Stories I like so much, they made me sad: The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God by Etgar Keret

I don't like most of the flash fiction I read. A lot of writers out there swear they love it, but I mostly find that what I've seen feels like one frame of a story board. There's often some interesting and evocative scene-setting, but overall, there's an incompleteness. There's no reason flash fiction has to be this way. The first flash I ever read in my life was probably the short stories of Borges, which never, ever feel incomplete. Rather, those are always miraculous in the way they seem to cram a whole novel of emotion into three pages. 

Borges didn't waste much time in his short stories with descriptions of scenes. There aren't elaborate metaphors for what things look like, no picking out of significant details of all the main characters and the surroundings. There are a few words to set the scene, then a few things happen, the story comes to a quick head and then it's done. There's a plot and a theme, and both can be summarized.

I once defined literary fiction as "fiction in which plot is not a central concern." Much of the literary fiction world almost mistrusts plot, considers it more a part of genre fiction, dismisses it as nothing more than "a what and a what and a what," in Margaret Atwood's phrase.

Rather than strip away all but the barest essentials of a story in order to get through a beginning, middle, and end in a few words, most flash I read instead ONLY focuses on the elements other than plot. It often reads more like confessional poetry, except that the words go all the way to the end of the lines. There's much more focus on metaphor, voice, imagery and the like than on what happens. That's a shame, because I really like the effect that a condensed, no-nonsense story gives you. It's more like the way people naturally tell stories when they're talking about a thing that happened to them. In Vonnegut novels, I almost like the mini-stories, told as summaries of novels by Kilgore Trout, more than the novel itself. 

To be honest, before I got serious about reading literary fiction about ten years ago, I was the kind of reader who'd tend to skip over a two-page description of scene. "They're in a desert. Got it. That's all I need to know."  

It's strange, then, that it's become so natural to me to read work that focuses so much on something other than plot. The kind of reading I've been doing, though, is all about taking what I used to think of as the filler and making it most of what's there. If you try to write a synopsis of a literary fiction story, you often find yourself struggling. There's a spectrum, of course, with some writers leaning more toward a discernible plot, but none of them is going to write a story that's exactly full of details in its plot. 

Enter Etgar Keret's The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God

Keret is undoubtedly considered part of the literary fiction world. He's been published in The New Yorker a few times. All the people who would have to call you a genius if you're going to be thought of as a serious fiction writer have called him a genius. When I finally shamed myself into reading something of his lately, though, I was shocked to find that his stories don't sound anything like what I've become used to. They're short, but still things happen in them. I could summarize any story in the collection with a synopsis of events, rather than having to describe the language or the narrative approach. There's hardly any art to the narrative, and that's the whole art of it. 

I think whole stories sometimes went by in which not a single character's appearance was described, nor a scene set. I could probably count the metaphors in the whole book on both hands. These are all fireside stories told the way an entertaining friend would tell, even if they're weirder than your friend's stories probably are. 

I enjoyed the stories very much, but I also found myself getting upset, wondering how he gets away with it. I'd like to write stories like that, too, but I haven't seen anyone else doing it. I didn't think if I wrote stuff like that, anyone would ever read it. I still don't believe they would. I doubt I could publish a single story writing like him. Yet it was undeniably a breath of fresh air to read. 

It's not just the style where he's getting away with things I didn't think you could get away with. His stories involve people getting high or trying to score with girls. There are a lot of stories of bros doing bro things. There are also plainly parabolic stories. The best story is the novella that closes the book, about a half-dead after life for people who've died by suicide. None of these are things I see in literary magazines. Hell, some magazines outright tell you not to do these things. 

Every story is a simple read, but every story can also leave you thinking for a long time afterward, trying to unravel what kinds of themes were lurking in the simple story structure. 

Have I talked myself into writing what I don't like?

I recently submitted a story to the Coolest American Stories anthology. Their feedback kind of took me back: 

We found ((the story)) solidly written and polished well. We're saying no because: 1) its overall premise is too murky for our readership (a wide audience from all walks of life); 2) it probably has too many characters for a COOLEST story--i.e., it allows characters to arrive and go (particularly in its 2nd half) as a memoir would, and our readers have let us know they've read enough autobiographical (and thus sometimes meandering) fiction pieces in university-affiliated lit mags (they want *story*).  

I was taken aback because my initial reaction was that hey, I like stories where things happen, too, unlike those stuffy lit mags. But I've been reading stuffy lit mags for so long, now, I'm starting to write like them. (I was also taken aback because the fiction wasn't in any way autobiographical, but that's a side point.) The worst kind of lecture is the lecture about something you thought you already were doing. If anything, I feel like one of the reasons I have a hard time getting published in literary magazines is because I focus too much on plot and not enough on poetics. But apparently, I'm starting to sound like an art house writer.  

This isn't the first time I've had this concern. I don't actually hate literary fiction's focus on language. I've developed a style by reading this kind of fiction that's sort of a hybrid literary-popular story-telling mash-up. I think I'm better for it, but I also think I've sort of lost my way in terms of knowing what it is I really love about writing. Maybe because I've also gotten a little lost knowing what it is I love about reading. I've been reading things I think I should read for so long, and getting used to not really loving it but forcing myself to "get something out of it," as they say, that when I naturally and instinctively do love something, I forget how to even react to it. 

I don't even know what to do about this. I've kind of developed myself as a writer of a certain sort, and if I tried to change now, it would probably sound like pop artists who suddenly decide the real money's in country music. I also don't even know what I'd change to. I just know that I feel like I've drifted from the kind of story-telling I love. Like most writers, I think my primary motivation in writing is that I don't see the stories I want to read out there in the world, so I have to create them. Part of that, though, should be remembering not just what stories I love, but what kind of story-telling I love, also. 

The Devil and Judd Apatow

I have a rather low tolerance for vicarious embarrassment. Vicarious suffering I seem to be somewhat okay with, but if I have to watch a fictional character humiliate himself, I struggle to keep going. Mrs. Heretic hates to watch a lot of shows with me, because I honestly have to pause them every five minutes to gather my strength to continue watching someone be debased.

Right now, I'm watching the series "Love" on Netflix. I have to watch it alone. Mrs. Heretic would never stand for how each 30-minute episode takes me 90 minutes to watch. Judd Apatow and the writers on this show seem to be masters of nothing so much as sticking characters in crucibles built by their own vices. It's wonderful and excruciating.

Writers are often told to make terrible things happen to their characters. I've certainly done that to mine. I'm able to make them suffer. But I have a very hard time humiliating them. I suppose I gave characters in "Brokedick" and "The Strongest I've Ever Been" some humiliation, but it was temporary and they bounced back from it. I can't imagine constantly torturing characters the way Apatow does.

I think there's some of my religious past at work here. If God exists, He apparently has no problem allowing his creations to suffer. It's one of the reasons I don't believe in God anymore. I feel like I owe my creations better than that. I want to use my omnipotence better than He does. So I tend to make sure that if someone endures something, there's a point to it. They live through it and become better somehow. I know this isn't how it usually works out in the real world. What doesn't kill you in the real world doesn't make you stronger. It doesn't make you anything. It just happens. I'd like the worlds I create to be different.

Yes, your characters are incredibly life-like and relatable. Please make them less so.

I wonder, when I consider my unwillingness to be a negligent parent to my characters, if writing is really my calling. I have the same weaknesses as a writer I do as a parent. I want to solve things for others instead of letting nature take its course and seeing if they've got the stuff to make it on their own.

Maybe that's the real link between alcohol and writing. It isn't that alcohol unlocks visions for writers, it's that if you become enough of an alcoholic, you can also be enough of an asshole to let terrible things happen to the people you've created.

Breaking the rules well: starting near the end of a story and when to really start at the beginning

Like a lot of writers, when I read advice on how to write well, my first instinct is to look for counter-examples that negate the advice. Anyone who is drawn to do creative work probably feels this instinct. We don't like to be told you can or can't do something, even if it's friendly advice from another creative type. This is probably a healthy instinct; every great work probably breaks some rule or another. But anytime a rule is broken, it probably does so following the logic of some other rule. The "rules," in fact, are nothing more than generalizations drawn from inductive reasoning from thousands of stories that worked.

On the one hand, if you could write a great story from merely following a list of rules, everyone would do it. You need to be able to show readers something they've never seen before by breaking the rules in the right way. On the other hand, if you've written a story and it doesn't have anything in common with any story anyone has ever cared about, you might need to ask yourself if you haven't broken the rules in a bad way.

One rule that comes to mind is the one best expressed by Kurt Vonnegut: start as close to the end as possible. Vonnegut himself followed this in a lot of his novels by having a narrator write to us from the perspective of someone who is already at the end. The narrator will drop hints throughout the novel of what the end is. The world has ended, and I'm writing to you from the future of this novel, for example.

