MHB’s Friends and the lessons I learned re: Disrupting Realism
by Kimberley Allen McNamara
My last post covered the free online class author Marie-Helene Bertino conducted with the help of the fabulous Electric Literature. Bertino’s class topic: Disrupting Realism.
A Recap: What We Established Earlier
Realism is subjective and to disrupt realism a variety of practices may be employed.
Bertino stated often and quite simply disrupting realism means disrupting the Laws of Physics but not the “laws of fiction” which are as follows:
What does my character want?
What does my character think they want?
What is standing in their way of getting their want?
And MOST Importantly: the Passover Question: Why is this night/day different from any other night/day. Or as David Mamet said in his famous memo: “Why now?”
From the Brownstone Steps
Set up in a format similar to Sesame Street with various authors from across the United States “dropping by” to weigh in on what/how they disrupt realism in their own writing. Here is my take away from three of the authors who “dropped” into Bertino’s class and shared how they Disrupt Realism.
The First Visitor
Author Helen Phillips, who identified herself as a white, female with freckles and green eyes, the author of five books, was the first author to “stop” by, cue the brownstone steps.
Phillips’ most recent novel, The Need, has been described by author Karen Russell as: “totally new vernacular” for the experience of motherhood. “She found some way to activate these primal anxieties,” she [Russell] says. “You do sort of feel, on any given Wednesday, there’s a shadow story connected to the day you’re living.”
To disrupt realism with her first collection of stories, Phillips focused on a constraint. She constrained her writing with a word limit. 340 words only for each piece of prose that she wrote. This would evolve into her first collection of stories entitled And Yet They Were Happy. The collection centered on the adventures of a young couple stepping out into the world where that world is both familiar and fantastical. She made herself write only 340 word stories, miniatures, of this young couple. The constraint of 340 words made the writing sing, pop, and at times crackle. She held her ground and in the end a chronicle of this couple’s world emerged. By limiting the space, her words had to perform double, contort themselves, and pull double shifts in the work of the story.
The Second Guest
Pulitzer-Prize winner and award-winning author, Mitchell S. Jackson was Bertino’s second visitor. In his most recent work (2019) , a memoir Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family, he disrupted the norm of expectation by a series of linked essays. Hailed by critics as and as noted in the Portland Monthly, “a series of blistering, lyrical essays that mine Mitchell’s life story as a springboard to explore the social, political, and historical contexts of his own experience—as well as the odds of making it through adulthood as a Black man in America.”
In the aforementioned interview, Jackson related why he set out to write what would become Survival Math: “I was reading about the Enlightenment thinkers and how they believed that the clearest evidence of your intellect was writing,”...“That’s what I really wanted to do with the [essays]: make them look at my mind.”
When disrupting realism, Jackson, known for his linguistic prowess, said pointedly conjugation also makes a difference in what is considered realism and reveals a great deal about the writing, the narrator, the characters, the surrealism or the grounding. According to Jackson, the key is to focus on the sentences. His personal tool box: repetition in terms of sentence, in terms of structure. Per Jackson: self and sound are analogous. Think about that. There is music in your words, Jackson said. He then paraphrased Gordon Lish, who said: “don’t have stories; have sentences”, but also believed that to be good at prose, to progress in prose, one should practice poetry in revision. Jackson continued: People like patterns; so consider the “Rule of Threes”, a wonderful and expected pattern. Now, instead of three stretch the rule to four. This is a disruption. Jackson also recommended playing with words, creating new words, and using colloquialisms without explanation.
The Third Guest
Kristiana Kahakauwila was up next, she dropped into class from Hawai’i. Kahakauwila, “a hapa writer of kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiian), German and Norwegian descent”, is the author of a collection of stories entitled This is Paradise: Stories, which was named a Barnes & Noble new writer notable in 2013 and shortlisted for the William Sayroan International Prize for Writing. The collection plays with refraction, with a refracted image, throughout with POVs collapsing into other POVs and melding/morphing into others.
( An aside: Having just started reading This is Paradise, I feel almost as if I am on a merry-go-round, catching glimpses or fragments of an image before being whirled away. I am humbled by the beauty of her writing.)
Kahakauwila read several passages from published works in the plural “we” point of view or the “you”, second person point of view, and then switched them to the more popular POVs of first person or third. These passages were changed dramatically by the point of view being changed. This exercise illustrated how sometimes by changing the point of view of a piece of prose you can either amp up the piece or make the piece more dense.
By shifting the point of view, Kahakauwila stated, you feel allowed to write about something you may never have written about, because to do so in first person or third may be too personal but write it in second or first person plural or third person plural, suddenly you realize you’ve disrupted realism and written that which could not be written. She also stressed the importance of negative space on the page, as a movement through time, and concept of vignettes as in The House on Mango Street as a unique and disruptive way to tell a overall story.
Three Visitors, Their Insights, And Application
These three authors: Phillips, Jackson, and Kahakauwila pointed out that sometimes to disrupt realism they have had to trick themselves into the process. The some of the methods they employed: applying a constraint, stretching an expectation, or changing point of view.
The next time you are “stuck” and feel as if you are mindlessly writing with the endless mantra of: and then this happened and then this happened…” try one of these tricks to disrupt the realism you are plodding through. Limit your word count, switch your point of view and simply write, or invent a word, retreat to a colloquial phrase without explanation, or repeat a simile but have a different character repeat the simile or the narrator can repeat the simile and thereby link two characters, two time periods.
Take a look at the writing you like to read. What has the author done to hook you? Chances are if you consider what Bertino put forth in the class with a little help from her friends, you were hooked by the echo of a sound, or an object, or a point of view that you couldn’t ignore because your realism was disrupted and the fictional dream enhanced.
Happy writing.
PS I highly recommend Bertino’s novel Two AM at the Cat’s Pajamas. Only about 250 pages and the audio version is well done too.
When I first listened to Two AM at the Cat’s Pajamas I hurriedly bought the electronic version so I could read it again. My quick review email to friend sent that morning reads: “Just finished reading/listening to a great book. Omniscient voice. Set in Philly in the present but throw back sayings where you think it could be in a time warp. It could have been the early 60s or 80s or present day. There’s a jazz club, there’s women who dance with snakes, there’s lots of music lingo and the clock is Christmas Eve’s eve. There’s magical realism and the gritty truth. Loved it!!”
Photo by Olga at Pexels.com public domain
