I'm reading: Margot Livesey

I’ve just finished “Eva Moves the Furniture,” by Margot Livesey. Consistent with my aim of picking the brains of writers I admire, I wanted to look more closely at Livesey’s undramatic, seemingly artless prose.

I’ll start by quoting a passage to show what I mean. In this piece Eva is recounting her aunt Lily’s memory of a frightening event that happened when Eva was a baby. Eva introduces the vignette as an adult, in the story’s present time:

“That spring I caught bronchitis, and Lily came to visit me in the women’s ward. Perched on a chair beside my bed, she told me about the afternoon she’d been polishing the silver while I took a nap. She had sat at the kitchen table, rubbing the spoons until the bowls winked back at her, then she moved to Barbara’s hairbrush. She was working on the handle, a posy of embossed flowers, when she decided to check on me.

“In the hallway she stopped, aghast. Sixteen steep wooden stairs led up to the bedrooms and there, within inches of the top step, I lay.”

The coziness of this domestic scene is shattered by the sight of a months-old baby lying at the top of a stairway with no earthly explanation of how she got there. Reading it, I feel like I'm strolling along a woodland path, lilting pastoral music in the background, and then I suddenly drop off a cliff.

How does Livesey do this? The only word in there with any emotional loading is “aghast.” The rest of the language is plain, though with flashes of brilliance in the imagery: “… until the bowls winked back at her …”  I think the secret is just this: the contrast between the drama of the event and the muted language she uses to tell it. She rejects the tricks for ramping up excitement that some of us are taught in workshops: use punchy verbs, hyperbolic adjectives, short breathless sentences, single-word paragraphs, descriptions of hammering hearts and sweaty palms, etc. It's because she doesn’t do those things that the scene is so powerful.

And that brings up another lesson I’m taking from Livesey. Her storytelling is bold—she is creating a world that is fey and mysterious, and she’s doing it unapologetically. Her plain language has a confidence that invites us to believe in the otherworldly place she is showing us.

As for me, I’m apt to second-guess myself when I’m working out a plot. I talk myself down from bold vivid scenes, mute the drama, make everything mundane, and all for the sake of the critical reader in my head who says, “They’ll never believe that.” So I end up boring myself, my critical reader, and any real readers I might eventually gain.

I hereby vow to be bolder. I vow to adopt the mantra of another writer I admire, the poet Eric Shaffer: “Reckless and Ruthless.” He means reckless in writing and ruthless in revision.

Such boldness requires skill, which takes lifelong study and practice. I aspire to build my skill in creating the confident plainness I so admire in Margot Livesey’s prose.