Le Guin Apprenticeship Journal VI
On time travel and the lost art of keeping verbs in line
The dedicated readers among you will, of course, notice... I'm late! A thousand apologies. I've had a strangely prolific couple of weeks, which, as excuses go, could be worse.
I wrote this story about a man-eating peach tree:
I also use this website I can't recommend highly enough; fabulous community, quite sweary (for me, that's a bonus):
They run a weekly game/exercise called Flash Face Off, where they throw out a set of quotes and pictures, with a theme, and we all write up to 500 words, then post to their forum and critique each other. It's spectacular practice. So, inspired by this quote:
‘I have all my doors and windows open to you
and you have come all the way inside,
sat down at the table of my deepest desires
and lit a fire to warm us both,
the wind blowing through the house,
the rain gently giving way
to turmeric sunrise
and you, darling,’
Filling spice Jars as Your Wife, Kai Coggin
I wrote this, which, since it's writing-themed, I thought I'd share with the class:
“What about that bit with the elephant and the sentient fireball?”
“I cut it,” she said, clamping the phone between her ear and shoulder, burying her fingers in the bread dough, squeezing and turning. “The voices were coming out too… Pixar.”
“Fair. What happened to the pirate, and the music box?”
“Don’t remind me,” she said. The dough took up a rhythm, palm to elbow, palm to elbow.
“Why are you panting?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
A pause.
“Look, just—”
“I know.” She tucked the dough into a round, slapped it into an oiled bowl, smothered it with a tea towel. “Don’t panic. I’m not stuck; just need to throw open the windows, blow out the cobwebs. It’s not like last time.”
Her editor sighed, like a burst of static over the phone. “It better not be.”
She waited.
“Send me pages when you have them.” Her editor hung up.
Sagging, relieved, she slid the phone down her front to the countertop, careful not to touch with her doughy, oily hands. Slowly, slowly, she crossed to the window, watched the rain as she washed up. Thought of the rising almost-bread, rolling the ghost of the taste in her mouth, watching the mizzle blend grey sky into greening treetops.
This is how we’ll do it, she thought. Think all the little nothings you can. The Idea would stray in among them. It will come. It will.
She made tea. Breathed the cutting steam of ginger, savoured the bloom of hot cinnamon, stirred the golden turmeric with her pinky fingertip. Thought about the burning hues of spices and sunset, and the last time she stood somewhere under the sun.
When the dough had risen, she knocked it back. Folded, folded again, rolled, then fussed over tucking in the ends, forming a neat loaf. She slashed it, laid it on a sheet pan under a fresh tea towel, and left it to prove again. Her temperamental oven, as touchy as her inner eye, she set to preheat.
Turning away, she sensed it; the first flit of a shadow through the back of her mind. She stilled. Kept moving. Don’t spook it. She washed up the proving bowl, admired the gloaming, her favourite hour, that stole through her garden. And poured a small glass of wine. On tiptoe, the shadow in her mind darted closer. She unloaded the dishwasher, wondering whatever happened to that mug her college friend had given her, the one with the pattern of robins. She put the bread in the oven, scenting her kitchen with hunger while the shadow loomed behind her. It took on a touch of definition, but she kept her eyes carefully away. The bread done, she scalded her fingers cutting a wedge. She was generous with the butter; it slipped meltingly into the crumb, and the first bite was luscious. Absorbed, she forgot about the shadow until, licking her fingers, her mouth full, she looked up.
“Ah, there you are,” she said. “At last.”
That's the light boasting and excuses, part of the agenda; now for the real reason you're here... Did Lauren get her arse kicked again this week?
Short answer. Yes.
Slightly longer answer:
I think we've reached peak Le Guin.
You see, we'd settled into a pattern. I got overconfident, or lulled into a false sense of security, and then the arse-kicking began. Then came a short interlude of Alice in Wonderland vibes where everything turned upside down, and I dreaded the horrors of the challenge, only to find things light and enjoyable for once.
Can you guess where I'm going with this?
The inevitable has happened.
I dreaded it.
And it was even worse than expected.
Allow me to show you:
Exercise Six: The Old Woman
The subject is this: An old woman is busy doing something - washing dishes, or gardening...
