The great theme of BASS 2024 is that when trouble strikes, it's okay to hide or run away

It's sort of ridiculous to try to draw themes for short story anthologies like Best American Short Stories. None of the stories in it were written with the intention of going together. They're culled from hundreds of thousands of stories published in English each year, whittled down to a list of top candidates of around a hundred or so, then whittled down again to the final twenty. They are intentionally chosen to demonstrate diversity of voices, not unity. While the O. Henry Anthology ("The Best Short Stories" collection, rather than "Best American Short Stories") does seem to give some consideration in its mix of stories to creating unity by selecting stories that share subject matter or theme and then try to place them in conversation with each other, BASS really doesn't. Even their choice of story order, always done by author last name, reflects this. If one story seems to be placed where it is because of its relationship to the story before it, that's just a coincidence.

Nonetheless, the BASS anthology is a cultural artifact, and as an artifact, it represents the culture that made it and the culture which it hopes to shape. In a thousand years, if someone happened to leaf through the digital pages of BASS, things might leap out to them that don't to us. (Man, the third decade of the 21st century was sure obsessed with their lame technology!) In spite of the piecemeal way in which is is assembled, it still presents itself, to an outside observer, as a singular object, so I'm going to look at it, just briefly, based on a reading that seeks for some kind of unity. 

The things that pops out at me most are the number of stories in which the reaction to trauma or stress is to hide or run away. Let's see:

-In "The Magic Bangle," the narrator attempts to hide in plain sight in order to be able to turn his gay-hating town into a gay paradise. 

-In "Viola in Mid-Winter," Viola uses a glamour spell to remain hidden from a romantic partner who hurt her. 

-"Blessed Deliverance" features a narrator who keeps his own name hidden, and the climax features rabbits being set free to run away. 

-"The Bed & Breakfast" features a young narrator trying to avoid her own coming of age as long as she can. 

-In "Dorcester," the narrator runs away from reading his poem when he realizes what a phony he is. 

-"Seeing Through Maps" has a son who runs away to escape his family's crazy. 

-"Engelond" is about an attempt to escape one set of circumstances followed by the desperate attempt to flee the first attempt to escape.

-"P's Parties" features a narrator who enjoys remaining hidden in the anonymity that parties provide. 

-Where do I even begin with the theme of hiding in "Baboons"? The utility of hiding as a survival mechanism is possibly the central theme of the story. 

-In "Valley of the Moon," Tongsu retreats from a modernizing society after the Korean War, preferring the presence of ghosts and moonlight on his family's secluded old farm. 

Is this a reflection of society?

Again, this is all a very tenuous thing to do because of the semi-randomness of a BASS anthology, but let's look at BASS as a product of a certain time. That time is really 2023, of course, because that's when the stories were published. And many were written, at least in part, long before that. Since the anthology says "2024" on it, though, and since it came out weeks before the 2024 election, it's hard not to read that as the historical moment of the anthology, even if the individual stories belong to a somewhat different moment. The 2024 election,  for now, stands out to me partly for the way in which so many people I know have disengaged from news since the election, because they just can't deal with it. Or the way in which some rich people who don't like Trump have moved to another country. Going underground, either literally or emotionally, seems to be a big part of the reaction of the 48 percent of us who didn't want this outcome. 

We used to do all kinds of drills in school that had us hide under our desks. They must have had a lot of faith in the structural integrity of desks in those days. 

I've come to be kind of skeptical about the ability of fiction to directly change the course of political history. The BASS 2024 story that most directly addresses American politics, "Democracy in America," is easily the weakest story in the anthology. I realize there are a few examples from history of fiction that has changed politics through a frontal attack, but those example are rare and limited. Fiction is great at a limited number of things, and at those things, it's not just great, but really great. It's great for imagining different ways things could be. It's great at helping develop empathy. It's great at raising questions. It's great at helping people to become clearer thinkers about issues with no obvious right answer. It can, when a story becomes so widely a part of culture that it is on the level of myth, affect the self-image of entire groups of people. 

And it's great at helping people to escape or survive hard times. 

That's BASS of 2024. Nothing in the anthology is going to change the political course we're on. It probably won't even elevate our dumb national political discourse by the slightest nanometer. But fiction has been a part of human society for as long as we've been around because it has a useful role in our survival in a wide variety of social contexts. In the current context, that role might be to help folks batten down the hatches emotionally and prepare for the storm. 

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. 

"Reading other writers will affect my voice while I'm writing" is a baseless fear for most of us

This blog used to be full of either complaining about the difficulties of advancing as a writer or occasional advice to developing writers on the rare occasions when I felt like I'd figured something out. In the last few years, it's tended to lean more toward my own idiomatic version of literary analysis, one inspired by literary theory, literary criticism, and the genre of Protestant sermons. Occasionally, I've looked at movies, TV, or novels, but mostly, I've been focused on short stories. 

I don't know if my readings of short stories are good, but I know this much: the deep concentration on the stories that's necessary to write something at least halfway sensible about them has made my own short stories better. I know this from the empirical evidence, such as writing provides. I've been accepted in more journals and a few more highly regarded journals than I used to. I've also gotten far, far more positive feedback from the elite journals than I used to. (They completely ignored me for years up until a few years ago.) But I also know it because my own inner reader looks at what I write now, especially after I've had time to get away from it, and is just a lot more satisfied with it. Sometimes, I've even surprised I wrote it. 

I could really sum up everything I've learned about writing in the last seven years with some really obvious advice. If you want to be a writer, read a couple of books on how to write, then read a lot of whatever genre it is you want to write in. More importantly than reading a lot, read closely. 

And I could leave it there, but there's a concern a lot of writers have. Some really good writers even have mentioned it. They're concerned that if they read a lot of other writers, especially while they're deep in the process of writing something themselves, the voice of the person they're reading will bleed into their own writing. Some writers have said they completely cut off input once they start writing for this reason. 

