"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. 

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. 

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.

Writing is not your day job, so don't treat it like it is

In grade school, I loved the math game we called "travel." You've probably played it, even if it was called something else. Two students stand and the teacher reveals a math question on a flash card. Whoever shouts out the right answer first moves to the next desk and faces off with whoever is sitting there, and the process repeats itself. The student who travels the most desks during the game wins.

I guess I must have been a cocky kid. Strange, since now I have almost no confidence in anything I do (or, more accurately, I vacillate wildly between total confidence and crying in a corner), but I liked that there was a game that not only tested whether you knew something, but how quickly you could get through it. It was a way to show how easy math was for you.

In graduate school, when I read Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, I learned of the notion of virtu, which the kids today might translate as "skills." Castiglione proposed that a distinguished gentleman of court would strive to not only show himself skilled in all the subjects a gentleman should be adept in, he should also strive to make it look easy, to show his virtu, his skills. It wasn't enough to succeed, you had to succeed with style, to hide the hard work that went into becoming adept in the first place.

Trying to make it look easy can win you admirers, but there's also an obvious downside to it. Josh Waitzkin, the one-time child chess prodigy who was the subject of the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, noted once that when he was a child, he would often beat better chess players because they were hurrying, trying to make it look like beating a child took nothing out of them to accomplish. Trying to look cool cost them big time, and they ended up looking like doubly uncool as they would have if they had just let everyone see that beating this particular kid was not that easy.

At my day job, I am sometimes guilty of trying to make the work look easier than it really is. Part of this is just work politics: if bosses think there's no work I can't handle, then I get the good assignments and more responsibility. In theory, one day this will lead to me getting promoted and paid more. I also tend to mistrust the perfectionists, whom I sometimes believe are using the quest to make zero mistakes as an excuse for malingering. Whatever picayune mistakes I might sometimes make, I more than make up for in quantity of work.

Don't quit your day job, but also don't try to do your day job at home

But I sometimes take this attitude home with me to the stories I write. I act like just having written a lot of more or less passable stories is what I'm aiming for, instead of ripping into the depths of myself to write the best story I possibly can right now, even if it's the last thing I do. I try to charge through my writing to-do list like it's a list of weekend chores: finish rough draft of story about the unfairness of the immigration system; touch up story about a young woman's ambivalent search for her own racial identity, but really ratchet up the tension in the climax and if you can, see about making that description of the hospital unforgettably beautiful and yet haunting.

It doesn't work like that. Writing isn't raking leaves.

I blame those writing advice givers for making me think it is. I mean the ones who tell you to write every day, as though writing were nothing more than a set of push-ups to do in the morning. Writing is hard. Or, it's hard if you're doing it right. That doesn't mean that every time you sit down to write something, it's going to feel like drawing blood. Sometimes, the writing comes rather naturally. But getting into that state where the writing comes to you--that's what's hard. You're not going to be in that state every day of your life.

I'd wager one of three things is true about those who write every day:

1) They're professionals. All they do is write, so they can arrange every day in such a way that they are in the right space to write;
2) Their writing sounds like it was cranked out by force (i.e., it sucks); or
3) They write a lot of wasted words.

I realize everyone has their own way of approaching writing. If writing every day works for you, and you don't mind writing a lot of words that are going in the trash, have at it. I find that just wears me out, and delays me getting into the right head space to do the good writing I need to do.

In my last post, I indicated that I hadn't written in a few months. It was partly a loss of self-confidence, but it was also just exhaustion. Work has been very tough the last few months, and I eventually wore out trying to match my energy during the day when I came home every night. I needed a few weeks of mindlessness, of doing anything except writing, in order to get to where I could write again. The writer's mind is a well. It can run dry if you are over-using it. You have to give it time to fill up, and you have to give it reading and experiences and just plain idleness so it fills up again.

I just had one of the most productive weekends I've ever had. All that lack of self-confidence I had a few months ago melted as the words just came to me. I'm on such a roll right now, that I really need to give it a rest for a few days. Common wisdom might be to keep going while I'm on that roll, but I think it's really better to leave while you still want more. In a few days, I'll come back to where I was with fresh eyes and new energy.

