Finding the Form with Adrian Markle
I feel like I’ve been writing this story forever. Not as long as Mark Anthony Jarman’s forty years, but still.
In 2011, I came to the UK for a Master’s degree after leaving UVic, planning to write a collection of short fiction. My MA supervisors dissuaded me from this, though, and told me to write a novel. But instead of just coming up with an idea for a novel, I ended up trying to Frankenstein my existing short story ideas into a fix-up novel, which would have been called Run-off Season and would have been about a kid who goes to the bizarre funeral of his estranged father. It was not very good.
After a couple years of trying to make it good, I gave up, then let it sit in the drawer for a few more years. Eventually, I looked at it as a source of short stories again, to see what could be salvaged. With some sections, I found success fairly early on. A section from the opening chapter, which I called “Lamplight Cleaners,” was published back in 2020, for instance.
“I struggled with this story for a while. I originally tried to write the two halves of “Run-off Season”—the fictive present where the protagonist is an adult and the fictive past where he is a child—as separate stories. I tried them out in different ways: different lengths, different narrative distances, etc. Some attempts were more successful than others, but I wasn’t truly happy with any of them until I thought about bringing them together.”
The process of joining them together was interesting, at least to me. As it appears in the published story, the section in the fictive past is largely the draft I had when I made the decision to combine them. But the fictive present required a complete re-write. Making them function as a single piece with a unified effect required so many changes to tone, narrative, content, pace, etc, that it was easier to start from scratch than to try to change what I had. That being said, the re-write was the easiest of all drafts I’d written; because I had an existing component already (the fictive past) that I could draw from and refer to, many decisions relating to writing of the fictive present finally came easily.
An interesting note (is this interesting? I don’t know): I figured out what to do with this story around the same time as I had been tasked with redesigning our degree’s introductory creative writing module. I wanted to make sure we consciously taught students good workshop practice, rather than throwing them into it and hoping for the best. As a part of that, I wanted to give the students a model of good workshop practice. I arranged a short workshop session on the first full draft of this story with some colleagues and recorded it, so the students could see what a positive, constructive workshop session might look like, and so they could see how a story goes from draft to publication. When it’s published, I’ll include this piece as well.
Adrian Markle is the author of the novel Bruise. He has numerous short stories in magazines and anthologies around the world, including EVENT, Queen’s Quarterly, and Pithead Chapel. He has a PhD from the University of Exeter and teaches at Falmouth University in Cornwall, UK, where he lives with his partner, the writer Eleanor Walsh.
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash