The story that was rejected fifty-two times, accepted four times and what I've learned about being a writer

We're often told as writers that getting published can be a question of luck as well as ability. You could write "The Cask of Amontillado," something centuries of readers and critics alike will treasure, but if you get a reader at a journal who isn't really up to snuff, or who has a thing about stories with violence or revenge in them, or who isn't having a great day, you'll strike out. I'm fully aware of how human readers for journals are, having done a year or it myself. You will, of course, make your odds better by writing something good, but that just gets you in the door with hundreds of others. Getting published sometimes comes down to giving one particular editor the story she was looking for on one particular day.

That said, as my 9th grade science teacher always said, "The harder I work, the luckier I get." When I first started submitting stories to journals a little over seven years ago, most ignored me. All of the higher-tier journals completely ignored me. (What do I mean by "higher-tier"? I don't want to get to much into it, but I guess the journals from tier five and above on this list, although the list is a bit dated now.) After nearly a year, I got an acceptance from a good, but not elite, journal. Another year went by, and then I got a second, then a third a month later. I've kept getting an acceptance or two a year from the non-elites since then. 

I'm happy when anyone likes what I've written. I really am. It's gratifying for even the humblest of journals to publish a story I wrote, because there's no journal so small my story didn't have to get picked over a lot of others, stories whose authors loved them as much as I love mine. 

Still, I've had a longing to see if I could make it into one of the higher tiers. There are two reasons. One is I'd just like to have a somewhat broader audience. Secondly, a friend of mine told me when she got a story in the high-tier New England Review, she got publishers asking her if she had a novel ready. Since I've had a hard time getting people to look at either novel I've written, I'd love a short cut.

A few years ago, I started getting more than just form rejections from some of the higher-tiered journals. There's actually a rejectionwiki someone keeps that helps you to know if your apparent "encouraging rejection" was actually meant to be encouraging. Most of mine were.

One of the most incredible string of encouraging rejections I got was from the now-defunct Glimmer Train. I somehow managed to make the finals of contests they ran three times in a row, without winning any of them. At the time, I was somewhere between excited and completely demoralized. I didn't feel like I could possibly write a better story than those, and even though I'd gotten closer, it seemed at the time like that was as close as I was ever going to get.

There's a reason I've written more about rejection on this blog than any other subject.

I decided I'd try to at least get over it enough to try to find a home for those three stories. Once I did that, I'd think about hanging it up for good. 

One of the stories, "Collision," I think I might never get published anywhere. A number of journals other than Glimmer Train have said they liked it, but I think they're all a little nervous about publishing it. One writer friend of mine who read it said immediately that it would never get published anywhere. Essentially, it's within the "#metoo" sphere of influence, and I think it's too hard for editors to tell where the story's allegiances lie. One editor said as much. I've tried rewrites to make it a little clearer, but I think it's too ambiguous a treatment of the subject for nearly any journal.

The second of that triumvirate of stories, called "Jajangmyeon," will be published this winter by The Chattahoochee Review. I'm really excited about this. The editors suggested a few changes that I think made it a lot better. I thought highly of the editors at this journal during my interaction with them. They were prompt to reply and insightful, and I couldn't like the journal any more if it had the clout of The New Yorker. 

Finally, my story "Love Hotel," I can now announce since the journal has, recently won the Robert Day Award for fiction at New Letters. If you believe in tiers, New Letters is the highest-rated journal that's accepted me yet. It may not get me Nate Silver asking me about novels in my desk drawer, but it's a big breakthrough for me. Mostly, I'm just happy someone saw in this story what I've seen all along. Some writers say they can't pick a favorite story they've written, that it's like asking them to pick a favorite child. I don't feel that way. "Love Hotel" is my favorite.

Even a strong story can have a twisted path to publication

Actually, New Letters wasn't the first to see something in it. It's the first story that ever earned me more than a form rejection from The New Yorker. The Georgia Review, and Hopkins Review each told me I'd made it to the final round of cuts before falling out. A number of other elite journals gave me my first non-form rejection: Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Granta, The Missouri Review, The Common, and and a few others. Each time I got one of these, again, I'd be stuck between elation and the most abject feelings of dejection.  