It's an understandable concern. Writers want to have their own style, not just imitate someone else's. Certainly, when I'm writing, I tend to cut off input, although for me it's more because when I feel the urge to write something, I don't want to interrupt it with anything else. It's more about striking while the iron is hot than it is about keeping my voice pure. I've only got so much time, and when I've got words to put down, I tend to make that my priority. 

But let's grant it's a valid concern. I still don't think it's a reason to keep developing writers from reading broadly and deeply, even while writing. (In fact, if you're going to follow the advice some give to write every day, that would mean you could never read if you wanted to avoid reading while writing.) 

There are two reasons. First, while developing, it's unlikely that accidentally picking up influences from the best can do anything but good for your writing. It's a lot like how you suddenly play tennis better after watching Wimbledon for a couple of weeks. As long as you're not flat our trying to transcribe Pynchon into your own auto-biographical-based story, the influence is probably a good thing. It's not going to magically make you Pynchon, but it can help you unlock new levels. 

The second reason is that even after you've started to develop your own style and voice, you didn't develop it out of nowhere. It's always been a mix of what you've read and the unique impact that had on your psyche. It's always been a tension between what's inside you and what's coming at you, trying to change what's inside of you. That tension doesn't stop while you're writing, even if you avoid reading. Reading just makes it more overt. At least you'll know where the voices in your head are coming from.

All writing is a lot of hard work that you hope serendipity somehow takes a hold of. That's why it's so devastating to lose something you've written. People might think, well, you wrote it once, you can write it again, but it isn't like that. It's like how Sauron couldn't make a second ring because he'd put too much of his own power into the first one. Once you write a thing, you've kind of emptied that part of you into the work, and the things that were coming together to make the you who wrote that work will never coalesce in that same way again. Reading while writing might mess with your voice, but it's possible it will mess with your voice in a way that's interesting, that the new hybrid will be something you never thought was in you. Because it literally wasn't until the second you wrote it. 

Why don't the best literary fiction writers tell stories the way our best story-telling friends do?

I knew a guy in the Marine Corps who'd been an honest-to-god cowboy before joining the military. He'd also spent a few years at Colgate, but by far, the more fascinating part of his past was that he'd once ridden a horse, carried a rifle to protect against bears, and herded animals. His first name was Michael, but he always went by his middle name, Bevan. Bevan! Have you ever known a Bevan? He's the only one I've ever come across, and his stories were as unique as his name.

His companion on many of his cowboy adventures had been a dog named Dog, who once--as Bevan told it--saved him from a giant rat that was leaping toward his throat out in the barn by catching the rat mid-leap and ripping him into two pieces with one shake of his head.

Bevan was a natural storyteller. He had a sonorous voice, and he knew how to draw out a story, build suspense, and get a laugh. People loved to listen to him.

It occurs to me from time to time, while reading the best literary fiction, that stories in, say, The New Yorker don't read like the kinds of stories Bevan would tell. All that metaphorical language that must have taken days of fasting and psychedelic drugs to come up with. All that tightness of language. When a scene is described, it's never in the language a normal person uses when telling a story. I can't imagine Bevan saying this, for example: "He was wearing a tattered coat and a faded black shirt, which gave him a penurious appearance. He ordered a coffee. I ordered a mint tea." (From "Sevastopol" by Emilio Fraia.) Or this: "There were six of us in the house. We were all about the same age, and at some point during the summer—I had moved in at the beginning of March, when the mornings were still cold, veins of ice glittering over the front steps—this became claustrophobic, unbearable. The house smelled of sweat and bike tires and something at the back of the oven being charred over and over again." (From "Old Hope" by Clare Sestanovich.)

What gives? Why don't the best story writers write stories that sound like the people we think of as the best storytellers? 

Part of it is obviously the difference between the spoken medium and the written. Bevan can use his voice or his body language as a tool to convey feeling, emotion, or humor. The writer can't. All the writer has is the word on the page, so she has to sometimes use her tools in ways we don't normally think of in order to get the same effect. We're all familiar with the concept of having different vocabularies for speaking, listening, writing, and reading, with reading being the one where we know the most words and can handle the most complexity. So it's only natural that writers would push language to limits it isn't build to handle in the spoken word.

Nonetheless, I wonder sometimes if we aren't missing out by how seldom the tone of the spoken story influences the written one. It wasn't always that way. American literary history is full of writers whose voice could easily transfer to the stage or the barroom, from Twain to O.Henry to Vonnegut. 

The distance between modern American fiction and the spoken story is nearly as great as the distance between modern American written poetry and music. I don't really want every poem I read to be as easily understandable on first listen as a typical song lyric. Most of the poems I encounter, I'm going to encounter in written form, and if it's a written story, then it needs to use the full set of tools the written word has at its disposal in order to be engaging. But every time I go to a poetry reading and have absolutely no idea what a poet is talking about when I hear a poem I've never seen before read out loud, I wonder if the propagation of the printed word hasn't robbed poetry of some of its organic pleasure. Poetry, more than any other genre, ought to be pleasant--dare I say fun??--to hear out loud. A modern poem that delights in upsetting expectations and resisting meaning provides one kind of enjoyment, but it's a different one from words that make music that conveys a feeling we've all had but couldn't find words for. A poem that requires hours to dissect, one that literally nobody can make much sense of hearing it read aloud without studying it beforehand, is providing a very different experience to the reader from what poetry offered for thousands of years of human history. 

Storytelling has followed a similar, albeit less extreme, path. I'm not suggesting we all start telling stories the way Ira Glass does. The truth is, I'm not a great oral storyteller. In fact, I'm kind of bad at it. When I tell a story at work, I tend to get more "cool story, bro" type responses than fascination. So naturally, I'm going to lean toward the page-centric, written literary story when I've got something to say. But I think it's worth considering, when writing those dense stories, whether what we're writing has the potential to captivate a non-literary specialist, and if it doesn't, whether maybe it should. It doesn't necessarily have to be "fun." I don't think writing about child soldiers or rape or abuse is going to lead to a story that's fun to read. But it can still be captivating. It can still cast a spell on a reader that makes the reader feel he must keep reading, as opposed to a story a reader only gets through out of a sense of duty. 

