Freele Pesters: Installment 3

During The Third Week of our Fiction Workshop, Fiction Editor Stefanie Freele Pesters Staff and LAR Contributor Heather Freese about Style and Technique.

Nancy  Boutin– Prose Editor

What styles or techniques (prose) have you read too much of? not enough of?

For me, the issue is not style or technique that gets old–it is the mistaken assumption that a shocking or emotion-laden topic will make a story important. I have seen enough incest, cancer, and death to last me the rest of my career. A good story about asking directions will grab my attention and hold it far more reliably than a mediocre story about a dying mother.

Joe Ponepinto– Book Review Editor

What styles or techniques (prose) have you read too much of? not enough of?

What I really enjoy is what the critic James Wood calls “Free Indirect Style.” It’s a form of prose that melds author and character into a seamless unity, enabling the reader to see both the character’s interior and exterior worlds at once. Conversely, I don’t care much for stories in which the POV is completely outside the character’s psyche. I don’t just want to know what; I want to know why.

Heather Freese – Contributor – “The Popular Girls’ Guide To Sticking It To Your Friends” LAR Issue 6

Should a reader have to “understand” a story?

I think there are many ways for readers to understand stories.  A story may resonate with readers on an emotional level, an intellectual level, or something more akin to an unadulterated joy and fun in reading the story.  All of these are ways of understanding.  Personally, every time I re-read a story I understand it differently.  There are often layers of meaning and metaphor in stories that become apparent the more we study them, the more we closely examine the language choices the author has made.  By keeping their eyes open for things like theme and metaphor, readers can more deeply understand the story, but I also think that connecting with a character and simply enjoying the reading of a story is a valid way of understanding it.

What techniques/styles did you employ in your story?

I wanted this story to be funny, and I wanted to play with an unreliable narrator who truly sees herself as a wonderful person but who is vain and shallow and lacking in any sense of self-referentiality.  I tried to keep the setting realistic, though, so that I could play up the ridiculous behavior of Amy, and also to have an undercurrent of real emotion from the characters.  Even though she’s awful, I wanted reader to be able to sympathize with Amy (or at least Lisa!).  I played with sentence rhythm and structure in this story for comic effect, with longer, twisty sentences when Amy is rhapsodizing in her head set against shorter little bursts of lines like, “You care about gums.  You care deeply about gums.”

What was the inspiration for this piece?

I think we’ve all dealt with people like Amy at some point in our lives.  As one of my workshop-mates said, “Everybody has a friend like this, and if you don’t, then you are that friend.”  A big part of my inspiration for this story came from being annoyed with a friend!  I think that sometimes people, women especially, can get sucked into a view of themselves that’s based around being pretty, and they channel that into entitled behavior and backbiting whenever anyone threatens their queen bee view of themselves.  Aside from that, the opening lines popped into my head and stuck there as inspiration, and I let the story flow from them.

You chose second person for this story – could you talk about that choice?

I didn’t consciously set out to write a second-person story, but I had been reading a lot of Lorrie Moore’s stories that use second person, and when I realized that the opening lines I couldn’t get out of my head were in second person, I decided to try to sustain it throughout the story.  I’d also never tried second person before, and so part of the choice was just for fun.  I’d just finished the first draft of a novel and was thoroughly enjoying the freedom and playfulness that short stories provide.  Try second person?  Sure, why not, it’s only eight pages!  I wanted the narrator to be Amy, but also not Amy, a sort of version of Amy that had access to how ridiculous she acts, and the second person point of view let me play with that.