I think the standard literary short story probably should follow the "start near the end" advice most of the time. Let's say you have some character in mind who grew up with a hard-knock life. He never knew his daddy and his mama never loved him. He discovered he was good at math by running numbers for a local mob boss. A kind-hearted teacher realized his gifts and got him a scholarship. But on the night before he leaves for Yale, he accidentally runs over the mob bosses's kid with his car. Nobody saw the accident. He can leave and nobody will ever know it was him. He has to decide, right there in the rain and in the dark of night somewhere, what he will do.

You start that story near the moment your hero hits the kid with his car, not back in his childhood. You can fill in the details of his past life from how your hero reacts to hitting the kid. His thoughts and actions will fill in the details for the reader so the reader knows all the stakes involved.

Different from "write the story with the end in mind"

"Start the story near the end" isn't the same as the principle, advocated by some writing advisers, of writing the whole story with the end in mind. This separate advice has to do with plotting throughout the story, not deciding where to begin. It is simply the idea that everything in your story should contribute to the eventual end. Even though most writers of "serious" fiction now eschew this idea, and advocate writing without pre-determining the end, I think it's still possible to let the end "just happen" on its own and still write with an eye toward the end of the story. This comes about through editing and revising the draft once an early version has shown you the way to the end. Dream, then draft.

But that's not what I'm talking about when I mean start your story near the end. I mean pick the spot where the crux is. Look at the entire arc of your character's life. Figure out what this story is about and start the story right at the crucial moment. Don't start "Bartleby the Scrivener" with the boss's decision to go into record keeping as a profession. Don't start "Gift of the Magi" with Jim and Della falling in love and getting married.

When don't you start near the end, then?

The epic seems to be a place where you should ignore the rule about beginning near the end. In an epic, you really want to start back at the beginning somewhere. Tolkien doesn't start Lord of the Rings with Frodo deciding whether to drop the ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Game of Thrones begins with a scouting party that picks up the first clues of a coming doom that will take 4,000 pages to fully materialize.

Reader expectations in the epic seem to be that they're going to get a long story, one that goes more or less in straight chronological fashion, and that it's going to give us a pretty complete timeline as it happens.

Of course, that still doesn't mean you start at the actual beginning. Tolkien had a world plotted out back to the creation, but he doesn't start the story of Frodo and the ring with the Valar singing Arda into existence. Martin also has a long history in his world that pre-dates the Game of Thrones series, but he still is focusing that series on a part of the timeline of his world that makes sense for that individual story.

I've argued that Justin Cronin's The Passage started too early; we spend over 200 pages seeing how the vampire apocalypse came, then another 500 pages watching as characters a hundred years in the future re-learned the whole history. Obviously, since the book did very well and millions of readers love, it, most people disagree with me, but the point is that it is possible, even in an epic, to start too early.

Limits to the rules and using your intuition

There isn't any rule for how to determine the exact correct point at which to begin a story, which should make fellow rule-breakers happy. Whether you're writing a tight short story with expectations that we are starting near the climax, or writing a fantasy series with expectations of hundreds of pages of world-building, there is a point that is too early to begin, and a point that is too late. You're going to have to use your own intuition to feel out where the sweet spot is. It is helpful, though, just to have the issue raised to your consciousness, to mull it over while thinking of some of your favorite stories or reading new stories in the future. What makes this the right place to begin? Is this similar to a story I want to write, and should I begin in a similar place in it?

A diverting exercise to try sometime is to take a story you love and imagine it beginning somewhere else. If it did, how would you still include everything in it that needs to be there? Is it now too difficult to tell the story, because you need to rely too much on flashbacks? Are you taken out of the moment too much? Then, try it with your own stories. Sometimes, you might find by starting it somewhere else that you've actually improved the sense of urgency within it.

F***ing the pig and why I'm rethinking what I want to write

The show Black Mirror is a little bit hit-or-miss to me, but when it hits, sometimes it just crushes it. The premises of some shows are so compelling, I had my first long conversation about one of the episodes before I'd even seen it. Just the description of it was enough to draw me in.

Jump off here if you've never seen the show

Anyone who's seen the pilot episode will probably remember it forever. In it, the British Prime Minister is awakened to hear some shocking news: someone has kidnapped a popular young princess, and is threatening to kill her unless the Prime Minister has sex with a pig that same day and broadcasts the act live on television for the world to see. There are technical provisions in place that prevent faking the act. 

There is a provision that makes it less preposterous: The Prime Minister can wear a condom. 

A friend of mine told me this premise in a bar one night to entice me to watch the show (it worked), and we spent the next two hours dissecting this thought experiment. We added wrinkles to it: what if, instead of a princess, she's a poor woman with kids? What if it's ten people whose lives are at stake instead of one? Fifty? A hundred? A million? What if it's a school full of kids? 

My friend tended toward the "no negotiations with people who make me fuck pigs" end of the spectrum. I had to add a lot of people with lives hanging in the balance before he would consider carnal knowledge of a pig. (I might claim some hypocrisy here. He loves bacon.) 

The show itself isn't really about the morality of what the right decision is. It's more about the media and how media-driven public perceptions can change in an instant and determine what politicians do. At the beginning of the day, the public supports the Prime Minister's decision not to pork the pork, but after an effort to trick the kidnapper fails and the princess pays the price, the same public begins to demand he do it. The Prime Minister ultimately bows to public pressure and does the deed, but he does it so save his political career, not to save the woman. But I didn't know all this when talking about it in the bar with my friend, so we treated it like it was more or less an ethics problem: given the situation--hostage, demand, pig--what is the right course of action for the Prime Minister? I've been thinking this over for almost a year, now, and I'm still not sure what the right answer is.

Turns out, The University of Alabama has been running an advanced program in theoretical ethics for decades. 

The no argument

My friend had some good reasons to say "no" other than just not wanting to do it. First, how do you know that anyone sick enough to come up with this plan would actually release the princess? But more to the point, let's say you do what the pig perverts ask and they do release the girl. You've saved her life, but what if there are other people who then try the same thing? Now, ransoming humiliation out of politicians can become an easy way to get any politician with an agenda you dislike out of politics. You've opened the floodgates to all kinds of evil. 

The yes argument

I wanted to agree and vote no on this, but there was something that didn't sit right with me. Try changing a few parts of the situation, and you might come up with a different conclusion:

-What if, instead of schtooping a swine, the kidnappers say you must give up your life in her place? You must drink poison on national television or the woman will die with suffering. Wouldn't most people say that yes, one ought to sacrifice oneself for another? Or at least that doing so would be noble? So why is it noble to give your life to save another, but not to just be humiliated to save someone? Does pride mean more than life?

-What if it's not the Prime Minister being asked? What if it's just some random schmo, and the kidnappers have picked him as the patsy at random from a phone book? They just want to humiliate a random person. What should he do?

-What if there were no public shame element to it? Let's pretend a woman has a rare form of cancer, and scientists have discovered that pigs produce a chemical that defeats the cancer. However, they only produce it when a human male has sex with them, and so far, the hospital hasn't found any volunteers. So there are no cameras and no agendas--just the need to have intercourse with a pig to save a life. 

-Even my friend had to admit that the argument for sexing Sooey became stronger when you started adding victims, especially if the victims were children. This, of course, brings about the difficult question of how many people become enough to fuck a pig and how many is few enough to not do it. 

I couldn't help feeling there was a good moral argument that at least the first time this happens, the morally correct action is to take whatever drugs you need to take so you aren't in your mind and your equipment works, and to fuck the pig. 

Okay, I might have been encouraged to take this position because every time I said, "I think you've got to fuck the pig" in that bar, I enjoyed watching the bartender who was eavesdropping on us shake his head. But I don't think I was only ready to say there was a good argument for banging the bacon because it got a rise out of the bartender; I think that it might actually be the right thing to do. Snort coke, take an entire bottle of Viagra, hire porn stars to whisper in your ear, and do the deed. After that, resign your post in politics and retire to a monastery somewhere to live our the rest of your life. 

Two caveats: 1) Only the first person this happens to should comply. Once is noble sacrifice. Twice is inviting an outbreak of copycat crimes. (And actually, now that Black Mirror has done this idea, I don't think anyone in the real world ought to go along with it. It could very easily become a popular form of criminal mischief, like an extreme form of SWATing.) 2) Nobody can blame you if you say no. If the kidnapper's requirement was to stab yourself in the eyeball, I don't think I could make myself do that, either. How do you overcome the body's instinct not to do some things? I don't know if all the drugs in the world could get me to do it. Even if I could bring myself to try, I'd probably fail. 

More important than the yes or no

The bigger deal to me as a writer is that I can't remember having had that animated and engaged a conversation about a "literary" story in a long time. Literary fiction seems to feel that setting up a moral choice that a character must make where there are competing moral claims is beneath it somehow. That's for science fiction. It's too plot-based. Yet people love reading for these reasons. Moreover, it's clear to me what the social value is of a story meant to engender a debate over the right or wrong path in a certain situation. I'm not always sure what the social value of literary fiction is. Lit fic seems to produce a million versions of the same story, where we open a window into the psyche of a character faced with a private form of crisis, and we try to convincingly render the psychological process in the character that leads to some kind of internal change. It sometimes feels like literary fiction is the same story over and over, just with a never-ending quest to find an overlooked type of character to tell it about and a new form to fit the story into.

