Other than the slow pace, I’m not drawing comparisons between my writing and Tartt’s or Chee’s — certainly not in ultimate outcome. Nor do I believe that writers who work more quickly are necessarily any less brilliant or less deep than those two are. (Try listing, just for example, the works of Muriel Spark or Graham Greene on a single page.) But writing a novel is an inherently strange exercise. It’s surreal to work for years and years on a project very few people have seen. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the grips of an incredibly intricate and time-consuming delusion. So it’s comforting to know that some of the novelists who inspire me also, of necessity, take their time.

You start with a trusty pot. This is of course after you’ve made it to Aimee Bender’s secret kitchen, in an undisclosed location in southernmost southern California.  Or, if not her kitchen, at least a clean one, tidy enough that your purpose remains focused and without distraction. You are making soup. That is all. This one thing. So, no toys, couches, television, radio, etc. No bills on the counter, etc. And yet, the kitchen must be purposive. This part I leave up to you.

In terms of pots, for Aimee the soup pot is a an old orange creuset; the rest of the cookery includes a bunch of old dented pans and wooden spoons she’s grown attached to over the years. She’s lost track of where they’re from, but some of them she’s had since college. This is as important as will be the bowl, at the end, from which you drink the soup. See below.

Starting out, you can definitely bring choppers into your kitchen space. Communal root chopping, that is—for any good pot of soup starts with this things that grow underground. For me, it’s onions in some kind of fat with a splash of white wine for light soups and red wine for stews. For Aimee, it’s many things but always carrots. Garlic, celery root, taro, burdock, parsley root, desert yams, prairie turnips, bush potatoes—all good roots. Stems, bulbs, rhizomes, and tubers in general are good here: ginger, tiger nut, cattails, lotus root, sunchoke, day lily. Gather and chop them. Especially if you have a garden to harvest and are in season, this is a good time for conversation (if you are not—as I often am—cooking in absolute silence). At some point, though, whether in silence or in conversation, the role of the choppers and harvesters is over. If you have a lot of these folk, give them something to discuss, some children to watch, a cake to pick up, some apertifs to enjoy, and get them out of the rangetop area. Two cooks for a single broth is twice as much as you need. If you want an elegant soup, only one cook. But we are cooking together, so are open to a bit more of a mess.

In fact, the openness to mess is what I’ve come for. Aimee was once and hence will forever be one of my teachers. And of late, I have been a bit stingy with soup ingredients. Generally, I like to minimize them. Worse, I spend too much money on ingredients that are a bit too dear. Once, I filled up a whole extra carry-on with ingredients from Formaggio Kitchen in Boston and brought them home to Colorado, for cooking soup, and paid them off over the course of a few months, and was afraid to use them because they were so expensive. This is ridiculous. There’s more. I generally won’t use pork fat, or beef, or chicken fat, or fat from any animal, including, nine times out of ten, butter, which limits things. These can be brittle and complex ethical issues, what we will and won’t cook with. We are, however you categorize things, creatures eating creatures. But there isn’t anything, Aimee tells me, that she won’t cook with. I believe this is something to aspire to, this kind of openness. As with life, so with soup. It is not my own idea but a wise one to use all the ingredients of your life, all the messiness, all the muck. Aimee in fact tells me she is a messy cook, she needs slack from the ingredients, and likes to give them slack too. This is a beautiful notion, and I will never forget her sharing it.

That said, you can’t be totally open or totally stingy with your soup. I am liberal with some things, like the non-animal fats I use, especially olive oil, sesame oil, and coconut oil. I am also liberal with alcohol when I cook. Sometimes, bourbon or a smoky scotch goes in the stock instead of wine; sometimes, a dark beer (never pale ale, nothing with a lot of hops). And Aimee, for all her inclusiveness, has limits: no noodles. In a soup, she says, they just seem wrong.

Try to identify yourself along this spectrum, so you can push against your tendencies a little bit. I know, for example, that a soup base of chicken fat and then filled with egg noodles (and butter and pepper) would be so good. Such a pot of soup may be somewhere in the future—next time, perhaps, Aimee and I meet to make soup—but we are not ready for that yet.

So for now, though this all feels to me like a lesson in the presence of a master, we compromise. We agree on some roots and stems, and to start, we agree on lentils.  In fact, what Aimee has to say about lentils is critical. So far in her soup-making, she tells me, she likes how about halfway something releases in the lentils and the flavor gets much deeper.

