The beginning of a story should be a question. This is a sense of discomfort—itch, sting, pang, sexual frustration, some kind of imbalance—that needs to be eased. When I talked about this to my students, I said that this question could be dramatic or linguistic or stylistic but it should always be urgent. (What I didn’t say was that, really, it almost always has to be dramatic, and that I just put the other options in there to sound more open-minded than I felt.) The first writing exercise of the Narrative Structure class: make a list of things that have made you double-take.
While the students frowned at their pages, or stared at their phones, I made my own list of things that had made me double-take recently: dishevelled man outside the station feeding dog food to a model of a dog made out of wet sand; the statue of a security guard holding a baby bird in the window of an office block in Holborn that really did look like an actual security guard holding a baby bird; a woman in the park pushing a buggy from which protruded the heads of two Siamese cats. It appeared that mostly what made me double take was unexpected animals.
I called on students at random to read out their double-take lists and I said everything was interesting. I said, “What questions do those moments prompt?” Then I said, “Those questions are your beginnings.” In the front row, a particularly keen student was taking notes so enthusiastically that the pen was audible on the paper as she wrote: Questions. Are. Beginnings.
Next exercise: There are two characters, A and B, they meet in a supermarket. Write a beginning paragraph in which A meets B. A middle paragraph. An ending.
Imagine it: A and B have met in the grocery store. What happens to them? Do they love each other, hate each other, kill each other, kill someone else or get married? Do they fight over the last remaining box of granola, or tin of baked beans, or bottle of soy sauce? What is the answer to the question we did not notice was asked in the beginning, when they met, when everything was possible? Do they ever leave the grocery store?
The summer after that first full year of teaching, Eley and I suddenly got married.
We both had writing fellowships at MacDowell in New Hampshire, and the prospect of long stretches of writing time, uninterrupted by teaching, by students, by the obligations of ordinary life, was one we had spent months anticipating and discussing with an almost religious fervour. We would have so much time; so much clean air; so many good ideas. During the university term, when we spent all our time talking about writing, the idea of actually having a moment to do any of it was almost laughable. It would all be different, we told each other, once we got to MacDowell.
In the New Hampshire forest, in our respective studios, surrounded by trees and ferns and deer and chipmunks and sharp-edged sunbeams breaking through the canopy, we sat down to confront our works in progress—I was writing what I described as a “backwards love story” that turned out to be one of those novels that you write while you’re figuring out what you should really be writing, and which remains unfinished to this day; Eley was working on The Liar’s Dictionary—and we decided, all at once, that what we should be doing instead was getting married.
And so we did get married, right there in the forest, surrounded by the other writers and artists at MacDowell, who variously played the piano and read poems and officiated and danced and generally made our sudden, impulsive decision feel weighty and real. There was a lemon cake. We made thank you notes out of tree bark.
And even at the time, we joked that our wedding was in fact an extreme form of procrastination. How long had we sat separately at our desks with our novels before the sudden urgency of doing this other thing, the wedding thing, took over? It was probably a couple of days. But I think, looking back, it was not only a reaction to the bagginess of writing first drafts but also to the sprawling, yawning chaos of being in love: it was a yearning for structure.
When I was an undergraduate creative writing student, A. L. Kennedy gave me a piece of paper with three boxes on it and said, “Now fill them in.” I was delighted by those boxes, by how easy they made everything seem: no longer the terrifying limitless possibilities of the blank page, just three little rectangles to populate, just a question of colouring within the lines, beginning, middle, end. I have started almost everything I’ve written since with those boxes, though sometimes I use four, sometimes five. Without them, everything feels too wild, too uncontained, and I think now that that was what being in love with Eley felt like just before we got married: this thing between us was so huge by then that we needed to build walls around it, to put a foundation under us, to have the reassurance of a box on a page. Our officiant declared us, at the end of our makeshift ceremony, “spouses for life,” and it felt expansive but also reassuring, the immensity of those words, the closeness of that structure we had built.
Once the students in the Narrative Structure class had written their beginnings-middles-ends about A and B in the supermarket, the next stage involved folding and tearing the stories into three. They separated the beginning, middle, and end and then swapped them around with each other. “Give one middle in exchange for another. See what happens when you use someone else’s beginning, or when you give your ending to another person’s story. What happens if someone else’s ending becomes your beginning?” I had attempted this exercise once a couple of years previously as a graduate student and it had descended into mayhem at this point: students talking over each other, scraps of paper flying. It appeared I’d learnt nothing from the experience. The classroom grew a little rowdy as scraps of paper were handed back and forth, scanned, rejected, replaced.
The lesson was supposed to be that other people’s endings always seem better than your own.
The lesson was supposed to be that fates are interchangeable.
Really, the lesson was just supposed to be plugging jigsaw pieces into a puzzle, showing the students how things fit and don’t fit. Imagining these two characters, A and B, locked into their lives, clawing at the walls of this imagined supermarket, which is in Croydon, or Paris, or Puerto Rico, or most frequently the nondescript detail-free dreamscape in which so much student writing seems to take place: hazy generic suburb of the imagination.
This was a few months before Eley and I got married in the forest, before, perhaps, I’d understood how structure is both universal and unique to the story it is telling, how much those boxes matter, but how only we, the authors of our stories and our lives, know exactly how and when to fill them.
When the students read out their mix-and-match stories, it was notable that in none of them did A and B ever seem to get out. They fought and flirted and competed and kissed, but they never left the supermarket.