Thievery is a series of blog posts about my story inspirations.
The Story:
‘Peach Cigarettes in Tokyo’, published in Pear Noir! #4.
An extract:
“The first time I ever smoked a peach cigarette, I was wearing a dinosaur suit and sitting on my friend’s balcony in a Tokyo suburb. My friend had a dinosaur suit because he’d gone to a fancy dress party the week before, and I was wearing it because I was cold and it was made of fleece. I’d never been much of a smoker, but the vending machine sold dozens of different flavours and what was the point of traveling halfway around the world if I wasn’t going to try new things?”
The Inspiration:
Tokyo. Oh, Tokyo. How you inspire me.
(Note: the third part of this story previously appeared in a slightly different form as my Darling Wigleaf letter. Which proves nothing except that I rip myself off.)
I spent two years on an MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University. About 90% of what I learned appeared to be a complete waste of time. One class was about OuLiPo, a French movement that seeks to constrain writing in order to be more creative. OuLiPo practitioners use exercises like prose sestinas (using the word repetition of the sestina form in a prose piece), writing a story without using the letter E, or the “snowball” technique (the first line is one word long, the second line has two words, etc.)
In class, we all produced ‘opposite’ stories – write a story, then for each word write the opposite. ‘Some people are grumpy’ would become ‘none ghosts aren’t cheerful’. The interest in the exercise was that most words don’t have a clear opposite. What is the opposite of ‘people’? I chose ghosts but it could be angels, or corpses, or monsters. It was a fun exercise, but I really couldn’t see the point. The things we produced were nonsensical, pointless; who’d ever want to read these?
It’s only now, a year after I graduated, that I see the point of these things. They force you to not be yourself for a while, to not fall into the same themes and tropes and word-patterns that you always do. When I first started the MLitt there was nothing that I ‘always did’, because I hadn’t written much. Now that I’ve cranked out some more words, I often need to stop and think: have I said this before? And that is where OuLiPo comes in.
‘All-Night Cartoon Party’ is a prose sestina (if you want to figure out the word pattern, please feel free!). I love writing prose sestinas. I love that I start out trying to write one story, and then realise that the words won’t allow me to, and so it has to turn into a different story. I like that I’m guided by the words. I like the sense of losing control, of being forced to make unexpected decisions. When I’m finished, I sometimes don’t recognise the story I’ve written. It seems so un-me. But sometimes it’s good for us to wear a mask for a while.
(Note: I really did go to a Halloween party dressed as Betty Boop.)
I am a nerd for fairy tales. I wrote my undergrad dissertation on fairy tales. I teach a class in writing fiction based on fairy tales. I’ve written handfuls of fairytaleandmythology-inspired poems. But I hadn’t retold a fairy tale.
This is because I have studied retold fairy tales, and I know how tricky it is to subvert them effectively. Cultural myths are ingrained in us from childhood and stepping outside them is no easy task, but there would be no point in me just retelling a story in pretty language. It’s been done before, and better.
When I tried to sum up Snow White’s character, it seemed that the most important thing about her was her youth. Sure, she was beautiful and innocent and pure, but all that was intrinsic to her youth. So I decided to subvert the fairy tale by changing the most vital part of little Snow: I made her old.
Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl with lips blood-red, hair ebony-black, skin snow-white. She had a child, a soft blonde angel. When the child was raised, the beautiful girl’s work was done: she had fulfilled her role as a woman. Her breasts emptied, her hands softened, her insides shrivelled like dead leaves. She moved slowly, thoughtfully. There was nothing to hurry for now. She was above the dirty business of men, of sex, of children. Her body did not bleed; it did not sweat or scream or cry.
Snow White is an object. She’s a doll, a statue: a thing to be looked at and fought over. It seemed to me that an old woman – a woman past childbearing, past sex, past everything that we’re told it means to be a woman – could be even more objectified. She could be even more of a china doll: fragile, slow, quiet. She could be owned and controlled.
I also wanted to look at the themes of female competition in the fairy tale. My favourite Snow White retellings subvert this (for example, Emma Donoghue’s The Tale of the Apple), but I wanted to highlight it. It seems to me that feminism in 2010 is not about women’s relationships with men; it’s about women’s relationships with women.
Feminism is about not using words like ’slut’ and ‘bitch’.
It’s about not seeing other women as competition.
It’s about not commenting negatively on the way other women look.
We’re taught from childhood – in stories like Snow White – that women compete. We’re taught that a woman’s value is in how attractive she is to men and how much they want to fight over her. We’re taught that being beautiful is the most important thing there is, and if another woman is more beautiful then she is more powerful, and you must tear that slutty bitch’s hair out and steal her man, and then you too will have power.
In this story, I wanted to highlight that. I wanted to show what happens when women compete instead of working together. And it’s not a happy ending.
Thievery is a series of blog posts about my story inspirations.
