Points and Slices:
A poet's take on the art of short story writing

A while ago I bought a CD by a Scottish group called Travis. They were flavour-of-the-month for the best part of 1999 here in Britain with good reason. There's a track on the CD called Why Does it Always Rain On Me? which begins:

Why does it always rain on me?
Maybe it's because I lied when I was seventeen.

The song never says what he lied about or to whom. It doesn't need to. The listener can relate to what the singer is going through — an unresolved guilt. We've all lied at some times in our lives, sometimes with impunity, but there are other lies that leave a taste in our mouths that even Listerine won't remove.

I'm a poet. That I have dabbled in most forms of writing is neither here nor there — I'm a poet. In that role I am often faced with that wonderful enigma: just where does poetry end and prose begin? I'm not going to get into that other than superficially. Basically, poets suggest rather than state. They expect their readers to do much more of the work, to add to the work from their own experiences. There is, however, absolutely no reason why the prose writer cannot adopt this technique. There's nothing sacrosanct about which techniques can only be used by poets.

The story that follows was written to complete a set of short stories on the theme of the senses (sense of humour, sense of impending doom — you get the idea) and so, even though it has to stand on its own, it also has to fit into a collection and, to that end, some concessions had to be made. I've added notes throughout the entire text. These are not to try and teach anyone how to write but rather — while it's all fairly fresh in my mind — to analyse where the story came from and why I chose to do things a certain way.

The story was actually written down in the order you see it. I started with the first line and went on from there. When I got to breaks in the dialogue I stopped and pottered around till I could see where I wanted it to go. Quite often I'll write the dialogue as a single block and then split it up with observations and asides but this time I just held the rest of the talk in my head till I needed it. I had no idea how the story was going to end when I began it. It was like being at school again. We never planned our stories then. We simply sat down and wrote. And it was great. At least that's how I remember it.

It would be a good idea to read the story through at least the once without looking at the comments:

Katherine and Juliet

The title is an allusion to Romeo and Juliet (which is why Katherine needs three syllables — otherwise the story could've been Kate and Julie — the original title). The fact that Romeo and Juliet is a love story might also make you think this was a lesbian twist on the original whereas in actuality it's a love story with only one protagonist.

I first was presented with Katie when I was sixteen. I'd seen her all my life, watched her grow, but we'd never been introduced properly. I didn't know who she was and it never mattered to me to find out. Why should it? I was as self-absorbed as any other sixteen year old, an only child, spoiled rotten and not a little full of my own self importance.

The age was originally thirteen which — for me at least — was a far more traumatic time and certainly the time when my siblings started acting up. But here we're looking at a time when the mother has been worn down to the stage where she would be willing to attempt a radical approach to the relationship.

Names have an importance. I always saw the names as Julie and Katie. Her surname was originally Newbury but it didn't flow. The 'new' part was what needed keeping, suggesting a new person — Newman was so obvious I'm surprised I didn't think of it immediately.

I don't think that our meeting was planned. Not in the great-plan-of- the-ages tradition of things. I suspect that circumstances had simply had enough of keeping us apart and conspired against us; I turned a corner in my life and there she was. It was one of those chance conversations, one of those what-ifs that got a bit out of control. I made an off-hand remark and Mum responded.

Of course there's no literal plan or corner and circumstance is not a person. This is a deliberately metaphorical review of the events leading up to the revelation. I've even taken the liberty of turning 'what if?' into not only a noun but a thing that can get out of hand — my original choice rather than 'out of control' but it didn't work with 'off-hand' so close to it. I'm deliberately suggesting the existence of two separate individuals to keep the reader's interest.

Some things are better remembered, clearer. I've had a lot of time to think about why my mother selected that particular moment or did the moment pick her? It obviously made some sort of sense to her at the time or, even if it didn't make sense exactly, I suppose it felt like the right thing to do; it can get confusing.

Change of tense. We're now seeing Julie as she is today — so we know she survived her adolescence and what we have here is a considered telling of a tale and an empathetic one at that. Here she's contrasting 'sense' in the intellectual meaning of the word with 'sense' as a feeling. This was the opening paragraph of the next day's work.

"I wish you weren't my mum!"
God, I could be so venomous back then. I fairly spat the words at her. Even when I'm at my angriest now — usually when my kids push me to that point and beyond — I just can't seem to let rip the way I used to.

If this was a film you'd see Julie as she is now standing in the corner watching the exchange between the teenage her and her mother (not an easy trick to pull of in words) but here we discover that she's had children of her own — more than one. I originally had her say simply 'the kids' but I wanted it to be clear that they were her children and so I sacrificed more natural dialogue for clarity.

