Dear Fellow Writers:
I love this collection of unique, diverse stories. Her exquisite and stylized prose lifts off the page, not only because these are vibrant tales, but because she painstakingly incorporates ordinary details about the characters and the worlds they inhabit. You forget that there’s any technique or craft involved in the writing of these narratives, because the writer has disappeared, leaving only the story. Annabel Lyon’s joke about Oxygen was that it had just one story: a girl and her dad watching TV. But really, each one has its own theme, with complex, distinct characters. And each one involves a certain amount of risk for the author. She experiments with mood, character, dialogue, and metaphors.
Her stories are written in a minimalist, pared down style – which belies the complex characters and storylines. Her style of prose has tremendous range, too: from short, punchy sentences to long, flowing, detailed descriptions, and I think this is what sets her writing apart. Her stories have the feel of a freewriting exercise, almost as though she used drift worksheets from Sarah Selecky’s Story Is a State of Mind Course to create scenes and images that fly in the face of a logical, orderly world. In short, they are original, contain the unexpected, and involve emotional risk-taking on the part of the author. Inanimate objects are sometimes treated as though they are living, breathing beings (“blushing sunrises”, “the piano’s ankles” and “a summer dawn – light, hot damp, and tender”), but then she assigns an unreal quality to a person, such as a secondary character that is an imaginary daughter (“This is a dream. This is the dream of a girl for whom nothing is yet real.”) And there’s a thread of tension, of unspoken danger, that’s woven into each of them.
Lyon plays with sentence length, but never for the mere sake of it. Seemingly random, disconnected scenes appear at first to be unrelated to the story, or pointless, yet on a second read, fit perfectly into the big picture. Sometimes, as she moves the story forward, there’s the barest of connections, as Anne Lamott said, but by the end, a great deal has been revealed, as in “Things,” where the themes of absence and loss are expressed.
In some stories, she repeats the same line at the beginning of a paragraph, or at the end of a story, thereby reinforcing a character’s state of mind. In “Song,” certain sentences are repeated, which are clues pointing to an unreliable narrator: “it happened like this,” “I was in the car,” and “two boys went into a house.” It’s a study in denial, a masterful guide to creating complex characters who are capable of not only lying to others, but to themselves. (This is comforting, and freeing, to realize that I can relinquish control of my characters, allowing them to be flawed, delusional, or downright frightening.)
Annabel Lyon is fearless, following the character’s journey to its inevitable conclusion, which doesn’t necessarily mean a clean resolution.
She begins her stories right in the middle, or right in the heart of the narrative, where it’s most raw, where it’s most powerful, just as Sarah advises us to do. “Saturday morning, six a.m. Katy is nesting seriously on the couch in the den, with the TV on soft.” (“Awake”) It seems like not much is going on, but she has started right where all the tension in the story resides.
She is an observant writer, molding characters that are vivid, original, and unpredictable. Regarding the importance of creating a nuanced character, “she pulls it off.” Because she dares to delve deeply into them, her characters have depth and scope. Even when she explores unsympathetic characters – who remain literally nameless in “Run ” – she writes with care and attention, with a kind of love, as Sarah Selecky reminds us to do. Lyon trusts the reader’s instincts, and since there are no judgments made regarding her characters’ actions, or thoughts, the reader is given the freedom to judge for herself.
She dares to upset the status quo, or our sense of what is expected: a character “back at home wore braids and a Nike T-shirt with overalls and thick gray socks. This was her disguise.” This is Lyon’s invitation to the reader to rearrange preconceived notions, to go deeper (for I had already determined that the character’s exotic dancer’s ‘costume’ was her disguise). This is part of the process of deep noticing, listening to the character, and holding the pen loosely, I think.
Her dialogue is a study in character development: they speak in their own unique, and quirky, voices, avoiding cliché. At the end of a wrenching scene of loss, regret, and sorrow, she heightens these emotions by having a character refer to something banal: “See these? I bought them at a celebrity charity auction. These jeans once belonged to Faye Dunaway, the film actress.” “My,” said Hero, crying now. “Fit me exactly,” said the girl.”
My takeaway (which is on a post-it note on my computer): Don’t be afraid to follow Annabel Lyon’s example: she is a risktaker, unafraid to reverse the natural order of things: “Sucked-out muscles,” “delicately traced with Swastikas,” and “Nazi, like a kind of Christmas cookie.” Since I tend to rush through my scenes, this book was invaluable, teaching me to slow down, listen to my characters, in order to capture the nuances, the layers, and the emotional truth in each character.
Regards,
Maureen.
P.S. I stumbled on this short video: Annabel Lyon, “Writers on Writing.”
What Fell From the Sky 