Slippery Slope: Behind the Scenes

Note: This writing discusses the machinery behind my story titled Slippery Slope. If you haven’t already, I suggest you go read it first, then come back here.

Explaining a story feels like explaining a dream, or a joke, but if I were to write a BTS (Behind the Scenes) piece, Slippery Slope would be it. (Also, my next piece is a haggler, so I’m buying some time.)

Slippery Slope started as an exercise that I did from Steering the Craft by Ursula Le Guin, from the chapter about punctuation and grammar.

The Poet Carolyn Kizer said to me once, “Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.” Maybe storytellers are interested mostly in life and commas.

Have to admit, I was one of those people who either wasn’t very interested in punctuation, or afraid of it. Little did I know the small monster that Le Guin would make me become — someone who now obsesses about commas, and em-dashes, and semicolon, and colons, and periods, and spaces around the em-dashes. Yes, it matters where the comma goes! But I digress.

The exercise was to write a paragraph of narrative with no punctuation (and no paragraphs or other breaking devices). What to write about is always a challenge every time you’re about to start putting the first word. Which end piece of a string in the thousands of yarn-balls living in my brain alongside hundreds of feral cats, that I need to pull?

Then I remembered the piece of memory — a borrowed one at that. It’s a small episode that really stuck with me, like a funny niggle, like a bookmark you forget about and find again from time to time. Most of all, I just thought it’s really funny when it was told to me — a ridiculous scene against a serious backdrop. And how I love contrasts and contradictions.

The writing took shape very quickly, and it emerged as a story told by someone, rather frantically, in a single gasp. The words run and slip into each other, mimicking the physicality of the characters slipping on the slippery slope, and eventually, to my surprise, mimicking how unstable memory is.

You know the tiny scenes that Marvel movies play post-credit? The short piece ended up just like that; it tugs nicely in between the full-length stories — not quite part of the main narrative, but happens within the universe, and works like the connecting tissue to the next narrative. Hint: there are elements that will make appearances in next pieces of the four-part series, like breadcrumbs leading into the mysterious woods. (Hopefully not a trap!)

Did it make the story less true? Or have I just added another layer of truth? Who truly owns any piece of memory? Do we own them all together?

And I loved how fluid it was. With no punctuation, the passage lets each reader hear it slightly differently and enacts ‘mis-hearing’. It reminded me of the nature of storytelling, how every retelling goes through a round of (mis)translation and (mis)remembering. And now I’ve joined the distortion — smuggling in words like ‘devious bananas’ and ‘fish gods’. Did it make the story less true? Or have I just added another layer of truth? Who truly owns any piece of memory? Do we own them all together?

I also continued on the play of sound (mostly starting from The Midnight Quest).

It was so slippery we all slipped our shoes and boots had no grip slipping like fish

How can a torrent of sound like slippery / shoes / slipping / fish — be so satisfying? How the mush is greasy and tricky, and the bananas with the grin and glint, the b b in the boring bush. The w w w in how slow we were you weren’t wrong to think. The repetition in no trees no roots no nothing.

Selfishly, the vignette also feeds my continuous obsession with memory and how memory works — a thread that I will surely continue in future pieces. The funny register is a relief to some heavy subject matters that I’ve been trying to cover; and at the end, the punchline brings us all back to reality, that there are tasks yet to be done. So we carry on, slipping and persisting.

If you misremember this later, that will be part of the truth too.