Shirley Jackson, teacher

Shirley Jackson

The 1968 collection of Shirley Jackson stories, Come Along With Me, also includes three of the lectures she gave during her lifetime. I commented on the stories in my last post, but her lectures are worth a few words, as well.

In one called "Experience and Fiction," she reflects on how a writer's own experiences get recycled into fiction. "Perhaps the most useful thing about being a writer of fiction is that nothing is ever wasted," she said, "all experience is good for something; you tend to see everything as a potential structure of words."

I don't write fiction, yet my own mind works much the same way. Any experience I have that is in any way unusual runs through my mind as words that might eventually be transposed into text, whether in a letter, an email, a blog post or whatever. Very few experiences ever actually get that far, of course, but I audition them all just the same. So I know what Jackson is talking about. Non-writers probably do much the same thing, imagining how they will describe their experiences the next time they talk with a friend. Still, converting real life into fiction is something a little different and requires much more skill.

"Biography of a Story" discusses her most famous short story "The Lottery": how she came to write it and how readers first reacted to it. She says she got the idea while pushing her baby up a hill in a stroller, then placed her daughter in a playpen and wrote the story in a matter of minutes. This was just three weeks before it was published in The New Yorker.

Then Jackson transcribes excerpts from numerous letters about the story sent either to her or to the magazine's editors. Most of these letter writers believed her fiction to either be true or based on truth. Several ask where the custom of stoning to death randomly chosen members of the community is practiced. These letters are almost as shocking as the story itself, which is included in this book.

In the third lecture, "Notes for a Young Writer," Jackson says, "Remember, your story is an uneasy bargain with your reader. Your end of the bargain is to play fair, and keep him interested, his end of the bargain is to keep reading." While this may seem obvious, I think it is instructive to think of any written work, especially one that is available for purchase, as a bargain or even a contract. The seller promises, in effect, to deliver something worth reading. The buyer, in effect, promises to give it a fair reading.

As Jackson notes, this is an uneasy bargain. Many books are dull or poorly written or not what the reader actually wants to read. Some people buy a book then put it on a shelf and forget about it or give up on reading it before giving it a fair trial.

In her lecture, presumably delivered to students interested in becoming writers, she offers a number of valuable suggestions about writing the kind of stories that will make readers happy to keep their end of the bargain because the writers have kept theirs.