blue curtains & the textural indulgence of seasons

When I was in university, I took a class about nature writing. If you asked me any specifics about this course, I couldn’t tell you. I think there was a lot of poetry, which is not a great start, because I don’t care for poetry. After glancing through some old Google Docs, I’ve been able to put a few more of the pieces together: we talked a lot about indigenous relationships to the land, travel writing by non-Canadians in their home countries, and environmentalism. Overall, it was a pretty neat class outside my comfort zone (hence, poetry) that introduced me to a new way of writing and new (to me) way of how humans catalogue and consider the world around them through nature.

While I may not have taken exactly what the professor wanted me to take from that class (poetry…), it encouraged me to think a lot about my own writing and the worlds it takes place in. This was less the consideration of my characters’ relationship to the land around them than it was even just my own consideration of the world around them. For anyone who’s spent any amount of time reading fan fiction, think about how often characters and their actions are described versus the setting. Or dialogue versus description. You know those visual artists who loudly proclaim how much they abhor drawing backgrounds? That pretty succinctly describes most fan fiction, including my own older work.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal. Fan fiction is character-driven and always will be. However, I would be remiss not to concede how much better my writing got once I realized the characters were not the only living, breathing, and interesting part of my stories. It sounds almost high school-esque to say, “Sometimes, things have symbolic meaning.” Remember that tumblr post that suggested symbolism was stupid and all of us 15 year olds on the site lost our minds thinking how clever and funny it was to suggest that the curtains were blue not for some deep, symbolic reason but simply because the author liked blue? Of course now I can’t find the original post, but I sure can find the well-deserved backlash. Or even to say something as pedestrian as, ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ sets the mood for the story going forward. Weather being (often heavy-handedly) thematic is storytelling 101, and yet actually internalizing it and intentionally including it in my work going forward has really upped the quality of my storytelling.

My understanding of the principle of enriching your entire world and not just your characters in the foreground manifested seasonally, which makes perfect sense for a few reasons. One, I’m very affected by seasons in real life, both in terms of mental health and more generally— I strongly associate scents, colours, foods, decor, and even moods with the various seasons. I’m extremely picky about what constitutes an autumn scent versus a spring scent versus a winter scent versus a summer scent. I don’t even look at a pumpkin if it’s not between September 1st - October 31st. Christmas decorations come down on December 26th, no compromises. If I wear fall colours outside of autumn, I turn myself into the local authorities. Two, seasonal changes are extremely visual. I come from a screenwriting background and my internal world while writing is very visual, and I want my readers to experience that as well. Seasons are fantastic at setting the mood (whether congruent with each other or not) and give a more streamlined feeling to the passage of time (which I always prefer over non-chronological narratives). Three… seasons are just lush. They’re so fun to write about, even the problem child summer. They’re fantastic imagery, they add texture and interest, and they help to ground your story.

There are two ideas jockeying for position in my head on this topic, and they’re mutually exclusive. They cannot be true at the same time (maybe), and yet, here I am entertaining them both.

For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ's birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer. For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles—breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.

The above from Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes showcases my first idea: The curtains are blue because they’re blue. There are few authors I would put above Bradbury when it comes to making the curtains blue simply because they like the colour. Note how a few paragraphs ago I didn’t give the author grief for making the curtains blue just because they wanted to, but the idea behind the post, mocking the concept of symbolism in storytelling at all. If an author makes the curtains blue because they want to, I don’t actually care. Sure, there’s a line to be drawn between over-describing and just throwing in something for fun, but that line is arbitrary and depends on so many factors that there’s no point in trying to draw one at all. I throw little goofy or enjoyable-to-me tidbits into my writing all the time, just because. I over-described outfits to a hilarious extent in The Dean Winchester Beat Sheet, and kept up that proud tradition in Don’t Worry About It. I can give symbolic reasons for both, sure, but I mostly did it because it was funny (Beat Sheet) or hot (Don’t Worry).

From The October Country, a Bradbury short story collection:

That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.

