Creative Digest #2: Mary Gaitskill’s dinner details; semi-colon vs comma splice; Percival Everett’s artifice

The second edition of our departmental Substack looks at craft issues around observation and authenticity, and uncovers a useful grammatical trick

Welcome back to Creative Digest, the Substack from the Creative Writing team at City, University of London, where we teach on undergrad and postgrad degrees in the School of Communication and Creativity. In this edition you’ll find:

• Jessica Andrews, on Mary Gaitskill’s observed details

• Jonathan Gibbs, weighing up the semi-colon and the comma splice

• Deepa Anappara, on art, artifice and authenticity

We hope you enjoy it!

Looking at the World

By Jessica Andrews

All writers study craft. We learn about voice, perspective, form, structure, dialogue, character, and how to polish our sentences. We get better with practice, improving our grammar and stripping unnecessary adjectives, honing our sense of style. Developing craft is an essential part of becoming a good writer, but the best novels, short stories or essays contain something else, that marks their writers out as different and allows the reader to be consumed by their world.

One way that something else shows itself is through the connection between a writer’s voice and how they look at the world. The best writing is sharply observed: the texture of an author’s world constructed through layers of objects and sensations. If we want to replicate a version of the world in fiction, no matter how different that world might be from our own, we must learn to pay attention.

Author Mary Gaitskill demonstrates her observational skills in this passage from her novel, Veronica:

Daphne made a special dinner of kielbasa sausage and baked beans, which I used to love, but now seemed so sad, I didn’t want it. But I ate it, and when my father asked, ‘Do you like it?’ I said, ‘It’s good.’ Sara picked out the sausage, glaring at it like she was really pissed. She ate the beans and went upstairs. ‘She’s a vegetarian,’ said Daphne. ‘Probably stuffing herself with candy,’ said my dad. Val Cliburn played Tchaikovsky in the next room; in the dining room, the TV was on mute. The months in San Francisco were folded up into a bright tiny box and put down somewhere amid the notices and piles of coupons. I was blended into the electrical comfort of home, where our emotions ran together and were carried by music and TV images. Except for Sara’s – she couldn’t join the current. I don’t know why, but she couldn’t.

(Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (2005) p.54)

Gaitskill evokes the texture of family life through definite markers: kielbasa sausage and beans, Tchaikovsky playing in the next room, the TV on mute, notices and piles of coupons. Through these details, the reader understands the family as cultured in some ways, with middle-class sensibilities, yet they don’t seem to have much money, and they still engage with working-class American culture, such as watching TV during dinner. There is sadness imbued in this; Alison’s father is aspirational, yet he is trapped, while his daughters are searching for their own ways to be free.

Even in the first line – Daphne made a special dinner of kielbasa sausage and baked beans, which I used to love, but now seemed so sad, I didn’t want it – Gaitskill uses a precise, almost throwaway observation to encapsulate Alison’s relationship with her family home. It was once her whole world, and she loved it, but now she has seen a glimpse of a bigger life in San Francisco. That knowledge has changed her, and she will never again be part of her family in quite the same way.

The dialogue, too, gives us the realistic family interactions, but also the unspoken emotion beneath the words. Sara is also trying to mark herself out as different, yet she is trapped in the family home. She rejects their food because she cannot escape them, whereas Alison has escaped, and feels obligated to join in with her family, out of a sense of loss, as opposed to rejecting them, like Sara, on account of her claustrophobia.

Gaitskill’s use of metaphor is grounded in objects and sensations that make up the family’s world. Alison’s big adult life in San Francisco is folded up into a tiny bright box and put down somewhere amid the smallness and clutter of her family. She is able to join the current of her family’s emotions because she knows it is temporary, whereas Sara must cut herself off from them, trapped beneath the weight of her home, desperate for independence. Alison temporarily forgets San Francisco, yet because the city has changed her, she carries it inside her. She allows herself to join in with her family, because she knows that she can leave.

