Lauren Groff on Work and Love
This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter— sign up here . Stream of consciousness is not a literary affectation as many like to think, but the way our brains naturally work; traditionally we’re taught that narrative fiction requires breaks and quotation marks and chapters to be accessible, that dense, unbroken novels with serpentine sentences and flights of fancy are a bit “literary” and “mannered.” But consider the way you tell a story and the conversations you have. You may be listening to a friend describe a new restaurant while you’re also thinking of the assignment at work you need to finish or why the forecast was for rain but there isn’t a cloud in the sky. This doesn’t make you a bad friend or a bad listener, it makes you human. Our brains have different trains of thoughts moving concurrently all of the time. All fiction is artifice, however a more conventional novel with its page breaks, chapter breaks and use of quotation marks often feels more contrived than a novel whose style traces the paths a mind naturally follows. I adore digression. Frankly, when I’m writing I want the plot or the premise out of the way. Not because I’m “for” or “against” plot (an argument which seems to be trending these days on social media). But, more than anything, I care about language. I want the words to erupt, the sentences to flower and the ideas to go places I hadn’t expected. The story will always follow. My novels always begin with a very straightforward premise. In Saint Sebastian’s Abyss the reader knows on the first page that an ex-friend has asked our narrator to visit them on their deathbed in Berlin. In my new novel – which relishes in digression – the reader knows in the first sentence what’s going on: the narrator’s wife has died, he’s mourning, but now he has the time to finish his life’s work, an essay about the French philosopher Montaigne. There, I did it. That’s out of the way. Now I can meander, I can explore the […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
