On Making Fictions
An art class prompt--the fictional tableau--and some old fashioned note-taking.
Yesterday a student asked me a question about how to make fiction out of her own experiences. This is the foundation of the art, and I was reminded of back in August when the wonderful
had me as a guest writer artist for her newsletter Draw Together. For that guest post, I described a drawing class assignment that I also learned a lot from as a writer, where you combine three figures from previous drawing assignments into a single drawing, a fictional tableau. And I added a writing prompt about making the drawing out of three figure studies or three drawings and then describing that world as if looking through a window into what was happening there in the world you’d just made.
Marcantonio Pasqualini Crowned by Apollo, by Andrea Sacchi, 1641, Met Open Access.
The training of a visual artist to create the fictional tableau is meant to enable you to to make something like the above. The god Apollo is crowning the castrati soprano Marcantonio Pasqualini, who has just won a contest with the satyr Marsyas bound to a tree behind them, fighting to be free. This is one of my favorite kinds of paintings for the way everyone is looking in a different direction inside of the painting and a story apart from the title is being enacted. Pasqualini seems uncertain of staying where he is; Apollo is naked and unconcerned, and seems proud of what he is doing. The satyr Marsyas seems determined to be free and to take his revenge, but also is looking at someone off to the side, someone we can’t see. Those are his bagpipes on the ground.
I did not know about this painting until I went looking for an example of a story taken from myth and I am very moved by the expression in the eyes of Pasqualini, who seems to be more interested in the painter or the viewer than the god who is about to place the laurels on his brow. But already I love the strange tensions of it and it would be a great launching point for some kind of historical fiction about Pasqualini. Andrew Lear’s essay on this painting at the Gay and Lesbian Review has more details. If I write a story or a novel about this you saw it start here.
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My next point is, this to me is what it is like for a scene from a story or in life to find me. If it catches my attention, I study it and think of everything that seems to have brought things to where they are and where they are most likely to go. My thinking on this was sharpened a long time ago by Guy Davenport's book on the still life painting, in which he describes how still life paintings imply the life lived around the objects. Whose life than are you looking at? You treat the scene in front of you like a detective. The grape scissors beside the grapes on the table describe someone walking out to the grape arbor and cutting the grapes off their vines. It tells you you are in the home of someone who uses grape scissors and grows their own grapes. Or a table full of game, that implies a hunt that has just ended.
The Silver Tureen by Jean Siméon Chardin, ca 1728-1730, Met Open Access
The idea of the exercise is to imagine what is implied and it is worth saying, this is always the idea, with fiction. You train yourself to leap to conclusions. You say if this is true and this is true, then I’d bet this also is true. You look at the figures at the center, a bird and a rabbit, the fruits. A cook is preparing a meal and has turned away from the table, to attend to something else. You see the cat to the left, studying the animals before her as if to try to understand what has happened but also to decide which one he wants to carry away before he’s caught. He looks ready to jump—to my mind—from that very specific cat scowl of concentration on his adorable face.
The prose version of this then is to take three unfinished sketches of a kind, three observational notes even, and combine them into an idea for a story. Write three observations out in a list at the top of a page and see what comes into view. See how the pieces might attach to make a single scene and what is implied there. So much of writing a story involves thinking into the implications of what your imagination sees but has not yet brought fully into view.
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As an example, here are some notes I took last year on a visit to Brighton.
Passing a series of gay bars, each of them with a drag queen performing Padam Padam, each of them singing at a different part of the song.
A beautiful young man with long dark hair walking barefoot on the sidewalk at night, smiling as if nothing touched him.
Three different pairs of empty shoes or sandals found throughout the day, as if someone just had to be barefoot suddenly.
I could see it so clearly, as we walked home. A scene that begins with the drag queens in their clubs singing this song, each of them at a different part as if they were singing a round, while above them in the night, the beautiful dark hair of the vampire is in the wind as he flies, barefoot, sighting his victims and snatching them up into the air to feed on them before dropping them into the sea. And all that anyone finds first is their shoes along the road or the sidewalk or in the grass. The story in my mind began almost immediately.
If you try it, let me know how it works for you. If you are so moved, maybe try both the one here and at Wendy’s newsletter and see what you get from that scenario and this one, and then combine those.
Until next time,
Alexander Chee
Love the uncanny juxtapositions from this exercise! It reminds me of what I read in Laynie Browne's The Poet's Novel last night--about her grocery list with old notes for a a poem on the back, and when she was standing in the aisle she found herself looking on the shelves for a "colonial jellyfish."
Incredibly helpful, post. Many, many thanks.