Naive Narration and the Ongoing Moment

Finding the suspense and excitement in narrating a journey of discovery.

As I’ve rewritten and revised Quibble ad nauseam for the last nine years, I’ve seen fit to dispense with many things — “Kill your darlings,” the commonplace advice goes, though it’s often attributed to people who never said it — but some version of events in chapter 10, “Glass,” in which Quibble breaks a drinking glass and gets a shard of it stuck in her foot, has stayed in the manuscript all along. It’s a survivor.

For one thing, I love foreshadowing. Of course, I won’t tell you just now what’s being foreshadowed. I hope to surprise you.

But for another thing, I’ve always felt that this story should vitally involve a struggle to distinguish real from unreal things. Much of what Quibble experiences in her early life as One Within — her dreaming — is unreal. Also, Ones never see each other and they live in rather a barren place, which is why they spend their time wakeful touching and singing, making the most of what sensory experiences life affords them. Clearly, these are efforts to cling to the little reality Within offers.

Now, Without, Quibble is in a world constantly real around her, a world of objects, of things she can manipulate. However quickly she takes to it (thanks to priming by her mother Quiddity), this new world must present difficulties, different as it is from the world she’s always known. Tellingly for her, or perhaps for me, her first real difficulty is with the poem she tries to write:

I was satisfied with the mythic allusion, but in some meaningful way the poem didn’t seem real. Rather, it seemed an orphan Without. There were no things in it, only ideas. Without was full of things.

Quibble has already learned that staring at the sun — “the bright knot in the sky” — makes her eyes hurt. Now, her disappointment in the poem sets off an inquiry into the nature of the things around her, an experiment from which she learns that she too is a thing and so she, like those things, can come to grief.

The “trick” of this chapter, if you want to call it a trick, is narrating a hand-on-the-hot-stove realization — “don’t walk on broken glass!” — and convincing the reader that it is a realization for Quibble, despite her apparent maturity. So, the reader needs to see her naivete beforehand: thus her foolishness in gazing at the sun, her puzzlement over the ripped parchment and the broken plate, and her fright at seeing the glass shatter against the stone wall. And I hope, as Quibble breaks one thing after another, a sense of foreboding creeps up on the reader about where it’s all heading.