When you’re first starting out with a pot of soup—and every batch is different, even if the recipe is quite measured (there can be rain outside the window or snow, it can be hot, your company can be bitter, you company can have gas, etc.)—you can trust that something, like the lentils, will release and make the flavor much deeper. In fact, it is wholly a matter of trust. For the most part, you can’t count on which ingredient will release. Counting on anything in this way will prevent the release of, say, the fennel, if you’re concentrating so hard on the release of shallots in the butter and grains of paradise that your very thoughts crowd out and inhibit the simple and earnest fennel.

In the spirit of non-stinginess, we talked liberally as we chopped.  As we did so, I asked her several questions, and divulged many secrets, and vice versa, and we both vowed to leave all of this out of all recipes and soup-making reports. But the truth was, there wasn’t anything very surprising or interesting about our secrets, and fortunately we had plenty of salt, which we had to add to the room through the soup. Here’s the thing: if you’re preparing a soup, or any meal, you really shouldn’t have many big secrets. If you have some juicy ones, before you even start chopping, go outside and walk around the city a little bit, make some phone calls. Say what you need to. Stop in the grocery and pick up some good aged bourbon, or some pork fat, for the soup you will eventually, one day, make.

This is actually quite important. Here’s an example of where I failed on this count: at one point, Aimee tells me she aspires to borscht and Italian wedding soup. That she has a great butternut squash recipe, and also makes a chicken soup, and is working on matzoh ball soup. But, she says, she has some work to do there—on the matzoh balls. Now, myself, I make a pretty good matzoh ball soup, maybe four times a year. But I use the pre-packaged matzoh crumbs. Everything is pre-measured and laid out in rules for me; the proportions for egg, oil, salt and pepper are written clearly on the back of the box. I don’t ask Aimee if this is what she means; I assume she means some more complicated way of preparing matzoh balls that I can’t even imagine.A ceremony—as all recipes are, especially those handed down—that in fact I have no right to. I was raised Catholic in Cleveland, Ohio (which is where I got my taste for matzoh, as well as gefilte fish, which my sisters and I begged our parents for and called magic fish), then moved to a famously evangelical community in Illinois for middle school and high school, where there was no matzoh, or even the language to talk about it.

Suddenly, in the kitchen with Aimee, I had the tighteness and irritation of self-doubt and evaluation and cultural analysis turning wheels in my chest and belly. You can see how my internal dialogue crowded the tidy purposive space; maybe even soured some of it with unspoken assumptions, divisive notions. I would like to master the matzoh ball soup too. And not in the store-bought way. So, you see, when you are cooking soup, especially with another person, it is best to say everything, and have an open window too. No matter the season.

Halfway through our process, because lentils take a while to soften, we started cleaning out the kitchen cabinets—not so much out productivity but because we were there, in the kitchen, and reaching for spices and chatting about them. In so doing, we found a can of black turtle beans, which Aimee hadn’t known was in the cabinet. The ingredients on the can read: turtle beans, water, salt. We wanted them in the soup.

Everything changed.

“Is this going to work?”

“What tastes good with beans and lentils?”

“Right. And what among those ingredients do I have in this kitchen?”

We spun the lazy susan around and chose cardamom, and cumin, and a can of chopped tomatoes.

“Now that we have added cardamom, we are going to have to add a little coconut milk.”

“And some chopped mangos?”

“With beans, lentils, and tomatoes? Wonderful. That sounds just right.”

“Roasted pepitas.”

“Yes.”

“You have to know when to stop.”

“Let’s stop.”

We scooped the soup into bowls, which Aimee chose. I will not describe them, but will only say—and this was a point on which we both agreed—the bowl is very important. The weight of it, who made it, why, or what you don’t know about it, and above all, how it feels in your hands.

But by then, everything had changed again.

“There actually isn’t much chill in the air out here. Not great for hot soup.”

It was a pretty warm breezy night.

“Maybe it will cool off a little later.”

“Let’s go outside.”

So we went outside, and were poking around in the white sand under the moonlight when my teacher took a quick breath and showed me what she’d seen: a rare desert flower. Edible too. Its petals were white, thin as tissue, and it had a deep purple heart.

“This is what we want,” she said. “This will be our dinner.”

“No soup?”

“You have to know when to let an idea go. Don’t get all hung up on soup. You know?” She sat down giving the little bunch of flowers space. “But here’s the thing, she said. Here’s the big question. This is a beautiful stand of flowers.”

“Beautiful,” I agreed.

“Not that much nutrition.”

“Only a dozen calories,” I guessed.

The question is, what are you going to do with the fifteen calories–what will be worthy enough of destroying such a beautiful thing?

Bonnie Nadzam’s work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, The Iowa Review, Epoch, and many others. Her first novel, LAMB, was the recipient of the 2011 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Nadzam’s second novel will center on a modern-day witch, so she has been spending much time at the cauldron – her writing desk – casting narrative spells.

