William James, brother of novelist Henry James and diarist Alice James, was a leading 19th century philosopher and one of the founders of modern psychology.
In his book The Principles of Psychology(1890), a publication that is often credited with making the idea of “stream of consciousness” more widely known in Western culture, one of the things he does (in Chapter 10) is name and describe three distinct aspects of human experience: the material self, the social self, and the spiritual self.
Story writers can have fun exploring fictional characters via the triple lens of these categories, and using them to uncover new insights:
(a) The material Self, for example…
the body
clothes
possessions
home
family (as we share common genes)
things we have made
Invitation: When you consider the material aspects of your main characters’ lives (as listed above), what specific details of their experience might you newly identify and describe? Feel free to indulge all five senses, where relevant, as you write, and include sensory details. Try writing a good page or two (or three!) of notes that you might use as texture informing (explicitly or implicitly) the stories/chapters themselves later on.
Notice how Hills describes the narrator discovering new things about the character, through the objects she encounters in his room. The narrator feels she ought to have known these things already, and her sense of the other person is therefore destabilised. Notice too, how before the microfiction reaches its end-point, the narrator starts envisioning the other person within the context of the objects in the room, and then how the real-world situation suddenly changes for the narrator, in a surprising shift of the action. Also note how the key physical object of the mixtape in the story is naturally imbued with an emotion that has parallel relevance for the wider story context, as a mixtape is associated with nostalgia, obsolescence (of a technological kind), and relationship (since mixtapes are often given as gifts), and sothe emotions inherent in the object have resonance for the overall themes of a story about loss.
Invitation: Pick one of the following writing prompts and create a new scene/story, or (if you prefer) try sketching out some “notes-towards-a-story”:
Today’s blogpost develops the recent theme of going further with the settings you use in your writing. We’ll approach the topic from a fresh angle by exploring the work of the Anglo-Irish poet Michael Longley, to see what can be learned from him more generally for writing about physical environments of all kinds. (NB See here and herefor two other recent blogposts about making the most of settings in your writing).
For those who don’t know Longley’s writing – a brief intro…
Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 and worked in Belfast, Dublin, and London before retirement. Along with Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and others, he has been celebrated as part of the remarkable cohort of Irish writers revitalising poetry from the 1960s onwards. Although all of his books contain outstanding poems, his collections during the period from Gorse Fires (1991), through The Ghost Orchid (1995), to The Weather in Japan (2000) are – for this reader at least – particularly worth seeking out, as they contain perhaps his most consistently brilliant work. He is known for his poems responding to The Troubles, for his translations of Homer and other classical poets (often speaking obliquely, as in this example, about modern conflict through ancient texts), and for writing about the First World War (in which his father fought), but if there is one subject he has returned to even more frequently than all of these, it is the physical landscape of Carrigskeewaun, in County Mayo in the West of Ireland, where Longley – throughout his life – has made regular visits to stay in a remote cottage belonging to a friend.
Michael Longley, Collected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007)
Over the years of reading Longley’s poetry, I’ve returned to his poems about Carrigskeewaun repeatedly, wondering what it is that beguiles me on the page and keeps me reading. What is it that elevates these poems beyond the routine tropes of pastoral poetry?
In what follows, I’m aiming to uncover some strategies we might apply to writing about landscapes and locations of all kinds, including the urban…
Invitation #1: As writers, whether we are most drawn to write about rural or urban settings, we could be inspired by Longley’s example to become fascinated by a particular kind of territory, and to root our writing somewhere recurringly (even if, as with Longley, it’s not where we live). What might happen in our writing if we explore a particular type of physical situation especially deeply? What might that specific location be in your case? Or maybe instead it’s a type of location you’re fascinated by – ports, airports, churches, mosques, rivers, bridges, hospitals, nightclubs, schools, factories, farms, solar farms, and so on. How might you develop what might be called a “productive obsession” in your writing?
(2) Another part of the answer, for me, is that Longley scrutinises landscapes with the triple-eye of a botanist, ornithologist, and zoologist all rolled into one. In his poems he is a model of good practice for “the writer as witness”, a mindset and responsibility that transcends subject matter, genre or literary form. Such a detailed witnessing and understanding of landscape, including a deep knowledge of its associated shapes and vocabulary, is not a skill we are born with – it’s something acquired through diligent study and a lifetime of accumulation. Longley, for example, gained much of his knowledge of botany via a 40-year friendship with the painter of orchids Raymond Piper.
