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

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

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

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

Dream hangover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Devil and Judd Apatow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post I most regret making last year (and why I'm not sorry)

As I said yesterday, we've been watching a lot of streaming video the last few days to wait out the cold. Yesterday, we finally got sick enough of The Mindy Project in season four that we found something else to watch. The first thing we tried was the latest Dave Chapelle special. I don't know if he's the funniest comedian I've ever heard, but he's damn sure one of the most perceptive.

One of his bits was him recalling the words he'd said in the 72 hours after Trump was elected, and how those words were perceived and reported on by the media. He repeated a few jokes that he'd done in New York the day Trump was elected, then talked about how a reporter had interpreted what he'd said to mean he supported Trump. He then talked about his appearance on Saturday Night Live right after the election and how he'd come up with something rather spur of the moment, something like "we'll give him a chance if he gives us a chance." Chapelle said he wished he hadn't said that. He credited his comments to the elephant effect, the way it's difficult to talk accurately about something until you've had enough distance from it.

I'm familiar with saying the wrong thing

We've all experienced this, of course. Anyone with the capacity to be the least bit honest and introspective will occasionally look back on the things he's said and feel sheepish about them. In 2017, I wrote a fair bit about race. That's because I feel like that urban blight, which affects black Americans disproportionately, is the most pressing issue America has to face. It's also because I feel that as much as conservatives miss the boat by promoting a bootstraps philosophy too much, at the same time, a lot of liberal rhetoric on race is also inaccurate and not helpful. And the whole conversation we're having about race isn't leading to improvement; being properly woke isn't going to fix the heat in Baltimore City Schools. That requires boring, long-term work to improve a system of acquisitions and accounting. The way we are talking about race now in America lacks the seriousness necessary to accomplish goals like these. 

I still believe that, and I think it's necessary for thoughtful people to be bold in shattering the icons held dear by those who seem to be dominating a lot of the conversation. But that doesn't mean I feel like I got everything right that I've said.

What I messed up last year

I now wish I'd either not posted this piece on football players not standing for the National Anthem or written it differently. At the time I was thinking something like this: Although I agree that it's shameful how not everyone is able to share in the full bounty of America's wealth, I am also worried that we are fracturing enough as a country that if we aren't careful, we will soon have a lot less wealth to figure out how to distribute. Democracies can be fragile, and if we lose all signifiers that bind us together, the whole thing can fall apart. 

However, looking back on it, even a moderate call to suggest players might want to rethink kneeling overlooked something far more important. Colin Kaepernick is not a perfect person. It was stupid of him to wear those pig socks. But he's a brave person and I admire him. The easy, cowardly, approach would have been to just stand for the anthem without meaning it. He gave up a ton of money to take a stand for something he believed in. 

The fact that enough people--mostly white--were incensed enough by his very mild kneeling protests that they terrified NFL owners into not hiring a capable quarterback says an awful lot about America. Mostly, it says Kaepernick was not wrong to call out systemic racism. 

It is really difficult to stand on a stage--or in front of a computer--and say something that is creative, audacious, and also true. But that's what any artist or thinker has to do. To do that, you have to be fearless. Chapelle noted in his special that he doesn't ever feel bad for anything he says on stage. I'm not by nature the kind of person who can really say I don't give a damn what others think and mean it, but I am resolved to try to become more of that kind of person. The best way to become more fearless is to keep trying to speak the truth as I see it. As I do that, I'll make mistakes. I will try to learn from them and do better, but I'm really going to try not to feel bad about them.

You can't please everyone, so you might as well please yourself (if only you weren't an asshole who's never satisfied)

Even if you do say everything right, someone can always take it the wrong way. Truth shares a property line with falsehood, and the minute you start trying to talk about the part of truth's domain that isn't dead in the center, others will start telling you that you're headed over the line. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes from a perspective of wanting young black people to not feel that the deplorable condition of many of their peers is their own fault, so he writes about systemic injustice, both historic and present. Some of his critics immediately counter that this narrative removes agency from young black people, that by focusing on the obstacles before them, Coates makes it impossible for them to overcome those obstacles. Because Coates is trying to put up a gazeebo on the part of the lawn where few people go, some are saying he must have gone over the property line. But he hasn't, for the most part. He wants to use the full value of truth's property, which means going up to the edge. That doesn't mean he's a bad neighbor. 

