Alison Theresa

Braids or mosaics or fragments, but never a whole

Questions

Why is writing fragmentary prose so much easier than cohesive prose?

Why am I resisting the urge to say it’s a necessary form to use when writing about climate catastrophe?

Are our brains fragmentary or just brains?

Thinking

There’s a reasonably accepted wisdom that fragmentary writing styles are becoming more popular in novels because they mimic the fragmented nature of the world and our thought processes. Claims to our lacking attention spans due to the emotional chaos of our social media feeds (War in Sudan! Relationship advice! Amazon haul! Historical case of extreme child abuse! Trans rights under threat! New brunch place with cocktails!), suggest that our world is fragmented, so therefore our prose must be too.

Climate fiction lends itself even more to this style. According to Copilot, fragmentation mimics the abrupt shifts in climate that are bringing precarity to our world, and that is why Bound in Shallows needs a fragmentary structure.

The AI is not leaping to a wild conclusion here. It plays into the common theories around fragmentation, and would be easy to argue is true for Bound in Shallows. I’ve considered exploring this form many times as part of my PhD.

But: it just doesn’t ring true to me. It’s a useful form in climate fiction because its allowing me to show the ‘now’ of their flooded lives: how everyday it has become, the small things that are the same or different to what we might expect, alongside the ‘then’ of the floods happening: the chaos and death and uncertainty. It allows me to do that without a flashing signpost to the reader saying OKAY BACK IN TIME WE GO. By the time they’re a few sentences in and realise the time has shifted, they’re already heading back to the present. It’s flashback by stealth to avoid accusations of exposition or backstory dumping.

But even more than that, it’s just how my brain works. I enjoy crafting longer scenes, finding my way into the detail, pulling at the characters, leading them out again. I enjoy that. But it’s hard work. Writing a paragraph or two at a time is simply easier for me. Writing around a full time job is hard, and if I can dash off a few fragments in the evening then it feels like an accomplishment. Much more so than writing a third of scene and needing to find my way back into it the next night.

Is fragmentation then less about social media brains and the precarity of climate change, and more about a culture that necessitates working when we’d rather be creating? What would my brain do if I could wake every morning and start a scene from scratch? How long might I be able to sit in that scene, immersed in it, hours stretching ahead of me?

Fragmentation as an impact of my lifestyle rather than my conscious artistic choices though just sounds so superficial. It makes me want to say Copilot is right, because it makes me sound deeper. An Artist with a capital ‘A’ who works in a form that speaks to her soul, rather than suiting her timetable.