Bonnie’s What You Have Soup

&nbspThe key to this soup is not going shopping for anything. You already have everything you need.

First, you need a fat: butter, lard, oil, peanut butter…

And a root, bulb or stem: leek, lotus, fennel, ginger, onion, garlic, radish, yam…

Chop the root, bulb, or stem and cook it slowly in the fat until it softens and changes
color (without burning). Really try to stick with one ingredient here. Don’t get all
enthusiastic. This step should take a while.

Add a salt source: soy sauce, liquid aminos, salt itself…

You need a liquid: cow’s milk, almond milk, coconut milk, apple juice, beer, coconut
water, Seven-up…Add the liquid and the salt source, to taste—however salty you
want it. You probably want it less salty than you think you do, but only you can say.

You may want a little sweet, but be careful, because you probably actually don’t.

Fruits/nuts/vegetables to put in the soup: chopped celery, apples, cashews, frozen
peas, corn, etc. Not more than three. Ideally two. Set them aside in a bowl. You’ll add
these last minute so they don’t get soggy or lose their color.

You need seemingly counterintuitive spices. Think of the mindset of finding a fresh
verb phrase or unusual adjective/noun paring. This is the same sense you use to
find the counterintuitive spice combination. This is not teachable, because you
already know how to do it and you have always known how to do it. In fact, you
can’t imagine how long you have known how to do it. If you can’t figure it out, freeze
the stock and read 9-12 excellent novels or a single work of Shakespeare (very
slowly) until you get familiar with the feeling in your body when you see a fresh
word pairing. Then write a novel or two, or at least a couple of stories, to practice
finding and honing this skill yourself. You can substitute painting, sculpting, etc.,
but any work of art or craft that comes with directions will take you in the opposite
direction, so don’t use any of those. No guidebooks, no how-to software, no pre-cut
pieces, etc. or you will forget you were even making soup.

Once you’re ready, defrost the broth, and come back to your spice cabinet. Choose
these two spices and add in just the right amount to the broth.

Very important here to trust yourself. Add a grain if you like—but not if it’s to cover
up the broth flavor. If the What You Have Soup broth tastes terrible, that’s ok. Try
not to judge.

III. FOLLOW YOUR YELLOW-BRICK ROAD TO A CONSISTENT, RULE-GOVERNED DREAM WORLD

One lesson that I have to relearn continually is that writing fiction set in an alternate reality doesn’t mean you get a free pass to do any crazy thing you want. If you’re going to try a Kansas: Oz shuffle, a radical “rearrangement of nature,” you have some additional responsibilities to the reader. Namely, that you don’t get tripped out on your godlike power (or more likely just exhausted and forgetful) and violate the parameters of the world that you’ve created.

Many of my early stories failed to create a consistent, rule-governed world, an Oz of sturdy emerald construction. They took place in frictionless worlds where I myself felt like a tourist with only a shallow sense of the laws and customs, places where anything was possible and there was no discernible center of gravity. I kept changing the rules as I was going, so the stakes were nonexistent—it was a world that wasn’t governed, that wasn’t consistent, so nothing was at stake. It wasn’t a world of consequences, so readers didn’t care what happened.

As difficult as it is to get a reader to suspend disbelief, it’s even harder to keep his or her disbelief lofted over the course of a story or novel as it progresses. In the same way that you can break a reader’s heart by playing fast and loose with the rules of your Oz, you can also fail a reader by getting sloppy on the Kansas details. Here’s my own embarrassing cautionary tale: I recently got proofs back for my first novel, Swamplandia! . In one chapter, Ava, the female protagonist, hatches out of a glowing red alligator in a reptile incubator in the Florida swamp. A few pages later, I had written that she falls out of “a forty-foot tree.” The copy editor gave me a pass on the red dragon, but that forty-foot-tall tree was circled three times. She’d attacked it with editorial lightning bolts. Her note read: “Is this a joke, or a mistake?”

So the red dragon was okay, but I had to do a panicked, humiliated revision to the forty-foot tree.

