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Layers

Let’s start today with the story of a woman. A woman whose beauty is beyond compare, with flaming locks of auburn hair. Let’s talk about Jolene.

I spent my adolescence in Tennessee and have even been a season pass holder at Dollywood, but I only recently listened to Jad Abumrad’s podcast Dolly Parton’s America. Maybe that’s why, in thinking about the layers that piece of art can have, the first thing that popped into my head was “Jolene.”

Now, to hear Dolly tell of its genesis, it’s about a bank teller whom her husband was quite taken with. But in the podcast, she reveals that the teller’s name was not actually Jolene. That name came from a little girl who had Dolly sign her album. Dolly just liked the name, thought it had a musical quality. (Um. Guess her instinct was right there.) She told the girl she would write a song named after her. But she knew it had to have a story. That’s where the bank teller came in.

Okay. So we’ve got this well-known song with a fairly simple story: The speaker doesn’t want Jolene to take her man. But the funny thing about art is that it has layers, even when those layers might not be apparent.

In the podcast, a music scholar discusses Dolly’s use of the minor key in Dorian mode and how that slight variation of the makes all the difference: it gives the song an ancient, elemental feel, like it was pulled up from the earth, rather than invented.

Another scholar notes that the speaker seems pretty into this stunner, Jolene. This scholar even composes a final verse in which Jolene and the speaker run off together and leave the man behind. (Yes, in the podcast, Dolly gets to hear this verse. Yes, she loves it.)

Perhaps most surprising of all is that when Nelson Mandela was imprisoned and the guards let him play music for his fellow prisoners, he chose “Jolene.” A fellow prisoner is interviewed on the podcast and claims that “Jolene” is not so much about a love triangle; at it’s heart, it’s about longing – deep, deep longing. In the case of the prisoners, for freedom and for a better future.

Readers bring their own understanding to a piece. We know this.

We can harness this to saturate the piece with so many layers that convey our meaning and build the intended mood.

Sometimes building layers can involve bringing in seemingly disparate elements that interact with our main story line or imagery to build something bigger. Take a look at this art. There’s something oddly logical about these mash-ups, and it all comes down to the fact that the colliding puzzles are cut from the same die.

Layers might go deep, or they might go wide – digging into the same grooves the initial draft has established, or drawing on a productive tangent to create new meaning.

We can also think about the layers of written work at the language level – the layer of the piece as a whole, the layer of each paragraph or stanza, the sentence or line, the clause, the phrase, the word, the individual sound, the punctuation.

Today is about sifting through the work you’ve already done and finding something that feels heavy with potential, then building, broadening, and deepening the layers within and around it.

Yes, around it, too. We have to consider the superstructure of the piece, the society in which the piece is being produced and read. Toni Morrison and critical race theorists note that most of the Western literary canon is layered onto a foundation of whiteness as neutral, as the norm, as the universal. Does your piece reflect heteronormativity? Does it use disability as a metaphor? Especially when you’re readying a piece for publication, it’s important to consider the layers that your piece implies. Does the piece reflect an inequitable foundation? Does it uphold stereotypes?

Exercises

  1. Take a piece and double it in length. Then cut the original piece in half, in terms of length. Then rewrite it fresh.
  2. In the left margin of your piece, write a traditional summary of each stanza or paragraph – what happens? What does it say? In the right margin, write a functional summary. What does this part do? How does it affect the reader? How does it move the piece forward, not in terms of plot, but in terms of effect?
  3. Footnote your piece. Then write a piece based on the footnotes, with the original as a palimpsest. Then try to bring the two pieces together.
  4. Take three lines from your piece. Write each one at the top of its own sheet of paper. Freewrite on each of them. See if you can discover something new hiding within the original draft.
  5. Consider the effect you want this piece to have on the reader. Write those feelings at the top of the page. Then free-associate all the words and images that evoke that feeling. Now go in and saturate your piece with those words and images.
  6. Take something you use as a metaphor. Research the heck out of the reality of that metaphor. Bring in that research.
  7. Determine what kind of logic your piece is using. If it’s using heart logic, write a companion piece using mind logic or body logic. Then bring those pieces together.
  8. Pretend that you are a historian using this piece to understand the context in which the piece was written. Write a description of that context, based solely on the information in your piece, to see if you might be inadvertently building on an inequitable foundation.

Supplemental Readings

Kate Finegan is the novel/novella editor at Split/Lip Press. She lives in Toronto.

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