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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

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.

Breaking the rules well: starting near the end of a story and when to really start at the beginning

Like a lot of writers, when I read advice on how to write well, my first instinct is to look for counter-examples that negate the advice. Anyone who is drawn to do creative work probably feels this instinct. We don't like to be told you can or can't do something, even if it's friendly advice from another creative type. This is probably a healthy instinct; every great work probably breaks some rule or another. But anytime a rule is broken, it probably does so following the logic of some other rule. The "rules," in fact, are nothing more than generalizations drawn from inductive reasoning from thousands of stories that worked.

On the one hand, if you could write a great story from merely following a list of rules, everyone would do it. You need to be able to show readers something they've never seen before by breaking the rules in the right way. On the other hand, if you've written a story and it doesn't have anything in common with any story anyone has ever cared about, you might need to ask yourself if you haven't broken the rules in a bad way.

One rule that comes to mind is the one best expressed by Kurt Vonnegut: start as close to the end as possible. Vonnegut himself followed this in a lot of his novels by having a narrator write to us from the perspective of someone who is already at the end. The narrator will drop hints throughout the novel of what the end is. The world has ended, and I'm writing to you from the future of this novel, for example.

I think the standard literary short story probably should follow the "start near the end" advice most of the time. Let's say you have some character in mind who grew up with a hard-knock life. He never knew his daddy and his mama never loved him. He discovered he was good at math by running numbers for a local mob boss. A kind-hearted teacher realized his gifts and got him a scholarship. But on the night before he leaves for Yale, he accidentally runs over the mob bosses's kid with his car. Nobody saw the accident. He can leave and nobody will ever know it was him. He has to decide, right there in the rain and in the dark of night somewhere, what he will do.

You start that story near the moment your hero hits the kid with his car, not back in his childhood. You can fill in the details of his past life from how your hero reacts to hitting the kid. His thoughts and actions will fill in the details for the reader so the reader knows all the stakes involved.

Different from "write the story with the end in mind"

"Start the story near the end" isn't the same as the principle, advocated by some writing advisers, of writing the whole story with the end in mind. This separate advice has to do with plotting throughout the story, not deciding where to begin. It is simply the idea that everything in your story should contribute to the eventual end. Even though most writers of "serious" fiction now eschew this idea, and advocate writing without pre-determining the end, I think it's still possible to let the end "just happen" on its own and still write with an eye toward the end of the story. This comes about through editing and revising the draft once an early version has shown you the way to the end. Dream, then draft.

But that's not what I'm talking about when I mean start your story near the end. I mean pick the spot where the crux is. Look at the entire arc of your character's life. Figure out what this story is about and start the story right at the crucial moment. Don't start "Bartleby the Scrivener" with the boss's decision to go into record keeping as a profession. Don't start "Gift of the Magi" with Jim and Della falling in love and getting married.

When don't you start near the end, then?

The epic seems to be a place where you should ignore the rule about beginning near the end. In an epic, you really want to start back at the beginning somewhere. Tolkien doesn't start Lord of the Rings with Frodo deciding whether to drop the ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Game of Thrones begins with a scouting party that picks up the first clues of a coming doom that will take 4,000 pages to fully materialize.

Reader expectations in the epic seem to be that they're going to get a long story, one that goes more or less in straight chronological fashion, and that it's going to give us a pretty complete timeline as it happens.

Of course, that still doesn't mean you start at the actual beginning. Tolkien had a world plotted out back to the creation, but he doesn't start the story of Frodo and the ring with the Valar singing Arda into existence. Martin also has a long history in his world that pre-dates the Game of Thrones series, but he still is focusing that series on a part of the timeline of his world that makes sense for that individual story.

I've argued that Justin Cronin's The Passage started too early; we spend over 200 pages seeing how the vampire apocalypse came, then another 500 pages watching as characters a hundred years in the future re-learned the whole history. Obviously, since the book did very well and millions of readers love, it, most people disagree with me, but the point is that it is possible, even in an epic, to start too early.

Limits to the rules and using your intuition

There isn't any rule for how to determine the exact correct point at which to begin a story, which should make fellow rule-breakers happy. Whether you're writing a tight short story with expectations that we are starting near the climax, or writing a fantasy series with expectations of hundreds of pages of world-building, there is a point that is too early to begin, and a point that is too late. You're going to have to use your own intuition to feel out where the sweet spot is. It is helpful, though, just to have the issue raised to your consciousness, to mull it over while thinking of some of your favorite stories or reading new stories in the future. What makes this the right place to begin? Is this similar to a story I want to write, and should I begin in a similar place in it?