I've never really read sci-fi, unless you count Vonnegut. I took a course in high school on sci-fi and fantasy, where I read a lot of the best-known sci-fi short stories from a hundred years ago when I was a teenager. Since then, I've never really examined the genre. I'm rethinking this. I've written before that I'm not totally sure literary fiction is the right genre for me. All the stories I've written in the last five years have been lit fic, but maybe it's time to change that. Maybe this is the year where I take a break from the road I've been on, read some new stuff and re-think what I want to do with writing. It makes sense that I would try to write the kinds of stories I myself find compelling. 

Dialect--yeah, I've got no good answers, either

Mark Twain and Uncle Remus are well-known examples of great American literature with a heavy use of dialect, but nowadays, excessive use of dialect is generally frowned upon. It isn't so much that you can't use it, it's that the generally accepted advice on dialect now is to aim for moderation.

Even in a novel that calls out for some use of dialect, like Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railraod, the dialect is very sparse, mostly not going beyond the occasional "ain't." Whitehead partly manages this by getting his main character, Cora, an education before she's too far along in the book. But even before that, the dialogue in the book probably doesn't very closely represent the actual speech patterns of Georgia field slaves in the 19th Century. A few examples:

-Ain't this a nice mansion?
-Mighty fine work. That a little bed in there?
-"Nothing today, Cora? Alice said. "Too early," Cora said.
-"Almost had it," Cora said.


The main technique Whitehead uses to achieve moderation in use of dialect is one common to a lot of modern high fiction: he just avoids using a lot of dialogue at all. The book really doesn't have any of those sections where you get through four pages in about sixty seconds because it's all back-and-forth. Not only is the dialect done sparingly, the dialogue is.

I wonder why fiction has chosen to go this route with both dialect and dialogue. Why are both treated almost with suspicion? One obvious hypothesis is that fiction feels the need to give its audience something different from drama or cinema/video. If you want dialogue, they can do it better, so a fiction writer would be wise to avoid going head-to-head with those media. Instead, better to try to render narrative using techniques only available to those who traffic exclusively in words.

It's funny to me that in this one respect, fiction seems to have tried to distance itself from cinema. When I was in graduate school, instructors often invoked language from film theory to explain ideas in narrative. The concepts of method acting were often used to explain how to determine authentic character choices. One instructor explained scene by talking about where to place the "camera." The fiction how-to books I've read are full of this kind of talk. So why the divergence here? If Hollywood was going to do a slavery-era movie and the actors didn't use dialect, we'd criticize the hell out of it. Being able to deliver a killer accent is considered a mark of a good actor.

I don't have a good answer to either why fiction is avoiding dialogue and dialect, nor to what you, as a writer, need to do to cope with this. In "A Cinnabon at Mondawmin," which is probably the best story I've written yet, I had a main character who was a young black man in Baltimore. If he was going to talk, there was a specific way for him to authentically talk. But I didn't think I, as a white, middle-class man, could really do justice to it. It felt like a literary form of blackface. So I came up with a narrative technique. It was an epistolary story in which the boy was writing in his school journal, but constantly asking his white teacher from the suburbs to "make it sound right" for white people. That allowed me to have echoes of the boy's voice, but mostly write in a way that is more like the way I, Jake Weber, actually talk and write. That worked there, but I can only use that trick once.

It's too bad that good authors are mostly staying away from using heavy dialogue and dialect these days. I see a lot of bad use of dialect as an editor, but that's probably because good writers know that these things are out of fashion and therefore hard to get away with. That means the only people still trying them are hacks. So the use of these things gets caught in a vicious cycle where we think only hacks use them, then hacks do, in fact, exclusively use them, and our prejudices are confirmed even more.

In conclusion, I don't have a lot of easy fixes if you're writing a story where it just doesn't feel right for the characters to be talking like the cast of Friends. Just know the expectations and be careful, I guess. 

Editing Roald Dahl

This is going to seem presumptuous as hell, but there's a point to it. Who am I, Writer McNobody, to suggest changes to the great Roald Dahl? Well, that's not exactly what I'm saying. Dahl IS great. I'm not arguing that. And I wouldn't want to change a word that he wrote.

Unless he were trying to get published today.

What I'm saying has more to do with something I suggested a few months ago, something having to do with not having read a lot of modern fiction until very recently. A lot of people who start writing have read a lot of fiction, but a good portion of what we've read is older. We've read a lot of the type of stuff we were assigned in school. I know when I first started writing, I'd read more 19th-Century literature than all other literature put together.

The 19th Century is great. Melville is great. I wouldn't change a word of Moby Dick. But you couldn't write Moby Dick today and get it published. You couldn't write Shakespeare today and get it published. Right or wrong, each generation has certain expectations it has to write to. As much as journals love it when someone turns those expectations on their heads, there are still some things you just can't do. In the 19th Century, journals often paid by the word, which lead to florid sentences. That was part of the expectation of editors and readers. But if you tried to write a story now with a bunch of seven-line sentences, you'd be rejected before the first page was up, unless you were writing something that explicitly channeled the age, such as John Knowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Same goes for the early-to-mid 20th Century. There are things writers from that age did that tend to have a low reputation among editors nowadays. You can argue with me that this is stupid, that the currently approved lit-fic conventions are terrible and banal and lead to literature that all sounds the same. You can argue that, but if you stick to your guns and write like O. Henry or Roald Dahl or Dash Hammett or Ring Lardner because that's what you read in your teens or whenever your introduction to great literature came, you're probably facing an uphill slog getting your short stories published. So fight me if you want. I'm just the messenger here of what editors are looking for.

Two things to avoid

I just read Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter" this week, because my son was assigned it for his English class. Two things stand out about it that, as much as I enjoy them in Dahl, I would advise writers to avoid now if they want to get published in a good literary journal.

1. The "dark and stormy night" beginning. Okay, Dahl's opening here isn't hackish like "it was a dark and stormy night," but it is a cold start onto scene setting: "The room was warm, the curtains were closed, the two table lamps were lit." Now, right after that, we get action, so this might not really be a problem, but I see a lot of stories come in as an editor that go on with scene-setting for a page or more. There was a time when this was a standard way to begin a story. ("A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight...") But nowadays, there is an expectation that right from the jump, you're going to start to establish not only mood and scene, but also character and, if possible, a unique voice. Generally speaking, it's advisable to give an opening line that introduces the people we'll be getting to know. If possible, make it sound like no other opening line ever, so we know that there is also something special about the people we're about to meet. That's expecting a lot, and maybe it does lead to cookie-cutter fiction by making every opening line predictably unpredictable. But that's sort of what's expected. Don't believe me? Here are the opening lines from the first ten short stories in this year's Pushcart Prize anthology:

1) I was once a star on YouTube.
2) Full disclosure up front: I am a gay black man, a proud New Orleanian, thirty years old, five out of the closet, a decade on the down-low before that; bi-dialectical as every educated brother in this city must be, a code-switcher as needed; a poet in my spare time, in my unspare time a poetry teacher devoted to dead French guys and live black ones.
3) My former daughter-in-law is sitting in the next room eating cookies off a plate.
4) Barnes Hollow was actually Jason something, but no one dreamed of calling him that.
5) Afterward, Eva turns her face to the wall and falls asleep immediately, smacking her lips like a newborn.
6) It's the middle of the night and the woman can't sleep.
7) Her parents always said they'd dig their own graves if anything ever happened to their children, so when her sister Claire disappeared on a camping trip in the White Mountains, Elsie kept at eye on things.
8) He lived in a world of grease, and no matter how often he bathed, which was once a day, rigorously--and no shower but a drawn bath--he smelled of carnitas, machaca, and the chopped white onion and soapy cilantro he folded each morning into his pico de gallo.
9) Joan had to look beautiful.
10) When Father Tom comes to a party, people look embarrassed, even the ones who invited him.

As you can see, you don't have to necessarily have fireworks going off. Most of these are actually rather modest starts. But one thing they all have in common is that the people in them are in sentence number one. We eventually will get setting, but that's not where we start. We start with people, normally. I'm sure you can find exceptions. I'm not telling you not to break the rules. I'm telling you what the rules are.

2. The plot twist as the story's raisson d'etre. Plot twists are great. I'm sure a lot of the stories we all grew up loving were built around plot twists. "The Gift of the Magi" comes to mind. (I just re-read that not long ago. It honestly stands up pretty well to the test of time.) But you can't make the plot twist the thing on which your whole story stands. In Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter," we get three moments where the plot turns: the man tells his wife some secret, probably that he is leaving her and their unborn child for another woman; she murders him with a frozen lamb leg; and then she feeds the murder weapons to the police who worked with her husband.

