In the spring of 1964, the writer and ecologist Anne LaBastille was living in upstate New York, running a hotel and leading hiking trips for guests, when her husband gave her an ultimatum: “Get out by the Fourth of July.” His demand wasn’t altogether unexpected; things between them had been bad for some time. With no nearby family to turn to, LaBastille bought a small parcel of land on a remote lake in the Adirondacks. Black Bear Lake had no power or phone lines. A dirt road led to the lake but not around it, and her new property sat a mile and a half from the dirt road, with no trail or track to reach it. The closest town—the optimistically named Lake Serene—was over twenty-five miles away. LaBastille decided to build a cabin. It seemed like the solution to her new homelessness. 

Her four-part memoir, Woodswoman, chronicles the nearly forty years she spent living there. She writes of the process of building the cabin, the labor required for its upkeep, the animals that make their way in, the solitude, and also the loneliness, especially in the winter months. In one chapter, she describes “the breakup,” and here she’s not talking about the end of the relationship with her husband, but the process of ice melting on a lake in the spring:

I have never seen the breakup take place. Yet every year I watch for it, always expecting a great exodus of ice. Expecting a rumbling, crushing, tumbling, tilting, crashing, and scraping down the lake and its shoreline. But this rarely happens. Instead, it’s a gentle, imperceptible dissolution with none of the stern precision of freeze-up. 

The most exciting moment takes place a few days before breakup when a fifty-five-gallon barrel placed on the lake ice melts through. Folks from all around Lake Serene have placed bets on this important event . . . My old guide pal, Rob . . . has guessed April 23 at 8:30 AM . . . Jake, a pessimist, bets on May 1 at noon. Sally chooses April 30 at 6 PM. I take an optimistic chance on April 15 at 10:15 AM. The winner will receive twenty-five dollars from the local fish and game club.

Once the barrel has slipped through, the breakup is imminent.

After reading this passage, I thought often of that steel barrel. Who might have the unlucky job of dragging it out onto the ice after freeze-up? What might it be like to catch a glimpse of the barrel, weighed down with snow from the long winter, as it slipped through the ice? I thought of the collection of barrels at the bottom of the lake, evidence of time passed, each marking a year of this tradition. 

This is how it sometimes happens for me. An image I can’t shake, can’t stop seeing, develops into a work of fiction. I wrote many pages about the people in a fictional town who make bets on when the breakup might happen. I explored the jobs they had, the losses they faced. I considered old-timers who never left the town and newcomers who, much to the astonishment of the rest of the community, arrived and stayed. Mostly I thought about the children and teenagers. Where were they while these adults were making their bets? What were they doing to mark the end of winter? They, I thought, would be engaged in their own ritual, and it, too, would involve that barrel. Rather than making bets from the safety of the shore, they might turn it into something riskier. Beginning on April 1, one kid would walk onto the ice, drop a single winter item into the steel barrel, and return to the shore. The next day, a different teenager would make the journey out onto the ice. They’d continue in this way until everyone had completed this rite of passage until the weather warmed enough for the steel barrel to disappear.

I wrote many drafts of this scene. It first appeared as a chapter late in a novel. I pulled it from the novel and reimagined it as a short story. I put it back into the novel, this time as the opening scene. And while nothing was ever lost by writing all these drafts, what became clear with each iteration was that I couldn’t figure out what form this material should take. I wasn’t sure how much to rely on the ritual itself, or whether it should exist in the background. And what did it mean that I had come to think of this event as a ritual, anyway?

*

It was Robert Boswell’s fascinating lecture, “Take Me to the River,” that first introduced me to the role of rituals in fiction. Broken up into thirty titled sections, the lecture weaves together personal anecdotes with observations of stories by James Joyce, Alice Munro, Peter Taylor, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, and others. Boswell breaks the idea of ritual into two basic categories: ritual, he says, may refer to “a single ceremony that ushers one along some path, or it may be a recurring event or observance with a set of specific activities attached.” His interest is in how authors invent rituals to serve their stories. In “The Dead,” for example, James Joyce invents an annual dance to reveal the falseness and triviality of Gabriel Conroy’s life. Like Joyce, Peter Taylor also uses an annual dance in “Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time,” but his desire is to reveal the hypocrisy of an entire community. In Eudora Welty’s “The Wide Net” and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” the ritual is a swim. In Alice Munro’s “Royal Beating,” the ritual is one of violence.

