Author: Michael K Freundt

When I discovered a way to bypass the agent/publisher mechanism, with all its frustrations, time-walls and disappointments, and make my work available directly to readers a great weight lifted from my head and allowed the creative juices air again: I was very excited. However I could see that the books that were self-published on smashwords.com were mainly popular fiction and not the literary fiction I usually read and aspire to write. I searched my bank of ideas and resurrected the idea that eventually became Veronica Comes Undone.
See my blog post Veronica Comes Undone: How did this happen? August 29 2014.

I started writing immediately, with that warm feeling of creativity gaining momentum and urging me along; using the third person point of view (POV) which is the usual form for popular fiction. I was well into the piece, about 30,000 words, when I realised that I was actually using third person subjective: I was writing in the third person but from a specific character’s close POV, that of my protagonist, Veronica, and no-one else’s.
The third person POV allows you to be omniscient, to know everything; the past, present, and future of the world and everything in it; everybody, everyone’s desires, secrets, and obsessions; in short to be god-like with the capacity to tell the story from multiple POV’s jumping from character to character; as if the god-like narrator is sitting on the characters’ shoulders experiencing the same story from everyone’s POV (Jane Austen, Tolstoy, St Aubyn).

First person POV only allows the narrator access to the first person; the protagonist is the narrator (I said, we went). It’s only from inside the narrator’s head that you see, feel, and are told the story.
Third person subjective is indeed using the third person (he said, they did, she went) but not jumping from the shoulder of character to character, but staying on the shoulder of only one: in my case, Veronica’s. Initially I worried that this was limiting: too much like the first person, that I was cutting myself off from a richer narrative, other character’s thoughts and motives but I had 30,000 words in my wake and it felt right; it was working.
I soon realised that third person subjective, as well as first person, has an up-side: you do not have to explain the motivations of others. People’s actions to us and others in our own sphere of perception can be confusing, annoying, or down-right maddening but they can also be surprising, alarming and devastating, and it is not possible, in the first person, to explain why these other characters do what they do. This is great fiction fodder.
Formally and academically this third person subjective is called free indirect discourse which can also be defined as the practice of embedding a character’s speech or thoughts into an otherwise third-person narrative. It’s almost like the narrative is coming from two brains: the narrator’s and the character’s.
James Woods, literary critic for the New Yorker, and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard, in his book How Fiction Works (Woods J,2008 Jonathan Cape) calls it ‘close writing’. I like this term. It expresses exactly what it feels like, what it reads like.
Here’s an example;

As he walked towards her she noticed nothing but his hair: it bounced and shone like a Pantene commercial. How does he get it to do that?
The first sentence is the narrator’s; the second is the character’s: something she didn’t say but only thought as if the narrator, sitting on her shoulder, heard her think this.

If close writing gets too close it can slip into the first person.

As he walked towards her she noticed nothing but his hair: it bounced and shone like a Pantene commercial. How does he get it to do that? I’d kill for hair like that. And before she knew it they were shaking hands and she was smiling far too much.

And the last sentence is back to the third person again.

By the way, writing in the second person (you said, your wife, take yours) is rare. However Elliot Perlman in his masterpiece Seven Types of Ambiguity opens in the second person;

He nearly called you again last night. Can you imagine that, after all this time? He can.

This is rather intriguing and troubling as it appears the narrator is talking to an unknown character or, even more disconcerting, to you, the reader.

However second person POV is used more commonly in advertising (Apple – “Think different”; even though this is grammatically incorrect), and song lyrics (“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell).

For a light hearted take on ‘close writing’ follow the link to the essay, The Art of Close Writing by Jonathan Russell Clark, a literary critic and fiction writer who writes the essay ‘close’ and not in the first person, as you might expect.
http://www.themillions.com/2014/08/the-art-of-close-writing.html

For a more detailed discussion of close writing try
http://litreactor.com/columns/the-benefits-of-free-indirect-discourse

“My mother’s death is the best thing that ever happened to me since, well, since my father’s death.” So says Patrick Melrose in At Last the 5th and last book in the Patrick Melrose series by Edward St Aubyn.