Again, I'm not saying Dahl's story is some cheap one-trick thing. It's a strong character study of a woman who puts too much of her own self-worth into how her husband feels about her, a story of a woman treated badly but who finds, suddenly, that she has the emotional reserves necessary to bring about her own resolution. If the story doesn't resonate with us today quite as much as it might have with readers in 1953, that's because we're now used to stories of abused women fighting back. It's like expecting us to be impressed with the special effects from Ben Hur.

But that's not the problem for a modern writer who would try to build a whole story around a plot twist. You can certainly have plot twists, but if we feel that's the whole reason you offered us a story, if that's what was gnawing at you until it spilled out of you into words on the page, then an editor is going to feel you've cheated him, that you didn't really have that much to say. The plot, in modern fiction, is a result of two things: what the author throws at the character, and how the character reacts. If the editor feels that the end result of your story was something you had in mind from the beginning without pausing to get input from your characters, then you're going to get a polite letter thanking your for your story, which isn't quite right for the journal right now.

And so, I offer this simple edit:

In order to make it not feel like Dahl is trying to spring surprise on us as the main draw of his story, and also to make the story open on Mary, rather than the setting, I would simply suggest that he change his opening sentence, if Dahl were alive and unknown today and trying to get his story published. I'd offer these two sentences: "The day Mary Maloney killed her husband with a leg of lamb, she was sitting with equanimity on the couch in front of the curtains, which were closed. The room was warm, and the two table lamps were lit." Now, it no longer seems like Dahl is trying to shock the reader with a plot twist more characteristic of mystery genre fiction than literary fiction. He's fine from there. Mary is still a fully realized character, and interesting for the way she reacts to her whole world being blown up with a few words uttered off camera. 

So there you have it. Open on people and don't make a surprise ending the whole draw of the story. Mock me if you wish for suggesting a legend should change to suit my dull tastes. Just keep some of what I said about those dull tastes in mind if you're trying to get published in a journal of serious fiction.  

A man crush leaves a comment, so I write a critique which is actually more of a general aesthetic treatise

A few posts ago, Anis Shivani, or someone doing a cyber impersonation of him, left a comment after one of my posts. This was pretty exciting for me, since I've quoted him a lot on here and really find a lot to love in his Against the Workshop. He has given voice to a lot of misgivings I've felt not just about workshops and writing programs, but the modern fiction establishment. I suspect when he writes these critiques, he's saying things many have felt, but few have the courage to proclaim.

I decided to read and then write a critique of his first book of short stories, Anatolia and other stories. After reading it a few weeks ago, I've been stymied about how to write this critique. I'd hoped that I'd find in his stories an alternative aesthetic I could aspire to, something different from what dominates the journals and winning short story anthologies year after year. Turns out, I didn't really connect much with this group of stories. I liked them less than I like most modern fiction, not more.

Which led me to ask myself: have I become so inured to a certain hegemonic aesthetic that I'm incapable of responding positively to alternatives? This is a strong possibility. So, rather than write a straight critique of Shivani's work, I've decided instead to try to trace what it is that makes his writing different, what there is about it that makes it belong to another time, and then interrogate my own assumptions about fiction that make me prefer a modern approach, or at least an approach that's more ubiquitous in modern literary fiction.

Hopefully, this will also serve as something of an answer to a friend of mine, who has sent me his fiction before, and I've found myself saying "I like it personally, but I don't think I'd publish it if you sent it to me, because I don't think it succeeds at certain things." I hope this will explain what I mean better than I've done so far.

Distance between author and narrator

One characteristic of Shivani's collection that's different from most modern fiction is that there is very little daylight between the point-of-view of the narrator, in whose voice the stories are told, and the author, Anis Shivani, lurking behind that narrative voice. Modern fiction-writing theory teaches writers to practice a form of Shakespearean negative capability popularized by the Romantics, that we should withhold ourselves from interjecting too much of our own selves into the work. Shivani (and my friend) are nearly opposite this kind of approach: the author and narrator are often almost one and the same (or the main character is antagonistic to the author's philosophy, and there as a cautionary tale). It's fiction that's strongly tied to the philosophical novel.

Shivanian aesthetic

I know where Shivani, the author behind the works, stands on each piece of fiction in this collection. Because one story is about a writer who goes to a sham of a writer's retreat called "Go Sell it on the Mountain," I don't even have to guess what Shivani's aesthetic is. He tells us. His first-person participant in the retreat says the following lines, both to reject the writing he sees others writing and to describe his own type of story-telling, which is rejected by other participants:

Her ((another writer at the workshop)) writing was curiously glassy on the surface: it gave you no entry point, no means to project your living, breathing mass of flesh onto the consciousness of the author. This kind of writing was in vogue now, while I wrote in the old-fashioned raconteur's spiraling manner, leisurely getting to the core of the story. My models were the forgotten writers of the thirties, forties, and fifties, like Roderick Lull and Morley Callaghan, who killed you with their explosive revelations of your own culpability in injustice.

Or, in another instance, the narrator shares these thoughts in a workshop with another writer, only to have his thoughts attacked by the workshop moderator:

"...what is the narrator's moral stand toward the lead character's afflictions? Does she have a moral opinion? Or is she neutral to her ups and downs? I don't see the author present behind the scenes.

The author in Anatolia and Other Stories is always visible, and often barely behind the scenes. In addition to the story of a writer finding his aesthetic out of place with hucksters selling false hope to the talentless, there is another story of Arthur, an old professor who feels out of place because he is being crowded out of the world by an academy and wife who espouse theoretical notions he thinks are ludicrous. Change "Arthur" to "author" on that one, too.

Summarizing

This voice where the thoughts of the author are often pushing into the narrative has a certain feel to it, like we can only proceed so far before we get a summary of what we've just gone over. There are frequent insertions of phrases like "Of course," usually preceding a sneering recounting of some fallacious habit of some character. (There are 43 instances of "of course" in the book.) In another place, it's "Oh, I'm sure he said something about the need to pace ourselves..."

I used to hate hearing the workshop stock phrase that a story "floats," meaning it doesn't have enough flesh and bones to tie its ideas to Earth. But these stories float a lot. There are powerful ideas in play here, so powerful, in fact, that there cannot be any shortcuts past incarnation. But in many stories, the word comes to dwell among us without first being made flesh.

In no story was this more evident than "Repatriation," a frustrating, semi-apocalyptic tale of people not sufficiently Anglo-Saxon enough being shipped out of the United States to...well, they never do make it anywhere. The story is nearly haunting, nearly palpable, but it keeps resorting to summarizing statements of how we got to where we are, brief quips from a fictional history. There is a tantalizing line in the story about how the refugees on the ship, not allowed to have books with them, "trade in poetry." I wish the whole story had been about that. Instead, it's part tirade, part oh-yeah-by-the-way-some-things-happened-on-the-ship, part details from the life of a hazy first-person narrator before the roundup.

Telling over showing

"Show don't tell" is one of those workshop mantras that rightly deserves some rebellion against it. It's not historical. It rejects the "instruct" in "instruct and delight." It overlooks that wanting moral instruction from stories is a core aspect of human nature.

Shivani tells a lot. Even when he shows, he often follows it up with telling. In "Independence," we get this summary of a character, rather than hints from action, dialogue, etc.:

Was it that he faced his mortality in the mirror the innocent boy held up to him? Was it that he saw in the boy's mindless questions and motiveless harmony some challenge to the ordinary man Saleem himself had become? Saleem had never been a rebel; he'd never gone through the wild phase his university classmates had, putting their fathers through the ropes, driving their poor mothers to distraction.

In one instance, right after we have a scene rendered, with Julie pinching the cheeks and ruffling the hair of her child, we immediately get an explanation of what those actions meant: "The good thing about Julie was that she didn't jump into defending her mothering skills when Saleem accused her of shortfalls in that area. She listened seriously, like a good pupil." Or later, "Their father pinched and rolled his chin, in an expression of concern." That's showing and telling in one sentence, the action and the explanation of the action all in one.

I'm not really criticizing this trait; this is more of a description of where Shivani lies on a spectrum of descriptive and prescriptive narrative. I'd like to see more fiction written near this end of the spectrum. I just didn't find this collection was a particularly effective representative of its spectrum.

Or am I just a tool of my environment?

Shivani the critic has convincingly--to my mind, anyway--attacked the modern academia-publishing complex in serious fiction for its dogmatic insistence on an unimaginative, bourgeois form of realism, what he would, after over a decade of developing his thoughts, come to call "plastic realism."  I realize that in my critique of Anatolia, I've assumed a position well within the mainstream of this kind of realism. Perhaps, as much as I've railed against M.F.A. programs and suggested I don't find much on the scene that deeply inspires me (all of my top five authors are dead), I have, without meaning to, been commodified by this system. Maybe in the process of trying to get published by literary journals, I've ended up adopting the aesthetic I think is likely to get me published by them, and become, in the process, the sort of person who can't appreciate something like Anatolia that doesn't conform.