I think this is a good lesson about the danger of imprecise details. Somehow, a mutant, strawberry-red lizard was more plausible in the world I’d created than a child’s forty-foot fall. Why? My guess is that a reader’s belief in the red alligator is predicated on Ava’s own reaction to it—she finds the gator “miraculous,” just as we might, but she goes on to assure us that it is real; it needs food and water like any hatchling gator; in other words, it obeys certain natural laws we recognize. Its blinking eyes and scales are described by Ava in the same straightforward register she would use to describe an ice cream cone or her sister’s hair color. To Ava, and hopefully to the generous reader, the red alligator is a strange-yet-true entity. In contrast, when Ava falls out of that “forty-foot” tree, she doesn’t call her survival “miraculous,” doesn’t check for a broken femur or anything; she just dusts off her swamp culottes and continues rambling on about her sister. That concrete detail, “forty-foot,” was my own lazy mistake. So, because I had not earlier indicated that Ava had an adamantine skeleton, and because gravity still seems to operate in the Florida swamps of this novel exactly as it does for us tumblers out here in the “real” world, readers were guaranteed to be confused and distracted by my Kansas detail gone awry. The copy editor’s faith in Ava’s narration, and in the entire cosmos of the novel, was rattled.

This is what I mean by “a consistent, rule-governed world.” In the kind of Kansas:Oz ratio I’d set up in Swamplandia!, no way should a kid fall a fatal distance, get up, and walk away like a cat on its ninth life. There should be a serious consequence (911, broken bones) or, at any rate, some kind of acknowledgement within the text of the story that a law has just been violated. When my characters weren’t jarred by a forty-foot fall, my readers were.

IV. THE INTERIOR WORLD OF OZ

I’ve spent a lot of time discussing “the concrete detail” and its ability to pin down the reality of both Kansas and Oz for a reader. I would add that a person writing a fantasy must also be strictly attentive to emotional detail. As I mentioned above, I missed the boat on a concrete detail, flubbing the realistic height of a tree; but just as crucially, I also failed to give Ava a credible human reaction to her fall. You need concrete detail to establish the bricks-and-mortar reality of your alternate world: its fauna and truck stops and weather. But equally vital, I think, is the convincing emotional detail. Characters must have convincingly human reactions to their world for it to feel real.

Sometimes the details that fully convince me of a twilight zone aren’t descriptions of the setting itself, per se; they are details that reveal the private, emotional worlds of the characters who occupy it. In Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead, millions have been killed by a lethal virus unleashed by the Coca-Cola Company. (And there’s a Kansas detail for you–Coca-Cola–to confirm the fictive, apocalyptic plague!) All of the newly dead are reincarnated in a purgatorial zone they call “The City,” which looks a little like Main Street U.S.A., where they continue to exist as long as someone alive on earth still remembers them. A brilliant, wild premise that becomes absolutely plausible as soon as you hear “eyewitness testimony” from credible sources like the character Jeremy Fallon: “Jeremy Fallon, sixteen, and from Park Falls, Wisconsin”—those are some pretty Kansas details, right?—“said that the fighting hadn’t spread in from the coasts yet, but that the germs had, and he was living proof. Or not living maybe, but still proof, he corrected himself.”

You can just see this kid’s shit-eating grin, his wry self-correction. Hear that teenager’s desire to charm, which, against the backdrop of his recent suffering, becomes all the more poignant:

The bad guys used to be Pakistan, and then they were Argentina and Turkey, and after that he had lost track. “What do you want me to tell you?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders. “Mostly I just miss my girlfriend.” Her name was Tracey Tipton, and she did this thing with his earlobes and the notched edge of her front teeth that made his entire body go taut and buzz like a guitar string.

In that tiny capsule, I think you can really see the Kansas:Oz ratio: you’ve got Park Falls, Wisconsin; you’ve got some sort of murky, apocalyptic plague that has driven these souls into the City; and you also have Jeremy’s shrug, his mock-casual affect and sincere confession of longing. These details strike me as exactly the way a sixteen-year-old boy from Park Falls, Wisconsin, would react to finding himself in an afterlife. Why should things make more sense in the afterlife, why should any of our questions get answered there? How can we even approach, in language, a loss so violent and extreme as the loss of everything? Against the scale of a global apocalypse, everything he misses, everything he’s lost, condenses to this tiniest of gestures of his girlfriend’s, a nibble on his earlobe. It’s a heartbreaking, human detail, and one that makes me immediately willing to believe in the plague and this city of the dead.

Another example in which concrete and figurative details combine to nail down a fictional world occurs in Kelly Link’s story “The Specialist’s Hat,” in which Link stages a tale about childhood grief in a possibly haunted mansion called Eight Chimneys:

Eight Chimneys has exactly one hundred windows, all still with the original wavery panes of handblown glass. With so many windows, Samantha thinks, Eight Chimneys should always be full of light, but instead the trees press close against the house, so that the rooms on the first and second story—even the third-story rooms—are green and dim, as if Samantha and Claire are living underneath the sea. This is the light that makes the tourists into ghosts.

