WRITE STORIES YOUR READERS WON'T FORGET by LITORE STANT

Author:LITORE, STANT [LITORE, STANT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westmarch Publishing
Published: 2022-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

Ever’ man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. ‘Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but ‘tain’t easy. Life knocks a man down and he gits up and it knocks him down agin.

Ellison, on the other hand, is not telling “ever man’s” story. The narrator of Invisible Man is not everyman; his experience is not universal, but is particular to black men, or to some black men, or even to one black man. He is a person who is marginalized, humiliated, and ultimately rendered invisible by the dominant culture—unless he can tell his story in a way that others can hear it. Penny’s “ever man” is inescapably visible and evident, but Ellison’s narrator would be unseen if he did not collide with us and force us to look at the pressures under which he lives. Because he must assert his existence, Ellison’s narrator defines the keyword and key metaphor of the book on its first page, then devotes the following five hundred pages to convincing those of us who have not shared his experience how real it is. Where Rawling’s tale can conclude with a thematic statement that the reader will accept largely unquestioned, Ellison anticipates the white reader being resistant to his or reluctant to consider it; he cannot take it for granted that the reader will accept his conclusion if it is left until the final page. So he lays it all out up front and then sets about the work of showing the reluctant reader just why that thematic statement has been earned.

Neither strategy is inherently better; each is suited to the particular thematic questions of the book—and to the author’s assessment of how ready and willing the reader may be to engage with those thematic questions. As you think about your own story, how ‘universal’ or ‘controversial’ do you anticipate your thematic questions will be? When your thematic concerns come up, are some of your readers likely to be “sleepwalkers” like those Ellison mentions, who may not recognize or respect your theme? How and when you present the thematic concern to the reader—how directly or indirectly, how aggressively or gently—can be shaped by what kind of journey you think you can take the reader along on. What preparation do they need, if any, to engage with the central concerns of your book, script, or short story? That’s worth asking yourself and thinking about very intentionally.

The choice of keyword may reflect this, as well. Rawling’s metaphor of the yearling speaks to the presumed universality of her theme (coming of age); every spring, we look around us and see yearlings and blossoming plants and signs of youth. The metaphor is familiar. Ellison’s invisible man is a less familiar apparition; we don’t encounter invisible men in our daily lives, or we are not aware that we do. The metaphor is striking, an anomaly, something that requires immediate explanation, something that—ironically—cannot be taken for granted or overlooked once it is mentioned.

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