I published this in Poor Mojo’s Almanac a while back. I was thinking about it again in the context of our ongoing discussion of comics, reading, Lynda Barry, and pedagogy (parts of said conversation being here and here and here. Anyway, I thought I’d reprint it, and then talk a little about how I wrote it and (generalizing wildly) about how people create.
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Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl named Lorna, who lived with her mother in a house in the woods. Lorna was so beautiful that everyone who saw her fell in love with her. This was a nuisance; she couldn’t go to the stream to get a drink of water without getting twenty marriage proposals, and it was hard to feed the hens when the lawn was covered with young men kneeling and weeping. Lorna got so fed up that she didn’t even want to leave the house, and when she did leave it she’d have to put a bag over her head, which made it hard to see. Her mother, who was old and wrinkled and had an odd sense of humor, would giggle when she saw Lorna walking around and bumping into things. But she did love her daughter, and she knew this sort of thing wouldn’t do for the long term. So she told Lorna, “When I die, and you must seek your fortune, take my skin and wear it to disguise your beauty.”
Eventually, Lorna’s mother died. Lorna did as she’d been told; she took her mother’s skin, clothed herself in it, and went off to seek her fortune. She enjoyed walking through the fields without a bag over her head and without having to dodge love-sick suitors, even though having to wear her mother’s skin was a little icky. Finally, after a long trek, Lorna reached a large castle. She knocked and the Prince who owned the castle came to the door. As it happened, he needed someone to watch his geese. Lorna took the job.
Lorna moved into a little hut near the castle. She might have lived happily ever after there tending the geese, except that her mother’s skin didn’t fit exactly right. During the day it was okay, but at night when she was trying to sleep it pinched and itched, and she discovered that if she wanted any sleep at all she had to remove it. So she put it at the foot of her bed. And in the morning the geese would poke their heads into her hut, and see her sleeping in her natural form. Then they’d fly into the air singing, “Honk! Lorna’s prettier than you think! Honk! Honk!”
One day the Prince happened to be up early wandering out in the fields. He heard the geese honking about Lorna, and he was curious. So he walked over to Lorna’s hut and saw her through the window just as she was about to put on her mother’s skin. “Oh, drat!” said Lorna. “Does this mean you’re going to fall in love with me now?” And of course it did. But the Prince was fairly handsome himself, and, to tell the truth, Lorna was tired of geese and of dead skin. So she married him, and after a while, as she got older, she grew less pretty, and started to look rather like her mother even without the skin. Eventually only the prince and the geese and her children loved her, and all the young men fell in love with somebody else. Which was perfectly all right with her.
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So…like I said, I wrote this a while back. It was originally supposed to be part of a Composition and Grammar textbook I was working on for high school students taking courses by correspondence. I was doing a unit on narrative and was having students do writing based on fairy tales. I would give them a bare bones outline of the fairy tale plot (one or two sentences), and then tell them to expand the story (into three or four paragraphs). I provided several examples of expanded narratives, and the story above was one such. (I think we didn’t use it because my boss at the time felt the whole mother’s skin thing was too creepy…and maybe she had a point.)
Anyway. Thinking about writing this, and the exercise it was a part of, made me think of this comment by Dan Kois about Lynda Barry’s pedagogy:
As I mention in passing in the article, Lynda makes the case in her class that narrative structure — that is, one major component of the craft of storytelling — is a natural muscle that most humans have. The example she gives is the way you tell a story depending on whether you have one minute to tell it or ten minutes to tell it; she points out that it’s a natural tendency to construct the details of a story in a manner appropriate for the space that one has to fill.
The exercise I was doing — asking students to expand a fairy tale — is basically an exercise that Barry says is unnecessary, if I understand Dan correctly. Barry’s saying that people naturally know how to tell a story in the time (or space) allotted. It’s not an issue of craft (that is, learned ability) because it’s natural, like falling in a lake. If you have ten minutes to tell a story, you tell it in ten minutes. Simple as that.
So were all my efforts superfluous? I didn’t think so then…and now that I have a son, and am subjected to his narrative efforts all the time, I’m even less convinced. If you listen to small kids tell stories, the thing you notice is that they don’t know how to do it. There was a horrible period there, for example, where my son was obsessed with Garfield. He wanted the strips read to him all the time (which was bad enough), but he also wanted to explain and relay the strips to others. And he just couldn’t do it. He could see the strip in his mind, and he generally got the words right, but he couldn’t figure out what needed to be told when and how to a person who hadn’t seen the strip. The narrative would start and stutter and stop and go back again, and miss the joke and then he’d start over and you just wanted to claw your eyes out and curse the name of Garfield forevermore.