And just because I am willing to criticize liberal racial rhetoric doesn't mean I am siding with bootstraps-type conservatives. The Dudley Randall poem we all learned in school, the one pitting Booker T.'s pragmatism against W.E.B. Dubois's idealism, is sort of a false dichotomy. We need both. We need the academy and the trade school. We need political activism and economic activism. That's the point I am usually trying to make when I write about race. 

I am resolving to continue to be as bold as I can be as a writer. But I also have to continue to look at the elephant, to see if anything has changed as I've (hopefully) gained perspective in life. For me, I think I'll always face a temptation to try for the overly clever interpretation. It's a pitfall for a lot of academics, artists, and public intellectuals. That's what I'll resolve to try to guard in myself. 

But I'm not sorry for what I've said. I'm just going to keep trying to do better. 

Having conversations about my own book

One of the reasons I made the financially disastrous decision to go to graduate school was just the anticipation of how enjoyable it would be to talk about books with other people who also loved them. It partially lived up to that hype, although I'd say the best conversations I've had about stories have been outside of graduate school. In any event, a deep talk about a story and how it changes the interpretation of what life means is one of life's greatest pleasures.

I've been sort of uninterested in my own book since it came out on Amazon in July. There are a couple of reasons why: I've found typos and other little errata in the book since that are embarrassing (even though I knew there would be mistakes). I decided I was going to forego paying for a review, and instead hope that I could convince a few reviewers to talk about the book for free, but I think I've failed, and I'm going to end up with not one single review from an independent book review site. Which is just part of the learning process for me, but is still kind of a disappointment.

Even though I wrote many times prior to the book coming out that I knew I'd be lucky if 200 copies were sold, it's still been disappointing to see how few copies have sold. I guess partly that's a blow to my ego. It makes me feel like my big moment of finally getting a book published is deeply invalidated by it mostly only selling to people who know me. (It hasn't helped that I've failed at doing the publicity things I needed to do, like get a review. Also, even the publisher has had issues: they can't find the guy who does the website, and so the web page hasn't been updated in ages. So what publicity I would have had from them has been null.)

Beyond ego, though, there's a personal reason I'm so disappointed by low sales. I like talking about books, and the thought of talking about the stories that meant so much to me I went to the trouble of writing them down is really why I started writing in the first place.

I have, it so happens, had a couple of conversations about the stories in the book. They were with my brother and my friend, so this wasn't that magical moment of hearing from a stranger in Duluth about how I'd touched their life and blown their mind. But both conversations still lived up to the hype I'd built up.

It helps that my brother and my friend are really good readers. My older brother is a lawyer; my friend is a recent Harvard graduate. They asked good questions, they saw things I didn't see, they got what I was going for in places.

My friend said he felt like many of the characters were resigned to their fate at the ends of the stories. I felt like if anything bound the stories together, it was that every main character found a way to snatch some kind of agency from fate, which is the opposite of being resigned. So we talked about that for a while. It didn't matter that we saw things differently; it was thrilling just to be talking about people who had only existed inside my head at one point in time. And at some point in the conversation, the feeling of how remarkable it was that these were my stories we were talking about just about knocked me over.

I'm likely to still feel a fair amount of disappointment about the book in the next few months. Again, this is going to happen no matter how much I've steeled myself for disappointment. But man, these little moments really do kind of make me think that writing isn't a total waste of time.
  

In which I take one of those 60's ladies magazine-style quizzes for the edifiation of all

I remember back when the highly unscientific quiz posing as a very scientific quiz was a staple of the ladies' magazines by the checkouts in stores. It seems to me a couple of 70's or 80's sitcoms used the prop of a wife taking one of those quizzes (usually about her relationship to her lout of a husband) and seeing how bad she had it as a way to drive the plot for 22 minutes. In that spirit, I now publicly take the 12-question quiz posed by former Bartleby Snopes editor Nathaniel Tower, "12 Signs You Aren't Really a Writer." May it lead to as much whimsy as a classic episode of The Ropers.  

Here we go:

1. You always force yourself to think about ideas to write about
 

What Nathaniel says: It’s fine to think about writing, but take a fucking break once in a while. If you’re always forcing it, then it isn’t real. Real writers don’t spend every waking moment straining to find things to write about.

