How Writers Create Stories From Elements: A Deep Dive Into "Feathers" by Ray Carver

Looking at how Carver chooses story elements and the importance of Chekhov's Gun to his work

This is part two of my analysis of Feathers by Ray Carver (week one can be found here). All page references are based off of this PDF (note: there are spoilers below).

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I will always, until the end of my days, have a boner for learning about where stories come from. Thankfully I’m not the only one with this fetish: there are thousands of books, blogs, interviews, and Substacks dedicated to their genesis. What a relief! It means that one can explore hungrily, achieve gratification from finding patterns in data.

From my reading I’ve realized that stories tend to originate from the same place: a few, sometimes disparate, elements jostling together in the artist’s mind. They could be anything, really: a sentence overheard, a recurring memory, a melancholic location, a bewitching character, a ludicrous dinner, a piercing sound. But, to be of any value, these elements must conduct electricity; when they rub against each other, they must generate enough friction to spark a story. From there the narrative starts helping the writer: it spawns new components in his mind and helps him generate the rest of what the tale requires.

Artists elucidate this process in a million different ways, but they’re all talking about the same thing. Elena Ferrante, one of the few good modern writers (can you be considered modern if you were born in 1943?) says that her stories come from fragments of memory:

They might be separate and identifiable—childhood places, ­family members, schoolmates, insulting or tender voices, moments of great tension. And once you’ve found some sort of order, you start to narrate. But there’s ­almost always something that doesn’t work. It’s as if from those splinters of a possible narrative come equal yet opposing forces that need to emerge clearly and, at the same time, to sink farther into the depths.

In film, the great avant-garde arthouse director and screenwriter, David Lynch, traversed the same path to come up with the idea for Blue Velvet:

It was hearing Bobby Vinton’s version of the song that got things rolling. And then I started thinking about what it would be like, sneaking into a girl's room and watching her through the night. And while there I would see a clue to a murder mystery. Jeffrey finds an ear in a field as the clue. I don't know why it had to be an ear. Except it needed to be an opening of a part of the body - a hole into something else, like a ticket to another world.

Most pertinent of all, since the focus of this essay is Feathers, are the words of the big lion legend Ray Carver:

None of my stories really happened, of course. But there's always something, some element, something said to me or that I witnessed, that may be the starting place. Here's an example: “That's the last Christmas you'll ever ruin for us!” I was drunk when I heard that, but I remembered it. And later, much later, when I was sober, using only that one line and other things I imagined, imagined so accurately that they could have happened, I made a story—“A Serious Talk.”

These words, for some mysterious reason, render a clear image in my mind: I see these artists walking around, going about their days—Ferrante at a cafe in Naples, Lynch at a diner in Los Angeles, Carver taking a walk in Syracuse—with a Black Magical Bag (BMB), invisible to all except them. After they finish a story the bag is completely depleted; for weeks after it may remain empty. But through experience, observation, imagination, and rumination, the writer starts filling it again. When it is heavy enough he forces the elements to play with each other—sometimes he finds that they do not react. He goes back to walking, reading, writing, imagining, seducing eighteen year-old girls, drinking four bottles of whiskey, eating five-grams of mushrooms—doing, well, you know, the work that makes artists great. And, eventually, it works. The right chemical combination starts sizzling. He smells it and sits down to write right away, keeping the bag at arm’s reach from his desk. Then the story takes off.

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Carver never spoke publicly about how he wrote Feathers, but let’s imagine that his bag commenced with Fran, Jack, Bud, and Olla. As he wrote and revised, the story itself kept generating new elements. One time he reached in to find a set of janky teeth. Another time it was an ugly baby. He kept placing these elements on a desk that was becoming stranger and more cluttered. Diligently, he welded them into a cohesive, scintillating narrative.

Though Carver is incredibly skilled with language, so much of the genius of Feathers lies in choosing the right mixture of elements from his BMB. Bud and Olla are simple, peaceful, affectionate, provincial. Even though their lives are messy, they are content with each other, their child, their bird. Even though their house is chaotic, its most prevalent feature is a sense of calm, similar to that which runs underneath the extreme surface-level discord of India. Conversely, Jack and Fran struggle with each other. The former is dreamy and romantic; the latter is uptight and agitated. They don’t have a child, they don’t want to have children—Carver never defines their relationship in terms of marriage or otherwise.

In the hands of a good writer, the contrast between these characters is bound to create a compelling result. That is, as long as he gets out of their way. Carver, of course, just does just that—he lets them run free—and the reader naturally discovers all sorts of fascinating divergences: Jack takes beauty (lusting over his girl’s long hair) whereas Bud gives beauty (fixing his wife’s teeth). Fran fights against the messy flow of life in nearly every scene whereas Olla moves with it (allowing the peacock into the house). The townspeople want to control whereas the provincial couple accepts:

It was an ugly baby. But, for all I know, I guess it didn’t matter that much to Bud and Olla. Or if it did, maybe they simply thought, So okay if it’s ugly. It’s our baby. And this is just a stage. Pretty soon there’ll be another stage. There is this stage and then there is the next stage. Things will be okay in the long run, once all the stages have been gone through. They might have thought something like that.

Another element in Carver’s BMB, which was at the center of last week’s analysis, is the motif of wishing. Ray first employs it to represent Jack’s romanticism, display the couple’s hope for the future, and further the already-present feeling of nostalgia:

Those times together in the evening she’d brush her hair and we’d wish out loud for things we didn’t have. We wished for a new car, that’s one of the things we wished for. And we wished we could spend a couple of weeks in Canada.