The last story I had published, "The Lifesaver on Board the Jamaica Mon," was me re-discovering what I myself find captivating. I actually had fun writing it, which I don't think has happened since I got serious about writing six years ago. After years of trying to learn how I'm supposed to write, I feel like how I'm supposed to write and how I want to write are finally re-converging a little bit. (Yes, I'm annoyed by an editorial insertion in the first sentence that put a questionable hyphen where a comma should go, but I'm trying not to let that spoil my fun.) 

This is what I want to do from now on. I feel like I'm sort of figuring out style and voice. I know what a Jacob R. Weber story is, at least sort of. It's kind of a big step for me. And maybe the strongest evidence that it's really happening isn't so much the stories I'm writing, but my ability to quit chasing false leads and spend hours and hours writing stories that aren't really the kind of story I want to write. 

What a story means should matter: thoughts after reading the big three short fiction anthologies

Because I've enrolled in a few writing classes online and used an editing service or two, I get a lot of emails offering me similar services. One came this week: "Send Your Manuscript Back to School!" The instructor of the fiction school offers this concerning his philosophy of fiction:

"When I respond to fiction drafts of any length, I try to think in the simplest of terms: what is the story doing well, what is it about, and what could it do better? I'm fairly convinced that authorial intent, while important, is often overrated--especially by the writer her or himself."

He then lists the elements of fiction he concerns himself with: what's it about, beginning, ending, details, plot/organization, character, setting, and voice. I think this is a typical way to approach writing nowadays. The primary concerns are with whether the story "works," not with its meaning.

He never mentions theme, but theme is, I think, why a lot of people serious enough about writing to go to graduate school or spend a lot of their personal time trying to hone their skills fell in love with writing in the first place. Unfortunately, the business of literary fiction now, especially short fiction, seems to be in the hands of writers, meaning there is a disconnect between what those writers pick to publish and what most readers actually want. Most people want stories that have a deep meaning, while most writers think in terms of the instructor in that email I received. I'd argue this disconnect accounts in part for the public's general indifference to serious short fiction.

In defense of theme 

What is theme? A lot of people talk about it as though it were the same as subject matter. They say things like, "The theme of this story is friendship." That's not really right. Friendship is a subject. How the story feels about friendship is a theme. "Friendship is both a blessing and a curse" is a possible statement one could make about the theme of a story. It's not a terribly deep or interesting statement, but it serves the purpose of demonstrating the difference between theme and subject matter.

I think modernity tends to shy away from theme because it comes too close for us to the "moral" of a story. It's didactic, and that summons up images of condescending schoolmarms smacking the hands of distracted students with rulers while tsking their way through some recitation of Aesop's fables. It implies certainty on the part of the writer, when the business of post-modernity is learning to live with uncertainty. But theme doesn't have to be as dry as "haste makes waste" or "love conquers all."

Just this week, I was talking with my son about Whitman's poem "Cavalry Crossing a Ford." I pointed out that you can intuit a lot about how the narrator feels about the soldiers without him saying anything at all. From the tone and language, you can see that he admires the soldiers, that he thinks they are perhaps engaged in something noble. This is entirely achieved through the pleasure of beautiful images and powerful language, but the themes are still there.

Typically in modern fiction, theme is hinted at and felt more than overtly stated. That's great for readers who want to feel like the story is real and organic, but it's not so great when we, as readers, start to feel the natural urge after the story is over to think about what it means in some larger sense. It's great when a writer masters all those elements of fiction mentioned above, and it's a keen pleasure to read fiction in which those elements are mastered, but at some point, we want to know how we ought to feel about all that wonderful manipulation of what is often called "craft." When that happens and the task is beyond us, we might need professionals to help.

A theme can be a moral, but it doesn't have to be that obvious. 

An intelligent person who is not a professional in literature might walk away from a story like Jacob Guajardo's "What Got Into Us" or "Nights in Logar" by Jamil Jan Kochai feeling like we have some sense of what to take with us as we go, but we might have a difficult time expressing that when we discuss the story with others. And we might not have a clue what we're supposed to feel after a story like "The Houses That Are Left Behind" by Brenda Walker or Carolyn Ferrell's "A History of China."

That's when it can be useful to have a critic, someone skilled at scouring the elements of fiction for the unique ways in which fictional logic creates meaning and then communicating that meaning to readers--preferably to readers who are not literary professionals. But such critics hardly exist. For every movie out there, you can find a dozen quality YouTubers doing God's work trying to mine the movie for meaning, but darned if you can find that for the best literary fiction. That's true even if you're talking about short fiction, which is probably easier to critique in the manner I'm talking about than long fiction. There's a reason students of Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories are finding my blog. It's not that I'm the most skilled person on Earth at this. It's that hardly anyone else is even trying critique on this level.

Instead, we get a review. Literary Review, critique, and theory are related disciplines but differ in important ways. A good review will let you know if you should read a book. A good critique will help you to analyze the work critically. Theory is more for professionals, and interrogates the work on a deeper level in which literature itself is often being investigated as much as the particular work under discussion. The three disciplines overlap to some degree: critique can include opinions on quality, and theory will include close reading of how the elements of fictions build meaning. Critique is the middle ground between heavily academic thinking about literature and a more personal reaction to it. But nearly all writing about serious literature one can find tends to lean toward the review end of the spectrum, because it's mostly other writers running the show.

This is even true of the anthologies themselves. Having just finished my critiques of the most recent big three American short fiction anthologies (Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and the O. Henry Prize Stories), I found a lot of great fiction. (I was actually worried, when I started, if I would be able to go through with a full critique of all the work, since I'm trying to get published myself by many of the same venues that published the work I'm analyzing, and I didn't want to make enemies. But I was surprised how often I could blog positively with a clear conscience.) But I didn't find much in any of the three anthologies to help orient a lay reader about meaning.

BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2018

This is the best selling of the three, and for the six years I've been reading it, has followed the same format. Heidi Pitlor, who has narrowed the possible candidates down to a little over a hundred, has a guest editor pick the twenty stories that appear in the volume. Both Pitlor and the guest editor offer thoughts on the volume, Pitlor in a foreword and the editor in an introduction. Often, these include some musings on how the stories reflect the historical year covered by the anthology.

In 2018, both Pitlor and guest editor Roxane Gay focused on the chaos and uncertainty in American democracy and how the stories they picked may or may not address that chaos and uncertainty (and for Gay, why they should be excused if they do not seem to address it pointedly enough). Pitlor's foreword begins with a list of all the unbelievable news that had happened in just the month before she finished work on the anthology. Her concern with fiction in this political context is more existential than semiotic, more about whether fiction can survive than what it might mean: "Fiction writers are now faced with the significant challenge of producing work that will sustain a reader's attention amid this larger narrative."

Pitlor relates her personal history with the BASS anthology, which she first discovered in college. Her first contact with the series included her realization that there was a section of writer notes in the back, a feature that still exists in BASS today. "After reading a stellar story, I turned to the mini-essay that provided access to what seemed like secrets: confessions about the difficulties of writing, self-deprecating comments about the author's obsessions; profound assessments of the themes of the stories." (emphasis mine)

Pitlor seems to care about the same things I've just said most readers really care about in reading literature. The raison d'etre of the anthology is to provide insight into the big questions. She writes that "The stories in this book offer readers passageway inside contemporary and age-old questions of what it means to live together in a society, as well as what it takes to define ans sustain oneself in difficult times."

She then moves on to a brief and now-familiar discussion of how literary fiction makes readers more empathetic, more open to diversity. But it's clear she sees one important purpose of fiction is to deliver meaning, not just great craft.

Gay, in her introduction, is even more concerned with existential questions than Pitlor. She writes about the realities of writing, how it takes time and space, and how we can't expect the perfect story responding to the present age to just emerge because we'd like it to. With all the political and social background to picking the year's best stories, all of which Gay is deeply concerned about, she says what she's looking for begins with writerly questions:

"First and foremost, I am looking for a good story. I am looking for beautifully crafted sentences. I am looking for a refreshing voice or perspective. I am looking for interesting, complex characters that I find myself thinking about even when I am done with the story. I am looking for the artful way any given story is conveyed, but I also love when a story has a powerful message, when a story teaches me something about the world, when a story shows me just how much I don't know and need to know about the lives of others." (emphasis mine)

So both Gay and Pitlor are looking for some kind of meaning, some thematic epiphanies from what they read in fiction, although these questions are of varying relative weight to each. But the notes from the writers in the back tend, for the most part, to rather pointedly avoid this kind of pontification. There are a few exceptions. Interestingly to me, the same writers who wrote what I considered the best stories in the volume (Brinkley, Cline, Evans) did try to address what their stories were about at their heart in some way. I wonder if one of the reasons I, a reader who reads for theme, connected with their stories is because the writers themselves also show a similar concern.

Most of the writers stuck to the background of how the story was written. Many wrote about aesthetic or "craft" considerations. For a story like Jacob Guajardo's "What Got Into Us," his biographical notes are quite helpful for thinking about theme, since Guajardo's life is similar to his main character. When he writes that, "Young, queer people of color become adept at hiding, but it's hard to hide that you are in love," he is writing auto-biographically, but he's also written a pretty good thematic statement about his own story. In fact, most of the better thematic statements in the author's notes section start with a statement something like, "I wanted to write a story about..." They are still writing from their own experience of writing the story, but by talking about what they wanted to say, we end up with a helpful guide to the story for the confused lay reader.

Ferrell, however, whose story "History of China" may be the most daunting to write about thematically, offers almost no help, choosing to write only about craft and the history of how she came to write the story. Ron Rash's writer notes are as fatuous and conceited as the story that appeared in the volume. Matthew Lyons wrote that male violence was at the heart of his story, and while that's a helpful hint at theme, I don't think it's entirely accurate. Maybe that's because I thought the story didn't quite work on the level of craft, dabbling a little too exploitively in exotic religious customs. But at least it was a thematic statement. Kristen Iskandrian, Rivers Solomon, and Esme Weijun Wang also offered an analysis of their stories that I partly disagreed with, but at least they gave some sort of analysis.

In short, the author comments usually didn't really offer much of the "profound assessments of the themes of the stories" that we were promised. Maybe that's too much to ask of the authors, who are, after all, only responsible for producing the themes themselves, not the analysis of those themes. But this analysis needs to exist somewhere. I'd like it if BASS itself too charge of leading the production of some of that criticism, either in the volume itself or somewhere with an official presence online.

All too often, I think the statements about these stories tend to dodge the thematic questions, because those are hard. You can be wrong about what you say. It's hard to be wrong when you say so-and-so wrote beautiful sentences, but saying a story's meaning is such-and-such can be contested. You can end up looking stupid. I'm sure I've failed at some of what I've blogged. I do it because critique is so rare and so important, I'm willing to provide something imperfect to at least have a starting point for readers. But I think BASS could call upon literary professionals to do better. 

PUSHCART

The Pushcart Anthology doesn't offer much of anything to help a reader out. Its focus is on getting air time for writers from smaller presses. It's an absolutely admirable job, and it gives a huge shot in the arm to the trajectories of the writers who make it into the volume. But it's an paperback-only book, which means size matters. They try to get as much content into it as they can, and that means they don't have a lot of room for introductions or writer notes. The introduction this year was only a few pages, focused on personal notes from the editors, and passed on any responsibility to contextualize the stories thus: "I won't even attempt to describe the immense variety in theme and style of what follows."

