Lessons Learned

Some craft from Lauren Groff

I started and finished Lauren Groff’s newest novel, The Vaster Wilds, this week. I want to write more, later, about the structure of Groff’s novels—she says that in every book there are two, one obvious and one hidden—and I’m still thinking that through. But for now, I just wanted to highlight a few of the craft lessons that I learn and relearn from Groff every time I read her.

Beginnings: You often can’t look away from the first page of a novel or the first paragraph of a story. The beginnings pull the reader in to the world, quickly and urgently, giving us only enough information to simply want more. Matrix and The Vaster Wilds were submitted to her editor at the same moment, and you can see, in their openings, how they seem to be of a piece, as though one novel is speaking to the other. They work similarly, and they both feature young women, each on a solo journey, in a time that is not our time.

Here’s the opening to Matrix:

“She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France.”

And here’s the opening to The Vaster Wilds:

“The moon hid itself behind the clouds. The wind spat an icy snow at angles.

In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness.”

And here’s the opening to “The Wind,” a recent short story:

“Pretend, the mother had said when she crept to her daughter’s room in the night, that tomorrow is just an ordinary day.”

Container: The tight propulsive prose is always held within a clearly defined container. In The Vaster Wilds, the timeline is a little over two weeks. In Matrix, we are with Marie until the end of her long life and then beyond. But both novels present for us the life of the protagonists, from their beginnings to their ends.

Groff is able to do this well because she moves easily through time. In The Vaster Wilds, we follow the girl through the days and nights of her journey. The girl’s memories fill her thoughts as she makes her way through the wilderness. She has dreams as she sleeps. And then, later, towards the end, she envisions a different life, a path not taken. Through all of this, we learn who the girl is, where she has come from, and her hopes for the future. And even within such a tight container, Groff is able to leap forward at times:

“Three days passed on the river lie so, the hard wind keeping up and the boat covering her body like a coffin at night, the same small fire to dry her boots, the light of which she hid with a wall of her hands’ making.”

In Matrix, because she is covering much more ground, she does this more often. She uses Marie’s age as a marker: “Marie is thirty-five.” Six pages later, “Marie is thirty-eight.” Three pages after that, “Marie is forty-five,” and two short paragraphs on, “Marie is forty-seven.”

Tense: Matrix is written in the present tense and that adds to the forward momentum of the book. The friction that is created between use of the present tense and the fact that the novel takes place in the 12^th century creates a wonderful energy. We are in the moment with Marie as she makes her way through her life. In The Vaster Wilds, she writes in the past tense, but the journey that the girl is on, given the tight container, supplies the necessary energy. The past tense feels right here, I think, because although the book is about the journey, it is mostly about the past, about the life that the girl has led and how the girl has found herself in this place at this time.

Naming: A number of her more recent short stories, including ones in Florida, have unnamed characters. And in The Vaster Wilds, the girl is unnamed for quite a while before we learn what she has been called over the years. Later in her journey, she reflects upon the idea of naming as she begins to name the things that she finds: “And it was exhilarating to name such things; it was a kind of power.” She thinks about what she has been called and wants to name herself but she does not; instead, “she went on walking, still nameless, unmastered, through the wilds.” It is clear that Groff does not want to name her, either.

Nameless characters, of course, remind us of fairy tales and fables. Instead of the specificity of a name, they take on a universality. In The Vaster Wilds, she is the girl but she is also all girls. In “The Wind,” the daughter becomes the first person narrator but, by the end, the story opens outward to consider all daughters and all women.

The Use of Conjunctions: I wish I had e-books so I could count the instances of conjunctions. Groff uses “and” and “then” often—the use of “then” implies the use of “and”—to start sentences and to propel a sentence forward. She is often writing about a journey—as, perhaps, we all are—and so the use of conjunctions doesn’t allow the journey to stop. She may close a sentence or a paragraph with a period and a return, but then starts the next sentence with “And” or “Then.” It is as though she holds the reader and doesn’t want to let them go.

Within a sentence or paragraph, she will string together clauses and sentences where many other writers might provide a stop, a breath, an exhalation. She uses “and,” in particular, to unite actions, to make each clause have equal weight: “The wind kept trying to push her this way and that, and the other shore obscured in the gray distance, and she had to paddle and push with all her might because she knew that going east was a certain death by drowning.” These sentences, tied together with conjunctions, almost all end on the weighty thing she wants us to focus on. In another’s writer’s hands, it might feel claustrophobic, but Groff knows how to vary the pacing of her prose, so she can slow down and then speed up when necessary, always propelling the narrative forward.

Thank you, Lauren, for these wonderful lessons. More later on the fascinating structure of her novels.