For this week’s exercise, I took Lydia Davis’s story “Excerpts from a Life” and refashioned it to be about a girl who grew up the daughter of a gun store owner, instead of the daughter of a violin factory owner. At first, it seemed like a novelty to simply paste one idea over the other, but it wasn’t interesting to note how my idea morphed as I tried to fit it into her form, as well as where it departed from Lydia Davis’s structure.
“Excerpts from a Life” takes an elliptical approach to the story, full of interstices and seemingly disparate pieces of information, and they are held together by voice, and the holistic feel one gets by the end of the piece. As I tried to reincorporate the story for my own purposes section by section, I found that by the end I relied much less strictly on the source text then at the beginning. At the same time, there were particular moments where certain tones, and indeed certain thematic movements, seemed appropriate for my own work. This is due in part to the desire to maintain something of the feel of the original Lydia Davis piece, but also as a result of the constraints of the form. I think that writing in this particular style (elliptically), I was inclined to unconsciously follow a particular narrative. Each of the details I incorporated in the first very short sections defined my character in the longer pieces.
If I were to continue working on these piece (as I would like to), I would find more ways to break away from Davis and find what is uniquely mine about it. But as it stands, it feels like I’ve made something original from a pre-crafted form. It wasn’t paint-by-numbers, it was learning from a master.
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