It took the author well into adulthood to finally confess to his mother, long after his father had died, that the man had sexually abused him as a child. He said something like ‘my father, your husband, sexually abused me.’ She looked at him and said ‘Me too’ denying him the sympathy we was looking for. St Aubyn’s creation, the father, David Melrose, a brilliant, disappointed but monstrous man also tried to teach his son to swim by throwing him into the swimming pool expecting the child’s innate sense of survival to force him to get to the edge and save his own life. He also attempted, while drunk, to circumcise the infant on the kitchen table much to the horror of the staff. If you’re a little confused as to whom I talking about: the character or the author, don’t worry as this series is robustly autobiographical which St Aubyn isn‘t shy in talking about.
At 54 Edward St Aubyn, an English novelist of meagre aristocracy is the darling of the literary world at the moment and at the Adelaide Writers Week in March 2013 he discussed his choice of fiction rather than memoir to Michael Cathcart (Books and Arts Daily, Radio National).
“I preferred the distancing effects that are available in a novel, the unity of setting something on one day in one place is very artificial; couldn’t be done in a memoir; the creation of a lot of characters who presents the reader with this arena of points of view; the margin for invention, conflation; all the powers of art and also because the books that have influenced me and that I’ve enjoyed most have been novels and not memoirs. I always wanted to write a novel; I always felt that novels were where it was at for me. Patrick is an alter-ego; the writer is an aspect of a person, the narrator is an aspect of the writer, the alter-ego is an aspect of the narration, so there’s a telescopic effect which isn’t available in memoir. The first person who is narrating is assumed to be the author. All of those gaps collapse in the case of the memoir. And I’m not making a confession. I was interested in creating something that was entertaining even if it dealt with very troubling material.”
Book 1, Never Mind, is set in Provence on one afternoon and evening when the sexual abuse by David Melrose of his 6 year old son Patrick begins. Book 2, Bad News, is a harrowing but often funny two days in New York where Patrick, now a heroin, alcohol and ‘ice’ addicted adult flies to pick up his father’s ashes while scoring on the down-and-out streets of the city. Some Hope, book 3, has Patrick now drug free at a party in the country where he tries to find his place in a world he no longer thinks is worth joining. Mother’s Milk, the Booker Prize short-listed 4th novel deals with Patrick and his loss of the family home in Provence which gave him solace from his neglectful family while dealing with his mother’s slow slip into dementia. At Last, book 5, is set around the funeral of his mother where Patrick, finally free of his parents, may find some peace and so can avoid repeating the horrid mistakes of his forebears, especially since he now has two sons of his own.

St Aubyn uses the third-person subjective voice, which James Woods, literary critic for the New Yorker, calls ‘close writing’. It’s as if the narrator is sitting on the shoulder of the protagonist, or, in fact, sitting inside the head of the protagonist and writes not only what he sees but what he feels and wishes. This gives the reader a sense of belonging to that character; a taste of compassion and understanding. St Aubyn take’s this technique further and has the narrator jumping from character to character seeing the narrow Melrose world, the people in it and what they are doing to each other from a single point of view; but in fact from many single points of view; and when this narrator, and therefore the reader, is in the head of David Melrose, this sadistic tyrant, this disappointed, angry and parsimonious father, this treacherous and violent husband the reader can’t help but feel some degree of compassion and understanding, tempered, of course, by the man’s vile and hateful actions. While at every turn a smile and a chuckle is never far away thanks to St Aubyn’s dry English wit and snobby asides.
The St Aubyn family came to England from France with William the Conqueror and, according to the Doomsday Book, has sat with wealth and privilege on a piece of English soil since 1087; “so there’s a lot of … continuity,” says St Aubyn. He has the voice you would expect: measured and slow in its lower register, with elongated vowels that just stop short of camp. He will undeniably join the likes of Wilde in that club of quotable writers;

“People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.”

“Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.”

“Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up… They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won’t drink too much, give up, get divorced, become mentally ill. The part of oneself that’s fighting against decay and depression is transferred to guarding them from decay and depression. In the meantime one decays and gets depressed.”

“It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they’re dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.”

“…life is just the history of what we give our attention to; the rest is packaging.”

… and my favourite, “Never use the conditional when talking about money.”

St Aubyn isn’t much interested in plot but his characters and their battered senses provide the action and the twists and turns are due to how well, or not, they all deal with each other. The Patrick Melrose novels are sharp, witty, and short. Highly recommended.

