Novel Swatching

If you’ve spent any time around knitters, you’ve probably heard about swatching. Swatching is essentially a kind of test-knitting undertaken at the start of a project, especially a big project like a sweater, to ensure that the sum of the knitted parts is at least likely to fit the intended recipient. It’s a way to test whether the yarn, knit at the necessary gauge, looks nice and feels nice and will be suitable for the intended purpose. It’s a test of whether you can knit yarn you want to use to the required gauge, and if you can’t, how much knitters’ math are you willing to undertake in order to make it work?

Of course, swatching isn’t foolproof. What works in a 6x6-inch square (or even an 8x8- or 10x10-inch square, for the exquisitely prepared) doesn’t always translate across the several square feet of a sweater, in the full and proper context of the sweater, including the sweater’s own weight. Color-quirks that seem charming in small-scale aren’t once they’re applied to the width of your back. But a swatch does provide important information, and it’s a chance to catch small problems before they become quite large.

(That said, every knitter on the planet has dueling “I did not swatch and the gods blessed my knitting anyway” & “I did not swatch and now I rue, rue, rue the day” stories. And sometimes, of course, the swatch simply lies. As a fiction writer, I can appreciate the swatch-as-unreliable-narrator.)

I have spent the recent mornings of the nascent year doing a kind of swatching for my current novel project, trying out iterations of tone, voice, tense in chapter-length tests. In these tests, I have arrived at a combination that doesn’t feel like it’s lying to me. So far.

Some time ago, I settled on an omniscient narrator for this project after repeatedly stubbing my toe on a rotating close third, and my first draft with that omniscient point of view in action did what it needed to do in showing me the rudiments of how it might work for this particular novel. But now it’s time to embark on a draft to refine that work, and in service to that, I’ve undertaken a (brief) study of omniscient narrators in relatively recent novels to learn from them.

Three particular favorites from this project are Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, which I read for the first time on Kate Senecal’s astute recommendation, Louise Erdrich’s The Master Butchers Singing Club, which I read years ago and did not appreciate correctly and now I am in love, and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, recommended to me by the brilliant Sarah Cypher, whose approach to narration and point of view is always well-considered. What follows are simply some observations about how these three books introduce the reader to the possibilities of their narration.

Patchett and Hamid’s narrators announce themselves and their range and power quickly. The opening sentences of Bel Canto speak for an entire crowd:

And then, in Bel Canto there is the move of knowing—one that startled me to the bone—just 17 pages in:

There is nothing this narrator does not know, at the moment of the telling, and that narrator will make any choices they want to in how and what they tell. And it is staggering (and narratively delightful) to me that Patchett gives away such a crucial part of the ending so early—I wrote it down!—and still when the book comes to its climax I did not expect it. I knew it, but I didn’t expect it. Or I hoped otherwise. It’s like the most superbly acted iterations of Romeo and Juliet: I think maybe this time, they’ll make it, even though I know they won’t.

Mohsin Hamid’s narrator in Exit West comes with a wry, solemn way of knowing. Though the central focus is on Saaed and Nadia and the arc of their relationship, and most of the novel cleaves to their minds in a way reminiscent of a close third person point of view, Hamid’s narrator—a beautiful example of what Ursula K. Le Guin calls the involved author in Steering the Craft—frames and contextualizes and comments:

(I have to pause here and say Exit West is one of the most quietly powerful novels about love I have ever read. It’s a very quick read, and the narration arrives at beauty and heartbreak and stark truths about our war-riddled planet so deftly and swiftly; I did not know where this book was going to take me, but I was glad to follow it.)

And then there is the knowing voice of The Master Butchers Singing Club, which moves, again, in ways much like close third, except in moments like this, where we are not only being introduced to Fidelis—one of the primary characters—but also to a larger consciousness than any one person in the novel might have:

Here is an omniscience that doesn’t solve mysteries, but rather points to possibilities, walking a long and fascinating tightrope. Unlike Patchett’s, Erdrich’s knowing narrator keeps their secrets. Read on to the end of this one if you haven’t read it before. I love this book.

Making:

In addition to my literary swatching, I’m also literally swatching, and I’ve added in the extra difficulty of using handspun yarn from fibers I blended myself. You see, my stash of spinning fiber is made up of many standalone 4-ounce braids or smaller batts that I bought because I was entranced by the fiber itself and not my vision of what to make with it. I frequently end up spinning them into yarn I then simply keep because it’s not quite enough to make the thing I want to make and it’s not quite the right size or color to match with another orphan skein. But I want a cardigan to wear in my office and my knitterly pride refuses to let me buy a sweater I could knit. So.

I took the above 600 grams of mixed fiber (some undyed 50/50 merino-bamboo, undyed Blue-Faced Leicester, a braid of hand-dyed Blue-Faced Leicester from Fossil Fibers, a braid of hand-dyed merino from Southern Cross Fibre, & gray wool from Nanette Wake Studio), and carded them together to make this:

The batts were blended on two passes of my Louet Junior drum-carder, and because of the two hand-dyed skeins and the way I broke them up, the batts fall into two categories: slightly more aquamarine and slightly more blue-gray. I am spinning each bobbin as one color, and then when I’m done spinning, I’ll take inventory of how much of each of these I have and decide how to handle the three-ply yarn for the whole sweater: whether it works out to have the whole sweater knit in two plies of one shade and one of the other, or whether I’ll have some kind of faint ombre situation. Those are questions for Future Me.

For now, I have this: a swatch that suggests I have a decent worsted weight yarn, a plan, and a suitcase full of clouds.

Doing:

I have been in desperate need of a refresh of my writing life. I haven’t had great success trying the same old things, so I’m leaning on tools made by others. Today, I’ll tell you that I printed and bound a copy of Bianca Marais’s really beautiful writing progress journal. Now, you can get the whole massive thing in print and bound professionally, but when I decided I would give this a go (back in November), that wasn’t an option. (And the properly printed copy is very large.) As Marais conceived it, the planner works beautifully on a digital tablet (like an iPad), but I don’t have my own tablet and I have enough trouble separating myself from my devices. So I printed the black and white PDF booklet style, one month at a time, and dug out my awl and made some covers from my 2023 wall calendar. Though it’s not the most expert example of coptic binding and though my signatures have too many pages in them, here are the first five months of the year, ready to go.

Reading:

Aside from semester planning and my point of view explorations, I’ve read a pair of books that I really enjoyed (and both, unsurprisingly, were gifted to me by my friend Laura, who always knows about books I didn’t know about and surprises me with them): Frontier by Grace Curtis and Passing Strange by Ellen Klages. Both are sapphic love stories; both cannot be reduced to love stories; both bend the world as we might otherwise know it; both are an immensely satisfying emotional journey that use setting in fabulous ways. I needed to read something with heart right now, and these novels surely fit the bill.

As you settle into the new year and all of the exciting possibilities of books to read (so many!), remember that (beyond buying books) some of the best things you can do to support the writers whose work you enjoy are totally free: leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon, tell a friend (or a thousand friends) about the book, ask your local library to add a copy to their collection, & attend book events in your community. The writers in your life will be ever-so-appreciative!