants a legacy, and she sees that children can represent that legacy.  She invites children into her garden.

This was the story that I set out to draft.  I did some research by having my wife show me some of what we have in our own yard that is special.  (She’s the gardener.  My gardening criteria are that there be some things that are edible, and as little lawn as possible.  Also, I like plants that attract bees.  Other than that, I don’t much care.  It takes me years to learn the names of things that Holly has planted.)

I wish I could remember when it was, exactly, that I decided on a peripheral narrator for the story.  The person who changes in this story is Mrs. Maeger, the gardener.  But I decided to tell the story from the point of view of a woman who grew up on the street and stayed as an adult.  It proved to be a fateful choice for the story.

I started drafting.  The narrative tended toward summary more than scene, so the three movements of the story are present, but not as distinctive scenes.  The events and details that I thought of didn't come to me as discrete moments, but as three sets of movement that themselves unfolded over time.  This isn't a cinematic story.  It is rather heavy on the "telling" and summary as opposed to "showing" and scene.

The closer I got to the end, the more the ending that I was writing toward seemed wrong and the more the choice of point of view seemed fateful.  I had Mrs. Maeger inviting the children into the garden and being tolerant when they wanted to eat blueberries.  But that tolerance would require a tremendous transformation of Mrs. Maeger’s thinking and feeling.  We’d have to have much more information about her to make it convincing, and we might even need to see inside of her head to understand such an A-to-Z change.  With a peripheral narrator, I found that I couldn’t be convinced of an A-to-Z change.  I went for A-to-M instead.

Even an A-to-M transformation will be mysterious to some readers.  And, indeed, I think there is more mystery in the story now, with the ending that it demanded rather than the one I first aimed for.  We don’t really know whether it’s a legacy that Mrs. Maeger now longs for, or merely an audience.  Merely audience seems to be the stronger possibility, but we don’t know.

We don’t know, but her actions, the evidence from which we have to imagine her psychology, seems convincingly real to me.  And the story still has the delicious irony: the thing that Mrs. Maeger fights against in the beginning is the very thing she wants in the end.  She has gone from angry confrontations aimed at keeping children out of her garden to an angry confrontation designed to invite them in.

I’m very happy with the way “Mrs. Maeger’s Garden” turned out, and I’m especially pleased with the good use I’ve been able to make of The Bright Idea Deck.  The Deck is a terrific creativity tool, supplying just the right combination of constraint and flexibility.  I’m planning on taking the deck with me to Crete to see if my students there will find it as useful.