As part of Short Story Month, I wrote about Porter's collection a couple weeks ago here. I kept thinking about the stories and how they work and so thought I'd do a quick little interview with him as a kind of companion piece to the original blog, special, just for SSM! In fact, this is likely to be the first of a few short companion pieces during the upcoming second half or so of Short Story Month.
Then, check out Andrew shedding a little more light on his process...
1) First, I'll preface this question by saying I did just finish my first year back in school, so I've been looking at "craft" more than I am used to. That said, I was surprised how many of these stories make explicit their "character in the future/looking back nature." As I pointed out on the blog, the first three stories I read all contained phrases like "That was twelve years ago." and "Even now, fifteen years later..." and "It is easy now, after everything that has happened to my brother..." I'm not sure what exactly my question here is, but am wondering if you could talk about this a little. Was this a conscious decision; at what point in writing the story did this facet of the story announce itself to you; what does it gain/lose; etc.? That is like 4 questions, I guess. Feel free to pick and choose as you see fit.
That's a great question, Aaron, and not one that I've been asked before. I guess when I do that type of thing in a story -- mention how many years have passed since these events took place -- it's my way of reinforcing the fact that the person telling the story, the narrator, is still trying to come to terms with these events, still trying to understand them. It's a way of adding weight to the story -- the fact that after so many years the narrator is still haunted by these events -- but it's also a way of reminding the reader that the story itself is simply an "attempt" on the part of the narrator to try to understand these events at a particular time in his or her life. If the narrator was telling this story twenty years later, for example, as opposed to say twelve, the story might have a completely different feel to it, or a completely different type of perspective. I guess that's something I like to think about, especially when I'm dealing with memory -- how many years have passed since this actually took place and how has the passage of time affected the narrator's ability to recall and understand these events?
2) A lot of the stories also seem to be as much about the actual act of storytelling as the story being told. Maybe not "as much," but it is definitely important. Um... right? Would you agree? I feel like that actually ties in with the above question and the ideas of memory and what happens to stories over time, etc. Again, sorry to be a bit vague here about what the actual question is, but... anything to add here about this idea of "storytelling" and how important it was to you, in regard to the stories in this collection specifically?
That was definitely something I was thinking about as I was writing these stories. As I said above, when I'm writing in the first person, I like to think about the story as an "attempt" on the part of the narrator to come to terms with the events of the story, but I also like to think more specifically about what the narrator hopes to gain by telling this story and where this impulse to tell the story might be coming from. In other words, beyond simply trying to understand these events, what other role does storytelling play for the narrator? In many of my stories, for example, my narrators seem to be burdened by a certain amount of guilt, and so perhaps the act of telling the story is a way for a particular narrator to alleviate some of this guilt. Of course, you might also interpret the same story as an attempt by the narrator to justify his or her actions, which is of course a very different type of storytelling impulse. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not really concerned with how the reader interprets the storytelling impulse; I simply want it to be something that he or she is thinking about.
Comments