My son’s much, much better at narrative now…but it’s not because he got in touch with his natural essence. It’s because he’s read a lot more, and listened to people talk a lot more, and has internalized (some of) the rules and codes for creating stories. And it really is often “rules and codes” — he and his friends tell stories to each other, and they are obsessive about breaking their stories into chapters…and almost as obsessive about repeating the same story in the same way as it was originally told to them. And…my son actually explained to me at length at one point how he was going to write the back cover blurb for his book. Which maybe means he’s being corrupted by corporate culture, but as a doting father, I prefer to believe that his command of point-of-purchase advertising is instead a sign of increased narrative mastery.
Be that as it may…I think my version of the “Mamaskin” story itself also suggests that narrative is less a natural reflex than an acquired skill. Specifically, the story is put together from other stories. The basic plot, as I said, is taken from a folk tale. My retelling is also informed, obviously, by my generalized knowledge of folk tales, and of folk tale adaptations. Specifically, it’s probably more than a little touched by Patricia Wrede’s YA feminist Enchanted Forest series, with the smart, capable Princess Cimorene, who starts young but as the series goes along gets older and wiser.
The end of the my story, though, comes from here:
He, the one they recognised, no longer thought–his mind being so occupied–that love might still exist. With all that was happening at the time it’s understandable that the only thing they would tell of later was what he did, the incredible action he performed, which no one had seen before: the gesture of supplication, in which he threw himself down before them, imploring them not to show love. Alarmed by this and shaking they raised him to his feet. They interpreted his
impulsive behaviour in their own way, while at the same time forgiving him. He must have found it indescribably liberating to find that they’d all misunderstood him, despite his desperately explicit manner.It was likely they’d let him stay. As the days passed he came to see more clearly that the love they were so vain about and which they secretly encouraged in one another did not affect him. He almost had to smile at the trouble they took and it became obvious that their concern for him could not amount to much.
What did they know about who he was? He was now so terribly difficult to love, and he felt there was only the One who was capable of it. But He was not yet willing.
That’s the conclusion of Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and one of my favorite passages in all of literature. And since I liked it so much, I stole it, which is more or less what writers do. (I also was thinking of this line from slightly earlier in Rilke’s narrative: ” The simple love of his sheep didn’t affect him; like light falling through clouds, it was scattered all about him and shimmered softly upon the meadows.” I love that.)
I’m not denying that there’s a personal element in my version of “Mamaskin” as well. Like Lorna (and lots of other people), I found marriage rather a relief. But I’d argue that (like Lorna’s again) the relief is itself a narrative one. When you’re in the story of romance, you’re in the story of romance; getting out of that is figuring a way to tell a different tale, which is closely related to living a different life.
Barry’s certainly right, then, that narrative is natural in the sense that it’s tied up with and into human lives. But the thing is that human lives aren’t very natural; we’re weird alien things, narratives grafted onto dyring animals. Figuring out what to do with this narrative that’s in us isn’t something you find naturally the way a bee locates a flower. It’s something you acquire like a baby learns to speak. That is, with a certain amount of struggle and tears, and with varying proficiency depending on numerous factors, including the quality of your teachers. Speech is a technology and a craft, and so, surely, is writing. And, as is generally the case with a craft, you get better at it by imitating models, practicing, and sometimes taking advice. There’s not any particular magic to it, except maybe the magic of not having any magic except the skins our parents have left us.
I think that narrative is an acquired skill (one that people may not realize is acquired, so it seems like they just naturally have it). So it is important to practice (writing “exercises”).
This particular story, I agree with your supervisor, is pretty gross (with the skin-wearing). Reminds me of “Silence of the Lambs,” in which the killer is making a woman suit out of real women’s skin (though I realize that in the story, there’s some kind of sanitizing magic involved. But still…).
In my defense, the skin-wearing was not my idea. Like I said, I stole it from the fairy tale.
I did think it was a pretty great idea, though, so I guess I am culpable in that sense…
It’s quite a bit like the Perrault tale Donkey Skin, which Jacques Demy made into one of my favorite movies of all time. Ans a bit like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, although youthful beauty meets its end in a more sudden manner.
