October 2019: Narrative Distance
Last week I taught a class about creative nonfiction, and we talked about narrative distance. Narrative distance, to me, is that perspective within an essay, the space between the narrator and the story. It was a concept that was new to me many years ago, when I was writing what I referred to as short stories based on experiences. I’d write in a tight, present tense—young Courtney on the page, rushing up and down the block of row homes where I had grown up. I wrote about the bad jokes you’d find on popsicle sticks after licking the last chunk. I wrote about the teenagers who were sometimes my babysitters and sometimes just the older kids whose world I wanted to break into. When I first workshopped one of my essays in graduate school, Jane Brox thoughtfully put the story down in front of her and asked if anyone else was missing the narrative distance. Yes, she agreed, there was a story here. There were characters and snappy dialogue and a dramatic tension. But who was telling the story? What perspective could narrative distance lend to the piece?
I tell my students that it’s usually healthy to write something with narrative distance. I was taught a long time ago that it’s as important to work out the emotional landscape of a story within ourselves as it is to work out the emotional landscape of the story on the page. But what about the stories with no narrative distance? What happens when you are inside the crisis as it is unfolding? I taught my class last Tuesday night with a pulsing worry inside of me, fear for someone I love very fucking much. Time has eclipsed itself to be everything before last Tuesday and everything after last Tuesday. I’m writing now because that’s what I’ve always done when trying to make sense of the world.
For the first time I feel so anxious for narrative distance. I want to know what happens next. When working on a memoir a few years ago, I did an interview with another writer who asked me if I plotted out what I was writing, or if I found the story as I went along. “Oh, definitely the second,” I said. She was surprised. Shouldn’t someone writing memoir know the plot of their own story before they sit down to write? My answer is no. My answer is the story, tugging on the threads of what happened until something takes shape. There are always risks with this method of writing. It could unravel. It could lead to a dead end. It could be the wrong story at the wrong time. But I’m the writer. What I can’t control is the narrative distance.
Every fall, for the last several years, I’ve received a time capsule from DoYou10Q.com with a list of ten questions I’d answered the previous year, reflecting on my life and my spiritual condition. It’s part of the ritual of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. In answering these same questions year by year, I always have a map of what has happened, even after it has happened. A map of where you’ve been is better than no map at all. Still. The answers pop up in my inbox when I least expect them. I’ve read them in a therapist’s waiting room, before a job interview, in the car with Emily, on a Sunday afternoon while deciding what to cook for dinner. This year the answers came when I was on a train to see the person I love very fucking much. Here was something providing me reflection from the year before, when I only had the space in my heart for the moment since my mother texted me. I’d been getting a coffee on my lunch break in Bryant Park. The barista kept calling my name even as my hands shook, trying to type, trying to call Emily, trying to grasp the story. My students often write about trauma. My students often work in emergency rooms and as patient care advocates and as oncologists or pediatricians or EMTs. I was suddenly a character in one of their stories, but I didn’t know it yet. It was so sunny out and the barista kept calling my name.
The first question of these ten questions, asking me to reflect on the previous year, arrived yesterday: describe a significant experience that has happened in the past year. All of 2019 has distilled itself to last Tuesday. When I got the email with the above question, I turned my phone off and just watched the clouds for a bit. When I can peel my mind away from the present and go back to just a few weeks ago in Arizona (time, what is time, what the fuck)—I remember sitting outside with my father one morning and watching the sky with him. We were talking about religion, and seeking, and he said that in times of doubt people can always turn to ritual. I made a ritual on the train of just one song, over and over, because it’s all I could do: I need you more than I ever have because the future’s here and we can’t go back. Repeat. Look at the clouds. Wait for the narrative distance. Repeat.
xo,
c