Invitation #2: How might we as writers become more devoted to learning about the physical world we inhabit? If you’re interested in urban spaces, might you research cities as a physical phenomenon? Or the architecture of individual buildings? If you’re interested in rural places, how might you be inspired to strengthen your knowledge of natural forms? In short, how might we all delve even more deeply into the phenomena of the physical world, as Longley has?
(3) Furthermore, Longley is particularly good at manifesting competing impulses within his depictions of landscape: abundance and entropy, tenderness and brutality. Time and time again, his descriptions of settings contain shades of nuance, doubleness and complexity.
And here, in ‘Between Hovers’, what could be purely a bleak narrative about a dead badger and a dead otter is suspended within a balanced framework that is “floodlit… [with] filament[s] of light… [and] sparkle…”, includes reference to “a spring tide”, and moves towards a closing image suggestive of transcendence.
Invitation #3: Where might you find opportunities, in your own writing, to remain open to complexity, by finding in your landscapes/locations contrasting aspects of both vitality and decay? Or a fluidity between gentleness and harshness?
(4) Lastly, Longley often places human experience within the context of the natural, or frames the natural world within the context of the human. He does this by effortlessly setting human and natural objects side by side within his landscapes, or else by deploying particular verbs or nouns as metaphors to make the natural and the human seem even more deeply intertwined.
Here, in ‘The Strand’ (part of the ‘Carrigskeewaun’ sequence again), the trails of a bird, children, and the narrator are all shown to be physically interconnected with and adjacent to the sand dunes and the seashore:
”….a sanderling’s tiny trail, The footprints of the children and my own Linking the dunes to the water’s edge…”
And here, in ‘The Leveret‘, we can see Longley toying with individual word choices to mix up ideas of the human (or human-built) and the natural: the conception of a baby is a “fire-seed”, young birds are a “sootfall”, and the leveret takes “breakfast”, an image that seems, in this context, very humanised.
Invitation #4: In your own writing, might you experiment with juxtaposing/blurring the natural and the human, through your choices of objects, symbols and metaphors? Might you, for example, experiment with using verbs that humanise your physical settings, or make your descriptions of people seem more animal-like, in an artful way?
One Final Invitation: In the coming days, why not carve out a bit more time to linger with Longley’s poems (there are some further links below…) and then return to your novella-in-flash (or any other writing project – a short story, a set of poems, a novel), and explore ways to transform your writing. In what new and subtle ways might it become a treasure house of encounters with the physical world that surrounds us…
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Recently I’ve been considering this principle more than ever before: the action of writing about place is always political. This truth perhaps feels like it has even greater and more tragic resonance in our current era, where landscapes are territories strongly contested by multiple forces, yet it has manifested in so many different ways throughout centuries of world literature.
Some writers already have an inherently politicised relationship with landscape because of their personal connection to a particular location – whether as a birthplace, or as “home turf”, somewhere that a person has rooted, or somewhere our ancestors were rooted.
Not all writers feel they have a readily personal link to physical landscapes that contain deeper, political resonances. Depending on where we live or have lived, we might feel like the physical settings we’re most connected to are too ordinary.
It’s a surprising truth that what feels like ordinary territory to one person can be astonishing or revelatory to an outsider who isn’t familiar with that place. Our ordinary can be someone else’s extraordinary, because sometimes we overlook what’s notable about the everyday world that surrounds us. Sometimes, too, our families or communities connect us to landscapes in deeper, more entangled ways than we conceptualise when we’re simply going about our daily life.
And ultimately every landscape, whether rural or urban, is inscribed with both a natural and a human history that is fundamentally political – not just the history of animal and plant life that has flourished or waned there, but also the history of our human relationship with that land, and how we have interacted with it over time (through agricultural machinery, or buildings, patterns of mapping, or physical sculpting and reshaping, or sometimes merely in the act of walking through it). Landscape in this way becomes more than only a physical territory: it contains layers of history, politics (local, national, or international), and story.
Invitation #1: Here are some questions to get you exploring your own personal connection to landscape and place. I invite you to find a spare 30-40 minutes or so (this weekend or at another time), and write out some reflections in response. And then whatever themes emerge, be open to the possibility of new ideas percolating their way into your current writing projects:
In what kinds of environments have you lived and worked? (In other words, the places where you have rooted, to a greater or lesser extent.)
