We Didn't [Stewart Dybek]

I am zealous over our textbook. Things I always knew in heart but not in words are clearly stretched before me in the simplest terms. The relationship between writer and reader: the magician and the audience. Writing is a trick of the mind – a slip of memory and imagination. In this way, the reader is “…involved as participants in a real way. Much of the pleasure of reading comes from the egotistical sense that we are clever enough to understand” (23). Writing isn’t about a story; it is about the way a story is told – a way that reflects its meaning, message, significance. Each detail, as the books says is meant to “not simply to say what you mean, but to mean more than you say” (23).

While I need further education (and experience) in the nuances of metaphor, it is a concept I feel very comfortable with. My brain naturally thinks in terms of associations and I’m able to write with a lucid flow, finding circles within circles, like that of a lazy river at an amusement park where round bodies sink into soggy inner tubes, slowly spinning within the circuit of chlorinated blueness. I feel equally competent in terms of rhythm and mechanics.

Anyway, my larger failure involves Active Voice. Ever since I can remember, this has been a red comment on the bottom of my papers. I understand the basics of this – to have the subject act out whatever they are feeling, wanting, doing. Yet, perhaps it is my own Freudian slip that keeps making my characters victims of action instead of acting themselves. As a student in this class, I’m excited to finally write a complete work of fiction (though no fiction is ever totally fiction). Either way, it’s a step away from the usual personal essays and dark semi-autobiographies I’ve been encasing myself in. My life has been a long series of difficult choices chosen for me, and then having to find a separate identity in the midst of the consequences of those choices. I need to make realist characters who have not had the life I have had, but who can still be sympathetic or encouraging.

We Didn’t by Stewart Dybek illustrates the message of this chapter is several ways. Dybek’s choice of repeating “We didn’t” as a euphemism for not having sex is a simple example of meaning more than you say. He masters the little details that go on to explode in the imagination. “At the dead end of our lover’s lane” is a favorite of mine. Metaphors of their relationship hide between the thick descriptions of “kisses tasting of different shades of lip gloss and too many Cokes”. Their relationship deteriorates as the dead woman’s body takes hold of the girlfriend’s mind. I interpreted this experience as a metaphor of relationships – where girls tend to be used and tossed away, or feel used and self destruct, but are nevertheless scarred by the ease that sex is for men. I’m not saying this is a reflection of all women’s experience, but how the girlfriend seems to interpret the dead woman’s body, and how it haunts her.

            Page 44 has the best example of rhythm, as Dybek stretches two sentences into a paragraph’s length and the reader is heaved along with the desire of the protagonist. The mixture of active voice and little punctuation makes you read faster because you have less breath to do so. Also, the “Yes. Yes wait…Stop!” is so abrupt and specific that you have no choice but to feel just as he feels – like you’ve slammed into a wall at a hundred miles per hour. Except he’s half naked with a dead woman and police nearby. This emotional response is what makes this a good piece in general, but also what makes this piece fit the theme of the chapter.