Jake's answer:  The last sign in this survey is going to suggest the opposite: that if you think you don't have enough experiences for a story, you're lost. Writing primers are always saying that everybody has enough experience for a story, that a story can come from any little scrap of life. This is one of those times when one can utter two similar phrases, but only one is true. "A story can come from anywhere" is true, but "A story can come from everywhere" isn't. Maybe one sign of maturation is the ability to let some ideas go if they don't seem to be yielding anything after a while.

Conclusion: Point me. 1-0 I'm a writer.

2. Criticism hurts your feelings

What Nathaniel says: Sure, a bad review of what you thought was your career-defining work will get you down, but if you can’t take any criticism, then you aren’t really a writer. This is especially true of constructive criticism. If you’re the type who thinks every little critique is an attack on your skills as a writer, then a writer you are not.

What Jake says: I take criticism very hard. It helps that now I'm a reader who helps decide what we keep and don't keep. I realize the tough odds I'm up against and how often very good stories get rejected. But that doesn't always make me feel better. Sometimes, it makes me feel worse to think that I'm just another guy on the scrap-heap of almost-good-enough. I'm not entirely certain that some level of dislike for criticism can't be good. Michael Jordan seemed to still be carrying around some bitterness about rejection from his younger years in his Hall of Fame acceptance speech. He did okay. It might have helped fuel his fire. But fine, I do still get down when I get a rejection, I'll take the hit on this one.

Conclusion: Point to "not a writer." 1-1.

3. Rejection gets you down every time.

What Nathaniel says: Get over yourself. Rejection is part of being a writer. Sure, some rejections sting more than others, but you eventually just have to accept it. When real writers are rejected, they do one of two things: submit somewhere else or revise their shitty writing. Oh, and maybe drink themselves into oblivion.

What Jake says: Although, upon the advice of a good friend, I've begun to drink more than I used to, I still don't like to drink that much. So I'm left to feel the sting every time. It doesn't hurt as bad as it used to every time, but it does still hurt.

Conclusion: Point "not a writer." I'm down 1-2.

4. You think you’ll lose it if you don’t use it

What Nathaniel says: It’s fine to write every day. It’s cool if you want to set aside time to write or have daily word count goals. But if going a day without writing makes you feel like you’re going to lose something as a writer, then you aren’t a writer. It’s like riding a bike. You don’t forget how to write because you go a day or two without doing it.

What Jake says: I don't write every day, nor have I ever felt I should. I do start to get antsy if I haven't written for a while, but this is probably one of those need-to-find-a-balance things. You can't be always writing, but you do need to write a lot to be a writer.

Conclusion: Point me. 2-2.

5. You don’t recognize your own bad writing

 What Nathaniel says: Do you think everything you write is good? You’re definitely not a writer. Even great writers have a fair amount of shit in their repertoire. The best writers in the world publish less than 25% of what they write.

What Jake says: Let's say I'm "in development" on this.

Conclusion: A draw. Still 2-2.

6. You think everything you write is bad

Flipside of the last one, which means this is a draw, too. I have days when I think I'm brilliant, and days when I think I should have been a locksmith.

Still 2-2.

7. You’ve never made any money off your writing

 What Nathaniel says:You don’t have to make a living off writing in order to be a writer, but if you’ve never made any money, then you aren’t a writer (yet). Especially in today’s world where there are so many opportunities to make a few bucks here and there as a writer (hell, self-publish on Amazon and sell one copy to your mom). Shooting free throws in the driveway a few days a week doesn’t make you a basketball player, does it? Oh, one more thing. Just because you have made some money off your writing doesn’t mean you are a writer. Getting called in to sub for your cousin with a broken arm in a pick-up basketball game on the playground doesn’t make you a basketball player either.

What Jake says: I find this criteria confusing. Is it enough to have sold a self-published book to my mom or not? I do have a job where writing in a very boring, methodical way is a big part of what I do. Does that count? If not, I once made $20 on a poem, and I was offered $25 for my story that won Story of the Month at Bartleby Snopes. I gave the money back as part of my "I support the journals that support me" pledge. 

One could argue that in a very literal sense, shooting baskets does make one a basketball player. 

Conclusion: I don't know. Still 2-2.

