A Girl's Story by David Arnason

YOU’VE WONDERED what it would like to be a character in a story, to sort of slip out of your ordinary self and into some other character. Well, I’m offering you the opportunity. I’ve been trying to think of a heroine for this story, and frankly, it hasn’t been going too well. A writer’s life isn’t easy, especially if, like me, he’s got a tendency sometimes to drink a little too much. Yesterday, I went for a beer with Dennis and ken (they’re real-life friends of mine) and we stayed a little longer than we should have. Then I came home and quickly mixed a drink and starting drinking it so my wife would think the liquor on my breath came from the drink I was drinking and not from the drinks I had had earlier. I wasn’t going to tell her about those drinks. Anyway, Wayne dropped over in the evening and I had some more drinks, and this morning my head isn’t working very well.

To be absolutely frank about it, I always have trouble getting characters, even when I’m stone cold sober. I can think of plots; plots are really easy. If you can’t think of one, you just pick up a published book, any book, good or bad, and sure enough, there’s a plot. You just move a few things around and nobody knows you stole the idea. Characters are the problem. It doesn’t matter how good the plot is if your characters are dull. You can steal characters too, and put them into different plots. I’ve done that. I stole Eustacia Vye from Thomas Hardy and gave her another name. The problem was that she turned out a lot sulkier than I remembered and the plot I put her in was a light comedy. Now nobody wants to publish the story. I’m still sending it out, though. If you send a story to enough publishers, no matter how bad it is, somebody will ultimately publish it.

For this story I need a beautiful girl. You probably don’t think you’re beautiful enough, but I can fix that. I can do all kinds of retouching once I’ve got the basic material, and if I miss anything, Karl (he’s my editor) will find out and call it to my attention. So I’m going to make you fairly tall, about five-foot eight and a quarter in your stocking feet. I’m going to give you long blonde hair because long blonde hair is sexy and virtuous. Black hair can be sexy too, but it doesn’t go with virtue. I’ve got to deal with a whole literary tradition where black-haired women are basically evil. If I were feeling better I might be able to do it in an ironic way, then black hair would be okay, but I don’t think I’m up to it this morning. If you’re going to use irony, then you’ve got to be really careful about tone. I could make you a redhead, but redheads have a way of turning out pixie-ish, and that would wreck my plot.

So you’ve got long blonde hair and you’re this tall slender girl with amazingly blue eyes. Your face is narrow and your nose is straight and thin. I could have turned up the nose a little, but that would have made you cute, and I really need a beautiful girl. I’m going to put a tiny black mole on your cheek. It’s traditional. If you want your character to be really beautiful there has to be some minor defect.

Now, I’m going to sit you on the bank of a river. I’m not much for setting. I’ve read so many things where you get great long descriptions of the setting, and mostly it’s just boring. When my last book came out, one of the reviewers suggested that the reason I don’t do settings is that I’m not very good at them. that’s just silly. I’m writing a different kind of story, not that old realist stuff. If you think I can’t do setting, just watch. I’ll amaze you.

There’s a curl in the river just below the old dam where the water seems to make a broad sweep. That flatness is deceptive, though. Under the innocent sheen of the mirroring surface, the current is treacherous. The trees that lean from the bank shimmer with the multi-hued greenness of elm, oak, maple and aspen. The leaves turn in the gentle breeze, showing their paler green undersides. The undergrowth, too, is thick and green, hiding the poison ivy, the poison sumac and the thorns. On a patch of grass that slopes gently to the water, the only clear part of the bank on that side of the river, a girl sits, a girl with long blonde hair. She has slipped a ring from her finger and seems to be holding it toward the light.

You see? I could do a lot more of that, but you wouldn’t like it. I slipped a lot of details in there and provided all those hints about strange and dangerous things under the surface. That’s called foreshadowing. I put in the ring at the end there so that you’d wonder what was going to happen. That’s to create suspense. You’re supposed to ask yourself what the ring means. Obviously it has something to do with love, rings always do, and since she’s taken it off, obviously something has gone wrong in the love relationship. Now I just have to hold off answering that question for as long as I can, and I’ve got the plot to my story. I’ve got a friend who’s also a writer who says never tell the buggers anything until they absolutely have to know, and as close to the ending as possible at that.