To what kinds of environments have you travelled?
Do you consider yourself a rural or urban person, in your upbringing?
Which type of environment – rural or urban – has the stronger or more positive associations for you now, and why?
To what extent do you consider yourself rooted (or rootless)?
What are the racial, ethnic or national identities that have shaped your experience of place, and in what ways?
How have broader environmental issues (climate, food, wildlife, housing etc) affected your life, or the lives of people you know personally?
How would you describe your relationship to the planet as a whole?
What are the key incidents and influences from your life through which place or environment have had an impact upon your identity?
TIP: As well as containing story, a landscape will also inevitably carry layers of emotion. As Graham Mort has written, in his brilliant essay ‘Landscapes and Language’: “A landscape poem or descriptive prose passage is always more than pure description… Landscapes in this respect are psyche-scapes, metaphors representing the yearnings and aspirations, hope, betrayal, anger and bitterness that we see in them.” (from The Creative Writing Coursebook, Julia Bell & Paul Magrs (eds.), (London: Macmillan, 2001), p.180). So as you start making notes about landscapes you’re personally connected to, notice any feelings associated with them, as well as simply trying to witness their physical existence. (If you notice challenging feelings arising, you have the freedom to decide to keep writing through the feeling until it transforms or subsides, or otherwise pause and distract yourself with another activity, chat to someone, or go for a stroll / get your body moving.)
Invitation #2: As a second activity this weekend (or at a more convenient time for you), I invite you to go out into your local landscape with a notebook or smartphone and practise the following two-part exercise as an act of witnessing: (a) observing the physical reality of things closely, and (b) finding vivid and specific language for capturing/evoking those physical things on the page. Consider the following categories of noticing, if they’re helpful:
(1) details of nature (incl. any interaction between “natural” and “human”) (2) architecture (incl. decorative vs. functional vs. culturally symbolic or meaningful; and manifestations of the passage of time within architecture) (3) people – as individuals and people in groups (e.g. why this person with these people as a group? clothes as a statement/unconscious signal; what is the person carrying and why? what are the person’s emotions? what kind of activity are they participating in?) (4) technology/equipment (its purpose, what materials is the technology using, how it might have been made, and by whom, and what effect does it have on its surroundings?)
Again, afterwards, be open to some of this observed material finding its way into your current writing projects…
Above all, have fun exploring the landscapes and locations you personally know. Consider them as if you were seeing the territory for the first time…
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And would you like some help with a novella-in-flash you’re writing?
Vivid locations, deftly sketched, are part of the contract we establish with readers that our story is authentic. Especially in long-form fiction, they are one of the subtle supports for persuading the reader to suspend disbelief and immerse themselves in the story.
In one-off flash fictions, passages of description may sometimes be minimised, due to the compressed nature of that individual form. But in a novella-in-flash, your settings and locations can have a more meaningful role in building story and atmosphere, through the gradual accumulation of detail across chapters. Plotting out your settings and locations on a map can also be a fun way to bring to life the novella you are imagining.
It can be helpful to think about your settings as if they were characters or entities in their own right. What’s more, a piece of description is always more than just description. It reflects the emotions and inner world of the protagonist or observer. The way human participants relate to their physical environment contains dynamic narrative potential.
Vivid, specific and unusual details can make scenes feel alive. Flash fiction writer and editor Randall Brown refers to Charles Baxter’s concept of ‘defamiliarization’, encouraging writers to focus on what’s unfamiliar and atypical about a location, the aspects of a scene that seem idiosyncratic, rather than giving the reader predictable and predetermined details. (Randall Brown, Pocket Guide to Flash Fiction (Wynnewood: Matter Press, 2012), pp.128–136)
Invitation: Pick one of the following prompts and write a new scene/story for your novella, or (if you prefer!) try sketching out some “notes-towards-a-story”, perhaps via the creative mind-mapping technique that Liz Berry talks about in this article.
Take a character to a location/landscape that’s physically or emotionally dangerous or risky. How do they respond?
Show a character in a landscape that’s full of vitality/abundance or ruin/decay. How do they respond emotionally? How are they prompted to interact with it/act?
