Lisle, Holly Mugging the Muse

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to figure out ways to tie the beginning of the book to the middle and the end, rather
than take out all the stuff that no longer fits. When you read a fairly complex puzzle
in one of my stories, you can guess that while I was writing it, I was lo-o-o-o-ost ...
and about half the time, you'd be right.
Middles are where I rethink my beginnings and debate the wisdom of my endings,
too so the book feels much more finished to me when I'm just starting it (and still
think I know where I'm going) than when I have three hundred or more pages done
and am wishing a massacre would make a suitable ending.
So here I am, right at the end of the middle, finally remembering all the things I
intended to do at the beginning (but didn't do), with a bunch of tap-dancing clowns
singing the Star-Spangled Banner and a dancing bear who refuses to eat the clowns
(though I wish he would), and my fireworks are exploding in the wrong places and at
the wrong times, and I'm on that tightrope that now consists almost entirely of Celtic
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MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY 75
and Gordian knots, but they're tied around my ankles so that if I cut them I fall and if
I don't cut them I'm stuck.
Boy, do I hate middles.
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MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY 76
Apples, Bananas
And now, a question. I throw you an object roundish, reddish, with a short stem, a
firm white flesh, seeds in the center, and you say fruit if you're being generic, or
apple if you're being specific. I toss you another piece of fruit, this one yellow,
maybe with a few brown spots, with a pulpy off-white flesh beneath a thick skin, and
you say banana. Here's the question.
What did you say wrong?
This is a discussion about life, and how the writer must see the world, and how the
world conspires to blind the writer. And the first thing you must realize in this
discussion is that the fruit I'm talking about is not a metaphor for anything. When I
say apples and bananas, I am talking about ... apples and bananas. The second thing
you must bear in mind is that this matters, no matter how trivial it may seem.
Back to apples. You go into the grocery store most anywhere in the United States,
most any time of the year. You can find apples. Red Delicious, Yellow Delicious,
Granny Smith. Maybe Macintosh. They'll be in the produce section, well-waxed,
beautiful to behold, stacked neatly in those geometric patterns grocers love. You take
them home, you eat them, your brain says you ate an apple. But you didn't. You ate
something with about as much taste as the wax fruit my grandmother used to keep on
her table, and whatever that insipid thing was, it wasn't an apple. Unless you live in
the North and have access to the roadside produce stands or to growers' orchards, and
you go out driving on one of those breathtaking autumn days when the sky has turned
an impossible blue and the leaves on the sugar maples are crimson and maroon and
lemon yellow, and unless you have purchased a small paper bag full of apples with
names you have never heard before, you have never tasted an apple. You have tasted
a lie, and been told that it was an apple. There are hundreds of varieties of apples, and
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MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY 77
there are apples that grow on abandoned farms in out-of-the-way back roads that are
almost too ugly to look at and that have no names at all. When you bite into these
apples, they are so sweet and tart and juicy and crisp that they bite you back, and your
eyes water and their sharp, tangy scent burrows a hole into your brain and fixes there
forever the taste of the apple and the rough texture of its imperfect skin and the color
of the sky on the day you tasted it and the sound of water from the spring just above
the roadside stand and the scent of growing grass and mouldering leaves and cold air
touched with both the heartbreaking memory of summer gone and the promise of the
coming of winter, and soaked overall in the unbearable beauty of the moment that
vanishes before you can blink, but that will be with you always.
Real apples don't make it into the grocery stores. Only the apple-shaped frauds that
are so durable that they can be waxed and preserved and fixed like bugs in
formaldehyde and kept almost forever touch the lips of most people. Most people
have never tasted an apple.
Have you?
Well, then, on to bananas. Bananas. What can anyone say about bananas? They aren't
like apples. You can concede that the best apples don't travel well, that probably by
the time they've sat in storage forever the market apples don't have much flavor ... but
a banana is a banana is a banana, right? You have Chiquita, you have Dole, and
maybe one or two other kinds, and every banana you ever tasted has been pretty
much like every other banana you ever tasted, and if there were ever a mediocre fruit,
that fruit would be the banana. Bland, inoffensive, polite. Nice. A cornflakes-and-
lunchboxes fruit.
And every banana you have ever tasted if you get all your bananas from the grocery
store has been as much a lie as those pathetic excuses for apples you know so well.
There are as many kinds of real bananas as there are real apples. Tiny bananas the
size of your fingers that are so sweet and rich they make an ambrosial desert all by
themselves, bananas long as your forearm that are bitter unless fried in strips and
eaten hot and crunchy, bananas with reddish skins, bananas with firm flesh, bananas
with bite. Coming soon to a grocery store near you? Not likely. You can buy all these
wonderful bananas in the open-air markets in Central America by bargaining with the
old, dark-eyed woman who sits on the cobblestones next to the white-plastered,
bullet-riddled ruins of the old Catholic church. They arrived in town that morning on
the back of her burro, and next Saturday she will bring more. You will not see these
bananas in Nebraska or Arkansas or New York because the good bananas, ripened by
the sun and eaten immediately, have no way to get from that far-away place to your
kitchen. Unless the fruits you have come to think of as bananas are cut from the
banana trees when they are hard and green and miles from ripe, they will rot in
transit. And if they are cut from the tree while green, they will never have the flavor
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MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY 78
they would have had. And the exotic bananas look funny to the eyes of consumers,
and wouldn't sell in sufficient numbers anyway. So if you get your bananas from a
grocery store, you will never taste a real banana.
Apples ... bananas ... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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