Kate Walbert on Characters Acting Out of Character

Your story “To Do” opens as its protagonist, Constance, is onstage telling a story about her mother at “Storytelling Wednesdays.” The mostly silent, clearly bored audience is made up largely of her colleagues. When did this scenario first come to you?

The story actually started for me with this—a character trying to tell her story, which quickly became apparent wasn’t exactly that but more an indescribable feeling wrapped up in her mother’s to-do list. I pictured a brightly lit stage and heard a cavernous silence, and since I never know where a story is going it took some time before I understood that the stage was in a bar, and that the silence was actually a room full of women.

Do you think there’s a substantial difference between telling a story onstage and telling it in print?

Absolutely. The page allows you to revise, to feel both adventurous and protected by the space between you and the reader. Onstage, if the story flags, there’s that palpable inattention from the audience. I think, for Constance, this completely flattens her and makes her want to do something reckless.

Constance’s mother has recently died, leaving behind to-do lists on every conceivable scrap of paper. “It all had to do with saying something,” Constance tells herself, “with continuity and mothers, lists and identity. In short: are we the sum of what we’ve crossed off? Or are we only what we still have left to do?” Do you think Constance knows what the answer is?

No, but I think Constance very much wants to know. And she’s not being cavalier in asking. It may be a futile exercise but at this point she’s trying to justify the significance of her story to herself, knowing she had approached the stage with a kind of blind faith, believing that somehow the act would make the answer clear. Reminds me of something I once heard—that every story you write is actually just a metaphor for writing a story.

Click Here: true religion mens jeans sale

Her friend, Beth, has a more outrageous performance (she stands bare-chested on the stage, balancing spoons on her nipples), yet is more controlled than Constance off the stage. Later in the story, Constance duplicates Beth’s act. Did you know this would happen when you started writing the story or did Constance ever surprise you along the way?

Once she got off that stage, Constance constantly surprised me. I had no idea she would meet Phil, much less attempt to perform Beth’s act; my guess is that Constance couldn’t have predicted this for herself, either. There’s always a little jolt when a character does something, well, out of character, or what I’ve come to think of as her character. A moment when I say, Really? This? But that’s what keeps a story going, too.

Constance assures herself that her mother’s death wasn’t the point of her performance at Storytelling Wednesdays, yet it’s her memories of her mother that she keeps returning to in the hours afterward. She recalls an incident when she was thirteen, in which she was a more capable child than she may have anticipated being, but also a crueller one. Would Constance have been able to revisit this period in her life before her mother’s death?

I’m not sure. She may have rehashed slightly altered, softer versions of this incident before her mother’s death, but I think you’re right, that it’s actually because of her mother’s death that she remembers her teen-age role as harshly as she does—a combination of grief and guilt. I’m never all that clear on the reasons for my character’s actions, or even if the logic adds up. I follow their lead, and the rest is a mystery. But it seems to me Constance finally empathizes with the scope of her mother’s thwarted ambitions when she is confronted with how she hasn’t lived up to her own.

“To Do” will appear in “She Was Like That,” a collection of new and selected stories which is coming out in October. How did you choose the stories? Did you see connections and parallels between stories you’d written earlier in your career and the new stories you’re including?

I arranged a lot of different stories, but the ones that fit together best became pretty clear pretty quickly. It seems certain themes and ideas in my work I can’t escape—maybe I should have subtitled the collection with Constance’s line: “continuity and mothers.” Despite their different generations, the women bridle at isolating definitions and expectations, seeking connection through storytelling, I guess, and small moments of rebellion. In the title story, an older widow is driving around New York in a rainstorm, offering rides to strangers. She tells one how her own mother would occasionally take a “break for freedom” by doing something fabulously unpredictable. And every Sunday she would forgo church with the rest of the family to go fishing, alone. “She was like that,” she says.