8. People often tell you that you can’t make it as a writer

  What Nathaniel says: I often hear people tell these horror stories about all the people who’ve told them they’ll never cut it as a writer. Not to be an ass, but no one has ever told me that. If you’re hearing this all the time, then you probably aren’t a very good writer. Hey, if it doesn’t quack like a duck…

What Jake says: I don't know that people have an opinion one way or another about this. I happen to believe I have very little chance of ever supporting myself fully as a writer. That wouldn't make me different from the vast majority of writers out there who need to moonlight.

Conclusion: I don't know. Still 2-2, now with four draws.

9. You get really mad about other people’s book deals

 What Nathaniel says: Yeah, it probably ticks you off a little that 50 Shades of Grey sold millions of copies even though it’s widely considered to be utter shit. But some shit sells. If you get really mad about everyone else’s book deal, then you aren’t a real writer. Instead, you should spend more time figuring out what actually sells.

 What Jake says: "Why do the wicked still live, Continue on, also become very powerful?" Job asked. It's an ancient and respected impulse to be angry about the success of those who don't deserve it. With literature fighting a tough battle to stay alive, it is sad to see the few mega-hits go to books that are just terrible. You know the people who bought that book were often buying the only book they were going to buy that year. 

Conclusion: Fine. Guilty. 2-3 against me. 

10. You create conspiracy theories about publishing

I can leave out Nathaniel's explanation. I harbor no such conspiracy theories. What publishers like is such a mystery to me, I wouldn't pretend to think I could explain it with a theory.

Conclusion: Point me. 3-3.

11. You spend more time wondering if you’re a writer than actually writing

Nathaniel says: Writers write. If you’re always sitting around thinking, “Oh, woe is me, am I writer?” then you aren’’t a writer. Just shut the fuck up and write already.

Jake says: Ouch. This blog started out pretty much as a place to wonder if I was really a writer. It still is, in some part. But I have written more actual fiction since I started this blog than I have blogged about my doubt about it all.

Conclusion: I have 9 stories out to editors at 20 different journals right now. Point me. I'm up 4-3.

12. You think you’ve never had an experience worth writing about

What Nathaniel says: No matter what type of writer you are, you need some real life experiences. Poets, fiction writers, journalists. Everyone has to be able to draw from something. But guess what? Even sitting in your room without doing anything for five years is an experience you can write about. If you can’t find any inspiration from your own life, then you aren’t a writer.

Jake says: This is the flip side of "sign" #1. I do think I've had enough experiences to write about. But then again, I've been a lot of places and done a lot of things. If there is something that makes me violate "sign" #9, it's that a lot of what I read seems to come from people with rather thin experiences.

Conclusion: Point me, and I win 5-3. I'm a writer. Barely. I think the fact that I have a hard time with failure doesn't mean I'm not a writer, it just means I have temperamental traits which make writing challenging for me. 

I think if you know that you are going to be undone by rejection, and you are, in fact, undone over and over by rejection, and you keep writing anyway knowing you will keep facing that rejection, you might be a writer.

failures as a human and putting it in writing

Writers are supposed to be like comedians in that anything bad that happens to us or any shortcomings in ourselves are supposed to be seen as almost fortunate: they give us something to write about. Louis CK does a bit about how he's just waiting for his kids to get old so he can commit suicide, but in the meantime, he's masturbating a lot and letting his body go, and we laugh because it's really funny. It is. It shouldn't be, but it is.

I've quoted that line by Charles Baxter about hell being story-friendly so often by now the four people who read this blog are probably sick of hearing it from me, but writers are told that when we see weakness in ourselves, we should see it as grist for writing. It's a fortunate failure, allowing us to convert our personal failures into something universal. It's like we got caught eating candy in class, and the teacher said "Did you bring enough for everyone?" only to find that by some Jesus-and-the-fishes miracle, you actually do have enough for everyone.

I guess hooray for everyone, then, except that it still leaves you, the writer, failing as a human. I'm thinking of a specific example. Last night, I was at a small party. A soiree, really. Not that many people, but all really smart people. Some I was meeting for the first time in person, but I knew them from correspondence as highly intelligent folks.