I’m going to have trouble with the feminists about this story. I can see that already. I’ve got that river that’s calm on the surface and boiling underneath, and I’ve got those trees that are gentle and beautiful with poisonous and dangerous undergrowth. Obviously, the girl is going to be like that, calm on the surface but passionate underneath. The feminists are going to say that I’m perpetuating stereotypes, that by giving the impression the girl is full of hidden passion I’m encouraging rapists. That’s crazy. I’m just using a literary convention. Most of the world’s great books are about the conflict between reason and passion. If you take that away, what’s left to write about?

So I’ve got you sitting on the riverbank, twirling your ring. I forgot the birds. The trees are full of singing birds. There are meadowlarks and vireos and even Blackburnian warblers. I know a lot about birds but I’m not going to put it too many. You’ve got to be careful not to overdo things. In a minute I’m going to enter your mind and reveal what you’re thinking. I’m going to do this in the third person. Using the first person is sometimes more effective, but I’m always afraid to do a female character in the first person. It seems wrong to me, like putting on a woman’s dress.

Your name is Linda. I had to be careful not to give you a biblical name like Judith or Rachel. I don’t want any symbolism in this story. Symbolism makes me sick, especially biblical symbolism. You always end up with some crazy moral argument that you don’t believe and none of the readers believe. Then you lose control of your characters, because they’ve got to be like the biblical characters. You’ve got this terrific episode you’d like to use, but you can’t because Rachel or Judith or whoever the name is wouldn’t do it. I think of stories with a lot of symbolism in them as sticky.

Here goes.

Linda held the ring up toward the light. The diamond flashed rainbow colours. It was a small diamond, and Linda reflected that it was probably a perfect symbol of her relationship with Gregg. Everything Gregg did was on a small scale. He was careful with his money and just as careful with his emotions. In one week they would have a small wedding and then move into a small apartment. She supposed that she ought to be happy. Gregg was very handsome, and she did love him. Why did it seem that she was walking into a trap?

That sounds kind of distant, but it’s supposed to be distant. I’m using indirect quotation because the reader has just met Linda, and we don’t want to get too intimate right away. Besides, I’ve got to get a lot of explaining done quickly, and if you can do it with the character’s thoughts, then that’s best.

Linda twirled the ring again, then with a suddenness that surprised her, she stood up and threw it into the river. She was immediatel struck by a feeling of panic. For a moment she almost decided to dive into the river to try to recover it. Then, suddenly, she felt free. It was now impossible to marry Gregg. He would not forgive her for throwing the ring away. Gregg would say he’d had enough of her theatrics for one lifetime. He always accused her of being a romantic. She’d never had the courage to admit that he was correct, and that she intended to continue being a romantic. She was sitting alone by the river in a long blue dress because it was a romantic pose. Anyway, she thought a little wryly, you’re only likely to find romance if you look for it in romantic places and dress for the occasion.

Suddenly, she heard a rustling in the bush, the sound of someone coming down the narrow path from the road above.

I had to do that, you see. I’d used up all the potential in the relationship with Gregg, and the plot would have started to flag if I hadn’t introduced a new character. The man who is coming down the path is tall and athletic with wavy brown hair. He has dark brown eyes that crinkle when he smiles, and he looks kind. His skin is tanned, as if he spends a lot of time outdoors, and he moves gracefully. He is smoking a pipe. I don’t want to give too many details. I’m not absolutely sure what features women find attractive in men these days, but what I’ve described seems safe enough. I got all of it from stories written by women, and I assume they must know. I could give him a chiselled jaw, but that’s about as far as I’ll go.

The man stepped into the clearing. He carried an old-fashioned wicker fishing creed and a telescoped fishing rod. Linda remained sitting on the grass, her blue dress spread out around her. The man noticed her and apologized.

“I’m sorry, I always come here to fish on Saturday afternoons and I’ve never encountered anyone here before.” His voice was low with something of an amused tone in it.

“Don’t worry!” Linda replied. “I’ll only be here for a little while. Go ahead and fish. I won’t make any noise.” In some way she couldn’t understand, the man looked familiar to her. She felt she knew him. She thought she might have seen him on television or in a movie, but of course she knew that movie and television stars do not spend every Saturday afternoon fishing on the banks of small, muddy rivers.