I decided to just start sending it out to whatever journal and resolved that anyone who wanted it could have it. About a week after I did that, I got an acceptance. It was from a brand-new journal. Part of me wanted to just let them have it, just so the story landed somewhere, but at the last second, something stopped me, told me that I'd already placed stories in okay places, but this story was worth believing in enough to keep trying for something bigger. 

So I told that journal it had just been snatched up right before they got to it, which, strictly speaking, isn't good writer behavior. A few weeks later, New Letters told me it was a finalist in their contest. While I was waiting for them to pick the winner, another journal said they'd publish it. I hadn't pulled it yet, because I wasn't sure it would be published in New Letters. This third journal agreed to wait to see if it won the contest. I pulled it from everywhere else then.

Or at least I thought I did. I forgot about one journal, because I'd submitted it so many places, I missed when I had to withdraw it. Also, because I was on the road and not working from my home computer when this all happened, it was hard for me to see where exactly I'd pulled the story from. This last journal happened to also accept the story, meaning I had to explain to them what had happened. All the editors I had to turn down were gracious about it, which was probably more kindness than I deserved.

What I learned from all this

There are two lessons to this. One is that there are just some editors who are never going to like my work. I'm looking at you, Colorado Review. I'll never get so much as a "we liked your work and would like to see more" from some places, so matter how strong the story is. "Love Hotel," which moved the likes of The New Yorker and The Georgia Review, got form rejections from some journals that don't appear on the list of 500 I linked above at all. Finding the right audience is a little like finding a romantic partner. The fact that everyone isn't into you doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. 

The second lesson is a little harder for me to absorb. Of course, I edited "Love Hotel" a lot before I first sent it out to journals. But after a year of near rejections, I looked at it closely for the first time in a few months. I made one major change to it, one which shortened it by a thousand words and made the main character's motivation clearer. (In fact, I had edited it so many times, I had to name one version of it something different just to keep it separate from all the other versions. This one I called "Lobu Hoteru," after the Korean pronunciation of the loan words "love hotel." That's the one that won, so now I'm stuck with "Lobu Hoteru" for all time.)

I hate waiting. I like to write stories, edit them, and send them out. It takes long enough waiting for a response, I don't want to wait forever to put something out. But even though I've written a few stories in a short amount of time that worked and were published, I think the main thing I've learned as a writer is that there's no substitute for time on your work. Writing a story, re-writing it, putting it away, re-writing again, and then putting it away even longer before re-working it yet again, is the surest way to make sure your story's putting its best foot forward.

In my day job, I'm always pushing people to not let making a perfect product be a reason to never produce anything. And at work, that's the right attitude. I have to learn to separate my work from my writing, though, or I'm going to continue to get close-but-not-quites. 

I just re-learned this lesson last week, when The Missouri Review gave me such an encouraging rejection on a story I wrote post-"Love Hotel," I thought they were actually accepting the story for a paragraph. Ultimately, though, they let it go, because they felt it got a little too windy. I looked at it again, and sure enough, after being away from it a while, I found 500 words to cut pretty easily, words that the story was better without. The editor also suggested I give the reader a little more of the main character's internal struggle, which I think I did with two sentences.

So while I'm elated by the success of "Lobu Hoteru," I'm also kicking myself for not waiting to send out my latest story, which might challenge "Lobu Hoteru" for favorite child status, a little longer. I'm wishing I'd made it just a little harder for The Missouri Review to turn it down. I won't get that chance again. 

What I've learned about writing is that it's extremely unfair. You can write a story that's 98% gold, and that two percent you didn't quite iron out is somehow making the whole thing not come together. There are so many elements to keep track of and pay attention to and be sensitive to, it feels impossible. But it won't do any good to either be in denial about that two percent, or to complain about it. The only way to cope with crippling depression post-rejection is to act like you're not depressed and work harder.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More daydream than lucid dream

One figure of speech about writing fiction that's held up for me is that it's like dreaming, or dreaming while awake, or lucid dreaming. But I'd add that the most apt simile is that it's like daydreaming. I think a lot of writing advice gives the impression that the best way to write is to keep a dream journal, wake up in the middle of the night, and write furiously while your dream is still fresh and your conscious, linguistic, rational mind hasn't completely taken back over yet. This is, in fact, almost exactly the advice Olen Butler gives in his fiction how-to book, From Where You Dream.