I don't think this is the case. I wanted to like these stories. I admire Shivani the critic so much, I was dying to love Shivani the story teller. He commented on my blog. I wanted to write about how I really got his fiction. I just didn't. Not that there was nothing to like in these stories, but nearly all the gold in it were thoughts similar to what Shivani has penned elsewhere in non-fiction form. As a story teller, I think he's a very good critic.

The stories I want to read and write

I don't mind being told how to feel about a story. I like it. I prefer it. But the moral grounding has to come organically from the story, or at least feel like it does. When Dori tells Marlin "It's time to let go!" it's pretty clear we've come to the climax of both the story and of Marlin's narrative arc. There's nothing thematically subtle about that line. But that line also works, because it is grounded in a real drama of a guy trying to find his kid. 

I once tried to write these types of philosophical narratives, where I'd have some thought about the world, stick it into a character, and then try to make that be enough to bring a world to life. It never worked. Jonathan Franzen's intellectual characters work not because they have brilliant thoughts--although they sometimes do--but because their brilliant thoughts do not solve all the problems in their lives. Sometimes, they are the source of nothing but anxiety. Franzen's characters do not exist just to have thoughts Franzen wants them to have. They have thoughts because that's part of what they do as fully formed characters. They might be characters similar to Franzen, but that's not the same as saying they're puppets Franzen has giving us his prophetic vision of life through the guise of a nominal story.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm a Philistine, or just an unimaginative critic. Maybe I'm unable to transcend the bourgeois tastes of my time. That's completely possible. Maybe I've developed such a knee-jerk response against what I think won't get published, I've equated it with something that shouldn't get published.

I might be wrong about what I like, but I don't think I've confused what I like for what I ought to like. Not yet. And my requirements for what I like are definitely not modern. I've never improved much upon Horace's "instruct and delight."

Confessions of a literary journal reader: overcompensating, and not the penis kind

I've written before about the fallacies, logical and otherwise, that might befall a literary journal editor, and how these fallacies might affect whether your story gets picked for publication. Editors are humans, and sometimes, the things we do are just weird.

You can control a lot with the way you write a story. Your skill as a writer can probably control, with about an 80% degree of accuracy, whether your story gets looked at more closely by the front-line readers or tossed aside. But when it gets down the the tough decisions of whether to publish the many stories a journal gets that deserve publication--many more than they can actually publish--there may be some things going on that you can't control.

Here's one I've caught myself doing lately

Although I neither like cars nor guns, in other ways, I kind of fit the male American stereotype. I like sports. I like sex. I like a particular kind of narrative voice, aggressive, quick-hitting and jocular, that tends to come from male writers. I'm aware of this tendency, and sometimes, I find myself overcompensating for it by intentionally trying to vote for female voices, sometimes even ones I don't really like. Maybe I'll vote down that hilarious story about the misogynistic womanizer with a secret soft side, or I'll vote up the story about consignment needlepoint workers in Kenya even though I could barely get through it. I don't exactly keep affirmative-action type quotas, but I am aware, usually, of whether the last few stories I voted for were written by men or women, or whether they featured male or female characters.

In case you were wondering--ladies--I do not drive a sports car. I have an old Corolla. So I'm not overcompensating. Or am I aware that people know men with sports cars are overcompensating, and I'm overcompensating for that? Hmmm...

This is similar to the other fallacy I wrote about, where I am more likely to vote for a story if I haven't voted for one lately, and less likely if I just recently voted for one. I'm not sure exactly what kind of cognitive bias this is--it's something like an availability heuristic, but maybe also something like the gambler's fallacy. I'd call it a fairness bias--a sort of one for you, one for me, incredibly clumsy kind of thinking.

Even being aware of it, this is still lurking at the back of my mind. I'm not only aware of it, I'm also aware of being aware of it. I don't want to give in to it, and I also don't want to swing too far the other way trying to avoid it. It's a very uncomfortable thought looking over my shoulder as I read and do my best to get it right.

There's really nothing you, as a writer, can do about this kind of thing. Which is why one point I keep trying to get across is to take all rejections with a grain of salt. It'll be a grain of salt in your wounds, I know, but really, just don't beat yourself up too much. 

Good and bad ways to break POV rules

While recently considering Chris Drangle's excellent short story "A Local's Guide to Dating in Slocomb County," I touched on something that occasionally troubles me both writing and reading in a third-person limited (or "single vision") point-of-view: the distinction between the narrator's voice and the character's voice. I'd wondered about this while reviewing another story I liked before. One reader suggested I was perhaps being a little doctrinaire, so I thought I'd dig a little deeper into this subject. It's actually kind of brushed over in the writing "how to" books. Here is an explanation of 3rd-person limited POV from the Gotham Writers' Workshop guide (which I'm using because I loaned my Burroway to someone and haven't gotten it back):

With the third-person point-of-view the narrator is not a character in the story. The narrator is a voice created by the author to tell the story...With this POV, the narrator has access to only one character's mind....The story is told by the narrator, from the perspective of a single participant in the action....The entire story is filtered through the POV character's consciousness.

Told by the narrator, but from the perspective and through the consciousness of the POV character. Hmmm....they give an example paragraph, from Elizabeth Tallent's "Earth to Molly":

     At the hotel, really a shabby bed-and-breakfast, the landlady, pinching her upper lip in displeasure at having to hoist herself from her chair, let Molly into her room and left her with the key. The landlady was a long time retreating down the hall. The dolor of her tread, with its brooding pauses, was not eavesdropping but arthritis. Molly was sorry for having needed her to climb the stairs, but of course the old woman complained her stiff-legged way up them all the time, showing lodgers to their rooms. Why, oh why, would anyone spend the night here? A prickly gray carpet ran tightly from wall to wall. It was the color of static, and seemed as hateful.

The GWW book points out that it's Molly wondering why anyone would spend the night here. Here's where I get a little shaky though: who is the one noting the "dolor" of her tread? Is that Molly? If so, then Molly knows some old-timey words that most people don't know. If it's the narrator, then we have the narrator's voice mixing in with Molly's observations. I'm not criticizing, I'm just pointing out that this happens, and that it isn't often made that clear when people write about how to handle POV. Does Molly merely see a carpet, and the narrative voice tells the reader that it's prickly, gray, the color of static, and hateful? Is this something Molly thinks? (If so, Molly thinks things I have never thought ever.) More likely, it's the narrative voice both translating Molly's senses to the reader and adding narrative editorial.

I was actually right about something 
 
The GWW then uses the term "distance" (which I was not sure was the right term, but it is) to explain this very thing I'm talking about: "While this narrator seems to stand just behind Molly's shoulder, or perhaps even lurk in her mind, the third-person narrator may also stand back at a little distance."

GWW even flat out tells us that 3rd person limited can be useful when you've got a character with limited intellectual powers, because the separate narrative voice can say things the character can't. So it's okay if Tallent's narrator knows the word "dolor" but Molly doesn't. Great.

So when I've wondered about other authors doing things that struck me as funny with their 3rd-person limited, it's not that the narrative voice is doing things the character couldn't. It's that 1) I'm not sure how far we can take the narrative voice's intellectually greater powers compared to the character and still feel like we're in that person's head, and 2) I think once a voice establishes its distance, it shouldn't jump around too much. Doing that is as jangling as breaking POV by suddenly giving us the thoughts of a non-POV character.

 Issue number two is easy to avoid once you've characterized the issue, which I just did (you're welcome). It's issue one that I'm grappling with as I work to figure out my own aesthetics. When I read the kind of story that makes most reviewers weak in the knees with its sinewy and stylish prose, I tend to get a little distracted, feeling that the voice is so strong it actually is another character. And where is this voice coming from? It's no longer hiding when it's that strong. It's now front and center, which means I feel like I'm now actually moving into what I would call the 3rd-person potentially omniscient. The voice doesn't know all, but it's capable of explaining anything the character happens to come across. The city dwelling character is suddenly out in the woods? No problem, the narrative voice knows the names of all the trees and shrubbery. The character is fixing a car? The narrative voice knows what every little bolt and screw is called, and is willing to look at it in a minute detail that no person I know actually looks at things with. It's like the narrative voice can direct the character's eyes and ears to do things while the character herself is off living her life doing what normal people do.

Cormac McCarthy springs to mind. I've never seen such a string of nouns of improbable specificity. It's a uniquely McCarthian thing to do, and lets you know you're reading a book he wrote, which almost makes Cormac McCarthy himself a character in his own novels.