 

To come across Boswell’s lecture around the time I was sending my characters across that frozen pond felt like a gift. It helped me understand the relationship between ritual and transformation, and it situated my story in a helpful canon of other stories built around their own invented rituals. Still, my own story kept failing and I sensed its failure had something to do with its structure, so I turned my attention to how four authors—Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Elliott Dark, William Trevor, and Tim O’Brien—structured their narratives around their own invented rituals.

*

Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” explores a couple in the throes of grief. Shoba and Shukumar live in Boston. Shoba works as an editor for a textbook company. In his sixth year of graduate school, Shukumar is, as he describes himself, “a mediocre student who ha[s] a facility for absorbing details without curiosity.” It’s fair to say they are both flailing. Things they used to care about have lost their shine. Things that never bothered them now do. Meals are a problem for them. Shukumar eats dinner at his desk, pretending to be working on his dissertation. Shoba eats dinner on the couch in front of the TV or with a stack of files on her lap. They are careful to avoid each other at dinner, because being too close for too long might force them to discuss the tragedy they experienced six months before when Shoba gave birth to a stillborn baby. 

The story opens with a notice from the electric company informing them that for the next five days the lights will go out at 8:00 p.m. while men work on a downed line. That night they’re forced by these circumstances to eat together at the kitchen table, small birthday candles providing the only light.

“It’s like India,” Shoba said . . . “Sometimes the current disappears for hours at a stretch . . . I remember during power failures at my grandmother’s house, we all had to say something,” she continued . . . “Let’s do that,” she said suddenly. 

“Do what?”

“Say something to each other in the dark.”

“Like what? I don’t know any jokes.”

“No, no jokes.” She thought for a minute. “How about telling each other something we’ve never told before.”

With the lights out, candles lit, a meal on the table, and months of silence between them, they begin this repeated action: a single confession each night for the next five nights. The confessions begin as somewhat sweet, rather innocent, both focused on a “first” in the early days of their relationship:

Shoba: “The first time I was alone in your apartment, I looked in your address book to see if you’d written me in.” 

Shukumar: “The first time we went out to dinner, to the Portuguese place, I forgot to tip the waiter. I went back the next morning, found out his name, left money with the manager.”

Night two brings somewhat more shameful confessions.

Shoba: “That time when your mother came to visit us . . . when I said one night that I had to stay late at work, I went out with Gillian and had a martini.”

Shukumar: “I cheated on my Oriental Civilization exam in college.”

By night three, their confession centers on small but biting ways they’ve betrayed each other: 

Shoba: “She told him that once after a lecture they’d attended, she let him speak to the chairman of his department without telling him that he had a dab of pâté on his chin.”

Shukumar: “He really hadn’t lost the sweater-vest she bought him for their third wedding anniversary but had exchanged it for cash at Filene’s, and that he had gotten drunk alone in the middle of the day at a hotel bar.”

And by night four those betrayals escalate further:

Shoba: “She said that she never liked the one poem he’d ever published in his life, in a literary magazine in Utah . . . she added that she found the poem sentimental.”

Shukumar: When Shoba was pregnant “he once ripped out a photo of a woman in one of the fashion magazines she used to subscribe to and carried it in his books for a week.”

By night four, Lahiri has established a pattern with this ritual, but it is broken when, on the fifth night, Shukumar finds another notice from the electric company in the mailbox. The line has been repaired ahead of schedule. Although the situation that made their confessions possible has been resolved, Shoba returns from work and they carry on anyway. They could easily replicate the darkness by shutting off the lights, but Shoba wants to keep the lights on. She tells Shukumar that she wants to see his face when she tells him this.

Shoba: “I’ve been looking for an apartment and I’ve found one,” she said, narrowing her eyes on something, it seemed, behind his left shoulder. It was nobody’s fault, she continued. They’d been through enough. She needed some time alone. She had money saved up for a security deposit. The apartment was on Beacon Hill, so she could walk to work. She had signed the lease that night before coming home.” 

So this is what it’s all been about. This was the point of her game—to tell him that she was leaving him. This could be the end of the story, but the structure this ritual has provided demands Shukumar gets his turn, and that his confession matches Shoba’s in scope.

Shukumar: “There was something he had sworn he would never tell her, and for six months he had done his best to block it from his mind. Before the ultrasound she had asked the doctor not to tell her the sex of their child, and Shukumar had agreed. She had wanted it to be a surprise.” 

