Note from Jess: Today, Alex gives us his theory of “The List.” Tomorrow he puts it into practice. So make sure to check-in tomorrow to read Alex’s “Dictionary of Your Fears.”

Parochial Plaids, Self-Cogitation, the Water Moccasin Myth, and “I Might Want to Come Back”: How You’re Already Trying to Figure Out What This List Means

At the moment, I have twenty-seven Firefox tabs concurrently open. I have three separate To-Do lists: one in a planner, one on yellow legal pad, one scattered across tiny scraps of paper all over my bedroom. I have an ever-present grocery list for four separate grocery stores in my surrounding area. I have Kevin Brockmeier’s catalogue of his Fifty Favorite Stories. I have stacks of writing rules from varied writers (Vonnegut, Gass, Moody). I have a sprawling scatter of subjects I should be writing for this essay. I have this list itself.

Clearly, I’m a collection of disembodied fragments. And I’m aware that not everyone is surrounded by such itemization or disarrayed organization. But in a lot of cases, we can distill much of living down to categories within categories within larger sortings because we like to be spread out with our fingers in lots of different pockets and lots of different pies. I imagine that a stranger reading all these lists of mine might have a fair picture of my habits, or at least enough of an introduction so that I’d no longer be a stranger.

The same could be said of meeting characters in fiction, and stories in general. As a reader, being given a list of objects that a character carries in his pocket every day on the subway or what he notices on the subway platform or who he tries to avoid on the subway car is both an easy and difficult technique to utilize. On the one hand, you cover a fair amount of ground in a short time; moreover, a reader will automatically search for links between listed items in trying to form a more whole picture. But this can also become tedious, frustrating, and cyclically repetitive. In his The Paris Review interview, Rick Moody says,

“I could list the books on the bookshelf here in your apartment (Philippe Sollers, Thomas Bernhard, Walter Abish), proposing, metonymically, this as an accurate sketch of who you are. There’s something really rich and powerful in not talking about what you need to talk about sometimes.”

That’s nothing new. By themselves, lists work fine within sentences, performing the function that Moody describes. The one I read this morning comes from Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask:

“I’d cure my solipsistic hysteria with a noonday jaunt. Sights and smells. Schoolkids in parochial plaids. Grizzled men grilling meat. The deaf woman handing out flyers for the nail salon, or the other deaf woman with swollen hands and a headscarf who hawked medical thrillers in front of the drugstore.”

Image, detail, setting, insight into the character’s mindset, language sounds, themes. In an effort to deliver some or all of these, an especially good list will “seem extemporaneous, but ring sacred” (Mary Leader). All well and good.

But I’d like to think that lists could do more—that they, in fact, hint at a greater urge to leap over gaps rather than go plodding down the long, step-by-step path of more traditionally told fiction. What I mean by “traditional” is typically a chronological, beginning-middle-end setup with little to no swerving (content-, language-, or narration-wise) from the goal dictated at the story’s onset. This gets played with a lot, yet many writers still, at the end of the day, bow down to the gods of the established, publicly accepted narrative that takes the direct flight from Point A to Point Z. I count myself in this camp, too. It’s difficult not to write like that because we’ve been taught it so thoroughly. But I’ve been trying to use the concept of list-making as less of a sentence’s anchor and more of an overt guide in the overall storytelling structure. The list doesn’t always turn out to be the story alone, but it can serve as the backbone—straight, scoliotic, or broken at several significant vertebrae.

First, a list introduces several elements. In most cases, such as the Lipsyte quotation above, those details never show up again. They are shooting stars or fancy fireworks: unique and pretty but far away and fleeting. To make the list accomplish more, one must not just A) remember to revisit those items elsewhere in the story, but B) actually use them in a new, interesting, and meaningful way where they begin to interact with the other items. What you took before to be a shooting star or firework suddenly returns, becoming a small meteor that suddenly crashes into your character’s Buick with a hostile alien at its molten core (see the recent and excellent film Attack the Block). When this happens, the story’s “arc” archetype changes. It moves instead in the shape of a corkscrew. It’s not just bringing up the “schoolkids in parochial plaids” again, but rather, later, showing them changed or intensified or under a different garish red light while they begin to swindle the deaf women. Already, an unexpected story has emerged.

