yellow brick road

Apart from the everyday world that I walk around in, there's another world I enter when I'm writing a new story. It's like a dream world because it has elements of my everyday world, but transformed somewhere in my mind into something strange and new. How strange varies from story to story.

In this dreamlike world, I quite willingly suspend my disbelief, and trust that most readers will be willing to do the same. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner guy, was the one who came up with "willing suspension of disbelief" as a necessity in the dream world of storytelling. In return for entertainment—a good story—the reader agrees to accept some fantastic elements in the story.

The storyteller must do the same, plunging headlong into the dream world, believing the story as it unfolds, taking a path less travelled and unpredictable, if only to see what's around the next bend in the road. Like Dorothy on the yellow brick road, for us the most important step is the first. All the adventures await her, and she must follow that famous path if she is find her way home. The writer, and reader, take that first step on the opening page of a story. Adventures await us, and we know that 15 or 20 pages later, or maybe 400 pages later, we will find our way home to the story's end. The end of the dream, the return to our waking world.

So let's think of that first page of the story as a first step on a journey. Everyone talks and writes about an opening page as a hook, and it is in a way, but that word has always had a sneaky, aggressive connotation for me. I imagine a writer in a long black cape skulking behind an innocent bookshop customer who has picked up a book and is seconds away from feeling a cold, heavy hook around her neck. Her only escape from the sinister hook is to buy the book and leave the store, thus freeing the writer to stalk his next victim.

How much better would it be to imagine the writer standing next to the reader, no weapon in hand, just browsing the shelves, then pointing down the yellow brick road of his story and inviting the reader to join him on the journey?

So here I am, having just finished dreaming, and writing, a short story about a young woman in Honolulu who is totally ruled by her emotions. I call it "The Manic Monday of Orchid Lefleur." This is a working title, but I doubt I will change it. Here's the opening page of that story (please don't call it the hook). This is my invitation to the reader to take that first step on the yellow brick road of this new story, to see what scarecrows and tin men and cowardly lions are waiting to befriend Orchid, what witches and flying monkeys are just around the next bend to threaten her, what poppy fields may delay her jouney home, and what great and powerful wizards live at the end of that road to give us all a happy ending. And so, gentle reader, I give you . . . Orchid Lefleur.

Orchid Lefleur—her real name—awoke on a warm Monday morning in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On an island, that is. On Oahu, in fact, in the single bed with the amazing Technicolor dream quilt she had bought at the Aloha Stadium swap meet, the one that perfectly matched her colorful inner life, for Orchid was a young woman who was ruled, as they say, by her emotions.

And yet who could have foreseen that this particular Monday would bring all the rainbow colors to the surface, as if Roy G. Biv himself had climbed through the window into Orchid’s bedroom during the night and shone his red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet rainbow self on her like some blinding psychedelic spotlight? Who could have foreseen it?

Not Faith Lefleur, her mother, the sweet Japanese-American lady who had done such a splendid job of raising the older daughter but somehow failed miserably with Orchid.

Not Henri Lefleur, the blustery, hockey-mad French Canadian from Montreal who had met Faith at the University of Hawaii when they were undergraduates and were both immediately attracted because each was so exotic to the other.

Not Lilly Lefleur, the older sister, the refined daughter who had her emotions under tight control and was carving out quite a career for herself in finance, currently the teller with the most seniority at her American Savings Branch in Kaimuki. (Lilly—just a side note here—would have been named Guy Lefleur, after Henri’s favorite hockey star, had not her mother insisted on a more feminine name. Some might say that a young woman with the name Lilly Lefleur was destined to become a porn star, or at least dance around a pole on Keeaumoku Street, but they would be wrong.)

Not Brad Pitzer, Orchid’s lingering-but-not-for-long boyfriend, who knew all about her emotions, first hand. Some said that Brad did not resemble the better known Brad Pitt enough to be worth the emotional investment of a long-term relationship, an opinion Orchid was beginning to share.

