Scheherazade | Bertram's Blog

Fabric Houses

March 26, 2015 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been researching tents, trying to find one that is livable for more than a night or two. If I ever went on an epic walk, I’d probably have to get something extremely lightweight, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to carry it, but if I went car camping, I’d have many more options.

The simplest tents are little more than a tarp. The most complicated have multiple rooms and even more complicated set-ups, especially if one person has to do it alone. The cheapest tents cost about $40. The most expensive top $4,000. The biggest tents seem to be circus tents, which are not something I have any interest in owning. (That’s just a guess about circus tents being the biggest. For all I know, the military has constructed temporary hangars that would make a circus tent look small.) The most terrifying are the bivy bags — they look like something a vampire would sleep in. I can’t imagine waking up in the middle of the night, still half-asleep from remembered nightmares of being buried alive to find the tent inches from my face. Oh, my. Sounds like heart failure waiting to happen.

Tents as both portable and p tent ermanent housing have been around for probably 40,000 years. The list of materials used for making tents throughout the ages reads like a mini history of peoplekind — mammoth hides, deerskin, silk, canvas, nylon, cuben fiber. Colors varied, too, from basic dead animal skin to rainbow hues, to camouflage and other “natural” tones.

When I imagine tent living, I don’t think of modern miracles of lightweight shelters that keep out both bugs and rain (though of course, I would need both such amenities). What I think of are glorious and sumptuous structures right out of Scheherazade or the Arabian Nights or even a fabric representation of Jeannie’s genie bottle — lots of jewel-toned pillows, rugs, silk swaths.

Sounds kind of fun, actually. I doubt I would make such a colorful tent — way too much trouble especially since there are thousands of styles on the market. Besides, I’m more of a practical person, at least on the outside. I can see getting a durable and sensible tent but inside, where it counts, furnish it with simple, colorful, lightweight portable luxuries.

I’m probably being silly since I don’t know what is feasible when it comes to fabric-home living, but I like the idea of decadent luxury coupled with sturdy practicality. Who says I have to get a solo tent? Who says I have to use a boring old sleeping bag? Who says a fabric house can’t feel like a home?

Who says I can live in a tent, even for only a night or two? I certainly don’t know, but as with all the rest of my whimsies, it’s fun thinking about.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Posted in culture, life. Tags: bivy bags, car camping, fabric houses, Scheherazade, tent living, tents. 12 Comments »

On Writing: Flashing Back to Flashbacks

March 25, 2008 — Pat Bertram

In my post on finding a beginning to a novel, I mentioned as an aside that if you have many flashbacks in your book, you should move the story backward in order present those scenes as they happened chronologically. It’s good advice — my advice on writing is the distillation of the hundreds of writing manuals I have read coupled with my own experience as an unpublished novelist — but reading the comments people left on my blog made me wonder where I really stand.

I do think that ideally a story should begin at the beginning and go to the end with few backtracks. Telling it chronologically gives the story impetus, making us want to read further in order to find out what is going to happen. But the ideal way of telling a story is not always the most practical way.

If I have any reservations about my novel More Deaths Than One, they come from its five long flashbacks. Two flashbacks are told as stories. Scheherazade-like, the hero seduces the heroine with the stories so, as in all elements of a good novel, they do double duty. Two other flashbacks introduce the hero when he was younger and introduce a friend who is murdered. The fifth, I’m embarrassed to admit, is there simply because I like the story it told, though it did introduce a minor character. (And the heroine asked for a story. What can I say? She was insatiable.)

Originally I wrote the book in three parts: present, past, then present again. That didn’t work — the past was so boring it slowed the pace, even though much of it was important. Then I tried using a prologue. That didn’t work either; it seemed as if it were there merely as a hook and not an integral part of the story. So I began the novel in the present and added flashbacks as needed. I don’t know if it works, but right now it’s the only way I know to tell the story.

In my other books, I let the characters tell each other their life stories. It’s a cheat, really, a means of making the past seem more immediate, but at least the characters get to know each other at the same time the reader does. The flashbacks in my work-in-progress are true flashbacks, momentary musings by the hero. I do not plan to write any scenes in the past. I want this one to have as much forward movement as possible to mask its real character — an allegory. (I mean, really, an allegory? Who reads allegories?)

As a reader, I prefer anything that keeps my attention. Often, flashbacks disturb the flow of the story, making me aware of the construct. In the minutes it takes for me to get into the flow of the back-story, I lose interest. But I admit, I have become something of a philistine and no longer admire writing solely for its artistic and intellectual achievements.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.