THE DOCTOR IS IN

A few weeks ago, MJ and I were discussing the rising popularity of the short-story form. “I don’t read a lot of stories,” she acknowledged. “There’s not enough in them for me. I prefer a nice long novel.”

I feel the same way, I told her. Stories entail too much of an investment for a slight payoff. Just when I start feeling I know the characters and begin to get involved in the plot, it’s over. My new friends have left town, and I’m alone and abandoned, wondering what I did to offend everyone.

She paused. “But you write short stories.”

True. I explained that writing them was different. It takes me at least as much time, and a far greater degree of commitment, to write a story as to read a novel. And like her, I write about the same characters repeatedly, so I never really let them go.

“You should write about that,” she said.

Okay. I wrote my first Amy story about ten years ago, after my best friend moved to California. It began as an imaginative retelling of our first real encounter. I started writing it to console myself for his absence by conjuring up his image, but everything changed in the telling—the characters, Amy and Jake, were no longer George and me, and the point of the story shifted, from a series of comic misunderstandings that point to the promise of real communion, to a woman’s stubborn but doomed resistance to the temptation to emerge from the depressed and cynical stance that have kept her isolated and safe since a painful divorce. I initially plotted a series of three linked stories, tracing the development of the friendship from this initial spark through their deepening friendship and into old age, constructing the adventures we might have shared if George had stayed in New York.

But as I worked on the second story, one of those situations developed that only make sense to other writers and to people with unmedicated psychotic disorders. Amy’s ex-husband, Brendan, who had had a cameo in the first story, burst back onstage and demanded a speaking part. This was not part of the plan—Brendan was a plot device whose usefulness was over. The stories were about Amy and Jake, period.

Except that they aren’t. Brendan is a major presence; in fact, he and Amy end up remarrying, after Amy becomes pregnant by Alan, another character who popped in unexpectedly and stayed. And that baby, Jim, has his own story line, as does Jim’s son, Jonathan. Then there are Amy’s childhood nemesis, Lizzie Farrell, and her camp friend, Laurie Mandel. And on and on.

As you may have guessed, the series burst out of the trilogy mold early on. There were thirty Amy stories at last count, about twenty published, and I’m not done. I keep thinking I am, but then I will find myself wondering why Brendan and Amy never had a child together, or what happened to Lizzie in middle age, and soon I’m writing again.

There are spinoffs, too. Lizzie and her son Louis appear in their own stories, without Amy, and there are four stories (so far) about three girls who grow up in a foster home in Amy’s neighborhood, one of whom is in love with Lizzie’s younger brother, Tim.

In some ways, my connection with these characters is even stronger than to the characters in my novels, because they are always with me. I do write about unrelated people, of course, and I go through periods when I don’t think about this group, consciously, at all. But a part of me lives, permanently, on Mercer Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where Amy grew up, and on Bank Street in Manhattan, where she and Brendan live—or, sometimes, lived; both have died, as has Jake, and I grieved them all as dear old friends. Fortunately, I can time-travel, exploring the confusion of Amy’s adolescence or  Brendan’s youthful drunken self-sabotage, and I count myself lucky to have such fascinating (to me, at least) companions.

I read nonstop as a child, in part to learn about the world, and in large part to stave off loneliness with imaginary friends. My present life is full and rich to a degree I could not have imagined then. Yet I still feel the pull to populate an imagined universe. In my real-life friendships, once I’ve embraced you I have a hard time letting go, even if you’ve moved across the country. Obviously, this trait carries over into my imaginative life.

Susan O'Doherty, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself, she specializes in issues affecting writers and other creative artists. She is the author of Getting Unstuck without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity (Seal, 2007). Her Career Coach column appears every Monday on Inside Higher Ed's Mama, Ph.D. blog. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.

Comments

[M.J. Rose]

And I'm glad you wrote about it - it's almost a novel itself - an author who writes about a series of characters for 20 years and what it does to her.

[Paul Elwork]

Great column, as always. It's interesting, this question of short stories (to go back to the opening). I love short stories and how different an experience they are from novels, which I also love. I notice more women make the above criticism of short stories than men, in my experience. It makes me wonder: Does this have anything to do with men often being up for one-night stands and women generally wanting more commitment in each situation?