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. 

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What might have made me vote no?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reason you overrate your own writing, and why that might be okay

A few years ago, when I started getting serious about writing fiction, I was genuinely flummoxed by what I thought I saw in literary journals: stories lauded as examples of how to do it right that I thought weren't any better--and maybe worse--than what I was turning in and seeing get rejected. More than three years into my rebooted attempt at writing, I can see that a lot of what I wrote in 2013 wasn't as good as I thought it was. This is a trap that most of us fall into, one that all the writing how-to books warn us of. It's hard for us to see where we suck.

Part of this is rooted in human nature. It was noted at least 2,000 years ago, when a moral leader advised his followers to take the log from their own eye before they worried about the speck in the eye of another. We are all much better at finding fault in others than in ourselves. We are critical and willing to blame that fault in others on defects of character while finding mitigating factors for our own weaknesses. It's very, very hard to overcome vanity, to practice the necessary self-critique (or listen to the valid critiques of others) needed to get better. Having this ability to be tough on oneself is the mark of a professional.

But not all critique is good, and not all vanity is bad

But that's not really what makes it so hard to develop as a writer. What makes it hard is that real development comes from knowing when to listen to critique and when to stick to your guns. You have to learn when someone is telling you something you just don't want to hear and when someone is telling you something you shouldn't hear.

Here's the real hell of trying to figure out writing: almost every great work comes about, at least in some part, by some writer telling everyone else to pound sand and going with her gut. But a lot of bad writing also comes from someone who refused to listen. The difference between a brilliant maverick and a stubborn hack might not always be that great.

And here's what really throws off your sensors with your own work

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
-Toni Morrison 

Yes, we all have to fight vanity. But there's something more fundamental at work. I write some stories about Ethiopian and Eritrean migrants because it's what moves me. I was inspired by my experience in the Marine Corps during a time when there weren't a whole lot of wars going on to write a story about a former Marine who feels like his manhood is invalidated by his own lack of a war record.

I wrote these stories because they came to me and I'd never read anything like them. I started thinking about the stories and thought, "I'd like to read that." So I wrote it.

One literary journal editor told a story about hopeful writer who'd been rejected by the journal over and over. Finally, the writer threw a fit and launched into an invective about how he couldn't believe the journal continued publishing the crap they put out and rejecting his work. The editor rightly wondered why the writer wanted to be published in the journal if he thought it was so full of crap.

I actually identify a little bit with the petulant would-be writer, though. Not that I think it makes any sense to be burning bridges yelling at editors. Editors aren't making money doing what they do. They don't derive joy from rejecting work. But I can understand the feeling that your story somehow seems to have a validity that nothing else you read holds. That's why you wanted to tell the story.

You're not overlooking the faults in your writing because you really think your writing is flawless. It's because with all those flaws, your story is still about something you connect with deeply. It's the story you have always wished someone would write, and so you wrote it--even if you didn't write it that well. It's going to seem to you to be better than it is just because it's the story you wanted to hear.

The kind of help we need as writers

The help we need, then, isn't the help that questions the validity of the stories we imagine. If we're wrong about what kinds of stories are worth telling, then we might as well quit writing altogether. Advice like "I just don't find a story of a homeless illegal immigrant compelling" is useless advice. You need help from someone who believes in your story, but just wants to help you tell it.

That can still mean massive revisions, even total gutting. When it becomes evident that this is necessary, I think my initial repulsion to the idea isn't vanity. It's more like when I realize that I've screwed up the assembly of some piece of Ikea furniture three hours into the project. I just can't deal with having to redo it.

When that happens, try sitting down on the backwards chair you've just put together for a minute and having a beer. You're allowed to be pissed. You just blew a whole Saturday on that. If it makes you feel better, take a sledgehammer to that chair, go back to Ikea, buy the exact same one, and put it together right some other time. Let it be a message to all the other Ikea furniture not to fuck with you.

The guy you need helping you is the one who will help you understand the instruction manual for the chair, not the guy who is going to tell you furniture from Ikea is tacky and cheap and a terrible idea.

Over time, if you never, ever manage to put anything together right, maybe it's time to accept that you are not meant to assemble Ikea furniture. But that takes a while to judge correctly. And it doesn't mean there is anything wrong with the idea of your chair in the first place--just that you might need to figure out a different way to see your dream of a chair come to life. 

The right way to lie

"Specific, definite, concrete, particular details--these are the life of fiction. Details (as every good liar knows) are the stuff of persuasiveness. Mary is sure that Ed forgot to pay the gas bill last Tuesday, but Ed says, "I know I went, because this old guy in a knit vest was in front of me in the line, and went on and on about his twin granddaughters"--and it is hard to refute a knit vest and twins even if the furnace doesn't work."