“Our baby was a boy,” he said. “His skin was more red than brown. He had black hair on his head. He weighed almost five pounds. His fingers were curled shut, just like yours in the night.”

What then is gained by this nightly ritual? 

The ritual provides a sense of escalation and tension, and it becomes the central focus of the plot. Both the reader and the characters wonder, what will they confess to each other next? Will they finally, after all these months, say what they haven’t been able to say any other way? Will they finally talk about their dead child?

The ritual also provides a (kind of) resolution. After Shukamar drops this bomb, the characters don’t fight or argue as we might expect. Instead, they sit together at the table one final time. And at that table they “wept together, for the things they now knew.” The invented ritual enables Lahiri to set her characters on a path toward healing and forgiveness, of themselves and of each other. 

The ritual creates a pattern, and the pattern creates structure. This can be a gift to writers; a pattern can offer a clear path forward, a sense of direction. 

If there is a risk to this kind of structure, it might be that the pattern can become predictable, and a reader might grow bored. In this case: Shoba tells a secret. Shukumar tells a secret. Shoba tells a secret. Shukumar tells a secret. Etc. But Lahiri guards against this risk, as shown in this birds-eye view of the physical layout of the story, as it appears in The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: 

Image 1:

(Image Description: Fourteen hand-drawn boxes. Sporadic, horizontal lines beginning in eighth box.)

The story is fourteen pages long. The star indicates where the ritual begins, when Shoba says: “Let’s do that. Let’s tell each other things we’ve never told before.” The lines within the boxes indicate where on the page the characters tell each other something they’ve never told each other. So what does this reveal about the role of this ritual in the story? To state the obvious, the ritual doesn’t begin until page eight, it takes up much less than half the space of the story, and it unfolds somewhat steadily in the story’s second half. Thus, Lahiri is at no risk of falling into a boring, predictable structure.

*

Looking at the physical layout of stories is a technique from Lucy Corin’s essay “Material” in The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. “All writing,” Corin says, “is some combination of visible and invisible forms, and the combination itself is a pattern that is meaningful to me, the rising and falling of my awareness of and attention to one kind of material—content . . . —and another—visible words, ink, like paint, on a page. I believe that all the finest fiction is actively and intelligently engaged in this dynamic.”

Consider “In the Gloaming” by Alice Elliott Dark, a story that, like Lahiri’s, explores the painful terrain of a parent losing a child. This time a grown son is dying from an unnamed illness. In his thirties, Laird has moved back into his childhood home, where he sleeps in a hospital bed and is tended to by a nurse. Unable to tolerate the friends who register shock at his appearance, he swears off all visitors and drops into long bouts of silence, often for weeks at a time. One silence ends when Laird says aloud, while sitting in his wheelchair, looking out the window: “The gloaming.” It’s a word his mother once taught him, the word that describes her favorite time of day, between daylight and nightfall, when everything looks purple. With the silence broken, a ritual begins: each night, when the gloaming arrives, Laird and Janet do the hard work of getting to know one another—as adults, with what little time they have left. They begin on rather safe territory—memories of Laird’s childhood, favorite authors. As the evenings go on, they navigate more personal terrain. When he teases her for asking about his sex life, she corrects him: 

“I’m asking about your love life,” she said. “Did you love, and were you loved in return?” 

“Yes.”

“I’m glad.” 

As with Lahiri’s story, the ritual here provides an opportunity for escalation. The memories and exchanges become more honest, more personal, all while Laird inches closer and closer to his final hours. But for Janet, as with Shukumar, the ritual also provides an opportunity for misunderstanding and, in this case, magical thinking. On a rainy day, when the gloaming never arrives, Laird doesn’t speak, so she wheels him in front of the TV. The established pattern is broken, and she emerges from the spell:

She realized that a part of her had worked out a whole scenario: the summer evenings would blend into fall; then, gradually, the winter would arrive, heralding chats by the fire, Laird resting his feet on the pigskin ottoman in the den while she dutifully knitted her yearly Christmas sweaters for Anne’s children.

She had allowed herself to imagine a future. That had been her mistake. This silent, endless evening was her punishment, a reminder of how things really were. 