On the next page, when Fran ignores Jack’s dreams of living in the country, the author reveals the distance between the couple (p. 6). Then—when everyone except Fran notices that Jack is praying at the dining table—the refrain increases the story’s wistfulness and the emotional gap between the two (p. 25). Finally, on the last page, wishing evokes a sense of tragedy when the two friends listlessly hope that things will get better for Jack, and that they could speak openly with each other (p. 26).

Even Fran’s long blonde hair, though terrifically simple, is another multi-dimensional element. Carver introduces it as a symbol of the couple’s bond, tied together by Jack’s lust (p. 3). Later, when the baby grabs it in the dining room, the author exercises its physical properties to build tension as we fear Fran will lash out at the kid, or the peacock will get a hold of it (p. 24). Then, when Fran cuts it at the end, he turns the hair back into a metaphor that signifies the end of the couple’s love and attraction (p. 26).

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Now it is time for the big daddy: the peacock. Originally, I hesitated to put this in because its meaning is more abstract, so please take the following with a grain of salt. All of this is, after all, only my interpretation.

With that in mind, I see the bird as a metaphor for how Jack and Fran experience their child, the one we never meet but the father describes as “conniving” (p. 26). Note that the peacock is first introduced in the same breath as a baby:

A baby’s swing-set stood in the front yard and some toys lay on the porch. I pulled up in front and stopped the car. It was then that we heard this awful squall. There was a baby in the house, right, but this cry was too loud for a baby.

Then they sit in the car, watching the animal, too gobsmacked by its awesome power to even refer to its beauty, an experience not dissimilar, perhaps, from that which parents experiences during childbirth:

“Goddamn it,” I said. I sat there with my hands on the wheel and stared at the thing.

“Can you believe it?” Fran said. “I never saw a real one before.”

We both knew it was a peacock, use, but we didn’t say the word out loud. We just watched it. The bird turned its head up in the air and made this harsh cry again.

This is one of the rare moments that moves the couple closer together:

“My God,” Fran said quietly. She moved her hand over to my knee.

“Goddamn,” I said. There was nothing else to say.

The only other one is at the end, when Olla gives Fran peacock feathers, the night she becomes pregnant:

And then my friend and his wife saying goodnight to us on the porch. Olla giving Fran some peacock feathers to take home. I remember all of us shaking hands, hugging each other, saying things. In the car, Fran sat close to me as we drove away. She kept her hand on my leg. We drove home like that from my friend’s house.

Right before she does, she uses language related to bird food, commonly referred to as bird seed:

“Honey, fill me up with your seed!”

And later, when she complains about how things are, she explicitly blames the peacock:

“Goddamn those people and their ugly baby,” Fran will say, for no apparent reason, while we’re watching TV late at night. “And that smelly bird,” she’ll say. “Christ, who needs it!”

Although they say earlier on in the story that they don’t want kids, they are moved together in the face of an astonishing, captivating, mystical force. To them, however, it turns out to be a trick. The kid, to a great extent, ruins their relationship.

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These elements are mind-blowing. They are versatile, powerful, comedic, and work well with each other. Carver’s invention and use of them is frightening because it is so brilliant.

It’s not only what Carver adds, however, that gives the story strength, but what he excludes. Feathers is incredibly dense—there isn’t a word wasted—and much of that comes from the author’s merciless commitment to cutting every element unessential to the tale. The story staunchly adheres to Chekhov’s famous rule:

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.

Every major element of the story—the teeth, the peacock, the two couples, etc— contribute tremendously to the plot; yet even minor details from early on in the story become relevant later on. Near the beginning of the tale, for example, the narrator relays the anecdote of hanging up on Olla because he forgot her name. Then, once he is at her house, he returns to it to add humor and create the relatable awkwardness that arises between couples that don’t know each other well:

I said, “Olla, I called here once. You answered the phone. But I hung up. I don’t know why I hung up.” I said that and then sipped my ale. I didn’t know why I’d brought it up now.

“I don’t remember,” Olla said. “When was that?”

“A while back.”

“I don’t remember,” she said and shook her head. She fingered the plaster teeth in her lap. She looked at the race and went back to rocking.

Fran turned her eyes to me. She drew lip under. But she didn’t say anything.

Bud said, “Well, what else is new?”

Because Carver abides by Chekhov’s Gun, the reader learns to expect that everything he introduces is significant. When the peacock enters the story and then goes away, the reader trusts that it will come back to give more to the narrative; when the baby is heard crying, the reader knows—before it ever appears—that it is guaranteed to be relevant.

In this way the reader learns to pay attention to even the smallest moments. He revels in finding foreshadowing. He feels at ease because he’s in the hands of a storyteller who can be trusted to connect all of the dots. Since every concept is important, he becomes more focused and, naturally, applies his attention.

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To thoroughly enjoy Feathers, you don’t need to think about any of this, of course. The story itself is inherently pleasurable. It takes you out of yourself; all that remains is unburdened emotion and narrative.

But, after looking under the hood, I’m in even greater awe of it. Carver took the most seemingly simple elements and mixed them to produce a profound story that can be appreciated on many different levels—a feat on-par with the Beatles writing the most original songs in history with four guitar chords.

By following Chekhov’s Gun, automatically, as if by a universal law, the number of Carver’s words and concepts decrease while the power and density of each multiplies. If the primary goal of a story is to move someone happily along to the end—instead of dragging them the way Joyce does—then it is essential to ask of each concept if it is relevant, to have the courage to cut it when the answer is maybe or no.

Feathers shows us that, if a writer can fill up his BMB with the right elements, and has the bravery to prune his stories ruthlessly, masterpieces are possible. Time to go look for inspiration like Henry Miller!

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Thank you

Lily | 5459.eth

for the edits!