Stepping Out of My Storytelling Box

By Tim Bascom •

When I was twelve, I wrote my first short story, which was about a boy who, while hiking alone, falls off a mountain cliff and lands on a narrow outcrop, unable to get down or to climb up. Though he calls out, the only response is immense canyon-silence and an occasional hawk gliding past. Day gives way to night, and he languishes. Then, at dawn some heroic man from a search party finds him, lowers a rope, and pulls him to safety. The End.

I know, I know. Not much characterization or plot development. I hope I can be excused as the twelve-year-old that I was. The only problem: My fiction didn’t improve much in the next decade, remaining stuck in the same isolated, solo-character rut.

For instance, as a freshman in college, I wrote a parable of sorts featuring a lone young man who wakes dazed, confined in darkness. He deduces that he is in a wooden box. When he thumps on the walls, there is no resonance. The sounds are muffled, as if the box is surrounded by something thick and impenetrable, which leads him to realize, to his horror, that he must be lying in a buried coffin. After hours of Poe-like torment, he thinks he hears a faint voice speaking, perhaps singing. He screams, and to his total relief he hears the ground being cut into, then a lot of scraping and the clatter of clods. Finally, the casket breaks open and he is pulled into breezy sunshine, rescued by a cemetery gardener who seems so brightly lit that the freed man can hardly open his eyes to look back.

Yikes! Too much solitary angst. No agency. Virtually no dialogue. Then ta-da—a magical rescue.

Okay, let’s jump forty years. Past my MA in English and my MFA in creative nonfiction. Past marriage and having children. Until today.

Now that I have published two memoirs and two collections of essays, I have swung back to fiction. The new pieces are more relationally sophisticated. They are peopled by an array of individuals, not just the detached protagonists of early attempts. As a result, they are getting published. However, if I am honest, I still seem to create a worrisome number of characters who feel cutoff and therefore hungry for connection, such as a young Ethiopian artist who, having been estranged from her icon-painting father, has come to Chicago to find a new life but finds herself alienated as an art museum guard until she receives badly needed affirmation from the museum’s curator. Or how about the story of an insistent factory worker who tries to explain to a stranger at a bar why, ever since his wife took her own life, he has felt like a series of songbirds were accosting him, trying to convey something important through cryptic messages written in indecipherable script upon their tongues?

These, too, are marooned characters who are longing, reaching, trying awkwardly to connect. And it used to worry me that my stories were driven by such alienated longing—until, some years ago, I stumbled across something revelatory in Janet Burroway’s classic textbook Writing Fiction, which has served as a guide for creative writers for nearly forty years. In that study of fiction writing, Burroway pointed to a narrative theory espoused by screenwriter Claudia Johnson, who proposed that there might be another way to understand stories than the oft-taught formula of conflict, complication, climax, and resolution. Johnson saw the limits of that model, which Ursula K. Le Guin had dubbed the “gladiatorial view of fiction,” and she proposed that stories are based on a simple question of connection versus disconnection. All of us, Johnson pointed out, are driven to connect, which means that stories will inevitably show patterns of relational connection or disconnection. At the simplest level, characters who start out close may end up separated, or characters who are adversaries may find themselves unexpectedly bonded. However, the stories are always about a relational dynamic, and the potential patterns are limitless.

This tendency to build plots around a multivalent dance of connection versus disconnection has become even more apparent to me as I have become increasingly aware of the fundamental human problem of isolation and, with it, the deep universal need to bridge interpersonal gaps. If I look now, I see strong relational patterns in most stories that stand the test of time. Take for instance, Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour,” about a woman in the late 1800s who, when told that her husband has died in a train wreck (forced separation), begins to imagine the freedom of a new independent life (chosen separation), only to discover that he was not killed (reconnection), which is so upsetting that she collapses and dies of what the doctor interprets as “heart disease” (absolute disconnection).

Intriguing patterns of connection and disconnection are evident in the writing of the newer generation as well, undergirding stories that are already getting anthologized and will be read for decades to come, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Arrangers of Marriage,” which is about a naïve Nigerian bride who travels to New York after an arranged marriage (potential connection) only to discover that her new husband has already been married once and slept with a woman in the next apartment, leaving the new bride in physical proximity but emotionally alone (psychic alienation). Or what about Laila Lalami’s poignant “Homecoming,” diagrammed here, which portrays Aziz, an undocumented Moroccan migrant (disconnection), who returns from Spain to Casablanca, reuniting with Zohra, his wife (connection), only to realize that he no longer feels at home in her world and will not take her back to Spain with him (return to disconnection)?