"Would it make a difference if I was wasn't?" Mum snapped back, a little too quickly but, of course it was too late by then — she was committed: "Couldn't we be friends then rather than mother and child and stop trying to compete with each other all the time?"

The first clue! The roles of mother and friend are mutually exclusive. They have to be.

I didn't think we did. Well, actually, yes, but I didn't think it was something we did. I accepted it as who we were. It was how things were. It seemed to be how they had always been, the norm. We squabbled constantly and we were in many ways as bad as each other.

The opening of this paragraph could be cleaner but I left it because I wanted the feeling that she was saying the words as she was thinking the thoughts so, while I avoided using similar expressions earlier in the story, here I deliberately use this approach.

But we still loved each other. That was taken as read. I never questioned that she might have been a bad mother. I never seriously considered that someone else might be able to fill her shoes better. They were her shoes and that was the end of it, frumpy and sensible. And smaller than mine. I could never get it. How come I have a mother who has feet smaller than mine?
The world is round — more or less — Paris is in France most of the time, when it's not in Texas and your mum's your mum even when she's disowning you for destroying some item of cherished clothing. That's the law.

This is the beginning of a section that leads onto the next paragraph discussing how we view the world. I had thought to use an extract from Woody Allen's writings here where a son is told not that he's adopted but that he's actually a dwarf and the whole world has been built to scale. We believe what our parents tell us. I considered using Father Xmas and the tooth fairy but, since I was writing this to be part of a collection in which I was sure I'd mentioned both, I decided to drop them even though they would've worked just as well.

"What do you mean, Mum?"
"I mean what I said, Julie. Would we get on any better if we were friends, if I could just snap my fingers and stop being your mum?"
"Don't talk rubbish."
"It's not rubbish."

And, the next thing, she'd snapped her fingers.

I thought about describing how she snapped her fingers here or the look in her eyes but I decided to leave that task to the reader. It was a hard one to resist.

I read a short story once — or maybe it was a Twilight Zone episode, I'm not sure — about this teenage kid who gets sat down one day and informed that he's an alien, that his parents are both aliens too. Now they've been recalled. He discovers that the next day he has to leave who he thought he was behind along with the Earth, all his friends, his so-called-life, his goals and ambitions such as they were. Even his dog. They've been transferred to Alpha Centauri or some other god-forsaken place that won't take pets. So, he says good-bye to his sweetheart without being able to tell her why he has to leave and he's predictably bitter but he does what he's told. After all, they may no longer be human, but they're still his parents. Anyway, it all works out for the best because he meets up with his girl the next day on the spaceship — it seems she's also an alien — and they all live happily ever after or whatever.

Actually I couldn't find the episode in any of the lists of Twilight Zone episodes I checked nor The Outer Limits but both my wife and I remember it clearly so if anyone out there does remember where we saw this we would both be grateful. I'm still sure I read it in a collection of Twilight Zone stories. Of course my summary of it isn't exactly accurate and it's not meant to be. Once again, it's the gist of what's going on that's important. And we do embellish our memories don't we?

"Who's Katherine Millar, Mum? And why do you have her birth certificate?"
"You are, Julie. You're Katherine Millar. Look at the date of birth."
"I'm adopted?"
"You're adopted."

Again, no preamble. I'm letting the dialogue set the scene.

I might just as well have been looking at a spaceship in the basement. It made as much sense.

Again, a link. The birth certificate is something alien to her. So is the face in the mirror.

In the bathroom later, after the tears — I really can't remember why I was crying — I looked in the mirror and, for the first time in my life, saw Katie and was seen by her. God, she had red eyes.

Three is for emphasis.

I've heard about identical twins, separated at birth, who meet as adults and, apart from looking alike — obviously — they find themselves working at the same kind of job, living in the same sort of house, married to similar-looking partners and with the self same dislike for mashed potatoes and mushy peas. If I hadn't been me, who would I have been?

There have been a couple of documentaries about twins recently that I've found compelling. Just for the record I'm neither a twin nor was I adopted. I do have a great love of the kind of alternative reality science fiction (Star Trek does this very well).

Needless to say I had an onslaught of questions ready for… Mum. She'd been crying too — and every bit as badly as me. See what I mean about us always being in competition? I wonder if she knew any better than I what the tears were all about? I wanted to feel strange around her but I didn't. That puzzled me. It was like the day I turned thirteen. Now here I was — a teenager — and I didn't feel any different. It was just like having a sticky label peeled off and another stuck on in its place.

As for feeling strange around my mum..? Yes, well I learned quite a bit about my parents before they died (and not all of it easy listening) but I could never stop loving them — and still do — despite (and in spite) of everything.