Some people fear that if you don't keep pushing through the same work while you're in the same frame of mind, it will end up sounding like it was written by more than one person. I actually don't think this is always such a bad thing for a story. Most stories I read for my magazine where I volunteer start off pretty strong and then flag. They get bogged down and lose their initial energy as the writer starts trying to get into the exposition. This is a very difficult thing to avoid, but doing different parts in a different state of mind can actually give each its own propulsion. You are really taking the work of another person--the writer you were the last time you were working on this story--and riffing off of it as the person you are now.

You can probably write a story all in one go if you're writing micro-fiction. If you're not, it's going to take you a while to write the story. It really is. That's because writing is hard. If it seems hard to you, that means you're doing it right. Don't try to keep pushing through as though it isn't. 

Be careful of the advice you take (with bonus microfiction)

I get sent links in my email to columns about writing, because some algorithm has figured out I'll read some of them. The articles I read are a mix of good and bad, with both usually being pretty easy to spot early on. The danger is when you read an article that's good in general, but all wrong for you.

The other day, the algorithm sent me an entry from this little blog by a woman named Mary Jo Campbell. I knew nothing about her, but it was a focused entry on how to write micro-fiction, so I read it. I thought it was fairly well done; it contained some advice most writers already know, like the importance of details and creative use of language, but it was generally worth my five minutes. However, if I hadn't already known the conventions of literary fiction pretty well, I'd have been led astray by some advice she gave. Here's the 100-word story she wrote that she shared as an example:

What Brings Us Together

My fingers are cold yet sweat drips down my armpits, under this black polyester suit jacket. Mom’s smile is her phony-phone-voice as she busies herself introducing the families that enter. The chosen groomsmen are called to the front of the aisle, one brother taller than the next, sleek in their dark combed hair, smooth complexions, pressed suits. Solemn handsome faces contrasted by the pink blotches on the bride-to-be’s cheeks. They are each handed a pair of too-small, bright-white gloves. I swallow hard as my brothers line either side of Bob’s casket.

I've said before I'm not a huge fan of 100-word stories, but they are a thing, and it's a way to get your name out there, so I guess I'd grudgingly write some if I thought I could do it well. But there's something about this story that doesn't sit right with me, at least as literary fiction. It seems to violate a critical aesthetic principle, voiced by Meg Wolitzer in the Introduction to this year's Best American Short Stories anthology. Wolitzer begins by discussing how the first short stories she was assigned to read in middle school were always the kind with a surprise ending, stories like "The Gift of the Magi." These stories conditioned her to always look for the big twist at the end, to consider it a sine qua non of a good story. Later, however, she came to realize that "if everything is surprising, then nothing is," and to dislike "an unearned surprise for a surprise's sake." She later comes to a more mature understanding of surprise: "...the idea of 'surprise' wasn't abandoned entirely; instead, it was given a shine and polish and a more mature translation. It's possible to see that a whole story--not just the ending--might itself take on what had been considered the function of an ending."

In other words, the whole story should shock one's expectations, should undo the reader's way of seeing things.  As a reader, you will "find yourself in a place you didn't know about before."

Campbell, however, specifically recommends the shock ending, calling for "...a twist the reader won’t see coming. But after a re-read, they feel that gut-punch of realization." The story above seems mostly designed for the sake of the surprise ending. There are details given that are clearly meant to lead the reader astray, like the mention of "groomsmen" and a "bride-to-be." (Campbell writes in the blog that this was taken from a cousin who died just before getting married. That's nice to know, but the story as it stands is a little confusing. Why are groomsmen at a funeral? When I read it, I wondered if someone died at the wedding, and they just had the funeral right there that same day because the church was already booked.)

