I would not be surprised to find that this is one of those stories where there was something hot you were looking into, something dangerous, and you cooled it down, defensively, before it got onto the page. So much is possible here if, in fact, a dynamic of real desire got into the story. As it is, the situation represents only a kind of distant problem to the narrator.
Megumi is not really developed as a character, especially in relationship to him. Why is he seeking the painting? There is a reference briefly to a work in which his mother appears in one of his father's paintings, but it's quite incidental; she's lost in a landscape, and the image doesn't become a functioning part of his psyche; it does not tap into his yearning. There just seems to be so much potential in this story. His father had done a portrait of his mother, and now the son wants to bring Megumi here, to recreate in this woman he's about to marry an emblazoned image of the mother — that, for example, would be possible. Development of that kind of interconnection and connection with desire.
When we finally come to a statement of how Paco has corrupted a situation that the narrator might wish to be pure, we begin to get a whiff of yearning. The narrator says that "Paco disrupts an already shaky marriage." He finally asserts a feeling about this but, again, it's done abstractly and analytically.
The absence of a relationship between our narrator and Megumi is also reflected in the fact that he's so open in front of her about what's going on next door. It's as if Megumi vanishes from his consciousness — indeed, that's part of the reason she walks away from him. But how much does she realize here? When she whispers, "We should go," it feels like she understands whatever ache he's feeling but, again, this is only vaguely hinted at, not really there.
There's a story full of possible yearning here. It's just that you've distanced yourself drastically from that story. I'm left with the question that I put to most of you at this stage, which is: Did the story come from your head? And then, if so, why?
It could be because the story from the get-go was a willed story, a thoughtful story, an idea story; in which case, when you put this thing away go on to something utterly different. Or, given that there's so much potential, was something coming from your unconscious that began this process, but you flinched and distanced yourself (and us) out of some kind of self-protection? In which case, I still say put it away and don't look at it — but do go back to your protagonist, to his father the artist, and his mother the flamenco dancer. There's a rich circumstance, a wonderful setting, a lot of potential here. But the story itself, as written, is disassociated from it. Do you have a sense at this point of which it is, whether the story is hot and you flinched, or whether the story was cool from the start?
Erich: Oh, yeah. Very cool from the start.
ROB: Well, then I'm impressed that you coolly set up so many possibilities.
Jocelyn: I'm curious why you say Put it on the shelf. I thought there was a lot of excellent rendering of setting, for instance. That was something very beautiful.
ROB: No matter how much beautiful stuff — we all have to learn this — I know I do — we're all struggling with it — if you write a thing from your head, everything in that piece is tainted. Even if you have passages that are beautifully written, brilliantly sensual, and maybe in their beauty and sensuality have actually come from the outer foyer of your unconscious — you don't go back and try to save those passages. Don't say, "OK, I've already got a good description of New Orleans; I'll just stick that in." An art object is organic, and this beautiful rendering of New Orleans may be exactly the wrong beautiful rendering of New Orleans for the object that's going to come out of this place. This make sense to you, Jocelyn?
Jocelyn: It's so hard.
ROB: It's the hardest thing in the world, but it's necessary. You go back and pull something out of one piece and stick it in another and everything is lost. It will just bend the story to fit an external factor. It's the same danger you run with a literal memory. Yes, Kent.
Kent: In the scene in New Orleans where they're walking down the street — say you go back to your trance, maybe there's something about his mother or something like that.. it won't be rendered the same way..
ROB: It's in the realm of human possibility that the same brilliant sentence may come back and flow right out of your unconscious once again and work perfectly.
Kent: Or you go back into the artist's studio or into.
ROB: Oh, absolutely. Scenes, actions, movements — you can redream them. Sure, he brings Megami into the studio and asks his father to paint her. But you might do that after a scene in which either he sees hanging in his father's studio or remembers from his childhood a painting of his mother that the father had done, that memory having been rendered moment to moment from his yearning to find a home again, or to reconnect with his parents, or to something lost — if such a scene is already in the story, then the minute he and Megumi walk into that artist's studio — everything will be different than it was in this version. Every detail — all the receptors will be thrumming to something in the piece that isn't there now. However, if you have some brilliant phrase from the previous draft that you're bound to work in, but which was created in a context without these new scenes in which the yearnings are manifest, then you've got a problem. As I say, it's in the realm of human possibility that walking into that studio, the same brilliant sentence may roll out and turn out to be perfect, but not if you go and get it to save it.
Janet: There's a parallel here with Mary Lee Settle's advice about research, where she says: Don't read about the period that you're researching, read in the period. magazines, memoirs, letters that were written in that period, and take no notes. Because when you come to write the thing, if you've taken notes you think you have to use them, whereas if you've immersed yourself in the period, what you need will come to you.
ROB: Absolutely. The work is an organism. Any external thing that has its own existence, anything outside the creation of the work that insists on getting in, is like a virus. Once it gets into the body, it will eat up everything around it. The organic nature of art is such that within the process everything must be utterly malleable, utterly fluent, so that everything ultimately can be brought together; and if there's anything in there that will not yield, is not open to change, you cannot create the object.
11. "My Impossibles" by Brandy T. Wilson