I'm not a big drinker, but I drank a lot. That's not the failure part. The failure is that one guy crossed over, in my mind, the line between funny comments about race (and maybe gender, too? I can't remember. I was kind of drunk) and stuff he just shouldn't have said. I'm of the opinion that you should be able to say whatever's on your mind about race, but you should always say something you would say in mixed company. If you'd say that line with someone of that race in the room, then by all means, say it, however edgy it might be. If it fails, I'll support you for the effort. But we were a gathering of privileged white males.

It wasn't close to the most prejudiced line I've heard, but I think it was out of bounds. But I really just failed to speak up. There were a lot of reasons. I was intimidated as (in my mind) the dumbest guy in the room, I was having a good time and didn't want to bring it all down, it wasn't my house or party, and I didn't want to ruin it for the host, and probably some good old-fashioned moral cowardice. Also, I was drunk. Don't know if I mentioned that. He was probably drunk, too.

My lame attempt to shame him was to bring up my close relationship with specific black people. I think I was trying to intimate, rather than explicitly say, "Hey, man. That last bit wasn't cool." I think my point eluded him. Not surprising; I wasn't anywhere near direct enough.

A fiction workshop would be happy about this and want me to get to work immediately on some kind of vignette about it. The four men, the cigar smoke, the pool table, the one word that made my head snap. (Not THE word.) I should show by actions, dialogue, dress, demeanor, and so on why person one felt it was okay to say such a thing, and why person two (me) didn't lodge the proper protest.

On the one hand, this makes sense to do this. This is the kind of role playing people in ethics training do all the time. You're the dumbest in a group of four people at someone else's party, and a guy you've just met, who is enjoying telling a pretty good story, gratuitously inserts an ethnic off-color line. What do you do?

The problem with these scenarios is that nobody really has time in real life to think of what to do. What's the perfect thing to say? How do I convey that this person has violated what I think is decency in his speech without moralizing? How can I be convincing? I don't want to just lodge a protest to make my own linguistic predilections clear. I want to convert. I can't stop being an evangelical, I guess.

Furthermore, I wonder if writers actually become better people by writing about their failures. If a comedian continues to get laughs from her screw-ups, isn't it a temptation to keep screwing up? You could even justify it as "staying true to who you are" or some bullshit. Amy Schumer's character in Trainwreck finally gets her shit together, but that's the moment when we stop watching the movie. What if the movie continued on from that great final scene, but she's not as interesting from then on? This is what I think the temptation is in writing: to embrace too deeply your own flaws, rather than set to fixing them, because they give you grist for stories.

Ultimately, I don't want to be someone who fails to be brave on a thousand small moral battlegrounds. I want to be someone who does the right thing. Does writing help me to get there? Or does it just offer me a means to forgive myself, or to fix my flaws by proxy rather than doing the hard work of fixing myself for real?

So that this blog entry doesn't become the only thing I do about last night, I'm going to at least e-mail him about what I thought. It's not much, but it's better than letting it go forever.

story sins

While writing "Infection," it was easy for me to imagine a reader finding misogynistic notes. A woman damages a man's sexual organ, symbol of his manhood, through her own psychosis-fueled philandering. Hemingway, who I think everyone finds some misogyny in, had something of an obsession with men being cuckolded and the loss of a man's vital masculine force through a woman's influence. I could see analogies being drawn.
I felt like there were other elements in the story that offset this effect. Evie injured Steve's phallus, but Maria helped to restore it, literally and figuratively. She didn't do this because it's the woman's role to restore a man's confidence in his sexual prowess, she did it because it made her happy to do it. That's one reason I chose not to make her too "feminine" looking according to contemporary expectations of what that means. She is boxy and strong rather than skinny at all costs. Her body is developed according to her own notions of what she wants out of it.

There isn't a whole ton of Steve and Evie's backstory, which was one of the things Blake Kimzey, my literary service editor, critiqued. We know they were in an evangelical church together as teens in Ohio, that they didn't fit in with the church kids, that Steve left for Chicago to play blues music and Evie followed him sometime thereafter. Since Steve's final act is a rejection of the opportunity to move forward that life offered him, we can assume that maybe Steve wasn't a completely innocent victim of Evie.