I think I saw Donkey Skin with you! I remember I liked it but not a whole lot else about it… Hadn’t thought of the TCM connection…though maybe my boss did….
This, fortunately, has nothing to do with wearing other people’s skin, except perhaps metaphorically, but I got to hear Umberto Eco talk the other night and he said (and this is almost a quote but probably not quite), “Every book is a dream of other books.”
I imagine he meant it ontologically — all books are this, whether or not the creator is thinking about it. Which gets at Christina’s apt point that narrative is not only acquired, but often not experienced as acquired.
Which is why, IMO, writers who focus on naif narrative can just never be as wise or as interesting as writers who understand what writing is — a dream of other writing. That’s why, I think, I don’t buy Jeet’s claims for orality on the other thread. Once it’s written down in a book, it’s no longer oral, even if that’s the tradition that’s being appealed to. That’s a kind of “non-literary” innocence that always rings very very false to me.
The thing about oral traditions is not that they’re too naive…it’s that in many ways they’re more intensely intertextual than writing. Oral traditions are avowedly and intentionally always retellings, and often use very formalized structural elements. Writing traditions have more of an emphasis on originality to counterbalance that. But if you’re teaching oral traditions, you’d generally teach specific stories and specific ways of telling them — the whole inner creative process question would be largely beside the point.
I should disclose that I’ve never taken Lynda Barry’s class, but I’ve read What It Is, Picture This, One Hundred Demons, The Greatest of Marlys, The Freddie Stories, Everything in the World, The Good Times Are Killing Me, Cruddy, Blabber Blabber Blabber, and every interview with her on the internet. It might also be relevant to note that, most of the time, I don’t work according to her methods.
However: Noah, I think you (and, to some extent, everyone on this site) are misinterpreting Barry’s goals as a teacher. Her classes and her books are meant for people who have never written for its own sake before, not for people who already write and want to get “better.” The goal of her exercises is explicitly not to produce something publishable. She’s very, very clear about these things.
Barry’s instruction books teach drawing and writing as self-medication. They are for people with trauma; people with anxiety disorders; people with depression; people who fight themselves, every day, every second. They are for people who are intimate with fear. They are for people who feel like their minds are not their own. Craft, for this particular sort of person, isn’t a process of refinement, the polishing of a stone; it’s something that stops them. Your own critical voice can make your art better, if you can control it–but if you can’t, it opens the door to that part of the mind, the dangerous part, that only has one thing to tell you: “You don’t deserve to live.”
Is the “natural” approach she advocates all that’s necessary to become a professional writer? Probably not. If you listen to her talk about her work, it’s clear that she’s spent years doing the same things your son does: reading, a lot, and listening to people talk, a lot. But I would say that the primary purpose of her pedagogy is not to lead people into careers (and rightly so, considering most writers and artists can’t support themselves without better-paying work on the side), it’s to help them feel safe in their own minds. Nobody, nobody who hasn’t felt it happen, can imagine what it is to lose that, the ability to be alone with yourself. It’s like not being able to breathe. This is why she privileges accessibility over craft, and over just about everything else.
In many ways, she’s not teaching writing. But what’s wrong with that? There are plenty of people who do.
If she’s a therapist, she should say she’s a therapist. If she’s teaching writing, then that’s really a whole other thing.
It certainly sounds from Dan’s piece that she’s presenting herself as teaching writing.
I have a lot to say about what’s wrong with the idea of writing as therapy, and with the idea that criticism and writing are opposed. Maybe I’ll just link this again though and leave it at that.
Noah, that review is one of the most deserving takedowns I’ve ever read. What an insipid book. In the spirit of reviewing amazingly stupid cultural publishing phenomena long after they’ve set sail, how about follow-up analysis on “Who Moved My Cheese” and “the Secret”? Hell, I’d love to be part of a “Who Moved My Cheese” roundtable…
I don’t think I’m up for reading a ton of self-help books…I just stumbled upon the Cameron and was transfixed by its utter evilness— I used it in a couple of found-text poems I did as well back then.
I’m all for you writing about Who Moved My Cheese, though.
True story: when I was a teenager, I wanted to be a Cheese-Moving style self-improvement/management/motivational speaker/guru/chopra. You get to make up total bullshit — one-half platitude, one-half outdated pop-psychology and one-half Barnumism — and people pay you for it! It seemed like the perfect job to me…ditto being a “futurist”.
Nowadays, I’ve set my sights higher and aspire to be the next David Brooks or Thomas Friedman.