A diverting exercise to try sometime is to take a story you love and imagine it beginning somewhere else. If it did, how would you still include everything in it that needs to be there? Is it now too difficult to tell the story, because you need to rely too much on flashbacks? Are you taken out of the moment too much? Then, try it with your own stories. Sometimes, you might find by starting it somewhere else that you've actually improved the sense of urgency within it.

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.

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.

how to be lazy as a writer (and still write a decent story)

Before I get into all the things "wrong" with the short story "Long Tom Lookout" by Nicole Cullen, which was included in the 2014 Best American Short Stories collection and is therefore, presumably, a exemplar of the best of the species, the tl;dr is actually this: This is a pretty good story, in spite of how its mechanics fall back on what I will argue are modern literary fiction conventions. I want to make two points by this:

1) Literary fiction is no different from any other kind of fiction. There are expectations and a kind of standard for the field. Some writers break out from this, but you can follow the pattern--sometimes without any innovation at all--and make readers believe you have succeeded in the genre.
2) There's nothing wrong with this. All genres are capable of providing life-changing imaginative connections even when being genre-conventional. Plot, theme, and characterization can make up for the lack of innovation in style and language for a writer.

What are these conventions that I see in Cullen?

1) Listing, often in triples, the things that a character notices as a way to establish scene
2) Highly specific nouns that most people would not really know the names of as a way to establish scene.

"Sin" #1:

When I'm reading a story, particularly a story in third-person limited, I am often distracted when there is a tone of narration going on that seems at odds with the character's POV the narration is providing. A third-person limited POV should give us only what a character can see, touch, taste, think, feel, etc. It is okay for the narrator to interpret for the audience, even to do so with thoughts that the character herself could not verbalize, e.g. "Monica was, in short, getting to that point in her relationship when she would start to invent reasons why the relationship would not work out." This is fine, and doesn't interrupt my enjoyment of the story. But when the author (not just the narrator) seemingly takes over the sensory apparatus of a character and uses the character's eyes, nose, and ears to sense what the author wants to sense, I want to call foul. Examples from "Long Tom Lookout":

- The headlights flood an irrigation canal black with water, a jack fence, and the beginnings of a field.
-The last few days on the road have been an experiment in cause and effect—the boy’s inability to communicate, his self-destructive behavior, his obsession with maps.
-...she thinks back to the rare find of a buried railroad tie, the smell of wet sagebrush, her father bending to touch the pink of a bitterroot flower.
-Nine years have passed and now she’s back with sixty-four dollars in cash, a truck in her husband’s name, and a boy that isn’t hers
-She passes a Wonder Bread truck then a flatbed hauling hay bales and two barking dogs. On the hillside above town, houses begin to wake.
-...the property has gone steadily downhill: warped cedar shingles, rusted wrought-iron fence, flowerbeds usurped by star thistle.
-Her mother stands in the side yard, dressed in a mud-hemmed housecoat and muck boots, throwing feed to the chickens.

I could go on (and on and on), but since all of these examples are within the first 750 words of the story, I think that will suffice. Oh, fuck it, let's do one more:

-Through the grain of the screen Lauren sees a woman impossible to please—dirt-caked knuckles and a gray braid. Glasses hang from a gold chain around her neck.

I included that last one because it looked for a moment like there would only be two things the narrator picked from Lauren's POV to show the reader, but then...BLAMMO!! The third was just waiting in another sentence. These examples are all before Lauren and her son get out of the car to meet her mother, which is when the action really starts.

Why do I have such a critique hard-on for picking out these tripled scene-setters? (To be fair, the second one in the list is more of a catalog of things that have happened than things in the scenery.)  Well, I don't really think this is such a great sin, to be honest. Writers are told to present "details that matter," and I suppose most of these details reasonably set tone and Lauren's interior landscape.

 I guess one problem I always have in a 3d person limited PoV is the leakage between what is the PoV character's observation and what is the author interpreting those observations for the reader. This very much kills the magic of the story for me on many occasions. I realize that the narrator's voice isn't the same as the character's voice, unless we're in first person. But when the narrator continues to pick up on things in the main character's field of view in triplets, it starts to take over the attention of the reader in a way I don't think is intended. The narrator can pick and chose from what the character has available to inform the story, but the narrator can't move too far away from the voice of the character without being a character him/herself. When Cullen writes "Through the grain of the screen Lauren sees a woman impossible to please," that's Lauren's thoughts that the narrator is giving us access to. Presumably, then, all of these sensory details are things that Lauren perceives. And if she perceives everything in groups of three, we have to wonder if this character has some kind of OCD.

Three is a satisfying number. If the character sees three things, we feel like this is a more authentic description somehow. But falling back on it so much that even I noticed it is going to the well a lot.