Of course, I'm not really sure what I want as an alternative. My son recently had to read the 1972 young adult novel Watership Down--possibly the book least-deserving of its status as a classic I've ever read. In it, a warren of rabbits, when it comes across the things of men, will describe those things in extremely rabbit-centric terms. A railroad is an "iron road," for example. Any type of machine is a hrududu or something like that. (The book definitely breaks this POV trick, though, which is one of the 11,000 things wrong with it.) I wouldn't want to read endless novels where the reader is tied to the main character's ignorance.

I do know that if you spend the whole story at once distance from the character and then suddenly jump, it's going to feel off somehow. It's an amateurish thing to do as much as directly addressing the  "gentle reader" is. And I wouldn't mind seeing other narrative voices than just artistic savants possessing the sensory apparatuses of their characters. Not that I'm sure what I want instead. Maybe this is why I'm writing so much first person lately. It may not have the respect these days that 3rd limited does, but it's definitely the easiest not to screw up.

Let's play "Would I have pubished this story?" (WIHPTS)

It was unfair, of course. Was it monstrous? A mistake had been made, but the numbers all but guaranteed mistakes. The sheer numbers. Every system had its failings. -Chris Drangle, "A Local's Guide to Dating in Slocomb County"

I've been reading the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart anthologies pretty faithfully for the last four years, figuring that's a pretty compact and efficient way to keep up with what's good--or at least critically well reviewed--in American fiction. When I read these stories, I often like to play a game with myself. It goes like this: If this story had come into the literary journal where I am a fiction editor, and I knew nothing about the author or had anything to mark this story off as special, would I have voted for it to be published?

Here, I offer to the public the latest round of this game I've just played, which was with Chris Drangle's "A Local's Guide to Dating in Slocomb County." This is an appropriate story to show how the game works, I think, partly because of that epigraph above. The story is about how an injured veteran's wounded dog, who is also a war veteran, is accidentally put down by a clinic, and what happens when the veteran comes to pick up the dog he thinks is still alive. It could also be a metaphor for the editing process at any literary journal: we have so many stories to go through, it's inevitable we're going to make mistakes and "put down" the wrong ones sometimes.

Quick Answer. Would I have voted "up" for this story?

Yes. It's a compelling story with a clear conflict, and the central conflict is introduced within the first page. We have two characters drawn with enough detail that we, the readers, are troubled to see them as they unintentionally come into conflict with one another.

There is a caveat to my yes, however. Our journal has a 5,000 word limit, and this story goes well over it. It's always strange to me that so many journals have 5,000 or 3,000 word limits, and that it seems easier to get a story published if you can get your word count down, but for the anthologies, it seems most of the stories are longer. I think there's still a feeling that a really short story isn't serious, somehow, even though all writers trying to break into publishing are pushed to write shorter pieces. 

What might have made me vote no?

1. A confusing passage early on.  There are two female characters, Portia and Naomi, who both work at the animal shelter where the dog is accidentally put down. Naomi is the one who fucked up. Early on, when we're still learning how to differentiate the two, we see Naomi leave a room and check a few things to see if it was her fault. We then get Portia again. Here's the passage:

     Back in the staff room, Portia was biting her nails and Dennis was stirring the instant tea.
     "How did it happen? "Dennis said.
     "I don't know."
     "This is so fucked up," Portia said.
     "Shut up," she said. "No, sorry. Let's just think."

I was confused about who "she" was in that last line. We've had Portia's name twice since we last heard from Naomi, so I'd think it was her. But it can't be Portia, because then it wouldn't have been a new indentation and a new line. Eventually, I got that it was Naomi, still in the scene, talking. But getting confused early on in a story, even for a second, sometimes puts an editor off for good.

2. Screwing up a detail about military life. There is a section that gives the back story for Fisher Bray, the wounded veteran, about how he ended up in the Army, how he met the dog, and how get and the dog were injured. I think Drangle did enough homework to get through that section without messing it up. But before that, Fisher explains that he was in the "First Battalion, 25th Infantry." If you know anything about the Army's makeup (or just look here), you know that "25th Infantry" is a division. Below a division are several brigades, each of which has several battalions. So there are many "First Battalions" in the 25th Division. Fisher Bray wouldn't say "First Battalion, 25th Infantry," in other words, unless I'm missing something.

I wouldn't have disqualified the story for this, even though I've kvetched before about people screwing up this kind of thing. It would just have given me a slight, instinctive nudge toward a no vote, and I'd have added a note for the writer to edit it. (Drangle might also have been wrong about Fisher shaving at 4:40 AM in basic training; when I was in boot camp, hygiene came at night. But that was the Marines, not the Army, and it was a long time ago, so I might be wrong. It wouldn't be a meaningful mistake, anyway.)

3. Would Fisher have really liked Megadeth? Infantry guys are know to like their hard-core rock, but this seems like something a Gen-Xer would have liked, not a kid who was 19 around 2007 or so. Again, not a big thing.

4. My often-felt uncertainty about an inconsistent narrative distance from the character. Just for review, third-person limited, which is the most ubiquitous point-of-view choice in literature today, means we, the readers, can only see the story through the five senses and the thoughts of one character. This story has different POV focus characters in different sections, which is fine. That doesn't violate point-of-view. That's just rotating third-person limited. Lots of people do it. No problem.

There is also an aspect of distance to point-of-view, however. That is, how far the voice of the narration varies from that of the point-of-view character. For example, it's very rare that a third-person narrative would have a character speak in dialect during dialogue and also have the main narration keep this dialect. The main narration has a distinct voice from the point-of-view character.

But how far this distance between narrator's voice and character's voice should be is not something discussed much. I don't feel it's something most editors read into too closely. But it does bother me sometimes when a nameless, invisible narrator gives us descriptions the main character himself/herself couldn't have come up with. That's part of the light criticism I made years ago of the story "Long Tom Lookout" by Nicole Cullenhttp://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2015/07/how-to-be-lazy-as-shit-as-writer-and.html. Sometimes, the narrator's voice is actually the thoughts of a character. Sometimes, it's a voice that is saying things I don't think the main character would think. If this distance from the main character is too great within the same passage, I find it a little jarring. Here's an example from "A Local's Guide":

     After lunch she stepped out for a short walk. It was seven thousand degrees outside. The cotton field behind the shelter was halfway into flowering, the dark bolls splitting around the cloudy blooms. In a month the strip picker would start lumbering down the rows, huge tires and green chassis and bright yellow teeth in front, thoughtless and methodical.

The "it's 7000 degrees out here" thought is Naomi's. The poetic rhapsodizing about the strip picker and the bolls and the thought that the strip picker rolls on impersonally like so many forces in life--that's all Drangle.

-----
I don't think there's any "rule" against this kind of mixing in writing how-to thought. It's certainly done all the time. I do it. But it's kind of a cheat for a third-person limited narrative. The idea of the third-person narrative is that the writer is going to give you a catharsis through the life rules and philosophy of the character, not the author. But authors sneak their own thoughts into third-person limited stories all the time, and sometimes they do it though a bit of supernatural intervention into the universes they've created.

None of these quibbles would have kept me from voting for it, I think. It's an excellent story, with a sharp conflict and plot that suggest strong themes. But one never knows. If I'd been in a bad enough mood that day, maybe I'd have looked at how long it was and thrown it out as soon as I got confused for a minute on page two.

Agreeing with Nguyen's view of the "hostile" writing workshop, even while disagreeing with it

Viet Thanh Nguyen, he of the 2016 Pulitzer-Prize winning The Sympathizer, wrote recently for the Times about how writers' workshops can be hostile. I agree with a lot of what he says, even though I have nearly opposite impressions of some aspects of the workshop system from him. Someone who has never been to a workshop would probably have been surprised by some of the assertions Nguyen made.

Show don't tell

Nguyen scores some points early by accusing the workshop of being rife with unquestioned assumptions. One assumption he correctly takes the workshop to task for is the mantra of all writing workshops: "Show, don't tell." He rightly claims this is ahistorical. Most of literary history is full of examples of stories that show and tell. This is one of the central tenets of contemporary commercial aesthetics in literary fiction I struggle to cope with. I feel like I often have to hide the reason why I've written what I've written. This "hiding" isn't new, of course. ("Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand." Or, 1800 years closer to the present, "Tell all the truth/but tell it slant.") But I can't help feeling that a lot of fiction/poetry out there that gets the establishment seal of approval has hidden its thematic core so well, it's effectively encrypted beyond breaking.  Jesus may have said that he hid his meaning in parables, but I don't think we find them terribly hard to crack.

Nguyen also calls out a related malady, the depreciated value of plot, which is seen as the province of genre writers. I've suggested before that literary fiction could be defined as "literature in which plot is not very important." Which probably has something to do with why I have pondered that maybe I do not really write literary fiction, although I don't know what other genre I might fit. 

Craftsmanship + workshop=manly aesthetic?

Nguyen, drawing on the connotations of "workshop" and the oft-emphasized notion of "craftsmanship," sees these notions as emphasizing masculinity and physical labor over mental labor. He claims this masculine aesthetic can make the workshop a threatening place for women and minorities. 