These two sisters, Samantha and Claire, have recently lost their mother. In the description above, Link skillfully blends concrete details about the house itself, such as the number of windows and the “handblown” glass, with the girls’ subjective experience of these “green and dim” rooms. We get a powerful sense of their isolation and their grief. During the day, we learn, Eight Chimneys is a tourist attraction: “The house is open to the public, and . . . people—families—driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway will stop to tour the grounds.” But these cheerful visitors from the “real” world, far from making the rooms of Eight Chimneys any less mysterious, enhance our sense of the kids’ seclusion. They really are just tourists, mere interlopers through the ghostly fog of the twins’ grief. Our feeling for the girls’ bereavement and isolation and the claustrophobia of Eight Chimneys (and of the private world of childhood more generally) is enhanced, not diminished, by Link’s deft mention of the Blue Ridge Parkway. While family sedans go whizzing past on the highway, here is a stagnant pocket, a twilight zone. “The light that makes the tourists into ghosts” makes the sisters’ grief palpable—it’s a literal detail about the actual light in Eight Chimneys, as well as a powerful evocation of these two characters’ haunted interiors.

Strict attention must be paid to your characters’ inner lives. It’s the characters’ responses to their environment that will ultimately make their setting real for your readers. No matter how foreign or strange your imaginary world may initially appear, if your characters move through it in ways that feel “realistic”—if your characters’ speech and behavior and moods and terrors ring true to what we know about their personalities and basic human nature—then your readers are far more likely to accept the place on its own terms. Through each character’s reactions to his or her setting, important boundaries are erected—what’s normal and what’s abnormal in this alternate zone? Possible/impossible? Cheering or heartbreaking? Where does the danger reside? What is there to fear in a Narnia or a Macondo? This is how consequence gets established. “Raise the stakes,” young writers frequently hear in workshops; in the case of an altered universe, I think this advice is particularly important. What do readers want? A world with pleasures and dangers that mirror our own, “so real that it is fantastic.” Characters with something to gain or lose. Permission to care.

Karen Russell is the author of the short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, as well as the novel Swamplandia!. Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue and on The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. She is currently writer-in-residence at Bard College. Her latest short story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, will be published in February. 

Several years ago, I was reading Dante’s Inferno with some friends, and there was one line in particular that struck me. It was the Pinsky translation, Cantos XI, and the line is “God / Has as it were a grandchild in your art.” I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but in the notes in the back, Pinsky says the structure goes more or less like this: there was God; God had a child and that child was Nature; then Nature had a child and that child was Art, making Art God’s grandchild.

I think that is an extremely beautiful statement; it is so precise and interesting and shapely. The quote links art and nature in this very, well, natural way. If you happen to believe in God, then there’s some supreme head of it all (or if you run it backward it’s a gorgeous definition of God—Art coming from Nature coming from a grand shapely unknown), but if you don’t find that useful, you can move down the line anyway and see that nature operates under certain rules of DNA and biology and that art operates under similar rules but in its human-made metaphorical way. That when making art, what we’re trying to do is create something with this natural, unimposed structure.

In a class I taught last year at Tin House, we talked about diversity in nature a lot—about how if you take a category, any category, the range is amazing. Trees, dogs, clouds. Every morning, students would go up to the chalkboard and draw on a different theme, for example, bugs, and we’d look at all the bugs in a row–grasshopper, butterfly, ant, spider–because they are all such different shapes. Or we would draw deep-sea fish, because deep-sea fish are also wildly surprising different shapes. The writer Jay Gummerman once reassured me about plot by reminding me that “there’s structure in nature.” And there is also such variety. There are boundless options, options with integrity. All trees do not look like the tree that a kid draws of the stick-with-puffy-cotton-ball. Evergreens, palm trees, oaks, Japanese maples–what different forms! We can have that expectation for fiction, too. All stories do not need to have the same arc, the same progression of character, the same twenty-page Times-New-Roman beginning-middle-end movement. We can allow our writing to form its own shape. David Shields has said that you don’t want to pour your writing into some kind of mold; it should be the form that it is. But I love the idea that the reason a piece of writing should take its natural form is because art is nature’s kid. For me, that reinvents a word we use often in workshops, the word organic.

And, these thoughts led me to fruit. If we look at the process of how fruit is made on a tree, we can see that it mirrors the process that happens in fiction, inside a sentence, inside a paragraph, or inside a whole story. We’re hoping the writing will bear fruit. But fruit does not happen in some quick way; it happens through a gradual process. It’s not as if a seed pushes out a stick that then bears an apple. Right? The seed grows into a tree, which grows a branch that grows a blossom that bears fruit. The definition of fruit is “any product of plant growth useful to humans or animals”–“useful” being an interesting word—“the edible part of a plant developed from a flower,” and “anything produced or accruing; the product, result, or effect; the fruits of one’s labors, something coming to fruition.” This is all just another way of talking about process, about development.