Thankfully, lots of great writers have given us all kinds of successful, experimental examples to work from. To borrow from Moody again, his story “Boys” is one of the clearest demonstrations of how a list takes a few simple elements, repeats and revisits them, and then unfolds into an engaging narrative as a result of the repetition. In this case, it’s a story about boys growing up. “Boys enter the house” is the staple phrase for every sentence. But with each sentence (i.e., item in the list), we get to watch its repetition mutate or disintegrate or reassert itself and in turn describe the boys’ lives as they mutate, disintegrate, or reassert themselves:

Boys enter the house having masturbated in a variety of locales. Boys enter the house having masturbated in train-station bathrooms, in forests, in beach houses, in football bleachers at night under the stars, in cars (under a blanket), in the shower, backstage, on a plane, the boys masturbate constantly, identically, three times a day in some cases, desire like a madness upon them, at the mere sound of certain words, words that sound like other words, interrogative reminding them of intercourse, beast reminding them of breast, sects reminding them of sex, and so forth, the boys are not very smart yet, and as they enter the house they feel, as always, immense shame at the scale of this self-abusive cogitation, seeing a classmate, seeing a billboard, seeing a fire hydrant, seeing things that should not induce thoughts of masturbation (their sister, e.g.) and then thinking of masturbation anyway.

The fact that we get this intense focus on their masturbation in a variety of venues allows the boys’ actions to be coupled with changing insights. Moody could have just left it at the first sentence and we would have understood the basics. But to simultaneously spin his wheels and leap forth in this particular subject gives the boys’ “self-abusive cogitation” that much more power and influence over the rest of the story and the characters themselves. Similarly, Jamaica Kincaid does this in “Girls.” Still, in these examples there’s that adherence to the old urge: clear connective tissue from one moment to the next. The sentences in Moody’s story still fit together in a logically unfolding way.

Taking a few steps off from this main track is Donald Barthelme. He works the same corkscrew method in his story “Concerning the Bodyguard,” only with much less obvious transition between his lines (which are almost all questions, one after another). And in turn, Padgett Powell performs a book-length version of this in The Interrogative Mood:

How often do you think about the mythic water skier who skis into the ball of water moccasins? Would skiing into a ball of water moccasins constitute an urban legend even if the legend predates the term “urban legend,” and are urban legends inclusive of legends that are, like skiing into a ball of water moccasins, distinctly not urban? Does the urban in urban legend mean the legend is born among urbanites as opposed to its happening specifically in a city? Have you ever heard of the water skier who skies into a great ball of barbed wire? How would you assume these legends related: is the barbed wire a distortion of the water moccasins, the moccasins a distortion of the barbed wire, or were these legends born independently? Do you believe it could be the case that a water skier has in fact skied into a ball of water moccasins, and that another has in fact skied into a great tangle of barbed wire?

By turning over the elements (water skier and water moccasins) a little further with each sentence, they take on a fuller depth and cast a larger shadow over what is to come. This example shows one of the more focused stretches of prose in the book; the majority of the questions elsewhere zoom from one subject to the next, ten different ones in a single paragraph. It’s the ability to employ all previously mentioned elements that helps cohere Powell’s book into a narrative rather than a list of totally disparate questions. A.L. Kennedy’s story “The Mouseboks Family Dictionary” is a list of entries from a dictionary. As you read each entry, the entries begin to interact. Some build on early ones and some forecast later ones. Altogether, they form a complete picture of this family and its values without ever having to abandon the list form and go into more traditional straightforward storytelling mode. This is my main point, perhaps. A list is a story, but only if you’re willing to abandon more conventional (see: arbitrary) modes of narration.

A story that uses the streaming list in a somewhat subtler version yet is nonetheless just as, if not more, subversive and powerful as my other examples is Tony Earley’s “The Prophet from Jupiter,” which I happened to find on Brockmeier’s list of “Fifty Stories.”

In short, the story is about a dam keeper and the town of Glen Lake, told through the dam keeper’s point of view in first-person perspective, present tense. Paragraph 1 introduces the dam keeper. Paragraph 2 introduces a family on Tryon bay, their labrador, a touched man named Junie Wilson, a flock of ducks, and the Prophet from Jupiter. Paragraph 3 goes back to the dam keeper, but includes a new character named Old Man Bill Burdette who left his Reo truck in the valley when they flooded it to make Glen Lake. Over the course of the story, we meet a total of at least seventeen different characters (human, animal, legendary). With each new one, all the previous characters have one more element to interact with. They fight, fuck, and defend each other. Again, this is merely good writing: to make things complicated for everyone involved.