While this image of a good story as something like a dream converted into words has held up for me, I'd like to add the caveat that it's more like a daydream for me than lucid dreaming. In both a day dream and the dreaming we do during our deep sleep, our brains tend to churn over whatever has been occupying their neurons in the last few hours before the dream begins. With a daydream, the link is somewhat direct: someone says something about getting takeout, and you start thinking about how good takeout was in Korea, and then you wonder what it would be like to deliver food in Korea on a moped, and then you've imagined this moped delivery guy's life, and you realize you've been dreaming a story. Everything is a bit linear in your thinking process. If you can remember enough, you'll recall how you got from point A to B to Z. In a dream during sleep, this linear process doesn't seem to hold.

The majority of stories I've written have started as daydreams. I'll use "Sunflower," which recently got published, as an example. I think part of how I ended up dreaming this story came from reading another short story, "The Stamp Collector" by Dave King, which I wrote about here. It's about an alcoholic in search of his rock bottom. I was sort of following some thought having to do with that story, and I was also hating myself for having just eaten too much again.

I was thinking about how eating too much isn't just bad for my vanity or my health, but it's actually a sin of sorts, because it means I'm using more of the Earth's limited resources than I should be. Overeating is like leaving the lights on. I was thinking about what would happen if everyone who over-consumed got what they deserved, and somehow, my brain put together King's story with overeating and the karma thereof, and I landed on the idea of a karmic rock bottom.

That's just where I started from, of course. As I wrote the story, I had to poke and prod, and I used the naturally occurring elements to build further than what my initial burst of imagination had been able to accomplish. Calling the woman Sunflower and then using the image of a sunflower as a central symbol came later. The dream gave me the scaffolding, but from there, I had to use my normal brain to finish the work. That's why I feel like writing a story is more akin to daydreaming than deep-sleep dreaming, because it's a negotiation between normal cognitive functioning and the breaking loose from reality that comes with a dream. It's a middle state between the logic of your brain after it's had its morning coffee and it's focused on work and your brain when it's whacked out on vodka and Gatorade and you pass out on the couch.

Sometimes it just smacks me in the face...

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

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

The downside of writer prompts

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

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

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

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

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

Intense. 

What I've learned about editing and reviewing makes me wonder how good literature ever gets published

I spent a year as an editor/reader for the Baltimore Review, mostly to thank them for being the first journal to publish one of my stories. I've also been the lead fiction reader/editor for the Washington Writers' Publishing House, the co-op publisher that put out my only book a few years ago, for the last two years. As a reader who gets hundreds of entries for a very small number of openings, I often rejected stories after one page. I felt bad about this at first, but it's really unavoidable. We don't have enough readers to get through everything if we're going to read it all carefully from beginning to end. And besides, readers are going to be even more fickle than editors: if I don't want to keep reading after a page, what reader, who has no obligation to keep going, is going to keep going? So we limit ourselves to work that compels reading from page to page.

Of course, you want writing to be compelling, so maybe this is just a quick way of getting to the good stuff. But as I've been doing more serious review/critiques for the last year, it's required an entirely different kind of reading from me. I read every story twice. Often, my opinion of the story completely changes between reading one and reading two. I've frequently been ready to rip apart a story, then something about it opened up upon further reflection, and I ended up writing a very positive review.

In theory, that's how you should read every story. A story written seriously deserves a serious reader. No journal should expect they will fill their pages with stories worth reading seriously if they don't take the time to read seriously. But nobody can really do this.

So how do stories like the ones in Best American Short Stories, stories that don't reveal their secrets until you've poked and prodded at them a bit, get published? I think the answer, for the most part, is that they're written by people who already wrote enough of the kinds of stories you need to write to get past editors, and now are given enough rope that they can write a different kind of story. Yes, there are new writers in BASS every year, but it's mostly filled with established commodities, people who probably got a different kind of reading when they sent work in than others did, a more sympathetic kind of reading.