If there isn't any real criticism of the big anthologies, there's damned sure not going to be any real criticism of Pushcart. This is a shame, because writing without good reading is the answer to the old Buddhist koan of what one hand clapping is like. It's nothing. Pushcart provides a great opportunity for writers desperately deserving of it, but without an active readership, it's difficult for the writers to develop an active base of followers. Writers typically gain a following when readers are attracted to thematic elements in what they read. But there has to be some discussion of what those thematic elements are before the readership can, in a sense, discover itself. So Pushcart itself is only half of the puzzle.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

Overall, the O. Henry anthology shows a little more attention to theme than the other volumes. It groups stories by similarities rather than by the randomness of alphabetical order of the writers, which in itself means they are taking editorial responsibility for how the reader experiences meaning. In Laura Furman's introduction to the series, she takes several stabs at thematic statements about the stories. She doesn't do this for every story, but she does it for many of them. I found some of her thoughts helpful in writing about the anthology. This section of the book provides something BASS was lacking. It gave at least a few paragraphs of thoughts from an actual literary professional about two questions: What is the subject matter?" and "What is the heart of the story?" I take this second question to be largely one of theme. 

Like the foreword to BASS, O. Henry's introduction promised further answers to these questions in the notes from the writers at the back of the book. "After you have completed a story in the O.Henry Prize Stories 2018, you might find you have two different answers to the questions 'What is the subject matter?' and 'What is the heart of the story?' And if you turn to 'Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018,' you can see what answers the authors themselves have to offer."

However, like BASS, the authors are not always as interested in thematic elements as the readers likely are. There are exceptions. One wonderful exception was Brenda Walker, who provided a succinct statement of what she thought was at the heart of her story. This was helpful, because her story was one of the more challenging to find a thematic core of. But most of the writers stuck to origin stories of their stories. Again, I don't really fault the writers for this, but it is disappointing to the reader who wants to engage with the work on a deeper level to find a dead end. 

O. Henry also includes a short essay from each of three guest editors. In each essay, the editors talk about their favorite story and why they liked it. This is more help O. Henry provides to readers that BASS and Pushcart do not give. However, since the editors are writers and not critics, their comments tend to focus on elements of craft rather than theme. 

Overall, O. Henry is the most satisfying to read if you are hoping to get some kind of foothold on climbing up the mountain of understanding meaning. But it still leaves a lot to be desired. There are many places where the introduction uses discretion as the better part of valor where a thematic statement would be difficult. It evades statements about the "heart of the story" for "subject matter" or aesthetic statements. It chooses review over critique, when readers would probably enjoy a bit of the latter and feel they are relatively more capable of drawing their own conclusions about the former. For example, Furman concludes her talk of Dave King's "The Stamp Collector" by saying, "In a short story, the writer has to do it all right away--establish the tone, ensnare the reader, and make us want more. Dave King does all three just right in 'The Stamp Collector.'"

This was my first year reading O. Henry, and I really was grateful for the way it was put together. But I'd like other anthologies to follow its lead, and for O. Henry to go much further than it does. I'd love it if the anthologies also included criticism about the stories. Preferably, it would be independent criticism. The critics wouldn't be required in any way to like the stories they analyzed. 

Short fiction in America needs a boost. The anthologies provide that. Getting picked for one of these collections is an immense lift to a writer's career. But criticism is in an even more pitiful state than fiction. The anemic state of criticism is intricately tied to the weak state of short fiction. It's a truism that only writers read short fiction. But what do we expect? Most serious literary fiction is difficult for a non-professional in literature, even a smart one, to dissect. Without a leg up, what engineer or math teacher or fire fighter is going to invest the time, when that time is likely to end getting nowhere? 

In short, I'd love to see the big three anthologies combine their yearly output with a coordinated and linked critical output. I'd love to see my blog become obsolete. 

Sometimes it just smacks me in the face...

Of course I realize that fiction writing is making things up, but when I've really been at it a long time at one stretch, it strikes me how absurd a practice it is to keep creating realities for imaginary people. I often treat fiction writing like it's a very serious business. Many writers do. But it's probably healthy to take a step back sometimes and just think about what it is we're doing in a more macro sense. I just spent the last hour imagining the love life of two people who don't exist until I had given one of the two fake people a little tendency to do something that slightly bemused or irritated the other. I'm daydreaming, which is often thought of as one of the biggest wastes of time one can do--so much that we yell at students who are caught doing it when they're supposed to do something else--and then putting the results of that daydreaming on paper.

No activity could be a more confident assertion that life is ephemeral and not something, ultimately, to be taken that seriously. Or, as Vonnegut put it, "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anyone tell you different."

The downside of writer prompts

Occasionally, I'll give writer prompts a try. If you're not a writer, you may be unaware that just like muscle heads can find a thousand workouts-of-the-day on CrossFit fora all over the Internet, writers can find thousands and thousands of writer prompts. There are many purposes to a prompt. At the most innocuous, they're just there to get your juices flowing, as it were, to give you a reason to write something. Hopefully, the thinking goes, writing the prompt may trigger something creative you can use in your real writing. Some prompts are more like an etude in music, meant to develop a particular skill. For example, in order to strengthen your ability to write descriptively, you might get a prompt to describe a scene, only the point-of-view character is upside-down. That kind of thing.

I don't use prompts a lot, but occasionally I find them useful or fun. As the kind of person who craves approval, prompts trigger the person who overachieved on assignments in college. There is a job to do, so I do it. It makes it easier to write without questioning myself why I'm writing, because the answer is that someone told me to write.

On a very rare occasion, the prompt succeeds beyond all reasonable expectation, and I end up with something that goes right into a story. The only problem with this is that I feel like it then becomes obvious that I used a prompt, which would kind of destroy the suspension of doubt of the reader. No artist wants to leave traces of, well, tracing in the drawing they did. It's the same thing for a writer. I just had a breakthrough on a story I gave up on a year ago, but a prompt helped me get there, and that's weighing on me as I continue on with the rough draft.