What interests me about this process in terms of teaching, and my own writing, is that I often see two things happen—first, a writer (myself included, of course) rushes to the fruit, to the dramatic moment, to the meaningful epiphany. In those cases, the result feels like plastic fruit. That’s what is meant when readers say, “It’s not earned.” The ending is too tidy, or fast. It has not gone through a genuine movement; it has skipped somewhere in the process from seed to branch to blossom. And the opposite happens all the time as well, which is that something is developing, the writer’s building his story, he’s going seed to branch, he’s going branch to leaf, and then he stops. And you feel like something needs to be pushed more; there needs to be a hint more development at that stage, but the writer is holding back, is not letting the seedlings of what he’s developed blossom. This is not to say the writer should spell everything out! She can still leave it open, can let the reader come in and do that work, but sometimes the process stops long before a reader can even get his hands dirty with the pleasurable job of finding the fruit. Sometimes the writer just hasn’t stayed in the piece long enough to make adequate space for a reader to enter. And if fruit is something “useful,” something that we can take away, something that is our nourishment, that we live off, when a story doesn’t get to that stage, we don’t have a satisfying response to it—we have something, but not quite enough, of the story, of the character, to take with us, to keep with us. We don’t have enough there to haunt us.

Now, what fruit is, per story, is obviously going to be very, very different, because, as we know, there are lots of different kinds of fruit. There’s the cantaloupe, there’s the blackberry. Aesthetics will vary.

On a related note—I’m not trying to encourage you to overstate. You can certainly go too far and overstate what you think is going on with your character or story. That is not what I mean by fruit, and this essay is not about that. This is about staying with the moment on the page, staying with what you’ve built. A good friend of mine is an actor and she told me that one of the most useful comments she ever got in an acting class was the teacher said the lucky thing about being an actor is that you happen to be a person. You’re a person and that’s helpful, because you are playing one, too. You have something very basic in common with your character. And I think there’s something similar in this idea that whatever you’re building in the scene is full of what you’ve already put into play; seedlings are already in place and you can start to look at them, to turn them around in your hands. What’s helpful about writing is you happen to be writing.

Gertrude Stein wrote a book called How to Write, which is a bit difficult to read, of course, but also pretty wonderful. In it, she says, “A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.” She says this over and over, being that she’s Gertrude Stein: “A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.” “A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.” In a lecture of hers about narration, she elaborates on this. She talks, in her roundabout and yet somehow very precise way, about succession (and in her windings isn’t she kind of the queen of succession? of subtle changes that make a progression?), about how one sentence follows another, and how sentences have to obey certain rules of structure, whereas in a paragraph you begin to build something in a different way. At the end of this talk, she says:

A sentence is inside itself by its internal balancing, think how a sentence is made by its parts of speech and you will see that it is not dependent upon a beginning a middle and an ending but by each part needing its own place to make its own balancing, and because of this in a sentence there is no emotion, a sentence does not give off emotion. But one sentence coming after another sentence makes a succession and the succession if it has a beginning, a middle and an ending as a paragraph has does form create and limit an emotion.

In other words, the larger context forms the shape. If a sentence has an emotional impact, which of course it does all the time, it does so in large part because of its placement against other sentences, and because of how, almost musically, the emotion will land on a paragraph or scene or moment or white space or word. I think Stein is talking about fruit here, in her own way.

Here are a few examples to try to make this all a little clearer.

This is by Basho, one of the great haiku masters. It is, I think, the smallest version of something very, very complete that moves swiftly through the fruiting process:

Even in Kyoto—

hearing the cuckoo’s cry—

I long for Kyoto.

“Even in Kyoto” plants the seed, places the reader; “hearing the cuckoo’s cry” is the seedling, creating the atmosphere; and then, the blossom: “I long for.” We’re moving toward the fruit–what is it he longs for? “Kyoto.” He longs for where he already is. Or he longs for a memory that is unfindable in real life. It’s not a punch line—it’s a natural build that takes us somewhere unexpected; he has captured something both elusive and exact.