The ritual continues for a few more nights, although their exchanges get shorter and shorter. The solace the ritual once provided for Janet is gone, and she can’t help but see the reality of her son’s failing body. The final time he says “the gloaming,” it is a bright October day, nowhere near that purple hour. She tries to correct him. “Soon,” she says. “A little flash of confusion passed through his eyes, and she realized that for him it was already dark.” Near the end of the story, the attempts at speaking to one another become shorter and more sporadic. Her son is dying. Janet now knows it, and she stands witness to those final moments, alone, her husband largely absent, filling his time with meetings and business calls—easy tasks that distract from the pain.

Image 2:

(Image Description: Twenty-nine hand-drawn boxes. Sporadic, horizontal lines beginning in first box. Beneath the final three boxes, handwritten text reads “Ritual transformed. Not Janet + Laird but Janet + Martin.”)

The astonishing final pages of this story take place on the night of Laird’s death, when Martin returns home from work. In the dark of their bedroom, in separate beds, Janet finally speaks to him honestly, openly, angrily about the injustice of having to watch a child die. Martin weeps. As they discuss funeral arrangements, it’s Martin who suggests bagpipes for the music and Janet admits that she thinks Laird would have liked that idea. “Please, Janet,” Martin says, “tell me—what else did my boy like?” There are phone calls to make, people to notify. But instead of rushing off to take care of those details, Janet stays to answer Martin’s question. It’s a ritual transformed, a conversation not between mother and son but between wife and husband, and it’s the ritual that might allow this couple to finally speak honestly and openly with each other. 

*

Another approach Boswell poses in his lecture: rather than showing the repeated actions of the ritual, show an activity but don’t reveal until the last page that these events will reoccur. He nods briefly to William Trevor’s “Access to the Children” as an example of this kind of story, so I turned to that story to see how its structure differs from Lahiri’s and Dark’s.  

The story takes place on a single Sunday in October when Malcolmson, a divorced father of two, shows up at his old home to pick up his young daughters for his weekly visit. These are the few hours of the week that Malcolmson actually looks forward to, and he has prepared for his daughters’ visit. On Saturday, like previous Saturdays, he has been to the bakery to buy meringues and brandy snaps. On Sunday mornings, he makes Marmite sandwiches with brown bread and tomato sandwiches with white bread. He picks up his daughters on Sunday afternoon at three, they spend a little time in the park, and, unable to decide on what else to do, Malcolmson drives them back to his apartment, where his daughters will spend the day watching television and where he will sneak sips of whiskey. For someone who claims to look forward to this day, Malcolmson appears not to be having much fun.  

In short flashbacks, we learn that the divorce is Malcolmson’s fault, that he had an affair with a woman he met on a train, and he chose that woman over his family. Just a few days before his divorce is final, this woman leaves him for another man. He regrets his decision now, of course, and while he spends his afternoon with his daughters, he invents scenarios where his wife will take him back. Soon we realize Malcolmson doesn’t treasure these afternoons with his daughters because he misses them and wants to see them; he treasures them because picking them up and returning them four hours later provides him with the opportunity to convince his ex-wife to take him back. To be clear, Malcolmson is completely delusional and even when his daughters let slip that their mother has a boyfriend, his desperate attempts to reunite with her don’t stop. Instead, he doubles down on his naïve hope when he returns his daughters that night, telling his ex-wife:

“I don’t mind about Richard . . . I think it’s your due.”

                  “My due?”

                  “Assuming your affair has been going on already for six weeks—”

                  “You’re drunk.” 

Even this he denies, despite the evidence, and later, while he’s still standing at the door, trying to win her back, she tells him, “You’ve gone to seed [ . . . ] You’ve gone to seed because you’ve lost your self-respect. I’ve watched you, week by week.” 

That Malcolmson ends his evening on a bar stool isn’t all that surprising, but what happens while he sits on his stool at the bar is, because it’s here where we learn this Sunday has played out much like the Sunday before that and the Sunday before that:

The barmaid smiled again and nodded. He bought her a glass of beer, which was something he did every Sunday night. He wept as he paid for it, and touched his cheeks with the tips of his fingers to wipe away the tears. Every Sunday he wept, at the end of the day, after he’d had his access. The barmaid raised her glass, as always she did. They drank to the day that was to come, when the error he had made would be wiped away, when the happy marriage could continue.