It's an old realization that readers approach a known commodity differently from an unknown one. If you put a story in front of college literature students and told them it was written by Joyce Carol Oates, you'd get a completely different reading than you would if you told them it was a story by another student submitted for a workshop.

After getting several stories published and then the book, I tried to transition to a different kind of story, one that was a little more at the core of the things I care about. Some of the stories ended up being longer. All are a lot more uncomfortable. I've had some positive feedback from editors, but the things they've pointed out about why they didn't ultimately accept the work seemed to me to be the kinds of things you'd say if you hadn't read very carefully. Two have opined on a story in a way that made me think they didn't read the key passage in the story, the one that (I hope) tied together all the questions about the main character.

This is really at the heart of why I've been in a place for a few months where I just can't even write. I'm never at a loss for words or stories or ideas. It's not that I have writer's block. It's that I don't trust myself as a writer. That's largely because I no longer trust myself as a reader. If I can write a story and put it aside long enough to look at it from the outside, and I see something in it that no editor sees, the problem isn't me as a writer, it's me as a reader. That's kind of an identity crisis for me, because if there's one thing I've always felt pretty confident about, it was that I was a fairly insightful reader.

So what do I do? Write "in the manner of a story that is likely to be published," or write my stories, even though experience should have taught me by now that's not a way to succeed? For the last few months, the answer for me has been to just not write.

Most writing advice websites emphasize how important it is to keep going through rejection. I wonder how many will tell you that at some point, rejection isn't an obstacle to push through, but a sign to be heeded? 

I...might need a break

Late last summer and early fall, I put everything I had into writing six stories I thought were good enough to get published in one of the stronger literary journals. As I've said before, I'm honored when any journal, however small, chooses something I wrote and gives it a home, but I've been at this for five years now, and if I'm every going to get anywhere with this other than it just being a hobby, then I need to get something published in one of the larger journals soon.

I've had a number of positive responses since then, which is way better than I'd ever done before. But none have quite made it. This morning, I got the most expansive response to a rejection I've gotten yet:

We'd like you to know that overall, your piece was well-received by our reading committee. They have some comments and notes listed below. We hope you find them helpful as you continue to revise or resubmit your piece elsewhere.

--COMMENTS--
“This is a moving, engaging story. I cared about the main character, her story, and her well-being right away. The pacing was appropriate: doesn't drag but it's not a race either. Secondary characters are introduced at the right times and their purpose felt meaningful each time. The dialogue read very natural. Despite my lack of cultural context, I understood exactly what the writer meant. The writer chose great moments to explain details to outsiders but to leave enough mystery to place you directly in the cultural setting. It felt like a story that really cared about its characters.

“The ending might need a rethink - the revelation at the end is a bit forced I felt. But I like the sense of dislocation.”

That's really, really kind feedback. It's way more than you get from most publishers. And most of it is quite thoughtful and also answers a lot of the questions I myself had about how the story might be read: mostly, is it too slow? 

I wasn't quite sure what "the revelation at the end is a bit forced" meant, because I didn't think there was a revelation at the end, really. The main character thinks she might have learned something about another character, but she isn't sure, so rather than take action, she decides to keep watching in a state of hyper-vigilance. That seemed to me to be the natural outcome of a story in which the main theme probably had something to do with surveillance, and the similarities and differences between state surveillance and neighborly looking out for one another. 

But if the readers who obviously paid close attention to the story saw something differently, then I must have failed to communicate it correctly. Which means going back and ripping at this story yet again, and I am so deflated and tired, I can't even think of doing it. 

So here I am, for the umpteenth time, thinking that maybe the hard fact is that no matter how good I do it, it will never be good enough, and I'm just going to go on being unhappy until I accept that and do something else with my life. At the very least, I think I need a break, and that includes this blog and reviewing Pushcart. So it may be a while before I'm back. 

I hate to think that posts like these come off as whining. I don't mean them that way. Anguished, I'm okay with. It's okay to communicate that this stuff is incredibly frustrating, so much that it might not really be worth doing. But I don't hold the world responsible for it. The game I'm playing is very hard to play, and if it's too much, I need to stop playing. I mean only to communicate that the value of playing the game is not always so self-evident to me that I think I must keep playing it at all costs. 

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. 

Is this a typo or do I not know English?