It's nicely written, it has good details, and the unexpected, jangling simile of the smile actually "being" the voice is nice. So is the alliterative word play of "phony-phone-voice." There's nothing wrong with the story, except that it's not literary fiction. I finally realized at this point that Campbell's blog clearly calls attention to the fact that she mainly likes YA fiction. I missed that up front, because I was assuming the algorithm was smart enough to know I write one and not the other.

The lesson is to pay attention to the advice you're getting and where it's coming from. Most writing advice is universal, like use good details. There are some principles, however, that change according to tastes and are genre-specific. So pay more attention that I did.


BONUS FLASH FICTION!!!

Just to give everyone a chance to shit on my writing, instead of me just picking on someone else's (even though I've said I liked her story), I hereby submit to you all the only 100-word story I've ever tried to write. According to the rules, the title isn't included in the word count
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Professor Mulkin Equivocates before a Greater Power

Professor Mulkin tried to be both seen and invisible in the Book Bonanza!; he hadn’t been in a bookstore since Borders closed, hadn’t even known they still existed. He saw only DVDs of TV shows and tween vampire fiction. His wife, recovering in the hospital, had asked for an adult coloring book.

He had written for the Times criticizing such fare and those who read them. They signaled the end. Now, he asked for them out loud. He paid for his purchase with his card, finding it suddenly easy to forgive every crime in history. 

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I have no idea if that's a good literary fiction 100-word story. Like I said, I don't know of any of these things that have really dazzled me. I think they're just an effort to be cute and prove literature isn't always stuffy--like churches telling us that Jesus is cool. This was my best effort to do something with the form. If it sucks, it won't really hurt my feelings much.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Editing Roald Dahl

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

Unless he were trying to get published today.

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

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

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

Two things to avoid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so, I offer this simple edit:

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

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

As some rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, Jake blogs about the process of writing fiction

While discussing one of the stories from my book with a friend the other day, my friend said he'd never be able to write a character as awful as the main character from ""Dawn Doesn't Disappoint." It's about a divorced man, starting to fall into the decrepitude of middle age, who takes up with an overweight, simple, but sweet and occasionally bright much younger woman who works for him. He does it because it's easy. He's realized that the relationship isn't good for him and definitely not good for the girl, Dawn, but he can't end it on his own. Instead, like a teenager afraid to tell a girl what he really feels, he decides to try to be a jerk to get her to end it.

I've discovered that the two questions a fiction writer gets asked the most are: 1) How did you come up with this? 2) (Related to the first,) Did this really happen/happen to you?

The reason I'm starting to have a little success, though, is because most of it didn't really happen

In grad school, or really in any writing workshop, you'll get this scenario all the time: guy turns in a story to the group, and the feedback comes back that the story seems to have a random ending, one that doesn't fit the logic of the story. The writer of the story will shake his head, look sorry for everyone offering their misguided advice, and reveal that "that's how it really happened!" The poor saps who didn't care for the story don't realize that the writer has given us TRUTH, because he's relayed it the way something really happened to him.

What the writer has really done is substitute anecdote or memoir where we expected fiction. This is normal; many writers start out by transcribing events in life that stood out to them. It's typical of a writerly temperament. Some aspect of life stands out to you, and you want to memorialize it. But it's not mature fiction writing yet. Fiction isn't real life. It's not real at all, in fact. That's what "fiction" means. Among other things, in fiction, unlike in life, things have to happen for some reason. You, the writer, are creating some order. Hopefully, it's not a heavy-handed order. It's something arising organically from the seeds of your characters and the situations you place them in. But it's still an order.

Stages from writing memoir to writing fiction

It may seem a little cheeky of me to be dispensing fiction writing advice; I've just had one tiny book of short stories published, and a handful of publications from respectable but not top-shelf journals. But I look at it this way: you cannot learn to play basketball from Lebron James. He's too good, and whatever he tries to tell you will only work for him. But you can learn from the guy in your neighborhood who made the high school team. So this advice is for people struggling to figure it out at all, from someone who's just starting to figure it out.