Write a story where a character crosses or fails to cross a boundary of some kind (to go somewhere off-limits, forbidden or hidden)
Show a character settling down or choosing to settle down somewhere and treating this place as “home”. What emotions do they feel?
Show a character escaping/trying to escape/wanting to escape. What are they needing to escape? How are they feeling? Are they successful?
Show a character returning to somewhere that’s very familiar to them, after a long time away. What emotions do they feel?
Show a character arriving somewhere that’s completely new and unfamiliar to them. What emotions do they feel?
If your character(s) live(s) in a city, take them to thecountryside (orvice versa). How do they feel in that new environment? How does it make them behave?
OPTIONAL: Consider using vivid, specific and unusual detail to bring to life the spirit of the location itself, and explore a character’s reaction to (or interaction with) the location. By the end of the flash, does the character realise something (about their environment, or a relationship or their status in/connection to the world)?
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Think about which aspects of character a pressurised/unfamiliar situation might uncover: (a) What flaws of theirs might be exposed? (b) Or in what ways might they thrive unexpectedly? (c) And what might then follow on from EITHER (a) OR (b), for the ongoing story?
Here are some methods for stretching your characters beyond their comfort zones:
Your character crosses a physical boundary of some kind (to go somewhere off-limits, forbidden or hidden) OR
A scene with a long-standing friend or a cherished relative is unsettled by a disagreement or conflict. Who loses their cool or gets rattled? What unexpected things are said?
Photo by Stewart MacLean on Unsplash
OR
Your main character meets a stranger. What’s the mood – awkward? tense? confusing? surprising? What unexpected or disconcerting things does the character notice about the stranger? What words, if any, are spoken by them? OR
An encounter with a wild animal – an encounter that unsettles them or alters them in some small way (NB the animal could be a pet, if that pet might unsettle/alter them somehow, or else a wilder creature) OR
Your character breaks a previously established rule (this could mean transgressing a social convention/code, or officially breaking the law) OR
Your character comes into conflict with institutional power in some form (you might think in terms of government, judiciary, healthcare, educational, corporate, and so on) OR
Write about a character and a taboo/fetish/obsession OR
A character having a supernatural encounter or unsettling spiritual experience OR
Your protagonist meets a person / couple / social group that’s verydifferent in some fundamental way from themselves. How does your character interact / react? Perhaps something awkward, tense, confusing or surprising happens? OR
Challenge your character(s) with a task, problem or role that’s beyond their current capabilities or natural skillset. What’s their unique response to this unique problem? OR
Throw your character(s) into an unfamiliar environment – perhaps one that feels incongruous for their core identity. (The classic “fish out of water” concept so beloved by Hollywood scriptwriters…) OR
An encounter with an enemy, rival or “frenemy”. Will it involve out-and-out conflict? Or will it be merely a banal encounter? Embarrassing? Awkward? Establish a mood that suits your overall story.
Invitation: Pick one of the above prompts and write a new scene/story for your novella, or (if you prefer!) try sketching out some “notes-towards-a-story”.
OPTIONAL EXTRA: Pick more than one prompt from the above list, and put your character(s) under pressure several times across multiple scenes!
OPTIONAL EXTRA: When describing performance under pressure, people sometimes distinguish between “comfort zone”, “stretch zone”, and “panic zone”. Do the implications of these categories have any bearing on the situation for your character? Or are there other relevant names you would use for “zones” you would push your character into?
OPTIONAL EXTRA: Ernest Hemingway, in an interview with Dorothy Parker for the New Yorker, once defined courage as “grace under pressure.” What one main quality does your character exhibit when under pressure here? Might it be something completely different from Hemingway’s concept of “grace under pressure”?
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The following three-part flash fiction – ‘Clean Magic’, by the stellar Francine Witte – offers the reader three different windows into its story-world.
The first part, from the third-person perspective of a jilted male lover, includes a non-realist element that feels like it’s been drawn from the territory of dark fairy tales, or some magical realist novel that’s playfully grotesque or absurd. The physical damage described is so fantastically extreme that it transcends literal meaning – it is signalling that it is meant to be interpreted playfully and symbolically.
The second section, in the first-person voice of a female aggressor mentioned in the first part of the story, enriches part one by revealing, through backstory, that the woman’s violence (as reported by the man) was enacting a kind of “pay-it-forward” retaliation.
