The Wedding
All's fair in love and war
Oh hi there!
As times continue to be strange and scary, writing can be an outlet for expressing current anxieties or means of escaping them for a little way. Today, we are going to focus on escaping them. I went to the wedding of two lovely people yesterday and it got me thinking about how magical weddings can be, but also how we often have strange expectations for them. So today’s exercise is called The Wedding.
The Exercise:
I’ve rarely been to any weddings that have gone off the rails, but weddings in books, movies, and television have prepared me for a number of scenarios: runaway brides, confessions of love, tawdry interactions between members of the wedding party, doubts, fears, murder, mayhem.
Today we’re going to write a wedding. This is a particularly good exercise for writing “crowd” scenes, which is something I often struggle with. Our projects often call for crowd scenes, but writing them is trickier than it seems. You’ve got to stay with your main characters while conveying the scale of the event and the number of people there, and if you’ve done your job well then your reader will feel as if they are right there in the crowd.
The Steps:
Weddings are fun to right because they come with a certain amount of rules. You can subvert these, of course, but the expectations that come with a wedding mean you won’t be creating something out of thin air. So start with the key element - who is getting married?
Next step - pick your location. Is it a destination wedding? Whether your lovebirds are getting married at home or afar, your location should have some kind of emotional relevance. In many of my favorite fictional weddings, the location almost functions as the third main character. Feel free to call on your own life for inspiration here. My husband and I got married three times - once on a wine farm in South Africa, then at my home church in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and finally on the Provincetown breakwater. Each had its own distinct character, and in fiction each would bring its own unique drama to the action.
Identify several main characters who aren’t getting married to track through the proceedings. It’s these characters that will allow you to expand the scope of your wedding and to bring that crowd feeling to your piece. A great example is Lucy Foley’s wonderful mystery The Guest List. First off, if you’re looking for a great setting, this book’s creepy island is the perfect inspiration. In terms of characters, Foley gives us a gorgeous, prismatic view of her novel’s central wedding by jumping between six main characters: the bride, plus one, the best man, the wedding planner, the bridesmaid, and the body (the novel’s victim, only revealed in the final pages). Even if your piece only has one POV character, one fun way to expand your own view (and thus your reader’s) of your wedding is to lay out exactly where several characters are at each stage of the wedding. Pick a few characters, give them back stories, and then plot out their experience of the wedding. Say you’re choosing a bride’s former best friend who was picked as a bridesmaid out of duty - she’ll start the day getting her hair and makeup done with the other bridesmaids. Then, feeling excluded, she’ll look for fun elsewhere, perhaps by doing a few sneaky shots with the other bride’s black sheep younger brother. From there, she wobbles back just in time to walk down the aisle, where she stumbles and sways (to the bride’s horror). She thinks she’s the life of the party, but no one appreciates it when she lifts her top for the official photos or when she tells the brides’ uptight mothers that she gives the marriage two months max. She passes out and nearly misses the reception, but returns just in time to throw up into the bouquet just after catching it. None of this would have to be in your actual story, but knowing this will give you a wider perspective of all that is happening during the big event.
Like a visit to the dentist, I don’t know that anyone has ever lamented a wedding ceremony being too short. This rule applies in your story as well. Have the details in your head - what music is playing, what readings are given, what are the vows - but stick with the highlights.
Speeches. Don’t give every speech, but there should be some speeches and they should be wonderful. Someone needs to confess to loving the groom or accidentally reveal an affair or sing an awkward ballad or have a meltdown. Bonus points if its a boozy mom/grandma.
Bring the unexpected. I remember when (Twilight spoiler alert) finally getting to Edward and Bella’s wedding day in Breaking Dawn and waiting for something cool or weird to happen. When it didn't, I was seriously disappointed. Even though I was firmly #TeamEdward, I didn’t want their wedding to be easy. I wanted them to be attacked by the Volturi or eaten by werewolves or something surprising. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve rarely seen actual weddings go off the rails. So when I find one in fiction, I want it to surprise and delight. Think of The Graduate. Think of Niles and Daphne. Think of that weird Madonna movie Who’s That Girl? One great way to surprise is to include unique wedding traditions. These can be religious, cultural, familial, or geographic. For instance, Pittsburgh-area weddings all have “cookie tables” which means that, in addition to cake, there is always a table overflowing with an insane variety of cookies at nearly every area wedding. Bring these elements into play.