But what is striking about the way Earley tells this story is that almost every paragraph (after the first one) features the actions of more than one character in more than one place at more than one time. For example:

Randy is twenty years old and already has two children. He is not married. His girlfriend is tall and skinny and mean-looking. Randy says she fucks like a cat. The old people say that the morning of the day the water came up, somebody asked Aunt Plutina why she closed her windows and locked her doors, and she said, Why you never know. Sometime I just might want to come back. Junie Wilson has seen her. I am afraid that someday I will see her, too. The last time I slept with Elisabeth, two hearts beat inside her.

The first sentence or two indicates that Randy is the main subject, that all the sentences will involve him. But it soon shifts to the old people, then Aunt Plutina, then Junie, then the narrator, then the narrator and his wife Elisabeth. The path of the narrative becomes unpredictable because the step from one sentence to the next becomes unpredictable. It happens over and over. Why are we willing to live with this unpredictability? Why do we suspend judgment of what might otherwise be considered shoddy, aimless writing because the paragraphs don’t stay honed in? Weren’t we taught that paragraphs are tightly arranged lenses with a single (albeit deep) subject matter under focus and that when we switch to a new one, we should start a new block of text?

We allow this structural “disorganization” because leaping, like Earley does, is a more natural, raw way of telling a story. To go straight from beginning to end, chronologically, without any deviation, is an illogical device imposed on a more fluid and ultimately more interesting pattern (or lack thereof). It’s like trying to straighten a river that’s already there. You can build a canal, sure, but if it’s perfectly straight then you can clearly see the other end, so why walk it unless your goal is simply to get to the end as fast as you can? I’d rather walk the impulsively meandering, backtracking, forking stream. This can happen between sentences, paragraphs, space breaks, chapters—at any point where the urge to provide some direct connective strings arises. The first-person narration is a significant reason why this works for Earley because the vacillations between time, person, and place are exactly how the dam keeper’s mind works. (Even more so in the present tense.) We make lists to help remember all those details, to try and give them some semblance of organization. But when we do this, it’s typically not with an effort to list them in a particular arc or grouping breakdown.

This seems a far greater accomplishment for a writer: to artfully tell a story in this admittedly more destabilized and decentralized manner because it’s more difficult than if, say, Earley had arranged each paragraph so that it only described one character or one event and then provided clear transitions between it and the next paragraph. He takes on the same corkscrewing principle, with many little corkscrews making up the larger ones. Every detail he introduces returns elsewhere to set hurdles for the plot. The last paragraph of the story revisits at least thirteen separate characters. Nothing says they all have to resolve neatly; their value comes in their own changes or in their exertion of some unique pressure on the rest of the elements.

Maybe I’m gravitating to the freedom that “The Prophet from Jupiter” permits me to feel, a young and inexperienced writer, when assembling fiction out of disparate pieces. But where so many stories I read now work to impose a kind of too-simple latticework of artifice on their narratives by setting down rigid walls of progression from Point A to Point Z (with the occasional flashback or tangent), their inclinations to do that lull me into a before-unnoticed boredom. Those flashbacks and tangents end up becoming the most engaging, memorable parts. They are the imagination inserting itself into the consciousness. So I’m all for allowing the unpredictable imagination to rule the order of thought because that’s at least how my own brain operates: in similar metonymic fashion. I’m not saying your brain has to.

At the moment, I have thirty-one Firefox tabs open, including job postings for Wizards of the Coast, a LivingSocial deal for Mini-Golf, and my Google Calendar. They seem to be multiplying exponentially. Of my three To-Do lists: the planner is getting messier with four colors of ink, the yellow legal pad is missing, and the scraps of paper have all gone through the wash. My grocery lists for four separate stores are stable because prices rarely change, but I keep making impulsive buys from the most expensive one. I have read very few stories on Kevin Brockmeier’s “Fifty Stories” catalogue, which makes me feel like I’m falling behind, or I already started far back from the pack. My stacks of writing rules aren’t doing much good in stacks. I still wonder if I should have chosen a different subject for this essay. But at least this list has me feeling natural and not so much a stranger.

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