-Writing Fiction, Burroway et.al., 7th edition, pg 26

Most readers can probably be divided into those who love great sensory descriptions of scene, those who let their imaginations go with the details, and those who are happy enough just skipping over that stuff. I've been one of the second most of my life. I first noticed this tendency in myself when I was nine and reading Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series. He was describing his characters traveling through a woods, and try as I might to bend my imagination to the details Alexander wanted me to see, I could only see the woods behind my house. Even after the characters had traveled for days, I still had only moved them from one end of the woods to another. 

Later, in high school, I read Lewis and Tolkien. I got very badly stuck for two days once on the same two-page description of some outdoor scene. They used British terminology for topography, and in those days learning a term you didn't know required getting a dictionary or encyclopedia. I eventually just said to myself, "this is a mountain," and moved on. 

I guess I'm a Philistine with details that set a scene. Jhumpa Lahiri or Khaled Hosseini's pearls are trampled by swine like me. In the last few years, I've been better about appreciating scene, partly because I've tried to write it but mostly because I can now just push an unknown word in Kindle and get a quick definition. This helps keep me on track. It's also critical that a deepening sense of how to view scene like it were film, with all the possibilities of meaning available there, have made it more enjoyable to put in the effort to imagine what I'm supposed to imagine.

But it still doesn't come naturally to me. Here's the beginning of an early favorite story of mine:

A certain man had two sons. (What were their names? What did they look like? What were their favorite colors and subjects in school?) And the younger of them said to his father, "Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me" (What did the father do to gain his wealth? How did his sons feel about this occupation?) And he divided unto them his living. And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living. (What was his motivation for leaving? Did he plan to party his money away, or did it just work out that way? Did he justify his decisions to himself, or was he deliberately blocking the voice of reason in his head?)  

You get the idea. You can put together a fine story without a lot of details. Flash fiction (which I don't really like that much, but everyone swears it can be as powerful as its longer cousins) necessarily drops details in order to keep the word count under 1000 and still have something happen. 

I think there's a much deeper reason why I tend to be anti-details than just my own laziness or lack of spatial and artistic intelligence. The passage I started this post with says that details tend to hide a lie. But don't they also tip the skeptical among off that a lie is being told? If a student starts to tell a long story about how the homework didn't get done through no fault of his own, or if the employee begins to talk a long time on the phone about why she is calling off, the teacher or boss gets a tingly feelings that all is not well. It's the same in fiction. I hit a point where, after too many too close details, I start to call bullshit. Here is a totally unfair example of a passage I recently read and hated. It's from "Depth Perception" in Carve Magazine by Laura Gibson. There are a number of well-crafted details that I accepted and even enjoyed for some time:

-Sitting on an old milk pail between rows, he stopped for a moment, a clutch of pineapple weed in one hand..
- I sat up and leaned over the booth table and put my face close to Lou’s, inhaling his sawdust and wood smoke flecked with motor oil, a whiskey after-burner.


But then I get to this line:

-The bottoms of his boots smooth and worn, so thin near the balls of his feet he’d have to have them re-soled soon.

And I just felt that the story was bullshit and had a hard time going on emotionally. Her lead character was putting the corpse in the rig, but my willingness to follow the story stayed there in the bar. Why? It was one detail too many, and too fine a detail. Nobody notices things like that with that amount of detail. It leads me to wonder: who is the narrator? Is it a disembodied person seeing through one character's eyes? Is that why he can see better than the person herself? (Incidentally, I'm not at all calling this a bad story, or saying Gibson should have written it to my taste. I'm saying that this is a taste I have, and I find it offended often in 2014.)

Well, of course that is exactly what third person limited is. But muscular or fine details have a way of making that too clear to me, and ruining my ability to listen to the disembodied voice. It just announces itself too much when I need it to stay hidden. It's like realizing what eggs really are in the middle of eating an omelet.  It's too good of a lie, and it makes me feel uneasy about the whole prospect of listening to a lie for the next 15 minutes to 20 hours, depending on the length of the lie. 

Of course, there is a way around this for me. Tell me tons and tons of lies. Make your lies outrageous. Because then, it'll be clear to me that you're just spinning a yarn that's meant to make me enjoy myself, and I can forget about suspending disbelief. This can be done in fantasy, of course, but it can also be done with really self-conscious description. The Corrections comes to mind. I of course know that all the too-fine thoughts going on are all Franzen, but he's not trying to hide that, so I just go along with Franzen, and it turns out Franzen is a pretty entertaining liar.