A Craft Essay by Joshua Wetjen
Strangeness and the Art of Revision: How I Invigorated my Fiction by Welcoming the Strange

The Toulouse-Lautrec masterpiece “At the Moulin Rouge” was recently part of an exhibition at Minneapolis Institute of Art, a ten-minute drive from my house. For better or worse, the substance of this eerie depiction of bar dwellers in Belle Epoque Paris is conditioned by the wear and tear the painting has been through. On the upper right, a dancer’s dominating absinthe-colored face is lit from below, showcasing stinging orange-red bow lips. The face—of May Milton, who danced at the Moulin Rouge and appears in other Toulouse-Lautrec works—repeats the colorways of the mirror images on the wall of the room in the upper-left, and is the searing, transcendent point of the composition. The novelty of this, is that her face was cut out of the piece in its first era of display, supposedly because it was so unflattering. The initial exhibitor applied a razor, excising what was too uncomfortable or unsettling. But unquestionably, this restored element makes the painting soar.

All this has got me thinking about writing and revision.

The excellent, dangerous strangeness of the face in Toulouse-Lautrec’s piece, and the impulse to remove it, reminds me of my first artistic instinct, which is to cut out everything that seems like it doesn’t belong, especially when I’m following a formula for what “should” belong, rather than letting my work exist on its own terms. I find the “supposed to” bandwagon an easy one to ride, and in a writing group, especially so—a kind of shorthand groupthink where we apply a list of what we think makes a story or poem or essay and excise accordingly. But doesn’t that turn us into defacers like the exhibitor who furtively edited Toulouse-Lautrec?

Increasingly, I’ve learned my most successful pieces of writing tend to break some of those common rules with an element of strangeness, and mirror the unsettling, yet harmonious quality of “At the Moulin Rouge.”

Even as a novice writer, I learned early the importance of getting to a scene in fiction: scene over summary, action over exposition; these are timeless fictional rules of thumb. But then, I read in The Trojan War Museum: and other Stories by Ayse Papatya Bucak, and saw this didn’t have to be the case. Inspired by her strange approach, I wrote a flash piece where exposition, even with some digression, defines the arc. In my story, “Clean” (published by Mystery Tribune), a sergeant developing a case against the Camorra is assassinated by a boy—that is the meat of it, but there are little interjections about the history of Naples and a quick switch in point of view after the first paragraph—two supposed common no-nos of fiction. I think it has personality! There is action, to be sure, but also digressive elements that seemingly run counter to the demand for direction in crime flash fiction. But these strange elements work and help the voice cohere. The resonant character of those little bits of backstory and exposition put the blunt murder in relief and turn it into something more than an easy loss-of-innocence story. The counterpoint of the backstory and exposition and the off-kilter switch in point of view—unusual things I at one time may have cut—give the story its lifeblood.

Another more recent flash fiction piece, “Air,” published in Gone Lawn, was inspired by my son’s school project—the central image is a life-sized soldier made of papier-mâché—and in my story the main problem is the protagonist’s father is never home. At first the rich image of the soldier felt like a square peg in a round hole, and in my first series of submissions, I did get feedback from some editors saying there was too much going on in the small story. Though the soldier image wasn’t to blame exactly, it was a lot for the story to take on and probably didn’t help the story’s focus. But the soldier made the story more than something predictable, so I kept him there and worked to shift some things and cut others, wanting to serve the strongest element, which also happened to be the strangest. Many venues passed, but the editors at Gone Lawn said the imagery lingered, causing them continue to think. And there the papier-mâché soldier lives to this day, unsettling the narrator.

Strangeness can be quite powerful as a defining aesthetic principle. If we take our writing to be a home for characters and development and meaning, inviting strangeness into a piece of writing is not so different from the real-life act of welcoming a stranger, a guideline I believe is worth living by socially and artistically. In my work as a writer, I’ve set several fictional pieces in the expatriate, third culture world of my childhood—as an American living in Hong Kong—a world too strange to fit into a lot of common literary boxes, where I often found myself an actual stranger, only to travel to the U.S., and still feel that way.

My initial efforts at managing this world as a fiction writer proved challenging. Readers saw a white American character in Hong Kong, and they suddenly had a million questions and expectations for exoticism and traveloguing. Indeed, the looks I got from people in my writing groups in reaction to my work were not so different from those I got when I left Hong Kong to begin college at the University of Iowa and had to explain where I’d just come from—looks that seemed to express a mixture of confusion and slight anger. Of course, I wasn’t around to see Toulouse-Lautrec go about his days in Paris, but he was someone who didn’t fit in to regular society with his lower social class and differently abled identity; he let this sense of being an outsider condition his work and guarantee his entrée into spaces others couldn’t go. Letting the strange speak is the artist’s and writer’s call. I continue to write about the strange world of my childhood and embrace the details in it that are potentially confounding.

In my short story “Skins,” published in The Headlight Review, I include temples and cruise liners and a song by the New Wave band Blondie all in the same piece. The world I wrote about and the characters in it don’t follow the same rules we see in other more common, especially American settings, like our various stereotypical versions of the American city, rural areas, and the suburbs and the general otherness of the foreign. I worked hard to maintain the disparate and potentially digressive elements of “Skins” as I revised and again, I think they’re essential and give the characters texture and inner life.

Floundering around and struggling with what I unearth from my intuition is harder than applying a quick, cookie-cutter approach. As with Toulouse-Lautrec’s work,  the effort demands wrestling with my own lens on the world. When I sit down to revise, the critical voice I’ve worked to dispel in the first draft rings loudly, screaming at me that there is a form my work should take—the checklist that lets me know I finally have a real story, poem, or essay and can give myself a high-five, as long as I smooth out the parts which don’t fit in predictable ways.Though it’s not as simple as cutting out the odd or unusual feature.

I know the very strangeness of the world we live in is what gives it its powerful emotional residue, which I’m committed to bringing alive. Some of my stranger stories get right to the heart of what I think matters.

My thinking is, we should not be like the man who cut out the dancer’s face in Toulouse-Lautrec’s piece, which is easy to do—smoothing things over for the sake of plot and coherence and social politeness. Each draft is a unique organism with its own needs and voice and shape, and to have any life at all, deserves to be seen for what it really is. Instead of automatically drilling down and pushing together and slicing away, I’m convinced we should sit a while with what is strange, discordant, and ethereal in our work and see what it tells us, where that leads us. Sure, some discordant moments are better left as echoes—ultimately random character cameos, unwieldy backstories, or odd descriptions which trail on too long like a bore gobbling time and not reading the room at a dinner party. They need to be cut.

On the other hand, the dancer’s face in “At the Moulin Rouge” pops out with no warning to complicate the meaning of the whole in a terrific way, and this can be our model for how to incorporate the strange. Her specter is a warning, a note of regret, and something else—mortality. Without her, the painting isn’t much. But her presence makes for a feast of emotions—of contradictions and vulnerability—from what would otherwise be a snack, and a forgettable one at that. There is something vulnerable and honest in her strange face that makes the painting linger rather than conveniently dissipate. Following Toulouse-Lautrec’s model, and those of writers like Papatya Bucak, it’s good to welcome the strange. 

Joshua Wetjen is a high school English teacher living in Minneapolis and working in St. Paul. When not grading or chasing his two children, he likes to tinker on his jazz guitar and try new restaurants with his wife. His work has appeared in MysteryTribune, Gone Lawn and The Headlight Review, among other publications.