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Pure Fiction

Pure Fiction
Sometimes fictional characters take hold of authors and lead them, often against their will, down blind alleys. In our newest Pure Fiction feature, Ania Szado and Carrie Snyder talk of such moments. Szado says her novel began as a story of loss, but wound up as something else at the hands of her heroine. And in writing her collection of linked stories, Snyder, quite unexpectedly, found a pivotal character in a man who'd been on the periphery of her life for years. Scroll down to read more.
 
Ania Szado on Beginning of Was
I thought, as I wrote the short story that would become the novel Beginning of Was, that I was writing about loss.

A character had come to me: a young mother trying to start a new life. I had written Marta as someone who had left her daughter behind in order to save her own skin. But while the manuscript sat unfinished in a drawer I became a mom myself and suddenly I could understand why the story was all wrong. Marta would not have left her young daughter, no more than I could leave my own. So what was I to do? I wanted to write about her losing everything that mattered...

That's when I realized, to my horror, that her daughter had to have died.

I say "horror." I knew what I would be putting Marta through. My father died when I was a teenager. My older brother died when he and I were in our twenties. I knew—I know—grief.

But I also knew that while time may not exactly heal, it does reveal. It had shown me that death is not a full-stop ending. I still talk to my brother, silently. He inspires me. I feel he is with me. He still loves me.

Having him in my heart and imagination, while no match to hearing his voice or touching his rough knuckles, is yet something. I can't say that he is entirely gone. Death can break a body, but not a bond. I wanted to give this balm of knowledge to Marta.

It couldn't be done in the span of a short story. Marta's journey—to the past from which she'd fled, and back again to face the future—called for a novel's worth of life. In giving it to her, I did not spare her the pain of grief. I placed her on the terrible threshold between losing what was and discovering that in some inexplicable way it continues to be ... and watched her step haltingly forward.

Perhaps I moved forward, too. Writing Beginning of Was showed me something I had never fully grasped before: grief is love, and there is fierce beauty in it. If Marta aches with it, if any of us do, it is a testament to something stronger than death itself. I thought I was writing about loss. I came to see that I was writing about love.
 
 
Who is Hair Hat? by Carrie Snyder
Hair hat man resided in a corner of my imagination long before he arrived on the page. Passing a coffee shop window as a university student, I saw what looked like a man with a flamboyant hat. The apparition didn't warrant a second glance. But it lodged in my memory, and later I wished I'd looked more closely. Perhaps, in retrospect, I'm glad I did not. There is something to be said for leaving it to the imagination.

That winter I wrote a song about a man with hair like "a spanish ballet with roses and gunshots." Even I didn't know what I meant by that.

A year later, a man with a hair hat made a short appearance in a story. I was surprised to see him. The story wasn't about him at all.

Next, he was a poem. It was called "Memoirs of the One Who Found." I wrote: "he wore his hair shaped like a hat / and i felt love, love, love."

Then, I forgot him.

A year passed, and another. My first baby was newly born. He screamed himself brilliant red when awake, but napped peacefully for hours on end. Sometimes I was so lonely, I wanted to wake him up just for something to do. I kept him in a basket beside me while I scanned old poetry files, looking for something that might cohere into a new creative project. I had finished writing my first novel (unpublished and forever so) and I wanted, needed, something new.

I came across "Memoirs." I had forgotten it so completely it was like reading an absolutely original poem containing an absolutely original idea.

I wrote the first hair hat story immediately. It was "Harassment," the only story in which the voice is male. He told me a little something about hair hat man, but not enough. So I wrote another and another. Two mornings a week, my mom drove from Waterloo to Guelph to babysit so I could write. (Babies quickly stop napping all the time, I learned.) But by the middle of that autumn I had run out of hair hat stories.

It wasn't until the following spring, pregnant and nauseous with my second baby, that I realized the novel manuscript I was working on was not a novel at all. It was a hair hat story. That was "Yellow Cherries," the first story in the book, and the darkest. Frankly, as a novel it was creeping me out. As a story, it told just a fraction more about hair hat man, but it opened up a new direction for the overall arc of the book. I wanted to push on. I wanted to push until I met hair hat man face to face, even knowing the potential for disappointment.

For the characters in the book, he is a mystery, an everyday mystery that anyone might stumble across and possess. But for me, he is also himself, someone never quite knowable, though familiar. Sometimes I can see his hair hat clearly. Sometimes I struggle. But always, always I remain fascinated.

That is the secret of hair hat.

To read more about Szado and Snyder, as well as other Pure Fiction authors, explore the links to the left for book excerpts, reading group guides, author biographies, and more ...