Maybe I'll just go with it. An artist might playfully leave the tracing paper glued to the canvas. I could just make it clear that part of the story really did start with a prompt. Or is that too corny?

The only thing I'm sure of is that just like every good CrossFit bro must post photos of his workout, I must also post photos of myself writing my prompt.

Intense. 

All in all, who isn't a brick in the wall?: "Kylie Wears Balmain" by Sarah Resnick

The Pushcart Anthology has a funny quirk I've noticed over the years. As the editors lay out the contents, which alter between fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction, only the fiction entries are specifically called out as fiction at the beginning. For example, the story I'm reviewing now has the title of the story on the first line, then "fiction by Sarah Resnick" on the second line, and finally the journal in which the story first appeared (n+1 in this case) on the third line. I can see why they don't specifically say that poetry is poetry. Poetry is set off typographically (so much that one college professor of mine said that the best way to tell if something is a poem is that "the lines don't go all the way to to end"), so it's easy to know when you're reading a poem. But nowadays, creative non-fiction tends to sound a lot like first-person fiction. So it's easy to get confused sometimes about what you're reading. Pushcart ONLY calls out the fiction as fiction. It's as if the non-fiction were the default, the assumed form, and fiction were the oddball that needs labelled. I doubt this would have been true fifty years ago in a literary anthology.

I bring this up because Resnick's "Kylie Wears Balmain" sounded a lot like to me like creative non-fiction, like a memoir. I had to keep going back to the beginning to be sure that what I was reading was actually a short story.

My difficulty being able to tell fiction (something that didn't happen) from non-fiction (something that really happened) turned out to be totally appropriate to the themes of Resnick's excellent story. In "Kylie," a woman (called "the woman" throughout) takes a job writing for a celebrity tabloid. She's tired of being poor and living in a crappy place, and she is already working two jobs. The magazine (called "The Magazine" throughout) offers good pay and a lot of nice perks, including great catered dinners for staff.

Immediately after taking the job, she has doubts about what she is doing. She went to school to do serious writing, but The Magazine is everything that's wrong with America: "fashion knock-offs, 'diets that work,' stratified wealth, divorce, couture latex, infidelity, single moms, countouring, God, fame, infamy."

She assuages the guilt in two ways. (Well, three, I guess. Guilt also goes down easy with a fancy catered dinner.) First, she tells herself she is just there to "check the facts." Although her friends chide her that a magazine like The Magazine doesn't contain any facts, there are actually a dizzying number of facts for The Woman to check up on. And unlike every serious journalism enterprise in America, The Magazine actually still employs enough fact-checkers to get its stories right. Reason being, The Magazine can lose the good will of its sources if it does something like misprint the age of a celebrity. So there are stakes for the magazine, and those stakes mean it's important to get the facts right. The facts might be about the most insipid things, but they're still technically facts.

The second way The Woman comes to terms with her job is that everyone else working as a fact-checker at The Magazine is a lot like her. They're all artists of various sorts: poets, novelists, the editors of a literary magazine who get no money printing literature, so they do this job to pay for the other one. There's even a Democratic candidate for city office working there. The Magazine is, without meaning to be, "a benevolent sponsor of the city's high-minded literary and arts communities."

It's easy to scoff, but what if this were how the next great American novel came to be? 

The Woman has come face-to-face with a reality almost everyone in the arts faces eventually: art doesn't pay. So she has to take a job in the world, and in her case, there's an extra perversity to it. As an artist, she's beholden to critique everything that The Magazine tries to push on people. But as a fact checker, she's forced to help protect The Magazine's ability to uphold the culture she should be deconstructing.

To add insult to injury, every day she checks facts about "artists" of a sort who are making money--scads of money--by being artists, which has to make The Woman question what is wrong with her and whether something was very wrong with her calculations of value in the first place.

Ultimately, The Woman is spared from having to go through an enlightenment that would allow her to walk out of the job, because the job walks out on her. Like all American consumer culture, it eventually consumes itself. The Magazine ends up broke, partly through bad business practices, and partly because the market has changed: celebrities no longer need to work with tabloids to stay relevant, because they can simply build their own brand through social media.

The Magazine's staff dinners get progressively more and more parsimonious, until finally, they consist of nothing more than a nutrition bar The Magazine is hawking on behalf of a celebrity publicist. When The Woman learns she's been fired, she takes one last nutrition bar and continues reading The Magazine on the way out. Far from finding a way to live without the worst of American capitalism, she has become content to drain every last drop she can from it.

I find this story "relatable," as they say

I never intended to end up in the job I'm in. If you'd told me in 1997 as I was getting out of the Marine Corps and headed off to college that I'd be where I am, I'd have laughed at you. But having no money when everyone else you know does has a way of changing your mind about things. I didn't want to be a burden on other people, and I hoped that maybe I'd even be able to help others if I got a job. So I gave in to the system, as the system expresses itself through market forces in the labor market.

That job has enabled me to support a family and also to help several people outside my family. It is enabling me to pursue writing as a passion. Like "The Woman" from "Kylie," I work with a lot of people who didn't dream of being where they are now, people who use their day jobs to try to follow what they really want to be doing on the side.

I don't think there's a solution to getting out of this situation. Any job you get is going to at least be supported by the worst of American capitalism, even if it doesn't directly feed into it. You might be a massage therapist (the job I dream of doing when I try to think of a job with no social downside), but all of your clients are going to be people who make money off the worst of American capitalism, unless you intend to specify "no robber barons" in your marketing. If the American economy went south, your job as a massage therapist would take a hit, too. If your ability to do your job depends on the health of another industry, then you are a part of that industry, no matter what you may think.

Anyone with a bank account can't really claim they don't support American capitalism, including its military adventuring side.