And the third and final perspective in the story, arguably the strangest, gives voice to a “magic[al]” rock. It explores some of the thematic material of parts one and two from an unexpected angle, and reaches for wisdom (“it has to pass in its own measured way”) in a way that transcends the limited views of the man and woman in parts one and two.
The three part structure makes the story-world “three-dimensional”, as though this story were a chair that wouldn’t be fully itself if it had only one or two legs. Each perspective feels different in dramatic terms, because each of the characters has their own motives, values, and needs. Each character is given, at the very least, a hint of a backstory. There is variation between first- and third-person voice. Each new part takes an element from the preceding section and develops it. And the first and third sections are notably strange, conjuring an uneasy atmosphere in the midst of the playfulness (even the talking rock, something that might otherwise seem like a device for comedy, is “trapped”, “trick[ed]”, and “gag[ged]”).
Triangles of connected characters are useful to introduce into our writing, perhaps especially for longer stories, novels, or novellas. The push and pull of power dynamics (loyalties, allegiances, rivalries, hierarchies) between three people can be in flux more often than feels possible with only two people. Harold Pinter’s play ‘The Caretaker‘ is a classic example of a writer exploring an unstable triangle – one in which a visitor to someone’s home is never quite sure where they stand, because they have to deal with two brothers whose relationship always seems to be changing.
Invitation: How might you introduce/develop a triangle of characters within your novella? What might be the shifting power dynamics between those three figures, over time?
Here’s Francine Witte’s story again to enjoy: ‘Clean Magic’
After reading Francine Witte’s flash fiction, adapt any of the following prompts to fit your novella’s storyline. Write a scene/chapter/story that features:
• Three radically different points of view. (As your focus, find and use a key moment in the action of the overall novella, a decisive event that merits investigation from multiple angles.) Give each character their own differentiated motives, values, and needs in relation to this decisive event. Conjure a backstory for each figure, even if only a small part of their backstory features in the final draft. OPTIONAL: Let the second and third perspectives gradually reveal something new about the limitations of the previous perspective(s), in terms of how they understand the decisive event.
OR
• Write a story including an element of “cartoon violence” drawn from the world of folk/fairy tale, where bizarre, macabre injury, mutilation, blinding, or physical disabling, which would be tragic in all other contexts, is grotesquely commonplace as a deliberately playful or subversive device. (If it feels like this element might not suit your novella’s tone, consider featuring it within a dream or vision, which may helpfully lighten and justify the effect.)
OR
• Write a story featuring a non-violent retaliation that’s paid forward – where someone is passing the parcel of emotional suffering. OPTIONAL: Write it in such a way that the reader sympathises with both the victim and the aggressor.
OR
• Write a story entirely from the point of view of a non-human object – a spirit trapped within an inanimate physical form. OPTIONAL: this object is a witness to some of the human characters in the novella’s story-world, and it offers opinions about them, as well as foregrounding its own priorities.
• If it helps, use the symbolism of the following picture as a way into the material:
The following flash fiction – ‘Mirror’, by Claire Polders – reads like a one-page novel, so neatly does it pack a lot into a small space. Its complex mix of action and reflection is also written as one sentence – a form that some flash fiction writers refer to as the “single, breathless sentence”.
A remarkable aspect of Polders’s story is the way that the story-world gradually shifts and modulates, even though the core action – the attempted stealing of a shoulder bag – is quite simple. (The simple clarity and boldness of that action, I think, help keep this piece grounded.) New clauses in the developing sentence introduce subtle moral shifts and character nuances as we keep reading. The young, wannabe thief is initially placed within a moral framework as the first-person narrator contrasts the thief with (a) children stealing wallets (b) teenagers picking pockets (c) herself. And then as we find out more about the narrator and her past (line 4 and line 12/13 in desktop view), we start to understand more about her feelings towards the young girl, and why she responds to this attempted theft in the way that she does. Polders makes sure we are on the narrator’s side – this “contender” who is a “gray-haired” woman with a scar “on [her] cheek” – such that we trust her judgement in the final words of the story.
After reading Claire Polders’s flash fiction, adapt any of the following prompts to fit your novella’s storyline. Write a scene/chapter/story that features:
• One simple, stark action of misbehaviour or law-breaking (but not attempted theft as depicted in the example story), that is explored through present-tense reflections – either of the person on the receiving end, or of the perpetrator.