Not Deena-Anne Tamashiro, Orchid’s best friend since high school who was interested in Brad and had agreed to take him off Orchid’s hands. Orchid had second thoughts, however, when she found Deena-Anne and Brad entangled on the sofa that Saturday night when she went over to see Deena-Anne and discuss when would be a good time to hand off Brad but it had already begun. The green monster took over Orchid’s head and she had stormed in and made a big scene and then stormed out, and wouldn’t pick up when Brad and Deena-Anne kept phoning her that night and all day Sunday.

believing the story

In the middle of Frank Delaney's novel Ireland, an engaging 560-page narrative about Ireland and Irish storytellers, there's one paragraph that jumped off the page at me and said "Take me home with you." Or perhaps it whispered "Kiss me, I'm Irish." Whatever. But it's a memorable paragraph for all writers, and readers, and here it is.

A story has only one master—its narrator; he decides what he wants his story to do. I know, I have always known, what I want my stories to achieve—I want to make people believe. Believe what I tell. Believe in it. Believe me. Belief is the one effect I'm always looking for, and I apply every device, every pause, every gesture, every verbal nuance and twirl, to that end. To achieve it, I myself have to believe; if I don't, who will? I must believe ancient Ireland was as I describe it. The swords really did ring loudly off the shields. And the armor surely gleamed in the sun.

It’s just one of thousands of paragraphs in a novel chock full of delightful Irish stories-within-the-big-story, but there it is on the top of page 278, like a gold nugget that I discovered when I turned the page.

The paragraph is the beginning of a chapter-long letter written by the master storyteller, an elusive oral storyteller whom our young protagonist pursues around Ireland, telling his own stories along the way. Most of the advice in the letter applies to the oral tradition, but much of it also shines a light into the dark corners of the written story.

The narrator is the master of the story. A fiction writer narrates his story, whether he uses third-person narration or lets one of his characters tell the story first-person. Even in the quiet telling of the written story, the voice of the narrator rings out.

It’s almost the first decision I make in creating a story—selecting the point of view. In “Pickles and Shawnilynn and Me at the Mall,” a short story about three 8th-graders who spend an afternoon at Kahala Mall, the voice of Anna, the “Me” of the title, sings from first sentence to last. She is the master of the story, and letting her narrate was the perfect choice, even if it meant much time spent asking friends and strangers about current teenage slang and favorite teenage shops at the mall, and then visiting some of those shops. Just a word of warning—the Hello Kitty shops (Sanrio Surprise at Kahala Mall, in case you want to verify this) are incredibly, and dangerously, pink. Sunglasses would have helped. My eyes were sore for days afterwards.

“I want to make people believe,” Delaney writes. “Believe what I tell. Believe in it. Believe me.” I read the paragraph in Ireland long after I wrote the “Pickles” story, but these words describe exactly how I felt about my short story as I was writing it. Part of the believing deal is getting the setting and details right. Yes, Carl’s Jr. is right next to the Kahala Theatre movies at the mall. Yes, you can see school kids sitting there eating their French fries and talking. And yes, you can go to Claire’s and buy blueberry nail polish. After the movie your mom might pick you up in front of Long’s. Easy to believe.

“To achieve it,” Delaney continues, “I myself have to believe; if I don’t, who will?” Absolutely true. The writer is the first reader. He must convince himself first. I carried Anna and her two best friends around in my head for weeks before I wrote a word of their story. And as I began to write the story she became more real.

Then I had a chance to read the “Pickles” story aloud for the first time to a group of writer friends, in a workshop on voice. As I read Anna’s story, she became more real to me than most of the teenagers I’ve met. She was in my head, and I was riding along inside her head, at least for one Saturday afternoon at Kahala Mall, as she and Pickles and Shawnilynn watched the Ratatouille movie and Anna told about the big surprise and the super cool stuff that happened at the mall. Of course I believe.

Frank Delaney’s Ireland is a hymn to the joy of storytelling. Now there’s a phrase I want to take home with me, “the joy of storytelling.” If the story doesn’t bring me joy, how can I expect it to bring joy to a reader? Or a listener, for now that I think of it, I realize that my favorite stories are also great read-aloud stories. Give me a good narrator, the “master” of the story, let me hear that narrator’s voice as the story spins out, draw me into the story, in from the cold, and I am home free.

“Pickles and Shawnilynn and Me at the Mall” is scheduled for publication in October 2009 in the next collection from Bamboo Ridge Press in Honolulu (Anna’s hometown, by the way, and home to Kahala Mall and the frightening pink shop).