She actually knew far less than I thought she might. She had never met my biological mother or father. She — so she said — had asked next to nothing about my background and little was volunteered. There was nothing really to tell.

This characteristic actually is one I do share with my own mother, the ability to cope with not needing to know all the gory details. When I was sixteen I was the very opposite and it's maybe because I dug around in things too deeply that I turned out more like my mum than I would ever have expected.

It was years later I decided to find out about my real mother. By this time I had made something of a life for myself. I had a job, a steady boyfriend I had no real intentions of marrying, a flat of my own and an ancient Mini Clubman that had seen better days. Don't ask me why. I woke up one Saturday with a mother and father of a hangover and started pawing through the phone book for some agency to call.

About eight years ago I met the only adoptee I've ever known. It was she who gave me the idea for this story (yes, I know, talk about a long gestation period) and she described in great detail how she found out about her real mother — indeed how she went about finding her birth mother — and the consequences to her life. This is not her story but there is quite a lot of my daughter here. The Mini was my father's last car which I incorporated since I'd used a Volkswagen Beetle already in two stories and needed another car. This is where we get the first suggestion that she has a bit of a drink problem and there're many sources for that in my life which is why I rarely drink.

"Why did you change my name, Mum? Didn't I look like a Kate?"
"It wasn't that. Your dad and I had tried for a baby many times before we decided to look into adoption. Juliet was the only name we'd ever agreed on for a girl. If you'd been a boy it was taken for granted that you'd be named after Dad so much so that the three times I did get pregnant we simply referred to the bump as Julie-Bob. You knew that much. I… we just needed some way to think of you as ours. It helped, Julie."
I'm sure it did. A name is more than simply a label — Brand X — it's… it's something to live up to, something to become.

The bump was my daughter, known by a dual-gender name during her pre-natal existence. Oh, and the adoptee I knew, her name had been changed from Katie. I actually forget what her name was. I'm guessing at Julie but I really can't remember.

When you think of Kafka or Van Gogh or Mozart, the name says everything.

Literature, Art and Music.

Afterwards, I started looking at women in the street and thinking, You could be my real Mum, and men, actors, singers. Maybe I was a long-lost daughter of Elvis or something. I kept seeing my nose on other people, my eyes, my smile on faces where it didn't belong.

Sir Paul McCartney was interviewed a couple of weeks before I wrote this. Much of the interview talked about John Lennon and I've always been struck by just how visually similar Julian and Sean are to their father. There was also something in the paper about someone's long lost son/daughter — some pop star — but I've forgotten who.

There is a small, meretricious museum in Prague whose singular claim to fame is that it has the head of Franz Kafka on display. When you go in there's this case with two skulls in it, one large, one small, sharing a label, "Franz Kafka". Once questioned about the smaller skull, the curator replied, in a rather surprised tone, "Why, it's the skull of Kafka as a child." It's a joke — or sorts — but, after I found out I wasn't who I thought I was, it somehow started to make a sense all of its own, the kind of point you could only get if you were an adoptee — or an alien or something.

I decided to do some research on the Web — by now the story was well under way — and I came upon an old site, long abandoned, where the author tells this anecdote. It's not original — both my wife and I have heard it before — so I had no problem adapting it to my needs. Interestingly, Kafka appeared two paragraphs earlier before I found this.

Actually, I was quite grateful to Mum for telling me, even if she didn't mean to, not like it happened, because it immediately gave me a class to belong to. I was no longer a minority of one. I liked that. Before I went looking for my b-mum I sought out those like me. Now that was an experience and a half.

Write about what you know. That's what they tell you. I've never had to search for my birth parents but for most of my life I've been a poet writing alone with no one to share what I wrote with (everyone say, "Awwww") that is until I went online and suddenly — and this was how I described it to people later — it felt like I'd "come home." There were people out there who didn't think that being a poet was a sappy thing to be.

It's strange how learning something like this affects how you look at the rest of the world. Gradually I became aware of a seeping suspiciousness about everything. If my adopted parents had lied to me about this for so long and so well then who was to say that they hadn't fibbed about other things? And who was to say that there weren't other people lying to me too? It doesn't sound very rational I know but where's the rationale in giving up your baby daughter I wonder?

This was another place where I thought about putting in the Woody Allen quote but that would've made three and I decided that was too many for a story as short as this.

I confessed all to Jeremy one drunken night after the end of our first year at uni. I told him I was adopted and he told me he was gay. It was an interesting moment. Actually I said I was 'adapted' but he said he knew what I meant.
"I know exactly what you must feel like," he said.
"No way."
"Way."
"In what way?"