“You can make all the noise you want,” he told her. “The fish in this river are almost entirely deaf. Besides, I don’t care if I catch any. I only like the act of fishing. If I catch them, then I have to take them home and clean them. then I’ve got to cook them and eat them. I don’t even like fish that much, and the fish you catch here all taste of mud.”

“Why do you bother fishing then?” Linda asked him. “Why don’t you just come and sit on the riverbank?”

“It’s not that easy,” he told her. “A beautiful girl in a blue dress may go and sit on a riverbank any time she wants. But a man can only sit on a riverbank if he has a very good reason. Because I fish, I am a man with a hobby. After a hard week of work, I deserve some relaxation. But if I just came and sat on the riverbank, I would be a romantic fool. People would make fun of me. They would think I was irresponsible, and before long I would be a failure.” As he spoke, he attacked a lure to his line, untelescoped his fishing pole and cast his line into the water.

You may object that this would not have happened in real life, that the conversation would have been awkward, that Linda would have been a bit frightened by the man. Well, why don’t you just run out to the grocery story and buy a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread? The grocer will give you your change without even looking at you. that’s what happens in real life, and if that’s what you’re after, why are you reading a book?

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have got upse.t but it’s not easy you know. Dialogue is about the hardest stuff to write. You’ve got all those “he saids” and “she saids” and “he replieds.“ And you’ve got to remember the quotation marks and whether the comma is inside or outside the quotation marks. Sometimes you can leave out the “he saids” and ”she saids” but then the reader gets confused and can’t figure out who’s talking. Hemingway is bad for that. Sometimes you can read an entire chapter without figuring out who is on what side.

Anyway, something must have been in the air that afternoon. Linda felt free and open.

Did I mention that it was warm and the sun was shining?

She chattered away, telling the stranger all about her life, what she had done when she was a little girl, the time her dad had taken the whole family to Hawaii and she got such a bad sunburn that she was peeling in February, how she was a better water skier than Gregg and how mad he got when she beat him at tennis. The man, whose name was Michael (you can use biblical names for men as long as you avoid Joshua or Isaac), told her he was a doctor, but had always wanted to be a cowboy. He told her about the time he skinned his knee when he fell off his bicycle and had to spread two weeks in the hospital because of infection. In short, they did what people who are falling in love always do. They unfolded their brightest and happiest memories and gave them to each other as gifts.

Then Michael took a bottle of wine and a Klik sandwich out of his wicker creel and invited Linda to join him in a picnic. He had forgotten his corkscrew and he had to push the cork down into the bottle with his filleting knife. They drank wine and laughed and spat out little pieces of cork. Michael reeled in his line, and to his amazement discovered a diamond ring on his hook. Linda didn’t dare tell him where the ring had come from. Then Michael took Linda’s hand, and slipped the ring onto her finger. In a comic-solemn voice, he asked her to marry him. With the same kind of comic solemnity, she agreed. Then they kissed, a first gentle kiss with their lips barely brushing and without touching each other.

Now I’ve got to bring this to some kind of ending. You think writers know how stories end before they write them, but that’s not true. We’re wracked with confusion and guilt about how things are going to end. And just as you’re playing the role of Linda in this story, Michael is my alter ego. He even looks a little like me and he smokes the same kind of pipe. We all want this to end happily. If I were going to be realistic about this, I suppose I’d have to let them make love. Then, shaken with guilt and horror, Linda would go back and marry Gregg, and the doctor would go back to his practice. But I’m not going to do that. In the story from which I stole the plot, Michael turned out not to be a doctor at all, but a returned soldier who had always been in love with Linda. She recognized him as they kissed, because they had kissed as children, and even though they had grown up and changed, she recognized the flavour of wintergreen on his breath. That’s no good. It brings in too many unexplained facts at the last minute.

I’m going to end it right here at the moment of the kiss. You can do what you want with the rest of it, except you can’t make him a returned soldier, and you can’t have them make love then separate forever. I’ve eliminated those options. In fact, I think I’ll eliminate all options. This is where the story ends, at the moment of the kiss. It goes on and on forever while cities burn, nations rise and fall, galaxies are born and die, and the universe snuffs out the stars one by one. It goes on, the brush of a kiss.