So I thought there was enough there that this wasn't a hate anthem to loose women who break your heart and give your herpes. There wasn't an underlying resentment of the female. But it wouldn't have surprised me if an editor at a journal or a reader of a literary journal, someone with a background in analyzing literature but not a whole lot of time to devote to analyzing one story, found it in there. Nobody sits down to read a story, turns off all electronic devices, eliminates distractions and says "I will now fully devote myself to giving this story my fullest, most thoughtful attention, giving the story the benefit of the doubt in every circumstance." It would be easy for a distracted reader, even a good one, to find that a woman gave a man V.D. and think "this is some woman-hating shit like in Hemingway" and move on. Worse yet, you might get a sympathetic editor to print it, and then a critic decides to treat the perceived misogyny at length. You've still got the piece itself to defend yourself, and all those parts you think mitigate that one fact in your story, but now the critic has already influenced the way others will read it. You've lost control of the meaning of your own words.

Every writer faces this. Blake told me to quit worrying about rejection from editors and other things I can't control. But I find it extremely frightening that something I wrote might be described with such an awful word as "misogyny." Worse yet, that a critic would jump the tracks of examining the intent of the text and head right into the intent of the writer, calling me, personally, a misogynist. You have to write about dangerous stuff and walk a line in writing, or else there's no point to it. But in a society that is getting worse and worse at reading, it's a guarantee that you'll be misunderstood. I can't imagine how comics write jokes about race or child molestation or other awful things and then go out in front of a crowd where someone is likely to not see how the joke is funny. Worse, to have the joke fail because it really isn't funny, and it actually does deserve to be called a racist joke or a sick joke. You're up there on stage. It's only seconds before they go from saying racist joke to racist comedian. You didn't mean it that way, but all the audience has to go on is the joke they just heard.

If you write, you will either say something you didn't exactly mean, or you will be misread, or both. Probably both, and probably every time. It will take exactly one reader to have someone see something in what you wrote that you didn't intend. Blake gave this story a very thorough reading, but when he listed themes he saw, this was his list: money, class, art, charity, love, regret, and a host of others. I didn't think money or class were at play at all. I more or less gave American capitalism a pass in this story; Steve is poor because he's a slacker, not--as thousands in Chicago who don't have a voice in "Infection,"--because the economic system has let them down. When Steve wants to improve his position in life, a job is there for him, and he does. I was paying Blake to read the story well, and he did, but he still didn't see in it what I hoped he'd see. If I had to give a theme to the story, I'd say it was something like "People have the ability to spread both faith and doubt to other people, like an infection."

A lurking commenter on this site once told me to write for myself, let others come along if they wish, and assume the rest are just too dumb to get it. This attitude seemed like hubris to me--if one of us is wrong, why should I always assume it's the other guy? But there might also be a sort of wisdom in this. Defensive backs in football are known for being cocky. Even after giving up a big catch, they will still talk like they are unbeatable. There's a reason for that. If you act for a second like you can be beaten, you're already beaten. So you have to act like you're the best. Give up a touchdown, whatever. It wasn't your fault. The receiver pushed off. He'll never do it to you again.

But I'll bet that defensive back still looks at the film to see what he did wrong. He'll learn from it. He'll practice to never make that mistake again. He'll build it into his muscle memory, but erase it from his conscious memory. He has to play fearlessly, and he will, because he's never been beaten on the next play.

So after a year of writing followed by a year of not writing, I'm ready for writing again. One purpose of this blog was to work out doubts about whether writing was even worth the trouble. It's served its purpose. My next story will be the best fucking thing you've ever seen.  



  



    

It is possible I do not really write "literary fiction"

I have staunchly resisted the conclusion in the title for a long time. I have a Master's degree in English (not "English Light"--I specifically sought an M.A. instead of an M.F.A. because I took literature so effing seriously). I haven't read every work in the canon, but I've read a lot. I scored high on my Lit GRE. I know freaking THEORY, for Christ's sake. I must write lit fic.

If we're just using the definition of lit fic provided by the almighty and infallible Wikipedia, then maybe I am writing--or trying to write--literary fiction:

Literary fiction is a term principally used for certain fictional works that hold literary merit. In other words, they are works that offer deliberate commentary on larger social issues, political issues, or focus on the individual to explore some part of the human condition.

I hope that what I'm writing is doing that. But then again, a lot of works that aren't really thought to be "literary fiction" do that. There's no shortage of political and social commentary in Harry Potter, as well as exploration of the individual against a (sometimes surprisingly dark) human reality.

