Solange

Solange is a student fiction writer in William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s workshop whose story about clouds conceals a more concrete disappointment: an unattainable boy. Her brief appearance shows both the limits of the story she has brought to class and the sharper judgment beneath it. She can acknowledge that the draft fails, explain the choice that shaped it, and remain attentive to another student’s fate even after the workshop has been overtaken by events outside the page.

Identity and Workshop Context

Solange’s character emerges through one class discussion rather than through a supplied account of her life beyond the workshop. She is the author of the story scheduled for discussion on a day when Leo, usually an early and conspicuous presence, is unexpectedly absent at first. The class has recently ended in morose silence, and its members appear to have carried that mood into the next meeting. Solange’s work is therefore introduced into a room already made uneasy, but the discussion soon proves unable to keep its attention on her story.

The instructor’s classroom is also the scene of a public humiliation: students have been reading campus newspapers that show his face on the front page, and some use the papers to grind their heels into his pictured smile. The real-world commotion makes the students more interested in campus events than in a fictional draft. Solange’s workshop is thus not simply a private encounter between writer and readers; it takes place amid the class’s strained attention and the spectacle of the instructor’s public image. That context helps explain why the discussion gives her story less sustained consideration than it was meant to receive.

The Story and Its Missing Plot

Solange’s story, titled “The Clouds of August,” follows a young woman who repeatedly turns from threatened action to contemplate the sky. The clouds grow darker and more ominous as the story proceeds, accumulating significance, but the workshop cannot identify a chain of events beneath the imagery. When the instructor asks for a plot summary organized by cause and effect, the students’ frowns register their dawning recognition that they cannot supply a sequence of causes and consequences—not even a secure beginning.

Solange first hears the class approach the story through its most visible device: one student offers that the clouds are a metaphor. The instructor takes that observation as an opening, but the conversation still circles around what the clouds might signify rather than establishing what happens. When Solange is asked to clarify the story in literal terms, she says that its protagonist falls in love and then falls out of love, comparing this movement to real life. The explanation surprises the other students, who had not understood that this was the story’s underlying action.

Asked to explain what the love is directed toward, Solange says the object is unspecified. Her account makes the clouds more than a decorative image: just as a person may be surrounded by them while flying through them and then emerge, love can be experienced without a clearly named object. The comparison gives the story a coherent conception of feeling, even as the workshop’s earlier demand for a plot exposes how little the draft offers in causal structure. Solange’s explanation clarifies what she meant, but it does not erase the distinction between an idea she can articulate and a story that the class has found difficult to follow.

Authorial Candor and the Story’s Impulse

Solange is usually not encouraged to participate in workshop discussion except to clarify a point, but the instructor explicitly invites her to answer. That exchange shifts her from the position of a writer being interpreted by classmates to the position of an author who can name the story’s intention. Her account does not present the clouds as a fully successful solution. Instead, she later tells the instructor plainly that she knows they were “bullshit” and insists that recognizing the failure does not make her stupid.

The disclosure that follows makes the draft’s emotional starting point more particular. Solange says that the story began as one about a beautiful boy she had no chance with. She then describes changing direction because she did not want to give him the satisfaction. The cloud-filled story can consequently be read as an act of redirection: its stated subject is an unspecified love and its metaphorical weather, while its acknowledged origin is a specific, unreciprocated or otherwise unattainable desire. Solange does not claim that this redirection produced a good story; she calls the result bad herself. What she reveals is the choice behind it—the wish not to make the boy the beneficiary of her attention.

Her account of her father adds a small but pointed detail to her self-description. When Solange says she is good at being mean, she explains that her father advises her to do what she is good at and that he is mean too. The remark is dry rather than confessional: it links her own sharpness to a family voice without offering a broader history. It also fits the candor she brings to the story. Solange can be cutting about her own work and about the disposition she attributes to herself, while still making clear that the bad draft came from a feeling she chose not to hand directly to its original object.

Recognition, Disruption, and Aftermath

The discussion is interrupted by the class’s growing awareness of the outside world, including news that a donkey basketball game has been canceled. The students begin talking all at once, but their animation moves away from the story. The instructor tries to restore the workshop’s subject, emphasizing that the point is to learn to make invented stories compelling rather than assume that real events are automatically more interesting. Solange’s story becomes the immediate test of that ambition: the instructor’s critique is severe, while the surrounding reality is drawing everyone’s attention.

That reality enters the classroom through Leo’s return. Solange’s discussion is already troubled by his absence; then he appears outside, crossing the lawn toward the building. The class watches him leave quietly, without the dramatic pause or memorable line a fictional character might receive, and soon sees him being led away across the lawn with his hands cuffed behind his back. The contrast between the instructor’s imagined version of what a story might make of the moment and Leo’s undramatic departure intensifies the class’s preoccupation with events beyond Solange’s draft. Solange’s scheduled workshop is effectively displaced by the scene unfolding outside.

After the other students leave, Solange stays to speak with the instructor. He suggests that she come to office hours the next day, saying she was cheated of the discussion she should have had. She resists the comfort implied by that assessment: she says she deserved nothing because the story was bad. The instructor nevertheless offers to help her begin something better. The exchange does not establish whether she takes up the invitation or writes another story; it does establish an opening for further work grounded in the failure of this one rather than in praise she does not believe.

Before leaving, Solange watches the police car pull away from the curb and asks what will be done to Leo. Her concern comes after she has admitted her own disappointment and after the class has been distracted from her work, but it is not absorbed into the story’s metaphors. The final emphasis is on a question about a real person’s immediate fate. Solange’s scene therefore closes on two unresolved matters: the possibility of a better story, and her worry about what will happen to Leo.