“Chose cinema over potatoes.”
When Mavis Gallant (Paris Stories, Varieties of Exile, etc.) was 28, she quit her job as a journalist and moved to Paris. She spent the next ten years traveling and writing fiction. Two years later, in 1952, she was living in Madrid and hocking her possessions—her typewriter, her clock, her books, her clothing—to buy food. And one day (see above) she decided to go to the movies instead of eating.
Sometimes Gallant worried that she had “gambled on something and…failed.” But mostly she was undeterred: “I am not pitying myself, because I chose it. Evidently this is the way it has to be. I am committed. It is a question of writing or not writing. There is no other way. If there is, I missed it.”
One day in April, she writes the following:
“I had again that second of pure joy I sometimes experience. It came, as always, without warning, and vanished nearly at once. I was on my way to the bakery with exactly eleven pesetas left. It is difficult to define and perhaps I shouldn’t try. It must be the highest and sharpest point of all the senses, or the mind, I don’t know. Remembering, I see myself and the street in a clear but blurry light, static, like a film abruptly stopped. I remember thinking suddenly these words, “Now I shall know,” then, when the rush of feeling I can only describe as pure joy was pulling away, these words: “This is why one lives.” It was like a wave and an inner explosion of light all at once, and not physical in any way.”
1. Today, give one of your characters a fleeting moment of joy. Write the aftermath of that feeling, too.
2. Write a moment in which your character steps outside of themselves, becoming a witness to who they are and how they might appear to others. (Inspired by the above Gallant quote, but also this one: “I am really shabby now: I noticed it yesterday when I passed two beautifully groomed women, hair waved, good suits, perfume.”)
3. Write a scene in which one of your characters thinks—or says—“Now I shall know.” What do they seek to know? And are they right that they will know it, or will the scene somehow result in misunderstanding?
Happy Friday, happy writing—
Emily