Maintain focus by tying up loose ends. Know where everyone who has arrived at the wedding ends up afterwards. This knowledge can be a great set-up for continuing your story: did someone disappear? Did a groomsman end up in the best man’s hotel room? Did the father of the bride go for a smoke and fall into the ocean? This goes for main characters and for the crowd - how do the guests get home? Are their drunk drivers or arranged transport? Did everyone sleep over?
This should actually be the first step, but remember to have fun. That doesn’t mean your wedding has to be fun; it can be a horror wedding or a drama wedding or a romance wedding or a mystery wedding. But make sure you’re activating your imagination and your knowledge here. Life and Hollywood have blessed us all with a strange amount of wedding knowledge and rituals.
You may kiss!
What I’m Reading:
I’m taking an online class on monsters with the absolutely wonderful Chloe N. Clark, and to prepare I returned to her amazing fiction collection, Collective Gravities, which was one of my favorite books of 2020 and one of my favorite short fiction collections ever. If your brain is, like mine, scattered and depressed at the moment, this is an especially perfect book. Most of the book’s 26 stories can be read in a single sitting and even the most monstrous stories have an invigorating energy to them. I’m not saying that the book is exclusively cheerful, but I always leave a Chloe N. Clark story feeling invigorated and excited, which is just what I need at the moment.
I’ve also just started Jake Wolff’s weird, wonderful The History of Living Forever. I picked it up because I’m a fan of Wolff’s short fiction and I’m so glad I didn’t know much about it because I’m only a little ways into it and I’ve been repeatedly surprised and thrilled by the story and the language. I’m not sure where it is going, but I feel very good in this author’s hands and I can’t wait to see what happens next!
What I’m Watching:
I haven’t been able to focus much this past week and I don’t think I’ve actually watched anything. Oh! I did manage to catch some Jeopardy! and I have to say that I think LeVar Burton would make an exceptional long-term host. His style is different from Alex Trebek’s and I think that makes him especially perfect. Trebek was an international treasure, but I don’t think he can ever be replicated. Burton’s persona is warmer, and I found him very comforting to watch in these uncertain times.
What I’m Playing:
I’m deep into The Legend of Mana, a remaster of which just came out. I’m a huge fan of The Secret of Mana but I’ve never played Legend, and it’s so wonderful to be back in the Mana universe. The game itself is a work of art, and I would recommend it for players who are happy to just enjoy beautiful music and art and small storytelling moments. For players looking for a big story or great gameplay, this probably won’t be the correct choice. That said, as an amateur game historian, I’m surprised by how many elements of today’s “open world” games can be found in The Legend of Mana. You pretty much get decide the order of when you do anything, and you’ve got a big, diverse world to explore as you do so. It seems like a really influential game (even if just for other Square games, many of which have taken elements from Legend and expanded on them) and I’m surprised that hasn’t been written about more. I smell an essay!
Where I’m Shopping
I got my mom some puzzled from the Magic Puzzle Company earlier this year and we finally found some time to put one together. And it was SO cool. Fans of Where’s Waldo? and games like Hidden Folks will love them, as each puzzle is filled with little things for you to find, and the magic “surprise” at the end of the puzzle is truly surprising and does, in fact, feel magical. I cannot recommend them enough!
My Work:
I was so proud to have a story in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s anthology Take Us to a Better Place and it really has been such a wonderful project to be involved with. Several of the stories in the anthology recently received recognition from the Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2021 and there are more exciting things on the horizon. And you can read or listen to the whole collection for free! My story “The Flotilla at Bird Island” takes about an hour to listen to, and I’d love it if you checked it out!
Okay, that’s it for this week. Do something magical!
Mike