This question was asked of me by a woman, a stranger, who happened to be sitting on my terrace with a few other strangers – I don’t remember the event. She asked this question immediately after I answered her question about what am I writing now. “I’m writing about a  thirty five year old single mum with a very unusual occupation who lives in Newtown,” I said, and so, she asked her question.
I said something like “Not specifically but I’ve known a lot of single mums in my time.” I think I then got up, poured more drinks, handed around more nuts, and smiled inanely while festering inside was the conversation that should’ve happened: something like this …
“I’m not writing a documentary.”
“No, but don’t you think you should write about what you know?”
“I’m writing fiction, not a biography of a single mum.”
“No, I get that, but readers like a ring of truth.”
“Do they?”
“Well yes, don’t they?”
“Only if they read non-fiction. I’m writing fiction. I’m making it up.”
“But don’t you want people to believe you?”
“Of course, that’s part of the deal. When you read fiction you agree to believe it: you know it’s made up but you suspend your disbelief in order to enjoy the story; it’is a sideline of our imagination.”
“But I want to know that the writer can be trusted to tell me a believable story. I don’t know, I just want to trust the writer.”
“But by buying a book of fiction you already know it’s made up, you accept it as fiction. A fiction writer starts way out in front in the believability stakes. Even a moderately good writer knows not to blow a lead like that.”
“But he would blow it if he didn’t know what he’s writing about.”
“If I was writing a manual on how to be a good single mum or a study on the lives of single mums living in Sydney then, yes, I agree that I would need to meet and talk to a lot of single mums, but I’m not writing a book like that.”
“Isn’t the life of a single mum very different from yours?”
“Not really.”
“What?”
“I think the pressures are the same, I don’t live alone, I have other people to consider and I have other people I’m responsible for, and I believe that, basically, men and women respond to life in the same range of reactions, but one thing I don’t think readers want is to read the familiar; they want to read the unusual.”
“Yes, but, the unusual within believable bounds.”
“How many witches and warlocks did JK Rowling interview; how many vampires did Stephenie Meyer interview; and how many men-tuned-into-bugs did Kafka interview?”
“But they’re fantasy novels.”
“Did you believe the Harry Potter stories?”
“No, they’re fantasy.”
“I mean IN the story: did you feel excited, on-the-edge of your seat.”
“Sometimes.”
“Well there you are, you believed it. You’re heart wouldn’t race if you didn’t believe it.”
“Single mums aren’t fantasy.”
“Let me tell you a story. Astronauts never get bowel cancer because before they climb into their high-tech suits, for rehearsal or for the real thing, they have to have an enema. Now if I wrote a story about an astronaut who gets bowel cancer would you believe me or would you throw the book against the wall because I didn’t know what I was writing about?”
“I don’t know; it would be the way it was told.”
“Do you believe that astronauts could get bowel cancer?”
“Well, I didn’t know that, that, enema thing that astronauts do?”
“What, don’t you believe they have to have enemas?”
“No, it’s not that. They do I suppose; sounds feasible.”
“Good because I just made it up. I don’t know anything about astronauts and enemas; but you were willing to believe it. You were willing to believe made up stuff.”
“… I just don’t think that a sixth two year old gay man living in Bali should he writing about a thirty five year old single mum living in Newtown.”
“…..more nuts?”

Here are the lInks
Smashwords Interview:
https://www.smashwords.com/interview/Michael24
Smashwords profile page:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/Michael24

Smashwords.com has just published an interview with me. Go to that website and follow the links. If you have any questions you would like answered you can add them to the interview and I will answer them asap.

I have been a fan of the writer, Colm Toibin for some years now; his novels, journalism, and essays delight and inspire.

Colm Toibin’s new novel, Nora Webster, comes out in October. His previous piece is a very short (96 pages) work called The Testament of Mary which made the short-list of last year’s Man-Booker Prize (his second nomination). My review appeared in Anne Summers Reports, Number 4 in September 2013. I include it below in anticipation of the release of Nora Webster, which, no doubt I’ll be telling you about in due course.

On Colm Toibin’s website, http://www.colmtoibin.com/, you will find a sample. His short story House for Sale, http://www.colmtoibin.com/content/house-sale, is an excerpt from, or perhaps an experiment for, the work that has become Nora Webster.

More importantly, I urge you all to subscribe to Anne Summers Reports – it’s free!

It’s a magazine that counters the common trend for today’s journalists to force on us their opinions: ASR doesn’t opine, it is “Sane / Factual / Relevant” and presents politics, culture, and society in an entertaining and forthright manner produced by a clever and passionate team.

Here’s the link, http://annesummers.com.au/asr/

 The Testament of Mary

Cólm Tóibín, Scribner, New York, 2012, 96 pp.

“History will judge us kindly,” Churchill told Roosevelt and Stalin in 1943, “because I shall write it.”

Nothing much had changed, apparently, since the death of Christ. That is exactly the attitude the gospel writers had: the story was for them to tell, in a manner and level of truthfulness of their choosing. We can augur that that may not have been their intention but they believed they were instructed to tell The Story, to spread the word; it was their duty to save people from their own beliefs.