...Intercut between the two times. 'Now' is where she is and what she's doing; 'then' is her memory of something that happened when she was young...
You will make at least two of these moves or time jumps.
Version One: PERSON: Choose either first person (I) or third person (She). TENSE: Tell it all in the past tense or all in the present tense.
Steering the Craft, Ursula Le Guin
Do you see why I was quivering in my little woolly socks?
Le Guin gives an example of this done very well: Charles Dickens's Bleak House (it's literally Chapter 1, but hell, why wouldn't you read the whole book, it's Dickens! Do it!)
Anyway, with the Grandmother from my peach story fresh in my third eye, I went for third person, and I have a weakness for the present tense (unpopular as it is) so I indulged that too.
Deep breath, aaaand we're away:
Agatha’s hands, age-spotted and withered as bark, are nimble all the same, and steady with the secateurs. Her task, time-worn, ferries her mind into the past, and it’s her smooth, young hand, long-fingered and French-tipped, that takes the yellow rose offered to her by the nervous boy. While crisp blooms fall at the snip of her shears, she wipes a tear from that boy’s face, now a man’s, as he asks her to marry him. She smiles as she says yes, smiles again at the memory.
On their wedding day, he plants this rose where she can see it from the kitchen window, almost planting his new wedding ring among its roots.
“All the days of my life,” the wind lullabies her in the soft tones of his voice, as she cleaves away the needless branches. He’s handsome in his wedding suit, if a little stiff, and her white lashes are dewed with bittersweet tears. She lays down her secateurs, cups a single rose in her palm. Arthur may be long dead, and her eyes slowly dimming, but his roses still blossom, radiant yellow.
Phew! We made it.
I'm not ashamed to admit you are looking at the fifth draft of this thing. It was the requirement for at least two time jumps that killed me.
(What I am a little ashamed of is my complete failure of anything resembling the Bechdel test; that will have to wait for another time, and I may just be a little sensitive because I'm reading A Room of One's Own. Moving swiftly on!)
What Le Guin wants us to focus on, of course, is verb tense. And she's nailed me with this one; mine are a little slidey. I especially struggle when I want to dip into a predictive, or speculative, future. And everyone's uncomfortable around a "would have had," aren't they? (You may notice one in a minute.)
Memory, it turns out, is also a b*tch. My first draft, predictably, came out Now-Then-Then-Now. Intercutting was the whole point. I knew that, and yet, I didn't actually do it. Forcing the past into the present was much easier said than done. I was at draft three before I got even as far as Now-Then-Now-Then-Then.
I was pleased, however, to discover I'd instinctively reached for a mechanism with which to tackle all this. Agatha's working hands. Literalising the activity gave me something to graft the exercise onto, and I don't think the writer I was two years ago would've had an easy time finessing that. (It's always fun to find proof of how you've grown in the wild.)
And once the cuts really fell into their proper place, and we had Hands - Boy - Pruning - Wedding - Rose, then we had a whole (hi)story, told through the life of the object, the symbol: the yellow rose. So, of course, the Lady was right, as always. The suffering, the graft, the craft; it was worth it.
However.
I have a horrible suspicion she's, of course, started with the easier of the exercises in this pair. Version Two, which I think I will share with you next week, is the same thing again, but you're free to use the other tense for either 'now' or 'then' (dealer's choice). This, I predict, will allow for many, many more opportunities to royally foul up. Fun!
The advantage of being restricted to one tense, while it means the construction is at times fiddlier, is that at least you're reminded to stay on the path. Eyes front, Cadet: we're in the present! Sliding back and forth without, well, sliding off a cliff...
I'm curious: have you ever tried writing across two timelines and had your verbs end up acting like a toddler in ice skates? Do you have any handy tricks for keeping them in line?
Share your time-travelling disasters, please:
On that note, I'm out of here, there are books to read and cups of tea to brew. Maybe see you next time.
xx
About the Creator
Lauren Everdell
Writer. Chronic sickie. Part-time gorgon. Probably thinking about cyborgs right now.
Website: https://ubiquitousbooks.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scrawlauren/
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