Remember when this used to be a fiction writing blog?

Yeah, me neither.

I was thinking the other day about the stories I wrote that I managed to get published. They are:

1) A story about an Ethiopian refugee who became an Olympic long-distance runner.
2) A story about two refugees from Eritrea who were kidnapped in the desert while trying to escape.
3) A story about a second-generation Eritrean-American trying to help his family pay to bring a refugee family member out of Africa.
4) A story about a poor kid in Baltimore and his role in the 2015 riots.

and:

5) A story about a working-class white guy who accidentally kills someone on his first day on the job as a truck driver.

1-3 are all about Eritrean or Ethiopian immigrants/refugees. #4 is still about the marginalized, and its main character is still black. Only #5 has a white person who is, if not rich, at least scraping to reach the middle class.

Politics, or something else?

Absent other information, if I had to guess, I'd assume the editorial boards of most literary journals are left-leaning politically. That would mean, among other things, a preference for diversity, for wanting its content to be about more than the realities of white, male American life.

My own success rates seem to bear this out. I've written about 30 short stories in the last four years. Only six have been about people who weren't white. Four of those got published. Only one of the other twenty-five has been published.

Some white writers complain about it being harder to get published as a non-minority. I don't think that's exactly true, and I don't think it's as closely linked to political beliefs of editors as one might think. Every journal gets hundreds of stories and can only choose a few. Many of them are of similar quality, and it's very hard to pick winners from similar products. It's not always a political decision to pick writing either by a minority or about a minority. You're just trying to put together a good collection, and that means you don't want all the material to seem the same. The diversity isn't ideological, it's pragmatic. The magazine just seems better that way.

Not that it's never ideological. It used to bother us on the Baltimore Review that our journal was named for a majority black city but our contributor page was always so lily-white. I was always on the lookout for writing from black writers or about black, urban issues that reflected the city. We seldom got it. That meant that if you were black and sending us a story, your chances improved. The other editors once picked a story I didn't think was very good, but had been written by a politically active trans-gendered woman. It was about the evils of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Or something. I really thought the other editors picked it because it said what they thought enlightened literary journals ought to be saying.

This isn't new advice, but make it new

It may sound like I'm writing one of those oh-so-precious "It's-hard-for-a-white-man-to-make-it-in-the-world" pieces, but that's not my point. If there is a bias in favor of minority writers, my point is that this is natural. Every writer has to struggle with the difficulty of writing something that seems fresh and new. Minority writers maybe have just a small advantage at making it sound new, because what they're writing about may seem new to editors and their readers. And I have no problem with that.

The lesson for everyone else is nothing novel. You have to write something people haven't already seen a thousand times. That show "This is Us" that literally even woman I know is crazy about is an interesting example. It's really about the realities of white, middle-class America. One character defends his family to a snobby theater-type, " So what if we're normal?" Except that they're not normal. They're triplets. Well, twins who lost their triplet in birth, so their parents decided to adopt a black child who'd been left at the hospital on the same day as their twins. One of the twins is a well-known actor; the other is a 300-pound woman. So, not normal.

You might be even whiter than I am, if that's possible. You might not know a couple of languages and have worked inside communities that give you access to good stories most people haven't heard before. But nobody's normal. Everyone has something weird, different, and new to talk about. Find that and write about it.

Because as much as people want a story that's strange, they also like to see themselves in stories. Finding what's abnormal in your normal life allows you to combine the shock of the new with the shock of the familiar.

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. 

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.

All readers are douchenozzles. I am a reader. Therefore...

If you read through some of my previous posts, you'll see that Blake Kimzey, author of Families Among Us, the book that won the Black River chapbook contest, was nice enough to respond on this blog, even though I wasn't 100% happy with his feedback on one of my short stories. He even sent me one of his short stories, one that he says he really is invested in, but can't seem to get a single journal to bite on. I gave him my thoughts on the story, not because I think I know how to write a story that will get published, but more as an example of his eventual typical reader--someone who reads literary journals. In the feedback I sent him, I quoted Kurt Vonnegut: "Readers...are selfish and have no compulsion to be decent about anything."

I've been thinking about this idea a lot in the last week. Readers have lives, lives in which they not only have literally millions of choices about what to read, but millions of choices of things to do other than reading. As a writer, you are always one split-second of unappealing writing away from losing your reader forever. And a reader has no more reason to feel bad about dumping your story than he does about deciding to take a nap instead of watching Fried Green Tomatoes for the eighty-seventh time on TNT.

I can think of two examples in the last month where I myself was guilty of being a dirtbag of a reader. One was the short story "Yachts" from the Spring/Summer edition of Glimmertrain. I almost didn't read it at all, because just from the title, I thought it would be about some rich characters in Kennebunkport or something. I set the magazine down, and didn't read it again for two days. If the story hadn't made it clear in the first page that it was actually about a poor person from New York who gets talked into a yacht trip in the Mediterranean with his wealthier friend, I don't think I'd have ever read it. A second example was a story from the Baltimore Review's 2014 compendium of all its work. "Patience" by Janice Greenwood began with these words: "Shortly after Maria had been released from the hospital, the snails began to destroy the garden." I thought there would be a lot in the story about gardening, which I consider to be boring. I put the story down and read something else. I haven't picked it back up yet. Totally unfair.

When I was at the Baltimore Book Fair a few weeks ago, I attended a workshop led by Baltimore Review's editors on "making the ordinary extraordinary." Seth Sawyers asserted that "you can talk about anything that interests you, and if you really are passionate about it, a reader will follow you." I'm not sure he was right. I'm kind of a jerk. I assume others are, too. If you try to sell me on a story about a lady who knits sweaters, I doubt I'll stay with you. I might, depending on how clever you are in writing it, but you've definitely turned up the difficulty on trying to get me to stay with you.

The upshot of all of this is that maybe it's good when you get feedback from someone and it includes some ideas that maybe reflect that the reader didn't all the way "get it." Because your real readers certainly aren't going to be MORE attentive than that. I still think I am right to have been annoyed by the lazy readership I got in grad school workshops, because, well, I was paying a lot of money to get a better readership. At the very least, I deserved more than half thought-out criticisms by other beginning writers who were struggling to keep up with classes, their own writing, and part-time jobs.

I really think the "literary service" was a nice middle ground. I can't afford to use it on every story, but really, I'd recommend it over a writing program for a lot of writers looking to get their careers started. I certainly got a closer reading than I ever got in grad school, and I got more useful feedback. But it wasn't TOO useful. That is, it wasn't so sympathetic to me that I got an unrealistic idea of how sympathetically my asshole readers in the real world will read it.

So does the basic selfishness of readers mean that you must always choose high-octane story lines that will prevent them from getting bored? I don't think so. If your pool of potential readers is a random sampling of the general public, then I reckon that for every person like me who loves Schwarzenegger films and hates gardening, you'll get one who loves to make their own socks and grow herbs. But you do have to keep your readers in mind as you write. This is definitely not something you do during an early draft, but as you get near your completed story, you need to kick the tires to make sure you don't have anything in your story that will make someone put it down for good. And getting feedback from a reader, even a distracted reader, can be useful for this. Your friend, family member or paid editor is still giving it more care than the person out in the world will.