I'm tempted to blow this off, because as a former jock and Marine, I've met actual masculine people, and the folks I knew in graduate school did not fit the description. Furthermore, the very aesthetic he critiques, the "show, don't tell" approach, seems to me like a feminine one. At least, it seems like something that came into play when feminism and other isms that challenged white, male hegemony of the university were gaining influence. Nguyen himself claims the rise of the workshop aesthetic coincided with the post-war era, and this is precisely why it is apolitical--because strongly held political feelings were associated with communism. I accept his timeline, but question the outcome. Rather than result in hyper-masculine literature that preached a certain way of living, it resulted in hyper-detailed, ethereal writing that avoided politics. 

Of course, this is based on my own white, male perspective. I don't say that sarcastically. My race and gender come with limitations and blind spots. I'm equating "feminine" with a type of writing I don't like, one I find a little bit frivolous. (Not unlike Hawthorne, who complained of the tribe of "scribbling women" writers.) If women and minorities find the workshop hostile, I do not discount their feelings. They perceive it that way, and that means something. 

Masculine or feminine, the current aesthetic itself isn't all bad: I don't want to read a bunch of allegory all the time. It's nice to give characters the semblance of real agency. I just don't want that agency to get beyond the plan of the creating intelligence. Watch your kids. 

Can any part of college be apolitical?

I'd guess most people who haven't been in a writing program would be surprised to hear a complaint that they are apolitical. If anything, most people would suspect they are lousy with politics. After all, aren't agitating professors turning every campus in America into a political training ground?

But Nguyen is actually only too dead-on. Another Asian-American critic of the literary establishment I quote a lot, Anis Shivani, has explained the apolitical nature of the current American fictional aesthetic:

Contemporary literary fiction has chosen to marginalize itself from mainstream culture. It has its own niche, like specialized Foucauldian sociology or Derridean philosophy, catering to the sensibilities of other experts in the field. The writer adopts a politics-neutral stance, excluding any sense that characters' lives are influenced by politics. The fear is of being branded politicized, in which case no serious reviewer will want to deal with the writer anymore, and of being called preachy or moralistic or sermonizing by the reviewing community.

The typical fiction writer tends to be vaguely liberal about womens' or gays' or minorities' rights. He is ultra-sensitive about not writing anything offensive to any constituency, and mortally fearful of painting with broad brushstrokes. He takes care to mark down any budding writer who might want to speak truthfully about minority or majority groups (it's open season, however, on white males, in the teacher's own writing). Beyond that, he doesn't have a grasp of politics. 

Nguyen sees a lack of seriousness in literature, an unwillingness to talk about the things that matter most to him, that matter most to all of us: politics, history, theory, philosophy, ideology. (I'd add religion and science.) American literature has, in fact, gotten to a place where only outsiders, it seems, can talk seriously about anything. I recently wrote a story that attempted to respond to the reality of the Trump era, and I know it will never get published. I didn't hide what it was about enough.

That being the case, although I am heartily sorry that minorities and women feel like outcasts in the workshop, I hope they will take heart in knowing that being treated with hostility is a sign you are onto something. If they coddle you, it means you lack talent and they just want you to stay in the program and pay your tuition. But actual opposition is a positive sign.

On "writing what you know"

"Write what you know" is one of those phrases that, depending on which circles you utter it in, can cause nods, shrugs, or mouth-frothed invective. There is a group of writers for whom it is nearly a trigger phrase, and if you utter it in what seems earnest, you will be hit with a counter-spell spoken with the force of a Huxleyan hypnopaedic suggestion, a la Brave New World. The counter-punch will go something like this: "Write not what you know, but what you can imagine."

The testy writers have a point. If we all stuck to only writing about things in which we had a certain level of expertise, most of us wouldn't have much to write about. Anis Shivani has noted that most writers enter the academy at a young age, after which they all start to have the same experiences: teaching, writing, struggling for tenure. The only common human experiences they have to relate to are the quotidian ones of relationships, break-ups, having children, struggling to make a living in the middle class, parents aging, etc. If someone from this class of writers does want to write about some specific human experience he knows first-hand, he often has to go back to his youth. This leads to a unbalanced percentage of stories written from a child's perspective.

Shivani is probably too hard on writers in the academies. If the people I knew in graduate school were a representative sample, a lot of them weren't in their early-to-mid-twenties. They'd done at least some other things besides go to undergrad and then go straight to graduate school. Joshua Ferris, whom I just talked about at length in my last post, worked in an advertising agency for a few years before going to get his M.F.A. It was enough to help him write a masterpiece. For a fertile imagination, it doesn't take a whole ton of experience for the seeds of a great story to grow.

But what about writing a story for which one has no direct experience? The white, middle-class American woman in her fifties who wants to write about the life of a child soldier in Sierra Leone? My initial reaction is to feel there's nothing wrong with this. If it's impossible to use imagination and human empathy to guess what the existence of another human is like, then what's the point of writing at all? What's the point of learning, or thinking?

My wife is a white woman from a middle-class Ohio background. She should have failed when she started teaching in 99% black Baltimore. But much to my amazement, her preparation for that life in the form of reading a healthy dose of African-American literature prior to starting her teaching career actually was in some form helpful to life teaching real-life African-Americans. Through reading and almost only reading, she was able to become as reasonably prepared as one can become for the alternate universe that is Baltimore City Schools. So imagination of even a totally different cultural framework must be in some sense possible.

But not all dalliances of lay people are equal

Nonetheless, I can still easily come up with examples of writing where I knew the writer was an outsider and I was bothered by a gap in knowledge.

Example One: Writing about the military

Almost every Best American Short Stories anthology or Pushcart anthology for many years now has had at least one story with a military character. Writers seem to be big on post-war characters reflecting back on their experiences. While my own military experience doesn't exactly make me Johnny Fifty-Cal, I know when I'm reading bullshit. Tom Paine's Bagram made it into the heady journal Glimmertrain, in spite of the fact that at one point in the story he accidentally transposed the numbers of the military intelligence unit the main character belonged to (the editors must not have seen it, either). It was pretty obvious to me Paine only knew about that unit from reading about it. His details were those someone would pick out if you'd only read about it. Not the place--a place you can fake well enough from just having researched it--I mean the whole ethos of being in the military. David Ebenbach, who is a member of the Washington Writers' Publishing House (the people about to publish me), whom I've met, whom I like, and whose book of short stories Into the Wilderness I rather like, has one story in it about a mother and daughter who seem to be coping with the death of the father. He seems to have died while on active duty in the military. It's a fine story, but the mother is living in a shack, and I just kept thinking "Every service member has $400,000 in life insurance! What did she do with all that money?"

Example Two: When journalists happen to write about something I know about

Even though most media outlets do have journalists who specialize a little bit (the Asia correspondent, the Science correspondent), they all end up having to cram-study for some stories as they're reporting on them. No media outlet can have reporters who are experts in everything they report on. A journalist's job is to get an explanation from an expert and translate it. But often, when I see reporting on something I happen to know really well, I can see that the journalist didn't quite get it. She has memorized a bunch of facts quickly and is spilling them back out, but didn't quite grasp the context. Sometimes, I know the picture drawn is so cartoonishly out of whack, it's like the person isn't even talking about the same thing I know from long experience. Like, say, if a journalist who didn't know about gyms did a report on one and came away thinking everyone there was a masochist.

I don't really get any schadenfreude out of this. It doesn't fill me with hubris to see journalists miss the point. It fills me with humility as a writer. Maybe I'm not really as able to translate some other culture or sub-culture to the world as I think I am. And not only as a writer--as a translator, too, I feel this sense of duty to be circumspect.

So what's the balance?

I don't know. I do know that I find the whole notion of "appropriation" to be a bullshit idea, one that is unequally applied. In the short story "A Cinnabon at Mondawmin," (in The Potomac Review right now) which I wrote thinking about the experiences of some of my wife's former students, the main character rejects the notion that his white teacher might be appropriating a story from him: "You said that was a fancy word for stealing, and there's nothing I have I wouldn't gladly let someone steal from me. Want my busted hairline I got because my cousin cuts my hair instead of a real barber? Take it. Want my bootleg Marbury shoes I got because I can't afford Jordans? Take them, too!"

If you can raid a culture and pull a good story out of it, have at it. Nobody owns interesting. However, you will be at a disadvantage in trying to tell that story against an equally talented writer who is coming from inside that other culture. In fact, you might be at a disadvantage against someone who isn't even as talented as you. I've written before that I prefer reading science fiction by Carl Sagan to whatever bloated, boring, bullshit it is Andrea Barret writes, even though Barret also writes about science and is a very skilled writer. Sagan, though, was a professional scientist, whereas Barret dropped out of Zoology grad school. It shows in how they approach the subject. Barret sees science as an excuse to rhapsodize about the human condition. Sagan finds science itself enough to gush about.

