Story #6: Reading to exhale
On big ideas in fiction, word economy and day jobs
It all started with a tweet. If I’d been more prescient I’d have screenshotted it and would embed it below, but I wasn’t and haven’t. It was a picture of someone’s hand holding up a hardcover edition of Exhalation, a book of short stories by Ted Chiang, along with a two-word post: Mind. Blown.
Chiang is known for his short stories and novellas about topics like how artificial intelligence might fit into our near future, or how technology might change our memories. But for as many stories that took place in the future, many are set in ancient times, looking at what “technology” like a time-travelling portal or the bricks and morter in a tower reaching to heaven might mean. How do humans fit into a story where tech becomes more pervasive? As we gain access to more knowledge, does that fundamentally change the way we think? And when we know more, does that change the choices we make—and what does that mean for our perception of free will?
You know, small, contained questions with easy answers.
There are endless thinkpieces that try to answer those very questions, and I’ve probably bookmarked and glazed over while trying to read them. My brain is just not well-equipped for holding philosophical ideas, never mind several of them at one time, and interrogating them. But presented through stories, with people and places and action, Chiang made these big questions came to life. They became manageable, and I wasn’t just able to understand the idea, but pick it up and turn it around, examine it from all angles.
The magic of story.
The story
Today I want to look at a section from “Story of Your Life.” It’s a novella from Chiang’s first short-story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, and it was the basis for the movie Arrival.
“Story of Your Life” opens with a mom telling her daughter about the night she was conceived—not in a TMI way, but because it changed the trajectory of everyone in the family. (Babies have a funny way of doing that.)
A few paragraphs in, the narrator steps back from the story to provide some background:
Right now your dad and I have been married for about two years, living on Ellis Avenue; when we move out you'll still be too young to remember the house, but we'll show you pictures of it, tell you stories about it. I'd love to tell you the story of this evening, the night you're conceived, but the right time to do that would be when you're ready to have children of your own, and we'll never get that chance.
A half-page later, we get this:
That will be in the house on Belmont Street. I'll live to see strangers occupy both houses: the one you're conceived in and the one you grow up in. Your dad and I will sell the first a couple years after your arrival. I'll sell the second shortly after your departure. By then Nelson and I will have moved into our farmhouse, and your dad will be living with what's-her-name.
I love the tone. After all, it’s called “Story of Your Life” and it sounds conversational and meandering, like something you might overhear in a coffeeshop. I get a sense of resigned wistfulness. It’s nostalgic but not sentimental.1
At the same time, there’s a tension between the tone and the vocabulary. You can see it in the second excerpt with its big words: conceived, occupy, arrival, departure. Later in the story, we’ll learn the narrator is a linguistics professor who works on a project involving physics and the military. So maybe the big words are a reflection of her academic training and foreshadowing of what’s to come.
Speaking of foreshadowing. In that first excerpt, Chiang leads us down a garden path with this vaseline-lens memory, and then ends with “and we’ll never get that chance.” Wait, what? He picks up on the thread in the second excerpt. The mentions of arrival and departure confirms of what we’ve intuited (that the daughter is dead), but is also such weird phrasing that we’re still a bit unsure.
As we read on, we’ll learn more about the daughter’s death and how it fits into the bigger theme of the novella: that if you know the end of the story, you might make different choices when you’re hanging out in the middle.
But at this point, we’re still at the very beginning and we need more background. Chiang does this so masterfully that you might miss it.
Check out the excerpt below. First, I love how it shows the passage of time through houses bought and sold. Second, it is remarkable for its word economy. In the span of three sentences, we learn that the narrator gets divorced and remarried, as well as a sense of the relationship between the exes. And Chiang does it all through pronouns.
Your dad and I will sell the first a couple years after your arrival. I'll sell the second shortly after your departure. By then Nelson and I will have moved into our farmhouse, and your dad will be living with what's-her-name.
In addition to showing how time is moving, this passage implies a geographic shift from urban to rural. Earlier the narrator refers to houses on Ellis Avenue and Belmont Street, which sound like city streets. She and Nelson later move to a farmhouse, without a specified street, which could mean she moves to the country.
Not bad for three sentences.
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Why it works
The story opens with a mundane, domestic story. (In between the two excerpts I shared, there’s a section about the daughter vacuuming when she’s thirteen.) But there’s a tension here, from the big-ticket vocabulary and the foreshadowing, that alerts the reader that there’s more to the story. It compels us to keep reading.
The writing is so tight—again, the word economy of the second excerpt in the houses bought and sold—that we skip over it without realizing how much we’re actually being told. And this is just the opening section. As you keep reading, this filling-in keeps building on itself so that by the time you’re in it, you’ve got a full-fledged story.