If we move into a slightly larger space, we see how fruit can be borne within a paragraph or short passage. In Lolita, Nabokov builds his incredible, articulate paragraphs with shockingly interesting sentences that burst forth; things are happening and fruit is blossoming at every moment. At the start of a paragraph fairly early in the book, the narrator, Humbert Humbert, talks about a photo taken by his aunt of him, his young love, Annabel, and others sitting around at a café. He spends a few phrases just describing the photo—“her thin bare shoulders,” his “moody, beetle-browed” face. Then, he gives the context: “That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate.” He’s changed the game on us—we thought we were just enjoying a photo, but it turns out to be a very important photo, a marker of sorts. He then goes into describing what happens after he and Annabel run off, in sentences of the most gorgeous language and such surprising succession: “There, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody’s lost pair of sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.”

We could probably study this for hours, it’s such an incredible stretch of prose, but for the purpose of this essay, I’ll say that one of the things I love most about it is the momentum. We start with the snapshot, with time frozen. We see Annabel; we see Humbert. How easy it might’ve been to end shortly after that, or after the line about the fatal summer. But instead Nabokov fills in the moment, swiftly, deeply, with the lost sunglasses both anchoring the scene and adding a hint of despair, because no one but Humbert will ever have this memory, all of this undercut by the surprising, funny entrance of the two bearded bathers, and his wonderful brief step into describing them as mythic creatures, larger than life. So we’re with him, with his disappointment at the thwarted attempt, and then we’re led directly–within the same long sentence!–to her death. A frustrating and classic adolescent moment leading to total loss and death. That ending phrase slams it down, shakes the reader, and suddenly the whole paragraph breaks open; we can see the loss, and why he’s talking about all this in the first place, and the gloriousness of his youth and life and adoration of Annabel, and then the quick, brutal ending. “A sentence is not emotional. A paragraph is”? Nabokov demonstrates this idea hugely here. Another crucial part of the fruit and musicality of this passage is the subsequent chapter break, the white space at the end. There’s a gap in which we have a moment to try to digest what we’ve read, but it is also somewhat indigestible. Nabokov has moved through time so fluidly, it’s all happening before our eyes and faster than we can even keep up with, and the white space gives us a moment to feel, briefly, this punch in the gut, which then we also may continue to feel in faint reverberations throughout the book. Fiction does this kind of time skipping so well, more, I think, than any other art form.

Aimee Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own, Willful Creatures, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, which recently won the SCIBA award for best fiction, and an Alex Award. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, among others.

Some of the earliest advice I received about writing poetry went like this: stop telling stories. One teacher patiently explained that there is simply not room in a poem to explore the lines of cause and effect so central to fiction. Another offered a memorable variation on T. S. Eliot’s words, advising: “Plot is the bone you throw the dog while you go in and rob the house.”

It has taken me a long time to ask: What kinds of stories are poems good at telling? In what kinds of conflicts does the lyric specialize? One might begin to answer this by reaching for the famous quote by William Butler Yeats: “Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric; of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.” I think it is fair to say that poetry tends to specialize in interior dramas, but even if we accept this distinction, how do poems effectively set up the outward occasions of interior conflicts? Poems constantly face the challenge of how to convey a sense of urgency without trespassing into melodrama. How a poem sets the stage matters. In this essay, I want to consider one dramatic setup that has proven particularly useful to poets. Let’s call it the drama of interposition.

Interpose: from the Latin inter, meaning “between,” and the French poser, “to place.” To interpose: to insert between other elements; to place between (in space or time); to come between, either for aid or for troubling. For aid, as in, “the prince interposed and made peace.” For troubling, as in “an interposing thicket blocked their way.” And sometimes both for aid and for troubling.

Traditional storytelling is about obstacles: what the hero must overcome to save the city, to get the girl, et cetera. Poetry is often about obstacles too, though they often take the form of quiet interruptions. Just as a hero advances toward his goal until an enemy gets in his way, the speaker of a poem is often moving toward something—a beloved, perhaps, or an expected destination or outcome—when something else drops in. Emily Dickinson’s famous poem is a ready example:

I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air—

Between the Heaves of Storm—

The Eyes around—had wrung them dry—

And Breaths were gathering firm

For that last Onset—when the King

Be witnessed—in the Room—

I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away

What portion of me be

Assignable—and then it was

There interposed a Fly—

With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—

Between the light—and me—

And then the Windows failed—and then

I could not see to see—

Just when it seems that there is nothing to stand between the speaker and her death, “There interposed a Fly—.”

What makes this a promising drama for a poem? (Granted, Dickinson could make great poetry out of any occasion, but I think it is not an accident that this scenario resulted in one of her most anthologized and best remembered poems.) First, the story line is not an elaborate one: we have an intimate sense of who, where, and when. Dickinson gives away and dispenses with the plot in the first line: “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—”: that is the whole story. It is a simple story of intrusion.