You could, I suppose, try to take extreme measures: move to the woods in Alaska, somewhere where you are allowed to just claim a piece of land and not pay for it. Use only what your hands can make, eat only what you can grow, gather, or catch. But what good is this? For one thing, if everyone did that, the wilds would soon disappear, making it impossible for anyone else to live that life. Secondly, I'd die in about twelve hours of that kind of life. I know no survival skills that don't pertain to civilized life. Finally, the biggest benefit from this kind of life would be a reduction in your consumption and footprint on the environment. But if that's your goal, the hard truth is that nothing you do to reduce your consumption will be as effective as suicide.

Is there any hope, then, for someone who wants to live a life that isn't co-opted? I think there is, and it lies in refusing to give in to the lies around us even while we are forced to give some level of support to those lies. The Woman, having helped fact-check a story on the short-lived romance between Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston, wonders whether they were ever really in love or if it was a con cooked up by their respective PR teams. She decides that it is "of little consequence as far as fact-checking is concerned."

"What matters, for her purposes, is that even if Taylor and Tom were not truly in love, they had still performed love for the cameras. Love or no love, there remains the fact of the performance. And in the fact of the performance, there is something one can call "truth," i.e., the performance happened. 

If there is a fiction in the story, it does not originate in The Magazine."

The Woman is lost at this point. And here we return to the difficult distinction between fiction and non-fiction with which we began, a distinction becoming all the more difficult every day as journalism struggles to keep up with the age in which we now live. 

The job of people is to know better and hope for better even while we work in a world in which better does not yet exist. It is to be "in but not of the world," as my Christian friends would have it. The Woman convinces herself that the lies she supports aren't lies because they contain so many facts. It's easier to believe this than to accept what the job really is. I propose that the superior route is to remember you are supporting a lie, even if you don't see much choice and this realization makes you unhappy.

The person who knows she is working for something other than the ideal can still push back, can still have small ways of influencing society. She joins an organization of people with no name, an international conspiracy fighting an ongoing guerrilla war for truth and a better way to live.

We will often fail to resist when we should. We will acquiesce when we shouldn't. But we mustn't content ourselves forever with living off the scraps the world throws us. I conclude with another Christian reference, this time, the words of C.S. Lewis:

Failures will be forgiven; it is acquiescence that is fatal, the permitted, regularised presence of an area in ourselves which we still claim for our own. We may never this side of death, drive the invader out of our territory, but we must be in the Resistance, not in the Vichy government.

How to deal with hating your own stories until they're done

I've said before (wayyy back when I first started doing this) I didn't care much for Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream, even though it's one of the most frequently cited books of advice on writing fiction. Essentially, I found Butler's advice rather broad and more pointed at what he thought good writing looked like than how to get there. It had some useful advice, but that advice was punctuated by a lot of Butler's own aesthetics.

Still, I took one thing from reading that book that's stayed with me, which is the notion that writing is akin to a kind of lucid dreaming. You have to try to arrange your life so you can recall your dreams as close to how they happened as possible. Butler advised writing in the morning when the mind was still in a pre-verbal/logical state (sort of akin to having a pad of paper by the bed to dash down notes on your dreams before they fade away).

I've found there is a lot of truth to the idea that writing a story is like wrangling a dream on paper. It's the strongest argument for not having a day job and committing yourself fully to writing; that's the only way to be sure that when the muse hands you a vision, you're able to immediately transfer it onto paper. If you can't afford to quit your day job, though, I don't think you need to despair. There are plenty of ways to deal with muses. I've found my muse to be pretty reasonable about my timeliness in transferring her visions to paper. If I write down a few lines to remind myself what I saw, I can start the real rough draft sometime later. (Usually in the late evening or early morning before work. The best time to work is late Friday night on into Saturday morning.)

Dream hangover

There are more kinds of dream-states than just the ones that visit you during REM sleep. There is day-dreaming. I think most of my stories come to me as day-dreams. There is also that manic kind of late-night thought where you feel you've suddenly found all the answers to everything. Writing, especially first-draft writing, feels a lot like this 3 AM kind of thinking (not surprising, since often, at least for me, I literally am writing at 3 AM).

3 AM thinking feels very powerful when you're in the middle of it. Maybe because the brain thinks it should be dreaming at that time, you're in a place where dreams and the real world collide, and suddenly, the obstacles that were blocking your thought are obliterated. It's a very creative time. 3 AM thinking is free-write, first-draft thinking, when you're just going with the visions or voices in your head.

Of course, 3 AM thinking doesn't always seem so sound the next day. We've all been where Jerry Maguire was, wishing to God the next day we hadn't listened so much to the 3 AM voices in our heads.

When writing a story, the advice generally goes to just get the first draft on paper. It doesn't matter if it's garbage; at least you can work with garbage. You can't work with nothing. So write something. Write drunk, edit sober--that kind of advice.

It's not bad advice, but there's a point where it can be problematic for a writer. In fact, it's the point where I'd say most of my story ideas die. It's rare I can write even a short story all in one go. If an average short story is, say, 5,000 words or so, then it's going to have at least a couple of acts. Usually, the muse-given vision that got me sitting at my desk in the first place only covers one of those acts. After that, I need to wait for more inspiration.

The problem comes when I'm waiting to figure out how to continue the story from one act to the next. Often, I have to wait a while. In order to keep my brain working on the problem of how to continue the story, I have to go back and re-read what I have so far. And that's when my logical, analytic brain seizes up in horror at the mess I've got going so far. My whole brain shuts down--both the logical and the imaginative parts--because I've got such a pile of shit going on, and I don't want to just keep piling more shit on top of it.

Two ways to deal with the horror of your own partial rough drafts

There are two ways you can deal with this. You can try, as much as possible, to avoid looking at your work as you go. I do this sometimes. Even if it takes me five or six different sessions at the computer to write a story, each time I start a new one, I won't read much more than the last few sentences of where I left off. The advantage of doing this is that your critically-oriented mind doesn't slow you down. You can keep plodding forward until you've at least got something you can work with. The idea is that you write the rough draft uncritically, then look at the whole thing critically when it's done. At that point, you do some major work to re-imagine the thing, at which point the non-critical, creative side comes back in to make a new draft, but one that's got some stricter limits to it imposed by the critical brain. You keep going back and forth between these two until you get a draft that's polished.

