Le Guin 2.2: Or... No Punctuation!

Here we go again: I’m doing the exercises and walking through Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft; you can go back to where I started with this post. Please buy the book, by the way, if you have any interest in writing fiction: it is the only “how-to” book I have read yet that made me think I wanted to do the exercises.

The exercise for the Punctuation chapter is entitled, “I Am García Márquez,” which I for one think is hysterical:

Write a paragraph to a page (150-350 words) of narrative with no punctuation (and no paragraphs or other breaking devices). (STC 34)

Le Guin has some ideas as to what one might write about, but for this one, I am going to wing it.

The force rose up in Vezna great and swelling a huge pressure of the Goddess pushing and swirling and tearing and she thought she could never bear it but then she was on top of it and riding it the power surging through her hands legs womb head blasting outward catching hooking clutching burning out the poison and blood-soaked agony-wound pain so much so much I can’t take it please Goddess let me go let me be unChosen nobody nothing it tore loose then and drove into her body a terrifying hurt-love-scream-orgasm-embrace and their bodies were well now and sleeping and health restored but the truth was you could never unMake the pain only shift it and now it was in her shredding scraping cutting grinding how could she ever heal could she heal perhaps now at last and yes now she understood that this was who what she was this death was healing and the Goddess’s truth and she embraced loved and sank under the bloody waves.

This is a kind of reinterpretation of an important moment in my current novel, The Rules. Vezna the priest (yes, she’s female; yes, she’s a priest and not a priestess; I can’t imagine why some readers can’t get over this) heals two people of mortal wounds by drawing on the inner power of the goddess who’s chosen her. This power is far, far beyond what any normal healer is capable of, and it destroys her. When this is over, she’s dead. But they’re alive.

I kind of like this rewrite, but I’m not sure whether it makes sense in the book. I’ll have to think about it. It’s so obviously experimental that I think a lot of readers will say, “Nope, that’s not for me.” I get that, but I don’t have to respect it. The real question is, is this interpretation better than the one I’ve already got, which is composed in very long sentences (to capture that tumbling, stream-of-consciousness feeling) but with fairly normal punctuation?

Le Guin suggests asking some questions about the exercise; without quoting her exactly, because I don’t want this series to allow you not to purchase the book—whoever gets the royalties for her books now, I want those people to get them—the basic questions are whether the stream fits the topic, whether it’s readable silently (because aloud it probably works fine), and whether I did something different as I wrote it because I couldn’t use punctuation.

The stream fits the topic fine: Vezna is dying, her consciousness is in some kind of extreme trance of death, pain, and the force of the goddess, and over the course of it she bleeds out (literally) everything she’s got. But that’s not a great test, because I chose this as a topic for the exercise.

Is it readable silently? I dunno. What do you think? I think it works, but I’m exactly not the person to evaluate.

What’s different procedurally? Now that is interesting…

Coming into it, I figured that there would be this tendency to go, “and then and then and then and then.” Not so. That felt so flat and dead to me that I hated it every time I started. I still did it too much, frankly. But you can’t stop, you see? You’ve got no way to break. So you have to pick up a thread and run with it, and then loop back to its start when you’ve come to the end. Since I have recently been reading some Faulkner, I have some of his endless verbiage (I mean that in a good way) in my head, but he’s not as out-there as García Márquez.

I found that a string of synonymous words created a kind of comma, a kind of hang in the stream; this is why I did the “hands legs womb head” bit, for example.

I cheated (arguably) by shifting to italics in the middle—that’s a bit I got from Faulkner. He uses it very differently, but the idea is the same: you’re creating a punctuated stream without using punctuation. I liked that bit, even if it was cheating: for just a moment all hope of rationality blurs, and the italics tell the reader, this is different.

For me, at least, the crucial bit was that I couldn’t imagine writing like this, describing like this; I could only imagine thinking like this. So it was obvious to me that whatever I wrote unpunctuated, it had to be a stream of consciousness. At the same time, you can narrate interiority without going into this kind of craziness, so it had to be a consciousness that was at least on the verge of total irrationality. I felt I had to be conveying an altered mind-state, something the reader could grasp but not precisely identify with. That said, I could imagine writing a sex scene in this style, though I think I probably will never actually do it. In fact, this is why I used the word orgasm: Vezna is riding higher and higher on waves of bodily sensation, trying to manipulate or control or understand it with her intellect, and at some point everything just goes away from her and she’s over the edge, and falling, and down into something that’s now past. In her case, it’s about pain and blood and death and healing, but it’s not so fundamentally different from sex. I seem to recall that there are cultures that talk about orgasm as “the little death.”

Anyway, enough about sex.

What did I learn?

I like this technique, but I’m not at all sure I’m going to use it much. It feels mannered, as in, I think a reader experiencing this would think (at best), “I get what he’s doing here, and it’s kinda clever, works pretty well.” I doubt any reader is going to read the whole thing at one gulp, as it were, and think, “Holy heck, that was intense.” And if you don’t get that response—which for my money is the only reason to do something like this full-bore—you shouldn’t do it.

A thought: what if this were punctuated, as lightly as possible, so that it doesn’t produce that aversion-response?

Thanks for reading!