I don't think there's anything especially unique about the way I do things. It's pretty similar to what all-world writer George Saunders said in this video. But precisely because there's nothing flashy about it, it might be a useful road map if you're looking to take your first steps into writing fiction, or if you've tried and gotten nowhere with it.

Phase One: Transcription of events

This is the phase I described above. Something happens to you, or you encounter a person who leaves an impression, and something about that tells you that there's something worth rehashing in what you experienced, some deeper level of reality waiting there if you scratch a little further. So you write the story, keeping pretty much to how it happened. When you're in this phase, you can still develop as a writer just by paying attention to details, picking out details that matter and are interesting, and figuring out how to describe scene and action both clearly yet without killing the reader with details. One advantage to this kind of writing is it solves one of the biggest problems in creating a narrative: deciding where the beginning, middle, and end is.

But it's hard to make pure recitation of events work as fiction. I get a lot of this kind of writing at the journal where I read. I'm not saying I could pick out with 100% accuracy which stories are really fiction and which are close enough to real life to be memoir, but I can sure tell sometimes. One reader often rejects stories with the note "sounds like thinly fictionalized memoir." There really is something about it that stands out.

Phase Two: Change some shit

Perhaps the one piece of advice that helped me the most was a simple one. If you're writing a story and one of the characters is based on you or someone you know, try changing one important fact about that person. If the person is tall, make him short. If he's athletic, make him awkward. If he's attractive, give him warts. You can try for something bigger if you like, such as changing the gender or race or sexual orientation, but it will do at first to just make one profound change. You'll find that if you change one important feature, the whole character will start to change. Taking away something like intelligence or athletic ability can be like writing about Superman with his powers suddenly taken away. In fact, it can really start to drive narrative. You're answering a question about what someone would be like if you changed something about them, and that in itself can become its own story. You may find that by changing one thing, you end up changing more.

What works for character will also work for plot. If you're retelling a story that happened to you, change one thing about how it went down. The girl didn't go to prom with you. Or she did. By shifting yourself just the slightest bit from the "real" story, you suddenly free yourself to make the story whatever you want it. There's no reason to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Phase Three: Start with what's made-up, and add some reality to it

This next phase is sort of the flip side of phase two. Instead of starting with a real person or story and adding fiction, you start with fiction and add some reality. This is where a lot of what I write now is. I start with a daydream or an image or a rough notion in my head. As I start trying to draft some of it, I will pull things from my life into it in order to give the story some bones. But I kind of throw them in wherever. I put words that my real-life hyper-masculine friend would have said in the mouth of the fictional gal pal of my female lead. I pull a story from dating Mrs. Heretic 17 years ago and transplant it into the foreign land of some story about a funeral home director from Akron.

One of the great things I find about writing like this is that one of those "phase one" stories I tried a long time ago suddenly finds a place where it makes sense as part of another story. I find that the instinct to think that a story existed there was right, it was just that that vignette really belonged within a larger fictional cosmos.

Phase Four: Make it all up

I haven't done this yet. I haven't written a period piece in which nothing is familiar to me and the characters are entirely made up and don't in any way resemble anyone I know. Some people would have you believe that until you ascend to this plane, you aren't writing at the highest level. I'm not sure I agree. Melville continued to mine the same autobiographical material for stories throughout his life. I can't think of a Vonnegut story that doesn't end up at some point back in some place he lived in--upstate New York or Indiana. Vonnegut actually recycled characters over and over. There's nothing wrong with this. Even if you're writing something completely out of your imagination, that imagination is still colored by your experiences. You can't escape yourself, and many of the best writers in history have done great work by not really trying to hide this fact.

Putting it together

Commenter Badibanga may critique me here for being formulaic and narrow about how I approach story writing,  but I promise the way I write feels fairly natural to me. After I've done whatever level of fusion of real life and dream sequence I needed to in order to put a story together, I look at it. I imagine what I do at this point is similar to what an artist does. The story probably doesn't look like I thought it would when I started writing, but that's okay. I look at it for what it is now as a rough draft, and see what stands out to me about it. Are there parts that made sense with the original plan that don't make sense now? Are there things that need to go in now to make the most of what's good about the story as it actually happened? What images have emerged as a result of throwing things into the story that I can now capitalize on? The rough draft becomes a launching pad from which to set out again--hopefully, with less imaginative heavy lifting to do from here on, but still with surprises to come as I continue to rework the clay.