The extract feels both new and familiar; the family dynamics and small observations feel true to life, and we can picture them in our minds exactly, even though the particulars of this family might be different from our own. We understand and empathise with both Alison and Sara’s positions; most of us have experienced feelings of belonging and dislocation in various ways. Gaitskill’s sentences are beautiful and she is a master of voice and character. Yet, her writing feels alive because she is able to effectively communicate her vision of the world. She observes small details and recycles them in her writing, using a fictional situation to address the real conflict between freedom and entrapment.

While we must work on our use of craft, we must also learn to look at the world. We should pay attention to the hungover teenager with unwashed hair behind the supermarket checkout, the woman crying quietly in the café with stickers on the soles of her shoes, the blurred Manchester United tattoo on the bus driver’s forearm, the raw skin around your friend’s bitten fingers. We must listen to the way people speak, memorising the cadence of their voices, noticing their inflections and unfinished sentences.

A writer might spend a lot of time alone in a room, hunched over a page, but in truth, writing is a study of the world. It is vital to look and listen, to develop sensitivity to smells and textures, to catalogue the crisp shimmer of promise on the first day of autumn and the sadness of damp pavements. We must learn to store the world in the back of our minds to be salvaged later, so we can capture it in language and spin our characters into life.

Semi-colon vs comma splice

By Jonathan Gibbs

A lot has been written about the semi-colon as a punctuation mark, much of it defamatory. Kurt Vonnegut famously called them “transvestite hermaphrodites” whose only purpose was “to show you’ve been to college”. We’ll leave aside the first part (what does it even mean?) but there’s an element of truth to the second – if we accept that going to college involves learning to present your thinking in elegant, sophisticated and persuasive ways.

The semi-colon, like many punctuation marks, is a form of pause, inserted to help the reader navigate the linear flow of the sentence. But, unlike the comma, the dash and the colon, it doesn’t just push the reader forwards, on to what’s coming next – it also asks the reader to hold in mind what has come before, as they read on.

The semi-colon points in both directions, encouraging the reader to consider both sides of the sentence it splits, or joins, before deciding what it means. It’s like the pivot in the middle of a set of weighing scales; in fact, you could think of it as asking the reader to weigh up what sits on either side of it. Go ahead and do that ‘weighing up’ gesture with your hands as you re-read that last sentence.

This makes the semi-colon very different indeed to the syntactic move called the comma splice.

In simple terms, a comma splice is where two sentences have been joined together with a comma where grammar suggests we should expect a full stop. The two parts of this sentence are independent clauses, they should really be separated by a full stop. You could of course use a conjunction (…and so they should really be separated…), or in fact a semi-colon, which would be grammatically correct, but a bit pointless. Vonnegut would roll his eyes, and I’d agree.

So if the comma splice is a grammatical error, does that mean you shouldn’t use it? Well, no. Not least because it does get used, very successfully, in published novels and stories – but you’ve got to know what you’re doing, and why. A good example is the novel The Separation by Katie Kitamura, which uses comma splices stylistically, to show the state of mind of the narrator, a woman searching a Greek island for her estranged husband, who has disappeared.

“I walked down to the sea, I did not want to remain in the hotel any longer.” “This meaningless interaction raised my spirits, it was first time I had spoken to anyone apart from the staff at the hotel, they had been friendlier than I had expected.” “I tried to sound neutral, I wanted to keep my bitterness out of the conversation, but she barely seemed to notice that I had said anything at all, she continued almost without pause.”

Three examples picked at random: there are plenty more on every page. The usage seems deliberate, intending to show us how the unnamed woman’s thinking runs away with itself, she can’t make links between her thoughts, the gears keep slipping, she slides across the surface of her thoughts like a car on black ice.

She can’t make links between her thoughts: it’s in this that the comma splice is diametrically opposed to the semi-colon, which is specifically there to suggest a link between thoughts. Diametrically opposed and, I’d suggest, mutually incompatible. The semi-colon and comma splice suggest radically different approaches to constructing narrative, or to showing how the narrating mind works.