OR
• One single, long “breathless sentence” with multiple clauses that explore a main character’s present-day relationship with one other person – perhaps a scene of action, gesture, and/or conversation. Among the multiple clauses, include fleeting references to an incident in the main character’s backstory/past, such that we find out more about their motivations and values in the present-day scene, and what’s at stake for them in this relationship.
OR
• A tense, awkward, confusing or surprising encounter between two strangers in any of the following settings: – café terraces – a church – a canal – a tram
OR
• A scene in which a character experiences unwelcome actions / behaviour from another person. Before the end, the main character realises that they see something of themselves within that other person, such that they feel a conflicted, nuanced mix of emotions – somewhere between tender empathy and harsh judgement.
OR
• A day that begins worryingly badly for a main character. Let the character salvage some light from the events that unfold, such that they feel, by the end, that there are good omens for the day after all.
• If it helps, use the following picture as a way into the material:
The following flash fiction – ‘A Way’, by Sarah Freligh – is a brilliantly written example of a story that is more than one narrative at once.
At the very start, ‘A Way’ seems to focus on two young people, Cindy and the narrator, who are conspiring over stolen wine and gossiping about other schoolkids. Quite soon, as the wine “unlatches the hinge in our tongues”, the story neatly swings on its own hinge into another story: about Cindy’s mother. I won’t offer “plot spoilers” here; read it first to enjoy how the story unfolds from one superbly distinctive detail to another, from donkey suits, to a red-ribbonned Bible, to fruit speared through a plastic sword.
In the final six lines, even though the story is no longer ostensibly about Cindy, her name is mentioned three times. The “story-within-a-story” (about Cindy’s mother) leaves the reader understanding Cindy in a more three-dimensional and emotionally profound way. Through the device of a “story-within-a-story”, Freligh has radically enhanced the reader’s empathy for the teller of that story. And one might argue that there is a further layer – because it’s really the narrator telling a story about Cindy telling a story. So we might infer something, too, about narrator’s friendship with Cindy.
Now imagine how it would be if Cindy and the narrator were the two main characters in a novella-in-flash, and Cindy’s mother a secondary character. We would have learned a good deal more about one of the main characters simply through the author focusing most of a story on a secondary character – because the two people are entangled. The behaviour of the mother carries implications for how we understand the daughter.
Allowing certain chapters of a novella to seemingly focus on a secondary character’s life but still subtly say something about an entangled primary character gives a novella richness and variety. There are even whole novellas-in-flash (such as Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street) that focus on a large and varied ensemble cast primarily in order to reveal something about the central narrator who is witnessing that ensemble cast of secondary characters. The trick is that the reader always knows that the main narrator/protagonist remains our primary ongoing concern. The secondary characters do not take over too much.
In summary, then, it can be useful to consider your novella’s main character(s) as entangledin a network of loyalties and obligations to other characters. In what ways are your main characters put under pressure by the words and deeds/drives and needs of secondary characters – directly or indirectly? In what ways are characters invested in or affected by each other’s moral choices and actions, such that the values of one character impose upon the identity of another, creating friction or internal conflict for them? Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays is a useful example of a novel (written in short chapters, a kind of novel-in-flash in all but name) in which the main character is repeatedly put under extreme pressure by what the characters around her want.
After reading Sarah Freligh’s flash fiction, adapt any of the following prompts to fit your novella’s storyline. Write a scene/chapter/story that features:
• A main character gossiping about another character. Let the gossip about that second character lead us to a deeper understanding of the person doing the gossiping. Crucially, let the main character’s identity be implicated/entangled in what we hear the second character has been doing or saying.
OR
• A main character encounters someone who works as a semi-professional in a given sport (whether golf, as in the story example, or any other sport), for example at local or regional club, but not at national level. Let the moral values of that semi-professional be questionable, in an interesting way.
OR
• A character engages in religious activity (for example joining a congregation, community, or prayer group, or undertaking a religious ritual) for some other more questionable motive. What are the consequences and what are the conflicts (internal/external) involved?
OR
• A character’s tongue is loosened after they drink alcohol or take drugs. What secret do they reveal, or what verbal boundary do they cross?
• If it helps, use the following picture as a way into the material:
The Novella-in-Flash 