A word about outlines

One point from that George Saunders video I somewhat disagree with is this, which I regard as perhaps a bit of overstatement: "...a bad story is where you know what the story is, and you're sure of it, and you go there with your intentionality fixed in place." Saunders compares this to going out on a date with someone who has notecards in his hands about when to compliment his date and when to tell which anecdote. He says it makes the story seem insincere, like it's talking down to its reader. A real story, a "non-bullshit" story, is one where the author goes into writing it without preconceived notions of where it should go.

This is a common notion in modern fiction theory. Because of it, it's typical to hear advice that you shouldn't use outlines going into a story. I don't think this is necessarily true. Saunders says he sometimes goes into a story with just the smallest idea of something around which he is basing his work. But I don't think that means that if you have a fairly detailed idea where you're going, that means your story is not authentic. Indeed, with some stories, such as Game of Thrones, it's hard for me to imagine writing them without plotting out a lot of it in outline/sketch/map format first. You don't need to feel like a story that comes to you in more pieces from the get-go is not artistically valid. You DO need to remain open to whether all your choices in the planning stage continue to make sense as you write. You DO need to fully incarnate people in your story, even if those people were just someone you originally drummed up to fulfill a role in your plot.


Anyhow, that's my advice, from one advanced beginner to beginners. Whenever I think of process, I think of what Arnold Palmer allegedly said about a good golf swing. A good swing is whatever makes the ball go where it's supposed to. Try this if you want. If it gets you near the hole, great. If it doesn't, try something else. Just don't stress too much over whether your stories are working out. Stories can teach us rich things about life, but they're also meant for fun, much like golf. Which is to say, there are a lot of things going on in the world that might be more important. 

More of an HTGP than a WIHPTS: "Raptor" by Charles Holdefer

I've been doing a lot of Would I Have Published This Story (WIHPTS) installments lately, while reading through the Puschart Anthology from 2017. The last story I read was so good, I'm not even going to do a WIHPTS for it. Yes, I would have published it.

Instead, I'd like to offer a quick HTGP (How to Get Published). Very quick, actually, because that's how this story introduced the main conflict. Here's two things any fiction writer trying to get past numbskulled first-line readers (like me) should do:

1) Get into the conflict in the first page. Here's how "Raptor" does it: The first sentence teases it, "Cody was the only one to see the raptor descend." We then get two quick paragraphs telling us who is involved and where we are, then the conflict literally descends into the picture:

With a swoop the raptor grabbed Ronny and the baby chair and then began to arc upward, pumping its wings furiously

We have a family that was on one arc now completely redirected by something not only tragic, but freakishly unlikely beyond all imagining. That gets us knuckleheaded readers past the first page.

2) When you need to go into a flashback or offer some kind of exposition, give another lead-in with as much force as your opening sentence to the whole story. You've established one kind of momentum, but when you shift on the reader, you risk losing all that if you don't give it another shove to overcome gravity settling on it.

Holdefer did this with three sections that begin with "even if not for the raptor..." Even if not for the raptor, the mother and father might have had marital problems. Even if not for the raptor, the mom was prone to substance abuse and depression. Even if not for the raptor, the father might have started cheating on the mom. This uses the inertia-defeating thrust from the first section to power the backstory, making the exposition as quick-hitting as the main action.

Here's something I'd like to emphasize to writers: this is really excellent writing, but it's not something writers of average talent can't emulate. This isn't the kind of verbal painting that only the greatest virtuosos of the English language can hope to achieve. It's just good, normal fiction writing. More and more, I'm seeing that it's possible to write a really powerful story without necessarily having to have access to language that's beyond the reach of all mortals. Just stand in there and tell your story your way.

Good and bad ways to break POV rules

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.