The Story:
‘Rebel Girl’, published in Girl Crush (Cleis, 2010)
The Inspiration:
When I saw a call for stories on the theme of a girl crush, Bikini Kill’s song ‘Rebel Girl’ immediately came into my head because it is a kickass romantic riot grrrl love story. As a 17 year-old I spent a lot of time stomping around the suburbs with this blasting through my headphones, and I certainly had a lot of badass girl-crushes at that age.
But I still love the song: for Valentine’s Day I made my girlfriend a card that said ‘Rebel girl, you are the queen of my world’. To me, the song already tells a story, so I didn’t just want to repeat that. I wanted to take the intensity and heat of adolescent girls’ relationships with one another and put them in another context.
I grew up in a middle-class suburb, and I’ve always crushed hard on rebel girls. I’m very aware of my relative poshness and I do try to fight against it, but I fear it’s a losing battle. I live in Glasgow and I have tattoos and I know self-defence, which you might think would make me a bit hardcore, but I am amazingly wussy. I hope to get through my whole life without being in a fight. A girl did hit me once, but I was so surprised that I just walked away.
For a while I’d wanted to write a story that wasn’t about nice middle-class girls, but the ones that the nice girls fantasise about. I wanted to write about gang girls, but as that’s a culture I know nothing about I thought it would be patronising and unrealistic for me to try. Seriously, women like this make me want to write all kinds of stories:
Photo by Katrina Del Mar @ katrinadelmar.com
The characters in my story, Katia and Evie, instead developed as people I’m more familiar with: posh girls trying to rebel. I imagine the story taking place in Cumbernauld, which is fairly grim town on the outskirts of Glasgow. It’s frequently cited on lists like ‘Britain’s Crappest Town’, and though the people I know who live there are all lovely, Cumbernauld is still a depressing place.There’s nothing in the story that suggests it’s Cumbernauld – it could really be any town in any Western country – but that’s how I imagine it.
The first draft of the story was okay, but something was missing and I wasn’t sure what. Then I read a friend’s story about humid summers in Toronto, and something clicked. The story needed temperature. Suddenly the whole thing had a structure, a building of tension and a conclusion. The summer heat and breaking of the storm came to represent the characters’ sexual frustration and eventual release.
I’m not sure I succeeded in getting across the heat and intensity of the girl-gang culture that so fascinates me, because Katia and Evie are not exactly hardcore. Still, they do have some good sex.
(Note: I bashed out the first 500 words of this story in a few minutes, in a mad rush of words that felt as if my fingers couldn’t type as fast as my brain was making sentences. I went to bed feeling really smug about it and then the next morning I woke to find my laptop had crashed and eaten all the words and I had to rewrite it all. Thus my Darling Wigleaf postcard is almost completely true. I still suspect that my first draft was somehow better than the rewritten version, but I’ll never know.)
I woke up at 4am one August morning with a line from a song stuck in my head: “I dreamed that the world was crumbling down, we sat on my back porch and watched it”.
The line is from a Matchbox 20 song, ‘Busted’, which I hadn’t listened to in years. When I was about 15 years old, I played their album ‘Yourself Or Someone Like You’ on a loop for about three months, which I’m sure my mother was very pleased about. I have no idea why that song popped into my head that morning ten years later, because it’s seriously the type of music that only a 15 year-old could appreciate. But I love the way synapses crossfire like that.
One of the standard drunk-at-a-party questions (at least in my social circle!) is ‘What would you do if the world was about to end?’, and everyone says things like ‘phone my mum’ or ‘tell my boss to fuck himself’ or ‘tell my best friend I’m secretly in love with her’. But I don’t think you’d really have a choice. The world is ending, and it’s ending now, and you’re with someone that you don’t even like that much but fuck it, it’s this or nothing so you’d better just make the most of it.
I’ve always thought there was something intimate about the apocalypse, in that the person you are with at that moment is the last person you will ever know – their face is the last thing you will see, and whatever they say is the last thing you will hear. I wanted to explore that intimacy, so it became an erotica story. Almost everything I write seems to be about sex in some way. I liked the line in the song “I don’t need you crowding up my space, I just want to get inside you”, and I decided to take it literally: the eroticism of merging the cells of your body with someone else’s.
So that night after my girlfriend went to bed I listened to the song a bunch of times, and I tried to think what the apocalypse would smell and sound like, and I drank a glass of wine and sat at the kitchen table with all the lights off and typed in the glow of my laptop screen. It took about twenty minutes. I didn’t edit. Sometimes stories are already lurking in your brain, waiting for you to uncover them.
(Note: You might notice that the song says ‘porch’ but my story says ‘roof’. This is because I have never seen a porch. Well, OK, I’ve seen them in films like Trouble the Water and Gone With the Wind, but I had never seen one in real life. Porches are not a thing that European houses really have. They have vestibules and balconies and conservatories, but not porches that you would sit on. And sure, I have been outside Europe, like to the US and South Africa and Japan, but I really don’t remember seeing any porches. Besides, I bet you could see more of the apocalypse from a roof.)
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