As to what is being intruded upon—that may be a more complicated matter. To better understand this, let’s compare this death scene to another one that Dickinson describes in a letter to Jane Humphrey in 1852. Dickinson muses: “Bye and bye we’ll be all gone, Jennie, does it seem as if we would? The other day I tried to think how I should look with my eyes shut, and a little white gown on, and a snowdrop on my breast; and I fancied I heard the neighbors stealing in so softly to look down on my face-so-fast asleep-so still- Oh Jennie, will you and I really become like this?”

The still, fast-asleep face, the white gown, the hushed grievers: many of us might imagine our own deaths with hopes of similar tranquility. It is a fairly conventional vision—which may be the reason why Dickinson doubts the veracity of the scene she describes: “will you and I really become like this?”

The speaker of the poem has the same basic idea of how death is supposed to go. Graceful, dignified, the speaker proceeds toward death in an orderly way: she wills away her possessions, surrounds herself with loved ones, and looks toward the light. So it is not simply that the fly interposes itself between the speaker and death; the fly interposes itself between the speaker and her ideas about how death is supposed to unfold. This is the kind of shift that I am proposing is so rich in a lyric: when a speaker is following a given path and its protocols, something is interposed that prompts reseeing and reevaluation. The almost humorously mundane housefly upends the grand trajectory toward an exalted “King.”

If things are interposed for aid or for troubling, the fly in Dickinson’s poem seems a straightforward example of a troubling intrusion. The speaker can no longer continue the experience that she and others thought she was having. And yet, the interposition of the fly moves her away from the inherited and predictable script and gives her a chance to see and hear the experience that she is actually having—which is complicated, “uncertain,” “stumbling.” The actuality of death is a diminishment; the dead speaker does not report on an afterlife of any kind, and the fly is the only candidate for “King” that appears. Nevertheless, the buzz has its own kind of power; it is the last thing that lets the speaker know she is still a part of the living world, even as the fly is a visceral reminder of her death (as others have pointed out, flies are attracted to carrion). The fly simultaneously separates the speaker from and connects her with death. In this way, the ordinary fly becomes the occasion of a moment that is extraordinary in its own right: nothing in the world of the poem is so vivid with movement, color, and sound as the “Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz.” Sound is described as color; the speaker may not be able to “see to see” in her last moment, but the fly allows her to “hear to see.” The synesthesia emphasizes the complication and richness of this suspended moment. The fly interposes both for aid and for troubling—or perhaps, more accurately, it aids through troubling.

Think of the number of poems that feature speakers who are, as the expression goes, “stopped in their tracks.” “The Moose,” considered by some to be Elizabeth Bishop’s greatest poem, is told from the point of view of a passenger on a bus that is forced to a stop by the tall moose that “looms” in the middle of the road. Standing between the passengers “from narrow provinces / of fish and bread and tea” and their unnamed destination, the moose, “grand, otherworldly,” demands their and our attention. The passengers suddenly feel (“[they] all feel”) something they haven’t felt before on this journey. Similarly, William Stafford’s best known poem, “Traveling Through the Dark,” unfolds the drama of a speaker who must stop his car when he encounters a large animal on the road—a dead deer; however, it is not the deer that turns out to be the interposing object. The unsentimental speaker knows exactly what to do: clear the “heap” so that he and others can pass safely. What stops him—if only momentarily—is the living fetus inside the dead mother. It is this interposed surprise of the fawn, “alive, still, never to be born,” that startles the speaker out of the “automatic pilot” response with which he began, startles him into hard thinking, startles him into feeling. An even more famous example is Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Many might overlook the dark woods when passing by them, but they bring Frost’s speaker to a full stop. He interrupts his journey, delays his promises, for a loveliness both “dark and deep,” and the poem creates that space for us, too.

I believe it is not an accident that so many of the poems I have pointed to are well known to most of us. This kind of dramatic occasion, in which something is interposed between the speaker and his or her destination or desire, seems extraordinarily well suited to poetry. The drama can be staged succinctly: a time, a place, a speaker directed toward something when something else gets in the way that provokes an unexpected response.

Please note that I have included no example of a speaker on a stroll who stops to appreciate a particularly striking flower or sunset. None of these speakers sets out with that kind of receptivity; what is interposed is not the thing that the speaker hoped to find. This is key to why these poems are so compelling. Most of us rarely have the quiet and leisure to seek out subjects of contemplation; what hits us where we live is the sense of being in motion, with volition and will, intention and desire, with goals and tasks and “miles to go”—when, unexpectedly, something stops us.

Mary Szybist‘s  first collection of poetry, Granted (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 2009, she won a Witter Bynner Fellowship. Szybist is also the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is an associate professor of English at Lewis & Clark in Portland, Oregon.