Malcolmson tells his story to a barmaid who already knows it. He buys her the drink he always buys her. He weeps, just as he does every Sunday. We know it even if Malcolmson can’t admit it: his wife is never coming back to him. His marriage is over. Somehow he’ll manage to get through the week. On Saturday he’ll buy meringues and brandy snaps. On Sunday he’ll retrieve his girls for the afternoon, and he’ll already be drunk when he returns them. This ritual will not lead to any kind of transformation the way it does for Lahiri’s and Dark’s characters. Rather, in Trevor’s story, the ritual is destructive and pointless and empty, and it is also all Malcolmson has: “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, he thought, Thursday, Friday. On Saturday he’d buy the meringues and brandy snaps, and then it would be Sunday.”

We might choose to represent the structure like this, the lines indicating the moment where the reader understands this one day as a pattern of behaviors that have happened before and will continue into the future: 

Image 3:

(Image Description: Sixteen hand-drawn boxes. Horizontal lines only in box sixteen.)

*

“When you are a student of writing,” writes Lucy Corin, “(which of course does not mean you’re taking a class; it means you are living, reading, and writing with the intent to become a better and better writer), you should look at the material you produce to find your material. . . . Whether you’ve written a draft that flowed in a smooth or bumpy stream or that accrued painfully or delicately, you have some material to work with and having a look at it can help . . .” 

What then of my barrel? Of those teenagers walking across the ice? Was there anything the physical layout of my drafts could tell me that I couldn’t see by looking at the words? Here’s what it looked like, with lines indicating where the ritual occurs:

Image 4:

(Image Description: Eleven hand-drawn boxes. Horizontal lines filling all eleven boxes.

One gift a ritual provides a writer is that of action. My characters were doing something in these eleven pages, and for those of us writing fiction we know that it can be surprisingly difficult to put our characters in action. But it’s safe to say that I had relied too heavily on the ritual. I wanted this scene to be suspenseful, but in the end the structure actually had the opposite effect. By shining a light too hard and too bright on one place, I had managed to turn an act inherently dangerous into a story that was pretty boring. I’d left no room for the things that give a story texture, no moments of reflection, no space for the reader to long for a return to the ritual. What a relief it was, after so many drafts, of tinkering with the language, the characters, the descriptions, the action, and the plot, to finally realize that the problem lay in the structure. 

An even deeper understanding of where I went wrong came later, while writing this essay. I found another narrative where the ritual made up the entire story, Tim O’Brien’s “Stockings” from The Things They Carried. “Whenever we saddled up for a late-night ambush, putting on our helmets and flak jackets, Henry Dobbins would make a ritual out of arranging [his girlfriend’s] nylons around his neck, carefully tying a knot, draping the two leg sections over his left shoulder.” 

The group of soldiers believe this act keeps Dobbins safe when he trips a Bouncing Betty and it fails to detonate. When Dobbins is caught in a firefight with no cover, he’s unharmed. “It turned us into a platoon of believers,” the narrator says. 

What begins as an act of intimacy between a couple separated by war morphs into something larger as the repeated behavior becomes important, not just to Dobbins but to the entire group. So when Dobbins’ girlfriend breaks up with him in a letter, the ritual doesn’t end. The ritual has transformed and the soldiers have been transformed by it, and in this moment the stakes couldn’t be higher. We’re talking about life and death here, about doing anything to survive. Here’s the structure of “Stockings”: 

Image 5:

(Image Description: Two hand-drawn boxes. Horizontal lines filling both boxes.) 

The structure of this story tells us that the ritual is everything, and in this way the form reflects content. The ritual is all there is because for these soldiers surviving is all that matters. This, of course, isn’t true for the characters in my story, and by focusing for all eleven pages on this one act I was sending a false message. It’s not to say that there wasn’t something interesting in what they were doing, or that the objects these teenagers chose to drop in that barrel weren’t meaningful, or that all was going to be fine while these kids played out this dangerous game—only that my ritual hadn’t earned the space I’d given it. 

As Boswell suggests in his lecture, rituals in fiction don’t need to be religious, but many of them take on qualities that echo religious traditions. In “A Temporary Matter,” storytelling looks a lot like confession. In “Stockings,” a pair of nylons becomes an amulet. In “Access to the Children,” a Sunday night chat with a bartender looks a lot like a prayer. And in my unfinished story, a walk across the ice becomes a rite of passage. These rituals allow characters to say what otherwise could never be said, and to do what otherwise could never be done. Perhaps most importantly, they provide the possibility of change, a way forward after a tragic loss, for example, or a way to cope with the fear and uncertainty of war. Of course, our characters won’t always take what’s offered. Sometimes, no matter how many Sundays we give them, they’ll still end up on the barstool.