Your story “Balloons” is ready at two junctures in its protagonist’s life: the primary, when he has an affair with a married girl; and (spoiler alert) the second, many years later, when the lady’s husband asks him for assist ending his life. Was it all the time a two-part story? When you have been writing the primary half, did you already envision the second?
I didn’t. I typically write till a narrative strikes some deadlock, which might be terminal. That was almost the case with “Balloons.” But I used to be helped by a dream wherein the married girl, Joan, was lifeless. It modified every little thing and drastically enlarged the prospects for making a narrative out of one thing that had baffled me, with out inflicting me to lose curiosity in it.
This isn’t the primary time {that a} dream has prompted you to begin writing or revising a narrative, is it?
Dreams are most useful when a narrative is underneath method however unfinished. Then the dream world might supply a hand. Writing earlier than you’re fairly awake is an efficient technique to maintain the unconscious in play.
You write about this world and these characters in a sort of shorthand. Just a couple of particulars about Roger’s skilled life give us a robust sense of who he’s, or at the least who your narrator thinks he’s. How do you select what info to share or not share with the reader?
I’m impatient with tales that bang on lengthy after I’ve acquired it. What I really like about brief tales is that they essentially bend towards concision, or should. It’s too unhealthy that nice collections of tales, particularly first collections by younger writers, so typically result in bulbous novels.
Joan is a cipher on the coronary heart of the story. Neither man appears to have actually recognized her. She’s a balloon that drifted inscrutably away. Is the middle of the story the unrequited love the lads really feel for her, or is it the rivalry they’ve with one another?
Joan is, certainly, a cipher, and that’s how she seems in her obituary, the place the main points about her are scant: she was somebody’s associate; she was the granddaughter of a banker and barge proprietor. Her canine, Olive, will get extra distinguished billing. Her associate’s job is described; if Joan had one, it goes unmentioned. The males are each in love together with her, and so they wrestle to outline precisely how they personal her, a delusional however commonplace impulse. She appears to have drifted via their lives, and maybe via her personal.
You reworked the ending of this story a few instances (or extra?). How do you resolve when you’ve one thing proper?
I rely on Robert Stone’s recommendation for revision: “If you think there’s something wrong, there is.” Robert Lowell famous that Yeats knew a poem was completed when it closed with a click on like a field. Lowell mentioned that he himself struggled with a poem till it “simply reaches a point where it isn’t worth any more alteration, where any further tampering is liable to do more harm than good.” Guess which of those descriptions is affectation and which is helpful and reassuring.
Plenty of your current tales have explored the ups and downs of marriages and relationships in small cities in Montana. Are you writing a collection?
I hope not. Thinking about marriages has a retrograde high quality, because it’s been a very long time because it made sense to get married in any respect. I belong to this fading cohort, so I am going on questioning about such hopeful preparations. In truth, any end result of hope pursuits me, in marriage or in any other case.