So my advice to students about these punctuation choices is always to think carefully about the messages they’re giving the reader about how to read their work. And while it’s easy to say that the simplest message about semi-colons is Don’t use them! my advice would be more circumspect, but also hopefully more constructive: Watch out for using semi-colons and comma splices in the same piece of work! It’s something I’ve found in student work, and to my mind it shows a lack of thought about how their narrative is working at the deep, subtle level of the sentence.

On Art, Artifice, and Authenticity

By Deepa Anappara

I often look to fiction for truth: not the kind of truth that will crack my life open—though that will be most welcome—but more of an understanding of how we live our lives and why. And of late I have been thinking about the relationship between truth and artifice in fiction, and what we are willing to accept as true, or an authentic representation of life in the novels we read.

Our emotional response to fiction is often based on our own experiences, and what we think is true, or should be true. I have lost count of the number of times someone praised a book set in India—where I was born and grew up—for its authenticity, while I thought of all the ways in which the writer had pandered to a Western audience. For instance, an Indian character in the novel would describe a gulab-jamun before scoffing it down, for no good reason except that it offered helpful context for the reader unfamiliar with the country. I am not saying this is right or wrong, but that the book became inauthentic to me in that moment, and lost its appeal.

Personal taste, of course, comes into play here. Certain literary devices strike us as false only because we are not used to it. As Matthew Salesses writes in Craft in the Real World, say or said work as dialogue tags because these tags are ‘invisible’. But why are they invisible? What if we lived in a culture where all writers used ‘queried’ as a dialogue tag? Queried too, Salesses points out, would then become invisible.

For writers of colour, the stakes around the question of authenticity tend to be higher. Percival Everett has a satirical take on the subject in his novel Erasure. (American Fiction, a movie based on the book, will be released in December 2023). Its narrator is Thelonious Ellison, a professor of literature and a writer whose books don’t sell because his writing is ‘not Black enough’. Meanwhile another writer spends two days in Harlem and publishes a bestselling novel with a title that tells you everything you need to know about it: We’s Lives in da Ghetto. On a flight Ellison comes across a review that describes We’s Lives… as a ‘masterpiece of African American literature’ and praises it for its ‘haunting verisimilitude’.

Ellison’s revenge is to write a similar novel, a parody of the narratives about Black trauma that the mostly white publishing industry welcomes as authentic, the kind that goes on to win awards. Erasure’s experimental structure is able to accommodate the parody novel alongside Ellison’s complicated, messy life, and these multiple strands instead of creating dissonance work together to signal the ways in which authenticity in fiction is often misinterpreted or misconstrued. Erasure is funny, but also painfully true. Its artifice is the scaffolding that prompts us to examine our expectations and prejudices, and why we value certain narratives over others.

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Thanks for reading! Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments. If you want to find out more about the programmes offering Creative Writing teaching at City, University of London, then do explore here:

• BA English

• MA Creative Writing

• MFA Creative Writing

• MA Creative Writing and Publishing

• We have a postgraduate Open Evening coming up on Wednesday 8 November 2023, running from 5-7.30pm, with course presentations and the opportunity to chat to staff. You can find out more and sign up here.

Contributing writers:

• Jessica Andrews is the author of Milk Teeth and Saltwater, both published by Hodder & Stoughton. She co-runs literary and arts magazine, The Grapevine and co-presents literary podcast, Tender Buttons.

• Jonathan Gibbs is the author of Randall, The Large Door and Spring Journal. He is Programme Director for the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, and is looking forward to teaching The Contemporary Essay in the coming term.

• Deepa Anappara is the author of Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, and co-editor of the essay collection Letters to a Writer of Colour.

Department news:

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Lecturer in Creative Writing Deepa Anappara's first novel Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line was recently featured as one of Time magazine's '100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time'.  Her second novel, titled The Last of Earth, set in mid-nineteenth century Tibet, will be published by Oneworld in the UK in March 2025, and by Random House in the US. More details can be found here.

Jonathan Gibbs has an essay in The Hinge of a Metaphor, an anthology of essays on film edited by Richard Skinner. He will be reading from the essay, entitled ‘Hal Hartley’s Amateur: the end of the affair’, at a book launch next month at Burley Fisher Books, Kingsland Road. Thursday 26th October, 6.30pm. Details here.