The problem with this is that by the time you've written 5,000 words in dreamland, you can sometimes have such a mess that the whole thing was a waste of time. It's very demoralizing to write 5,000 words for no reason. I know writers will tell you that this is normal, or that maybe those 5,000 words weren't really a waste and you might reuse them somewhere down the line, but the fact is that there in the moment, it's a very sobering thing to realize your brilliant dream thoughts were gibberish.

So you can try another approach, which is kind of the opposite of the first one. You can overload yourself with reading and re-reading the drafts you've created. While you're waiting to figure out how you want to proceed, you can just keep going over and over the rough draft. Edit it. Whack at it. Or don't. The important thing is to just keep immersing yourself in it, because what it will do is make you somewhat immune to the gut feeling of how bad parts of it are. It's like getting used to a smell. Not that you want that smell to stay in your writing when you're finally done with the whole thing, but you do want to have developed the ability to at least work around the smell without getting sick to your stomach.

I tried both approaches this month with two new stories I wrote that I'm pretty excited about. Both approaches worked. I used the second approach with the longer of the two stories, because the length of the story meant there was no way to get around needing to go back over and over again to earlier passages so I could keep it all straight. Since I had to keep looking back anyway, I figured I would just keep re-reading what I'd done so far. After a while, it started to feel like I was working on someone else's work. I had distance from it, which meant I could be more objective. The shorter of the two stories, I just kept leaving myself an unfinished sentence as I wrapped up each session at the computer so I'd have an easy thing to get me going next time. The result was that I ended up getting through the story quickly, so at least the dream-feel of the entire story's first draft felt somewhat consistent.

I think either extreme will work. You'll have to try both yourself and see what works with your temperament. Either way, the goal is to get past your own "this is shit" sensors, at least until you've had enough of a chance to give those sensors a complete story to complain about. 

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.

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.

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. 

Gallimaufry of observations

Nothing big enough for a full post here, but a few half-thoughts.

1. Amazon apparently enforces its terms of service for comments on books

I had never really thought Amazon had tough rules for its comments. Based on past history like the three-wolf shirt comments thread, I kind of thought the comments could be a place to throw some absurdist commentary. I left a comment on my own book that gave it five stars, but also said the book was terrible. I was kind of proud of it. After over two months, Amazon I guess noticed that it was me, and removed it. They also did not allow a post from my mother, although I'm not sure how they knew it was her. It's not really a big deal to me. It's apparent that barring something unforeseen, this isn't going to become a huge seller, and a few comments one way or the other aren't going to change that. But it does seem like an unlikely to be really followed policy. The FAQ tells us that Amazon doesn't "allow individuals who share a household with the author or close friends to write Customer Reviews for that author’s book." I'd guess that the vast majority of people who actually write reviews on Amazon of smaller press books have some kind of relationship with the author.

2. I had a reading the other day, and I had a wonderful time

The publishing company, Washington Writers' Publishing House, is just fantastic. It's made up entirely of past winners, and many of them came out, got a book, heard me read, asked questions, listened to me talk about writing the book, and generally made it a great day. A few friends actually gave up football just to come hear me read a story they've already been hounded into buying. Made me feel like a real author. I could do that every day.

I rock a pencil and pen in my shirt pocket nearly all the time. It's kind of my thing.

It was also kind of encouraging to be at a book store that looks like it's going to stay open for a while. I'm thinking I'm going to start buying my books from here, if I can. They support the local writing scene and they provide some sort of alternative to Amazon, so if it's a few dollars more, it's worth it.

3. It's fall, so that means the rejections are coming in

I shot for the moon with nearly all my submissions this fall. I feel like after the book, I'm writing better work, but I also feel like I need to move forward in terms of the level of respect of the journals I'm appearing in. That means the job of getting published--which is hard enough in any journal--got a lot tougher. I've already had seven rejection of the work I turned in last month. Two seemed encouraging, which I guess ought to make me feel good.

I have to say, a lot of the fancy journals are really on point with handling submissions. They are making decisions quickly, much quicker than my journal is usually able to do. I think that's because many of them are either tied to schools or can otherwise command large numbers of slaves intern readers interested in getting in on the ground floor of publishing.

4. I paid $45 to have an agent proof read my query letter for my novel. 

I'm not sure yet if the final product is great, but I can't complain about the level of effort from the agent. For $45, I got three rounds of edits, which were not in any way half-assed. I'll start sending out more query letters next week after the last round of edits is done, and I'll report back on whether the next 25 letters got any better response than the first 25.

Washington Independent Review of Books reviews my collection of short stories

Let my friend Chris know that I actually did manage to do one thing right as a self-promoter of my book: I got a review from Washington Independent Review of Books.

I didn't know for sure that they were going to review it. (In fact, it's been up for three days and I just now saw it.) I sent them two books, because the folks at my publisher, Washington Writers' Publishing House, suggested it. A woman on the WWPH staff knew someone at WIRB, but when I sent them the books to review, I forgot to include my email address, because I am a moron. So I never heard from them. I also saw on Amazon that there was a used copy of my book for sale at the Goodwill right by the WIRB, so I wondered if they just dumped it. But it looks like they did a real service to a local writer and used one copy to get it reviewed.

They don't normally review a whole lot of books from small presses like mine. I believe this was a solid they did me because I'm local. That's darn nice of them.

It's especially gratifying to see this now, because I'm in the middle of doing my own literary good citizenship right now. I'm doing a review of a book someone asked me to do. Turns out, it's a much harder assignment than I thought it would be. The American Review of Books actually wants a short academic paper. I haven't written anything like that in years. I'm not sure I'm up for it, but it's my job to do this, and I know if I were the author, I'd want me to put some effort into it. So I'm struggling through it. Nice to see karma paying me back for it ahead of time.

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.