So far, I have lied
I am going to start with The Party. This is the first short story that I ever wrote. Living in a small, dark room in Havana, I decided to write. I read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande, and she said that anyone could write stories, so long as they paid attention to their life, and didn’t get too fancy. And I saw her point. I didn’t understand how anyone could invent anything. The core story, the emotional one, is always true of its author’s life. It’s always their voice, small or unheard, one they may never dare express, embodied in the work.
Bakery in Vedado, Havana. The words read: Por la dignidad de la patria, movilizacion cederista - For the dignity of the homeland, local mobilisation
I am disappointed with The Party. It reads as if I took the best, raw, bits of writing from the notebooks at the time, and polished them into what I thought a short story was supposed to be. I wanted to remove myself from the work, but in doing so threw baby out with bathwater, so that the story had no point of view – or a ghostly narrator about whose feelings we know little, with whom we can not emotionally engage.
What I thought when I re-read source material in my notebooks for The Party. They contained much that was left out of the final draft
I need to go back to the source material and experience that party again. I was a stranger there – overwhelmed and bewildered in Alamar, a Havana suburb, with no other foreigner for miles around. Nothing made any sense and I was writing to escape from overwhelming claustrophobia in a poor town where I understood little, and could not make myself understood. Each point of reference dissolved. Cross-purposes, my broken Spanish, the order of the day. This is the core of the story, and I realise that so far, I have lied: The Party is serene and the ‘I’ who narrates a calm and happy woman, unaffected by events. For honesty’s sake, I must get the dissonance back in.
Tags: Cuba, Leila Segal, short stories
February 28th, 2010 at 9:12 pm
I can’t wait for more about these stories – not just the book itself when it’s ready – but the story of the stories. This post is so helpful, so encouraging and inspiring xxx
March 14th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Thank you Miriam. I’m enjoying blogging here, because writing can be achingly lonely. Articulating the process has started to make it less overwhelming – I am in company with other writers, in conversation with them as I work.
Love xxx