This idea is paramount in Cólm Tóibín’s latest book, The Testament of Mary. Mary’s house, where she lived out her last years, many believe, is in modern-day Turkey, near Ephesus.

It is a simple and single-roomed stone dwelling surrounded by olive trees obviously tended to religiously over the years, but its solidness and forthright aura matches exactly the character of the woman at the heart of Tóibín’s text. She is old, knows death is soon upon her, but stoic in her defiance of the two gospel writers who warily tend to her needs.

They feed and protect her but want her to say what she cannot: “I cannot say more than I can say”. And she smiles as she knows that this disturbs them. They want “foolish anecdotes or sharp, simple patterns of what happened to us”. She is dependent on the men and resolute in her refusal “to say anything that is not true”.

One of the men, who used to comfort her, is ready now “to scowl impatiently when the story I tell him does not stretch to whatever limits he has ordained”. What strikes the reader about the opening, the set-up, of Tóibín’s story is its two-pronged relevance to the intellectual life of today’s world: its attitude to the church, and its attitude towards women.

It is hard to ignore the anti-church sentiment behind Tóibín’s text. If the religion is the retelling of the story, tenuous over the centuries that may be, it is the marketing of the retelling that is the reason for the men who hover around Mary. They torment Mary in her final years by wanting stories from her lips that they can use to enrich such marketing. This is what the church does: it markets the story.

The novella is an internal monologue and it’s easy to picture Mary on her stone stoop watching the two men tend to her, with their ulterior motives, while she thinks these thoughts.

What Tóibín does is put a vibrant worry-worm, a woman, both terrified and terrifying, into the foundation of the Church. These two men of the Church want her to tell them stories, to tell them miracles and “to stretch the limits” to meet their demands. What they fear is her refusal to give them stories they can use, for it is miracles they need.

So they feed and protect her, waiting for her to change her mind. The men write their story nevertheless, writing “things that neither he nor I saw” and “I know that he has given shape to what I went through and he witnessed, and that he has made sure that these words will matter, that they will be listened to”. They are writers, and good ones.

With the current problems the church is facing it is easy to see where Tóibín is going. Over the centuries the church has developed dogma to aid its cause, such as the development and the inclusion into doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which began one hundred years after the death of Christ.

But after 2000 years, how far has the church veered from the truth as Tóibín’s Mary saw it?

She was there, on the hill that day amid the male-instigated violence, the waiting, the blood-letting and the boredom, surrounded by cruel life and lingering death, afraid but also revered by those men who “could not look a woman in the eye”. She was, after all, the mother.

Mary, in Tóibín’s monologue, tells of a man with an eagle in a cage and a bag of rabbits that the man eagerly feeds one by one to the caged bird, who eats just little bits of each because it isn’t really hungry, but what else is a bird of prey to do when prey is thrust beneath its beak? This is what she saw that day, but it is not what the two gospel writers want to hear. They cannot use this story, it doesn’t advance their cause.

Mary’s retelling of the Wedding at Cana, of the raising of Lazarus, words and miracles; some she witnessed, most she heard second-, third-hand. But then she sees him … she meets his gaze as he lumbers with his cross on the way to the Hill, and it is as an infant that she remembers him. The thought as she nursed him was that here was someone who will look after her when she is old, who will tend to her ailing body and then her grave. No mother dreams of seeing her child die, nor of watching nails the length of her hand being thudded through his flesh and bone into the raw wood beneath. But she was a small woman and standing in a crowd only gave her limited view of what was going on. She relied on what others told her, and what others, via others, said, like his followers through the ages.

The first theatrical production of this text at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2011 caused no great ripples in the local Christian community, but this revised and expanded version is harsh on the church. Mary sees it in its infancy: followers all behaved as if this was planned, part of a great deliverance… And within this group of men (fools, twitchers, malcontents, stammerers) there was a set of hierarchies, men who spoke and were listened to, or whose presence created silence, or who sat at the top of the table, who demanded food from the women who scampered in and out like hunched and obedient animals.

Tóibín prepared a longer revision for the Broadway production which opened in April 2013 with Fiona Shaw as Mary.

To read Tóibín’s version of the crucifixion, Mary’s escape and the resurrection through her eyes, ears and dreams is to understand what a writer can do; it is to appreciate the power of the word on a page. Mary’s minders know this too. Tóibín has told a story set in the first century but it’s really about us now. It’ll be on the fiction shelves in your local bookshop but, like all fiction, it’s about truth, not of plot, but of ideas.

The same production was presented at the Barbican in London in May 2014.