I suppose if I had to pick a rule, rather than "write what you know" or "write what you can imagine," I'd choose "write the story you don't have to force." Seriously, when you've got a good story, you know it. That doesn't mean you didn't have to scratch and dig before you found that well--maybe for years. But when you find that well and the water comes pouring out, you know it. If that means you are writing stories over and over about the same kinds of things, fine. Vonnegut is probably my favorite 20th century writer, and he re-used places, characters, and plot points. If you tend to find stories all over the place, fine. If you watch a show about Borneo or read an article about lumberjacks in Yellow Knife and feel inspired, follow it. If it's good, you'll know it.

If the thing doesn't come to life because you just can't imagine a life so alien, you have two choices. Give up, or learn more. When have you learned enough? When the story gets good. Melville didn't need to finish his whole stint on a merchant vessel to be able to write about life at sea. I only worked with Ethiopian and Eritrean migrants for about a year, but that year gave me a lot of stories. You might screw up a few details, and people like me will nitpick when you do, but it probably won't doom the story. You probably don't have to spend a lifetime at whatever it is you want to write about. But you need to find some way--vicarious or in person--to live that life deeply enough to be able to bring some part of it to life.

Misplaced aggression

In the 19th century, writers were sometimes paid by the word by periodicals. This led to what can only be called "padding" by some writers, as they laid on parenthetical remarks and lists of adjectives. Even those who weren't induced by money were influenced by the style, and almost any writer of prose you can think of from 1850 to 1890 had a style that leaned at least a little bit in the florid direction. (Mark Twain comes to mind as a possible exepction, but even then, he was willing to let characters run off at the mouth in imitation of the style, and a reader of Twain does get some enjoyment out of Twain's permissiveness to his characters.)

Some folks find this style baroque and unappealing. I have always envied the world they lived in that had time for such rhetorical luxuries. We don't write that way now. One specific injunction all fiction writers face is to avoid overuse of adjectives. One reason is that writers are supposed to use verbal economy now (how is it that in the 19th century, when paper cost money, writers were encouraged to use a lot of it, while now, when digital space is essentially free, we all need to be sparing with our words?) The main reason, though, is that adjectives are not considered to be anchored enough to reality, and can thus be a violation of the "show don't tell" policy. Don't tell us that Cindy is loquacious, show her prattling on a lot. 

I think that writers are making up for being restricted from using all their fancy adjectives by using nouns that no normal human being knows. I'll use The Road by Cormac McCarthy as an example, but I can find examples in almost any literary journal. McCarthy's style, if you've never read the book, is almost unbelievably plain. Many of the sentences (most?) are only fragments. The book is compared to a dream often, because the brevity of the sentences leaves everything only roughed out. There is no artifice at all.

Except for the nouns. Depending on where the characters are, you can end up getting three nouns on one page that I have to look up. What's a macadam? Mastic? I don't know. I see this all the time--writers using nouns in their writing to identify a very precise item that hardly anybody would recognize without looking it up. This isn't a bad thing. I think it derives from a similar impulse to that which once made writers call characters "loquacious." Those writers wanted to give the impression that they knew all the people in their stories with godlike precision. So they had a name (adjective) for each of them. Modern day writers want to give the impression that they are truly in command of their dreamscapes, and so they make a point of showing that they know the proper names of everything within them.

I don't really object to this. I did it myself recently in my flash fiction attempt. I looked up the type of grasses and trees that would have been native to an Illinois prairie. I DO think that writing like this runs the risk of giving the impression that it was written ten minutes after a Google search. (Mine was.) That can spoil the illusion that the precision of nouns was meant to create.

All this biz about "character-driven"

I've been wanting to talk for a while about what it feels like when something gets published and you don't think it's that great. Before I can do that, I guess I have to back up to talk about what "great" means. I'd like to deny having an aesthetic philosophy, because it sounds like something the people in grad school would have claimed they had, but I guess I can't deny that I have one. It isn't that complicated, and it's really old school. Literature should: teach something, give joy to those who read it, or both. Preferably both. If you know aught of literary history, you'll recognize this as the old Horatian "instruct and delight."

I think modernity mistrusts "instruction." We tend to talk about observation, and revealing truth in little bits like reporters, rather than philosophers. Instruction smacks of didacticism or pedanticism. It's stuff for kids. And even stuff for kids doesn't do that anymore, we think. Don't give us your morals, your fobbed-off truisms. We want real life, life as it is.

The writing books tend to support this. We are encouraged to imagine characters like they are real people, imagine every little thing we can about them, then put them in situations and see what happens. You let your characters show you what they will do. That's the essence of "character-driven" fiction in a nutshell.

A lot of thoughtful folks have written about what "character-driven" means as opposed to "plot-driven." The main thrust of most writers is that in character-driven stories, everything that happens flows as a result of who the character is. Jodi Henley said that the first Rambo movie was character-driven, because:

it’s the psychological study of a Vietnam vet. In the movie, Rambo is a drifter. Everything that happens in First Blood builds on his backstory and who he became because of that backstory. When he heads up into the mountains and does his whole poncho-survivalist thing, it’s understandable because he was Special Forces. It’s something he was trained to do. When he refuses to leave town, it’s because he was a former prisoner of war and he was controlled for a long time, which means he refuses to let anyone control or confine him.

But later Rambo installments were plot-driven: "Although Rambo is still at the center of each movie, he could easily be replaced by pretty much any action hero from Jean-Claude Van Damme to Jason Statham because the scriptwriters forgot the simple incident Morell based Rambo’s reactions on—Rambo was a POW."

Jordon McCollum's idea is much closer to mine: "Most writers use both character and plot to drive the story forward....It's not an either/or." I'd go a little further, though. Remember all those "elements of fiction" that were tacked up on your 7th grade teacher's wall? Plot, character, setting, conflict, theme? I think ALL of these drive a story. In any story, one of them might come more front-and-center than another. In some stories, like maybe the first Saw movie, setting might not matter that much. In others, plot might take a back seat (Tree of Life). But all the elements exist in just about every story.

To me, then, whether a story is "driven" by X,Y, or Z is kind of arbitrary. A story should be driven by what the story calls for. But I think I tend to call a story "plot driven" if, when asked to describe it, the first thing I do is start telling the plot. I guess that means that most stories end up being plot-driven to me. For example, I'd call Hunger Games a plot-driven story, because if you ask me to describe it, I'd say it's about a world where the government makes kids fight each other in an arena like gladiators. Plot.

So a story can be driven by plot, character, setting, conflict. What about theme? Can there be theme-driven fiction? Again, modernity tends to groan at the thought, but if you consider the best-loved stories that most people treasure, I think there are a lot of stories where theme might be the first thing you think of. Examples: Moby Dick, 1984 (or a whole lot of dystopian stories: The Giver, Brave New World, etc.), the parables of the New Testament, lots and lots of kid's stories, To Kill a Mockingbird, Grapes of Wrath. I could go on. Maybe you'll think some of these are stories you remember more for the plot. Fine. But I'll bet you could take a decent shot at a one or two-sentence summary of the theme of any of these stories.

I like stories where I either think I can figure out a theme or where I am left what feels like a breadcrumb trail leading me to the direction of theme. You don't have to hit me over the head with it. Even Jesus knew not to do that. But I want theme to be within my reach if I do some work for it.

A word about what theme is and is not. "Friendship" or "social justice" are not themes. Those are subjects. How you feel about friendship or social justice are themes. This is the source of my crankiness at my editor Blake Kimzey from Crave magazine. He had some great ideas about how to make the story come alive, but I thought he was mistaken about the theme, and we used a different vocabulary to even talk about theme. Why? Because modern-day literature and writing programs don't teach theme in this way.

I disagree. I think it's the most important thing there is. It's why we read not just fiction, but anything. To know something about the world. I'm not saying you should write a story where you say "I'm going to write something that proves that love really does conquer all" or "I'm going to write something that embodies my belief in free markets." But if you can take cues from your imaginary character to guide you through a story, why can't you also be led by your sense of the way the universe is? Will Tom and Angie end up together? Well, do you think that the universe is full of souls who never really connect? If yes, then probably not.

So theme matters, theme isn't a broad subject, theme can guide fiction overall. Keep this in mind when I talk in my next post about why I sometimes wonder about what does and doesn't get published.

FREEBIE: Examples of quick themes in well-known stories:

Moby Dick: If you go up against the universe, you're likely to get the crap kicked out of you.
The Giver: Being fully human causes a lot of problems, but it's worth it.
To Kill a Mockingbird: Leave people who don't bother you the fuck alone.
Grapes of Wrath: Poor people get shit on by rich people.
1984: In the end, stupidity will be the end of us.

Terrible example of the concept of theme: "As the title suggests, the main themes in Pride and Prejudice really are pride and prejudice." --some middle school teacher somewhere. Neither pride nor prejudice is a theme.