Also from The October Country:

Martin knew it was autumn again, for Dog ran into the house bringing wind and frost and a smell of apples turned to cider under trees. In dark clock-springs of hair, Dog fetched goldenrod, dust of farewell-summer, acorn-husk, hair of squirrel, feather of departed robin, sawdust from fresh-cut cordwood, and leaves like charcoals shaken from a blaze of maple trees. Dog jumped. Showers of brittle fern, blackberry vine, marsh-grass sprang over the bed where Martin shouted. No doubt, no doubt of it at all, this incredible beast was October!

The problem with Ray Bradbury is that as purple and eye roll-worthy as some of his prose can be, every once in a while he nails it. In fact, if you have ever noticed a proliferation of hyphenated phrases in my writing where you’re like, okay, that’s a little much, it’s probably due to his influence. The annoying thing about over-hyphenated writing like this is that sometimes, regardless of how little sense it makes, it just works. It evokes a feeling, a memory, a tug in your chest, and that’s all it takes. It’s pathos all the way, baby. Not an ethos or logos in sight. Considering Something Wicked follows the adventures of two kids, this makes perfect sense. Does that excuse him of similar crimes in books with adult protagonists? Does it excuse mine? Readers choice.

I’m not a Bradbury scholar, though I’ve read a number of his novels and, for the most part, enjoy his work. To be honest, my take on his use of symbolism is minimal. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe his work is a well of deep symbolism I’m too much of a dummy to catch, but speaking only for myself as a reader, I doubt it. And that’s fine. There is nothing inherently better or worse than writing with an eye toward texture instead of meaning.

That being said, my second idea: hey man, like, what’s the point?

It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Unless an aborted attempt at reading Romeo and Juliet when I was 14 or a CliffsNotes study of The Merchant of Venice in grade 11 English counts, I am also no Shakespeare scholar. The amount to which that makes me an uneducated pleb in the eyes of stuffy academics is unimportant to me. However, the above, from Macbeth, has stuck with me since I first heard it. First it was as it related to Wei Wuxian in The Untamed. After, as it relates to my own writing and this specific debate. How many endlessly lush descriptions of your world without saying anything significant can one read before it starts to feel like empty calories? Like someone getting up on a soapbox and speaking for twenty minutes, only to say nothing at all?

Years ago when it came out, I watched Mike Flanagan’s Haunting of Hill House. I enjoyed the actual horror aspect of it, but the writing… whew. It took a few episodes for me to put my finger on it, but when I did, I became unable to unsee it: this man LOVES listing things. For what it’s worth, I also love lists. I make them all the time. But I’m also not writing a horror novel, unless my increasingly desperate cover letters to prospective employers count. In Hill House, the music swells, the camera swings around, and someone starts to speechify, and in place of actual substance, they’re just abusing semicolons (and thesauruses, because a lot of what’s being said is just repeating the same thing with different phrasing). Once I caught onto that, Hill House totally lost me. I lost whatever respect I had for it, because that’s a lazy way for a professional writer to approach a story and fill runtime.

And the thing is, what’s so different from Hill House saying, “Ghosts are guilt, ghosts are secrets, ghosts are regrets and failings. But most times a ghost is a wish. Like a marriage is a wish. A marriage can be like a house and a marriage can be haunted, and I let that happen to us,” and Ray Bradbury saying in Something Wicked, “Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.” Lists, lists, lists, lists of the same thing but slightly different. Why does A GHOST IS A WISH make me want to tear my hair out but “a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness,” is a little much, but doesn’t come close to the agony of Hill House dialogue? Am I comparing apples to oranges? Maybe I’m being unfair, pitting a visual medium against a textual one? But then again, A GHOST IS A WISH is funny regardless of medium, so I dunno.