"Sin" #2

I don't know who started the tendency to go crazy with Google and look up the exact words for things (or find things you didn't know about and put them in your story), but I see this everywhere. I don't believe Lauren would know pyrite from granite. Or what balsamwood, cheatgrass, and Canada thistle are by sight. But all these things appear in the description. To me, this is a break in the direction of third person omniscient, to a narrator who is able to break the surly bonds of the character and be a lot smarter than the character is. I honestly believe that lit fic has developed an unspoken rule that it is permissible if not outright expected that a narrator will break from the constraints of the character whenever scene is being described. Why? Well, I think it's kind of a bourgeois sentimentality. We want beautiful descriptions of scene, because when we go to our book clubs and don't really understand what the book is about, we can always pick out a few passages of description and talk about how beautiful we think they are. I mean, it's fine. I've done it. I looked up the kinds of grass that would grow in the lowlands of Illinois down by the Illinois river and put that in my story. But I really could go for an easing up of this tendency.

NONETHELESS..

This is a really compelling story. Lauren is feeling all the powerful emotions of new parenthood, all that sudden being needed. She is trying to connect, but failing. Her attempts to nurture end up vomited back up like the Huckleberry milkshake she gives "the boy." She is telling herself that her reasons are altruistic, and that she is being much put upon, but the reactions of others seem to call this into question. It's clear that we at least have a mix of altruism and a desire to somehow reconnect with Keller through Jonah. She's a lookout who can't look out for herself, certainly not for Jonah, which makes her doubly isolated. This is good stuff that scratches at the meaning of parent-child bonding, how it complicates the play between romantic love and our fear of being alone. None of this is weakened because Cullen employed some modern lit-fic stock techniques. She makes up for her mechanical plainness with a good plot and a good character working toward a complicated and meaningful theme.

I get tired of always hearing about how much people value original language or language that makes you stand up and take notice. That's not really what people want. If that were true, then 70% of stories in literary journals wouldn't sound an awful lot like one another. So what I'd like is for us to just drop the charade that great technique is what we want because we're such smart, literary readers. I'd like "literary" fiction to open up to stories that don't sound so "literary," that is, that follow conventions other than the ones that lit fic uses. Because at heart, lit fic isn't really better writing or more linguistically virtuosic most of the time. It's just people doing what they've read other people do in order to tell a story that nobody else has told yet. That's what this story did.

Misplaced aggression

In the 19th century, writers were sometimes paid by the word by periodicals. This led to what can only be called "padding" by some writers, as they laid on parenthetical remarks and lists of adjectives. Even those who weren't induced by money were influenced by the style, and almost any writer of prose you can think of from 1850 to 1890 had a style that leaned at least a little bit in the florid direction. (Mark Twain comes to mind as a possible exepction, but even then, he was willing to let characters run off at the mouth in imitation of the style, and a reader of Twain does get some enjoyment out of Twain's permissiveness to his characters.)

Some folks find this style baroque and unappealing. I have always envied the world they lived in that had time for such rhetorical luxuries. We don't write that way now. One specific injunction all fiction writers face is to avoid overuse of adjectives. One reason is that writers are supposed to use verbal economy now (how is it that in the 19th century, when paper cost money, writers were encouraged to use a lot of it, while now, when digital space is essentially free, we all need to be sparing with our words?) The main reason, though, is that adjectives are not considered to be anchored enough to reality, and can thus be a violation of the "show don't tell" policy. Don't tell us that Cindy is loquacious, show her prattling on a lot. 

I think that writers are making up for being restricted from using all their fancy adjectives by using nouns that no normal human being knows. I'll use The Road by Cormac McCarthy as an example, but I can find examples in almost any literary journal. McCarthy's style, if you've never read the book, is almost unbelievably plain. Many of the sentences (most?) are only fragments. The book is compared to a dream often, because the brevity of the sentences leaves everything only roughed out. There is no artifice at all.

Except for the nouns. Depending on where the characters are, you can end up getting three nouns on one page that I have to look up. What's a macadam? Mastic? I don't know. I see this all the time--writers using nouns in their writing to identify a very precise item that hardly anybody would recognize without looking it up. This isn't a bad thing. I think it derives from a similar impulse to that which once made writers call characters "loquacious." Those writers wanted to give the impression that they knew all the people in their stories with godlike precision. So they had a name (adjective) for each of them. Modern day writers want to give the impression that they are truly in command of their dreamscapes, and so they make a point of showing that they know the proper names of everything within them.

I don't really object to this. I did it myself recently in my flash fiction attempt. I looked up the type of grasses and trees that would have been native to an Illinois prairie. I DO think that writing like this runs the risk of giving the impression that it was written ten minutes after a Google search. (Mine was.) That can spoil the illusion that the precision of nouns was meant to create.