So, who's Jeremy? Who he is should be made clear by what he does. The age is set by the fact that they have this first conversation at the end of her first year at university but the exact age is indeterminate and academic. Why Jeremy? I needed a name that suggested who he was without stating it explicitly. If he were a Jerry then a whole other image would be conveyed. That a boy of (say) nineteen would insist on being called by his full (and a bit fuddy-duddy name) says a lot.

"Well, I went on a march once, a couple of years back or maybe last summer, and I'm in the middle of everything surrounded by gays on all sides waving their banners and shouting when it struck me..?"
"What? A brick?"
"No. Be serious. It dawned on me that the only thing I had in common to the guy next to me and the guy next to him was my sexuality and that was it." I didn't get the point. So he explained: "You've been going along to all these groups and talking to others 'like you' but you're not happy with any of it are you?"
"No."
"Kinda frustrated?"
"Kinda."

The march in the story did take place and there was a gay man in it who made such an observation. It was something I saw on TV about eighteen years ago now.

"Because you're you. You're not an adoptee any less or more than you're a woman, a Virgo, a socialist, a Joni Mitchell fan and a right royal pain in the arse most of the time."
I got the point.

Why Joni Mitchell? Because she had a daughter when she was young who ended up being adopted and has since found her. If I'd thought about it then I might have made her star sign Gemini (the twins) but it didn't matter to me at the time. The point I'm making here is that she is more than the sum of her parts. Again, I would've used this expression had it not already have been included in another story in the collection.

I miss Jeremy. I wish he hadn't killed himself. I know the coroner said it was "death by misadventure" but I know. Too wise for his own good. Too wise by far.

My daughter's best friend is gay and very much alive but there was an upset some months ago when he went off the rails a bit. I'm not so sure if this was about his homosexuality or his troubled-youthedness but it could've ended tragically and I wouldn't blink an eye if I did hear one day that he'd ended it all.

I've never actually found my birth mother. I know I was born in Liverpool and I know she was called Phyllis Millar. It's an unusual name — the first name at least — but I decided I'd let things lie until I could think of a good reason for finding her. I stopped off there once and expected it to feel like I'd come home but it was just a big empty city full of women in their forties who all resembled me. Actually, I think it was the internet that finally did my head in, all those saccharine letters to imaginary mums. (Why do the dads never get a look in?) I tried to write one — two or three times.
I never could. So I stopped trying. Maybe I'll get inspired one of these days.

The web sites I found varied and I actually found them quite sad places to visit. They reminded me of the kind of walls littered with scraps of papers after a war, people trying to get in touch with any surviving lost loved-ones. I only actually read one letter that could be described as 'saccharine' and it was. I'm not denigrating the person who wrote it — and maybe it was cathartic — but I did wonder what the birth mother of that person would've thought had she ever read it.

I always thought an identity was something secret. Everyone knows that Clark Kent was Superman's secret identity but he wasn't Clark Kent. He was Kal-El, or, at least he should've been. Sometimes I tell people my name's Katie — or Kate, depending on my mood (I can be a right moody bitch) — and that's who I am when I'm with them.

Everyone knows Superman so I'm safe here. Had I chosen Batman and developed something around the loss of his parents likely most people would've got that too. Remember this is a girl's story though — and a British girl at that — so her knowledge of American comics would be likely limited to what the cinema has regurgitated for us.

I can even do a passable Cilla Black when I've had a couple. I know it sounds schizo but there's actually something quite comfortable about there being another possible me to be.
What do they say? "There, but for the grace of God … "
Yeah, right.

Cilla Black (for all the non-Brits out there) is a popular Liverpudlian (i.e. from Liverpool) singer who talks a lot like The Beatles (actually she was a contemporary). I had my doubts about using her since these days she's known as a TV presenter more than anything but the simple fact is that she is exactly the right person for the job here so, whereas in one place I might be willing to bend to make my audience's life a little easier, this is one instance where they need to catch up.

Jeremy asked me once if I'd ever thought about being gay.
"My life's complicated enough without tossing that into the mix. Did you ever think you might have been adopted?"
"Anything's possible, dear Katie." (I liked when he called me that.)
"Life is full of possibilities. Maybe I'm really adopted and don't know about it and you're actually gay and don't know about it."
"Jeremy..?"
"Yes, love..?"
"You're drunk."
"Quite possibly."

How to end a story? It's a problem. This, however, is a slice of life. It just stops when enough has been revealed. At the same time as I wrote this I re-visited The Last Picture Show and so I was very much in that frame of mind when I wrote it.

One last thought: when you paint a picture do you start at the top of the canvas and work down to the bottom? No, of course not. And it's the same with the slice-of-life story: if there's a point in there some place it's probably masquerading as a full-stop.