Apart from the everyday world that I walk around in, there’s another world I enter when I’m writing a new story. It’s like a dream world because it has elements of my everyday world, but transformed somewhere in my mind into something strange and new. Just how strange varies from story to story.
In this dreamlike world, I quite willingly suspend my disbelief, and trust that most readers will be willing to do the same. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner guy, was the one who came up with “willing suspension of disbelief” as a necessity in the dream world of storytelling. In return for entertainment—a good story—the reader agrees to accept some fantastic elements in the story.
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Islands Linked by Ocean (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2009) is a showcase for the short story magic of Lisa Linn Kanae. Lisa is also the author of Sista Tongue (Tinfish, 2001), about which Susan Schultz wrote, “It combines the history of pidgin English in Hawaii with memoir with story telling.”
Islands Linked by Ocean is all about story telling, and Lisa tells a great story. I asked Lisa to share some of her thoughts about this new collection.
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So here’s a situation for you …
Imagine you’re writing a novel and it’s starting out all right. You’ve written only the first three chapters, so you’re not bogged down in the middle yet. You have a character you call Charley Meyers narrating the story first person and he’s easy.
But … and it’s a very large but … there’s this other supporting character, a 19-year-old rodeo queen wannabe with big blonde hair and a bigger personality, and she’s just about bursting to take over the story. Do you stop her? Leave her on the sidelines in most of the chapters?
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Writers spend a lot of time on their opening paragraphs, and rightly so. Then we stand on the corner, displaying our wares under a streetlamp, waiting for a reader (or agent, or editor) to drive by. When they slow down, or stop at a red light, we boldly slink out to the curb, holding the first manuscript page of our novel up to the car window, pointing to that first seductive sentence, the alluring opening paragraph, the irresistible hook that will charm them into opening the passenger door and inviting us in. Hooker and hookee, together at last in a kind of erotic literary eHarmony dream.
But—and I apologize if you wanted me to pursue this dream further—what about the final paragraph of the novel?
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