Finally, without giving away too much, one big theme of the story is that there are two philosophies of thinking. The first is sequential: one thing happens, then another, then another, and at arbitrary points we pause and try to make sense of it all.2 The other is more gestalt-driven: the idea that if you could see the big picture, you might better understand the connections between seemingly disparate (and non-linear) events.
Key point: depending which way you’re thinking, you might make different choices. Or you might make the same choice either way, but your reasons for making those choices might be vastly different, even if the supposed outcome is the same. (Which begs the question: does it even matter? Such is the mind-bending, brain-hurtingness that Chiang induces for me, in the best kind of way.)
The process of reading this story is such that you get to experience both modes of thinking. On the first read, you get a sequential experience as each page reveals more information, which informs how you approach the next page. But once I got to end of the story, having gotten the big picture, I felt compelled to read it again (and again and again). Maybe that’s just how close reading works, period. But it felt like like Chiang had written a story in which the story allowed the reader to experience the very thing he was trying to get at.
What we can learn from it
I could go on all day about why I’d like to be Ted Chiang when I grow up, but for now I’ll focus on my main takeaways from this story:
The more you know… I’ve read about fiction writers who fill out McDonald’s job applications for all of their characters, knowing they’ll never use it all. But in learning about their characters, they can bring more to the story. There is so much under the surface of Chiang’s prose, some of which becomes more clear to me as I re-read, but it’s clear that he knows these characters and stories deeply. And that allows him to fill in all the background that makes these stories feel real and authentic, even if some of them feature robots and aliens and alternate universes.
Fiction can be more instructive than non-fiction. Both have their place, but fiction has a way of taking us into other people’s worlds and minds. And because of its emphasis on story, it has a way of illuminating big questions and making them accessible, in a way that a non-fiction approach might not be able to.
Ted Chiang keeps a low profile—no social media accounts, as far as I can see—and wrote science fiction while keeping a day job as a technical writer.3 Factoids like this continue to be validating for me (even if Chiang seems to have leaned into his craft as artist-in-residence at the University of Notre Dame). I used to hide the fact I had a day job, as if it meant I wasn’t a good enough creative writer / food writer / travel writer to make the leap full-time. But I see that now for what it really was: imposter syndrome and the misplaced belief there is a “right way” to do things, and therefore I was doing things the “wrong way.” I am pleased to report that I have grown up since then and give far fewer f*cks.
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Similar to the nostalgia/sentimental divide, I took a memoir-writing workshop in which the instructors made the distinction between a bleeding story and a scab story. A bleeding story is one that you haven’t fully dealt with, and it shows on the page as overly wrought, overdramatic, unprocessed. A scab story is one you’ve come to terms with and can write about with a detachment that adds to the story—for example, with wisdom or perspective gained from the other side.
Humans are story machines. Culturally, stories have helped us create—some would say impose—meaning on our lives and make sense of uncertain times. If this seems self-evident, it is. And it has a name: sense of an ending.
I stumbled on this term in the early days of COVID-19. I was curious what happened to SARS and whether that might offer some guidance for how COVID-19 would end, and found this unexpectedly thoughtful essay on “Where has SARS gone?” which is as much about epidemiology as it is about philosophy and the creative process. It includes this passage, which put me on the trail of “sense of an ending” as fictive technique:
In a study of fictive endings, the literary scholar Frank Kermode noted how human beings impose a coherent pattern on the world to explain the apparent arbitrariness of life. We make sense of an experience by parenthesizing it in a story. In Kermode’s words, we fabricate “an intelligible end” that is consonant with a beginning and a middle. Endings are both imminent (impending, about to happen) and immanent—in other words, they are contained within the story and given meaning in relation to the beginning and middle that precede them.
The article also discusses the false ending:
We are dealing, in other words, with a false-ending—with an end that turns out not to be an end at all, but rather a spurious foreclosure and at best a pause for breath. Such narratives invite us to rethink what an “end” means. Rather than asking “where has the SARS virus gone?” we might reformulate the question to enquire: What was the virus before it was SARS? What will it become when it is no longer SARS? In questioning the end, we call into question the beginning. We enter into the realm of incalculable risk and perpetual anticipation.
I appreciated this look at writers who have day jobs, and the stability and structure that a day job can provide—and the fact that it forces you to choose which of the writer’s activities you participate in (for example, not taking time off from a day job to promote the book as much as you’d like, and being okay with that).
I also loved this nugget from that article, from Colin Walsh:
“You usually get people who just take it for granted that no one makes a living off writing and you gotta pay your rent. Doing a day job, for them, is just a given. At the other end of the spectrum, you get this slightly confused sneer, like you’re a dog that’s just started playing a piano concerto. With their shoes on your paws.”