What it comes down to, I think, is my practical, objective-focused side versus my magpie-esque pleasure button side. In my writing I try to blend the two for the best of both worlds, but like I said earlier, this is no easy task. Indulgence for indulgence’s sake is the point of, uh, indulging, so adding in deeper, more resonant elements becomes very difficult without losing the delicious texture of, “beetle-scurrying, creeping, threading, filtering, motioning, making all moons sullen, and surely clouding all clear-run waters.” Because if and when it doesn’t make sense, evoking only feeling, only pathos, you lose ethos and, as a result, your audience’s belief in your authority as storyteller. You lose logos, too, your argument for your story’s existence, your plot, your ability to lead your audience from one point to the next. Texture is great, but that’s all it is. Without the surrounding context, it’s just a ghost-wish.

While I was hunting down some seasonal quotes to pull for this post, I came across the following from Helen Bevington’s When Found, Make a Verse of:

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

Funny that it’s about poets, given my stated distaste for the genre (keeping in mind that just because it’s not for me doesn’t mean I think it’s a worthless medium!). Putting that aside, this observation makes the important point that texture and indulgence are vital to the human creative process. Whether it’s seasonal, sensory, or circadian rhythm-related, these seemingly shallow and mundane facets of our daily lives play a huge role in our ability to write and create. This texture, on a meta level, is more relevant than anything Ray Bradbury can put to paper, because without it, there would be nothing to write (woe be the man who keeps me from my odorous rotten apples…). And then imbuing that texture into the worlds of your work is just one of many ways that authors observe the world around them, condense and refine it as necessary, and turn it into a story.

This debate that I am having with myself reeks of semantics, of who cares’. You write how you write, and what you write is what you write, and what you write might be that ghosts are wishes. I guess what I think is relevant and worth taking away from this post is that both approaches have merit, and, as with so many other elements of writing, are context and genre-dependent.

Something I’ve thought about a lot over the years is, despite a four-year writing education, I never really learned how to write on a macro level. No instructor ever stood at the front of our classroom and said, “this is how you write a story”. Which is wild and, judging by my alma mater’s tuition fees, financially vexing. It haunts me, a bit, that you can’t learn to write like you can learn a math equation, the laws of thermodynamics, or how to… do… other STEM-related procedures I have no understanding of. That seemingly unteachable gap of how to actually write a story (preferably a good one) hovers over so many of my granular, hair-splitting arguments I document here about writing that there must be some sort of connection. That anyone who writes any kind of story is, in a way, in a never ending freefall. That some of the most important elements of writing and creating will always resist being pinned to a corkboard. And that is something I will surely be talking about in the future, because I find it fascinating, confusing, and even a bit alarming? But also freeing, and scary, and help, I’m Flanaganing…

I pulled a bunch of quotes for this post and only ended up using the Bradbury ones because his absurd prose proved an excellent case study for this discussion, so I’ll put the remainder I grabbed below so you can enjoy them like I did.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.

― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

— Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard’s Egg

'Is the spring coming?' he said. 'What is it like?'

'It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine…'

— Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations 

Spring drew on...and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.

― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future - the timelessness of the rocks and the hills - all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

― Andrew Wyeth (Listen, I can’t find the actual source for this quote but I love Andrew Wyeth’s work so it’s staying here anyway)

But now she loved winter. Winter was beautiful "up back" - almost intolerably beautiful. Days of clear brilliance. Evenings that were like cups of glamour - the purest vintage of winter's wine. Nights with their fire of stars. Cold, exquisite winter sunrises. Lovely ferns of ice all over the windows of the Blue Castle. Moonlight on birches in a silver thaw. Ragged shadows on windy evenings - torn, twisted, fantastic shadows. Great silences, austere and searching. Jewelled, barbaric hills. The sun suddenly breaking through grey clouds over long, white Mistawis. Ice-grey twilights, broken by snow-squalls, when their cosy living-room, with its goblins of firelight and inscrutable cats, seemed cosier than ever. Every hour brought a new revelation and wonder.

― L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle

And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bed-sheets around corners.

— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats.
Tom Skelton shivered. Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows' Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells: gourds being cut, pies being baked.

— Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree

A GHOST IS A WISH YOUR HEART MAKES

For what it’s worth, Oculus is a great horror movie