These stories are not exceptional cases. You can conduct your own survey. But I guarantee that you will find similar relational dynamics played out in the stories of widely known authors such as James Joyce (e.g., “Araby”), Ernest Hemingway (e.g., “Hills Like White Elephants”), Flannery O’Connor (e.g., “Everything that Rises Must Converge”), Raymond Carver (e.g., “Cathedral”), Mary Hood (e.g., “How Far She Went”), Richard Bausch (e.g., “Tandolfo the Great”), Amy Tan (e.g., “Rules of the Game”), Robert Olen Butler (e.g., “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot”), Bharati Mukherjee (e.g., “The Management of Grief”), Jhumpa Lahiri (e.g., “A Temporary Matter”), or Elizabeth Strout (virtually every story in her collection Olive Kittredge). If you take time to look closely at key characters, you can actually diagram how they move closer together or further apart, as I have done below with a diagram of Carver’s “Cathedral.” The patterns of connection and disconnection are so predominant, in fact, that they seem to confirm the oft-quoted advice of one of the characters in E. M. Forster’s great novel Howard’s End—“Only connect.”

By the way, another highly regarded contemporary story writer, Yiyun Li, who was once a classmate of mine at the University of Iowa, chose to borrow the following words from the twentieth-century novelist, Katherine Mansfield, using them as the title for her memoir about near-suicidal depression: Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. I am struck that Yiyun, through her very act of writing, reached out to bridge the relational gap, finding connection with her reader. Which makes me wonder, why write at all, if not to connect?

Okay, I’ll admit that there are a few other time-honored reasons. When I was working on my MFA at the University of Iowa, I was actually given a list of authorial motives by the British author Blake Morrison. His motives include: to understand, to get stuff out (arriving at catharsis), to justify the self, to feel creative, to be remembered, or even to take revenge. But near the top of the list is that most basic of all reasons: “to invite intimacy, connecting.”

Think about it. The urge to connect is as strong or perhaps even stronger than the urge to eat. We want to feel known, accepted, received, affirmed, loved. It is not enough to be fed. In fact, babies die without being held. And as we keep growing, we still want to feel the force of life rising in us like sap into a tree, a force that registers most strongly at moments when we are united with others, no longer alone, no longer in the casket of the self.

I don’t know what to say about those early stories of mine and the deep sense of isolation buried within them. Freud would have a heyday I fear, pointing to my childhood experience of abandonment at a mission boarding school. Other writers are clearly more relationally savvy, which is why they have been able to bring their characters out of the box sooner—into the relational dance. But now I’m not as embarrassed by my early characters, or by current ones who wrestle with isolation, since I see that alienation is a universal human problem and that it may serve as a hidden engine within narrative.

We all live with the limits of our skin, cut off from those who are ensconced in separate bodies. We are alive in there, but not easily known—at least not fully. We long to be opened up and freed, and so we sympathize with characters who are cut off by circumstances or attitudes, even their own. We feel their pain, hope, fear, joy, as they struggle to come closer to an “other.”

These days there’s comfort in realizing that isolation is not my problem alone and that other writers have written it right into their narratives, instinctively creating characters who long and reach. I would argue that this reaching is actually at the core of the stories that have the greatest emotional impact, which is—in my humble opinion—more vital to readers than any amount of intellectual or witty pyrotechnics. Disconnection and connection drive stories forward, which drives us to read on.

TIM BASCOM earned his MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and he has published short stories and essays in Zone 3, Witness, Boulevard, River Teeth, Front Range Review, and numerous other journals. His stories and essays have also been selected for editors’ prizes at The Briar Cliff Review, The Missouri Review, and The Florida Review, and have been included in the anthologies Best Creative Nonfiction and Best American Travel Writing. Bascom is the author of a novel and four books of narrative nonfiction, and his first collection of short stories—Continental Drift—is forthcoming from Main Street Rag.