In practice, "literary fiction" isn't synonymous with "good fiction," and this is where I have been kidding myself. Writing is considered lit fic if it tends, in an oft-quoted line from James Joyce, to not simply be "about" something, but to be the thing itself. It does not simply use words to make a story that is about something, the words themselves, and the form they take, becomes the story.

Not all that is called lit fic is Ulysses, of course. One literary agent wrote about a "sweet spot" that publishing companies like it lit fic, a sweet spot that has at least enough of a plot to keep readers reading, but also has enough smart stuff to make it different from reading pulp. It's meant to appeal to good readers.

By any standard, I am a good reader, but I wanted nothing to do with writing for a long time. One reason, I think, was because I read so much literary fiction in college, and felt that #1: something must be wrong with me, because I didn't like a lot of it and didn't even "get" some of it, and #2: I couldn't write like that.

I started writing again after five years of reading "young adult" literature with my son. We've read a lot of the books you'd expect (although he's very young for some of these, not being ten yet). Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, The Hunger Games, the Tolkien canon, Lemony Snicket, that kind of thing. None of these are great books in the sense that they do anything new and unusual with language. In fact, in some of them, the language is a little bit unimaginative, and in the Percy Jackson series, it's just pretty bad. But that doesn't mean there wasn't greatness in these books. There was "a focus on the individual to explore some larger part of the human condition."

I try to write stories that are full of merit and maybe greatness, but I am not a virtuoso with language. Not that I can't hit a beautiful note here and there, but I'm kind of a puncher with words rather than a graceful pugilist. I take a Hercules approach--I prefer to progress by brute force when I can, and I only use my head if I get to a point where I have to.

But I wonder if trying to get published by journals that specialize in "literary fiction" isn't a losing proposal for me. I'm not sure I write it. I might be doing myself a disservice by insisting that because I think what I write is "good" that it is "literary fiction."

Accepting this would greatly alter my "game plan." I've been trying to publish short stories with the hope of accruing enough credits to find someone to take a novel. But if I drop the whole idea of writing literary fiction, I could skip right ahead to the novel. Commercial fiction doesn't require a long understudy period in short fiction for journals like lit fic does. 

When I took up writing again, the short story was a way to improve how I wrote and to gain credits. I think I have done enough of the first that if I really am not writing lit fic, I could just stop caring about the second.

Counterpoint: Readers are sometimes great

In my last post, I wrote about how readers can be terrible. They can, and this has some ramifications for writers. First, you have to realize how easily you can lose a reader. That doesn't mean you've got to always spoon-feed or hit them with pap or otherwise try to compete with less demanding forms of entertainment. That's likely to end badly for you: cat videos will always be more cat-video than you can ever achieve, and you'll just earn contempt for trying. Fiction isn't something people read primarily because they have to. They do it for enjoyment, and people enjoy being challenged a little bit. Just don't take that willingness to take on a challenge for granted, or push it beyond its natural limits.

Secondly, you can maybe sometime give yourself a break as a writer if you think you wrote something great and you got feedback that perplexes you. It's possible that your reader was distracted, in a weird mood, or just isn't a very good reader. That doesn't mean you can just dismiss all advice you don't want to hear because the guy's a knucklehead anyway. But it's a factor worth considering.

All that truth about readers often being ass hats remembered, though, sometimes readers really are pretty great. I mentioned two stories I gave up on early on for bad reasons. I eventually finished both stories. It just took me a while to work up to them. Readers are people, which means they will often (most of the time?) confound you with their thickness, but they'll also knock you over with their perceptiveness. They'll make you feel grateful for the loving, giving way their read your stuff.

I mention this because I don't think it's helpful when actually writing to think too much about the asshattery of readers. If you worry too much about it, you'll never write. Instead, picture a really good reader (maybe you), and write to that person. Don't exhaust your good reader more than you would someone you really like, unless you happen to like being exhausted. But write with confidence and certainty that your work will find a good reader if you accomplish your goal in execution.

Considering what twats readers can be is something you should only do after you've written and gotten feedback either pre or post-publication. Consider well what you hear from a reader, and be willing to be humble enough to make changes.  But also take everything with skepticism. A lot of people just comment to have something to say. Many people weren't paying much attention when they read. (Obviously, I think almost everyone in my college workshops fits this description. They were just overworked, and probably more interested in getting, rather than giving, good feedback.)