Behind the Words: Turnstile

This was one of the first pieces of fiction I wrote when I moved to Japan that actually engaged with my surroundings. I kept a blog almost daily, and I was working on a novel that eventually went nowhere, but I wrote little fiction about Japan in those early days. Part of it, I think, was processing. Emotion recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth put it: I needed time to let the raw impressions filter, settle, and rise up again. You can see that in the descriptions of Nagoya station in this piece.

It’s also an experiment in a style I’d never used before and have used sparingly since. I’m not much of a writer for description. Or a reader for that matter. Padding out prose by describing the weather, the architecture, the people around, is usually a cheap way to bump up the word count. I subscribe to Roddy Doyle’s idea that description should only be used when it’s directly relevant to the plot: it matters that witness was driving a blue car, not a black one; that her shampoo smells of vanilla rather than coconut because that’s how she will be identified later; that the building is four floors rather than two will be crucial when he falls from the roof. Otherwise, what’s the point? We fill in the blanks ourselves, creating images of the characters and settings that are unique for each reader.

This style however, I found interesting. I encountered it first in Shusaku Endo’s writing, mainly in his short fiction rather than his novels. It’s sort of the inverse of what I was saying above: you substitute descriptions of the character’s surroundings for actual narration. Not just pathetic fallacy, though there is some of that (it’s unavoidable sometimes). You boil everything down to short, direct, clear sentences and allow the accumulation of them to build into a style, a voice, a story.

I remain unconvinced by it, though I think it generally works here. It’s hard to sustain beyond a few paragraphs. The first draft of this story was about three times longer and over the years it got cut down, and cut again. It was mostly these descriptive passages that got cut. It’s an interesting style but it’s just not me.

In the end, for me this story is a snapshot of a stage in my development when I was trying on voices, experimenting with techniques, finding a way to write that was both true to me but allowed me to branch out into new directions. I got turned around during my creative writing Masters at Glasgow, and it took me a while to work out who I was as a writer. Turnstile is a stepping stone on the way.