Because I've submitted to hundreds of writing journals, I get constant email reminders to submit to them again. I ignore most, but for some reason, I opened up one from the Cincinnati Review yesterday. I did this even though I've submitted there four times, never been accepted, and they accepted a story that sounded kind of dumb written by Jane Villanueva in Jane the Virgin.  Here's what the banner said:

I believe this is a typo, and they meant "bring us your finest literature." The only time I've ever heard "literatures" as a plural was in a comparative sense, e.g. "The literatures of Spain and Portugal are not as similar as one would think." But here, it seems to be using it to mean "multiple pieces of literature." In this sense, when I write two books, I don't just produce literature, I produce two literatures.

My spell check doesn't even like that word. Am I crazy here, or is the reason Cincinnati Review never accepted me because I'm too dumb to even know the possible uses of the word I'm supposed to be producing? My Googling seems to support me, but maybe insiders in the profession are starting to use the word in a new way?

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.

Lord of the Rings as Zombie Fiction

Lord of the Rings is one of those stories that continues to reward me throughout my life for knowing it. As a young man entering the Marine Corps, I drew on its characterization of adventure. The story both set me off on the course out the front door of my parents' house and also reassured me when nothing went the way I thought it would that that's just how adventures go.

As an idealistic man in my 20's and 30's after the Marine Corps, I saw the story as an injunction to push back against evil, even when it seemed like evil was likely to win. The movies came out during this period of my life.

Now, in my forties and seemingly in the middle of multiple, overlapping slogs that feel like they'll never end, I see something in Frodo's quest I appreciate now in a way I never did before: the way the hero's journey is often about fighting the same small battles thousands of times more than it is about one epic moment of heroism. It's a zombie war.

Why I would ever use stupid zombies in the same breath as my favorite fantasy series

LOTR isn't a zombie story, although there are elements in the story that have some similarities. Orcs are largely undifferentiated--one orc's the same as another. (In the book, we do learn that orcs have different dialects and factions, but largely, orcs are just orcs.) Orcs don't think much for themselves, although instead of following some primal instinct to eat brains, they follow the will of the Eye. And Aragorn saves the city of Gondor when he takes control of an army of undead soldiers. But none of these are what I mean when I speak of Lord of the Rings as a zombie story.

The best explanation I've ever read for the modern fascination with zombies was Chuck Klosterman's back in 2010. The physical prowess of zombies varies from franchise to franchise--a World War Z zombie is stronger than a Living Dead zombie--but by and large, a single zombie or a small group aren't that hard to kill. They are slow and loud and stupid. Knock the brains out of one, then do the next one. As Klosterman put it:

"If there's one thing we all understand about zombie killing, it’s that the act is uncomplicated: you blast one in the brain from point-blank range (preferably with a shotgun). That’s Step 1. Step 2 is doing the same thing to the next zombie that takes its place. Step 3 is identical to Step 2, and Step 4 isn’t any different from Step 3. Repeat this process until (a) you perish, or (b) you run out of zombies. That’s really the only viable strategy."

That's modern life for a lot of us, actually. Klosterman compares it to the act of answering hundreds of emails a day. It's not hard, task-by-task, but the downside is that what we do never ends. The same tasks keep coming back every day, just like the horde is never gone. 

Can I set up a rule in Outlook to delete this without reading?

The Fellowship leaves Rivendell around the Winter Solstice, which is about when Christmas happens. Frodo finally completes the quest around the Vernal Equinox, somewhat coincidental with Easter. In between is the sloggiest time of year. There are moments of terror and excitement in Frodo's quest, but most of it is just putting his head down, moving forward, and fighting the slow, poisoning effect of the ring on his mind. That's it. When reading the second and third books of the trilogy, which are split into a Frodo/Sam portion and a portion with the rest of the Fellowship, the Frodo/Sam portions are by far less thrilling. But they're also by far the most important. Winning heroic and desperate battles means nothing if Frodo doesn't complete his task. 

And that's the whole secret of life. "I know what I must do," Frodo says, "It's just I'm afraid to do it." He might also have said, at many parts in the book, that he knew what he had to do but just didn't want to do it anymore. 

"Time to wake up, Mr. Frodo," Sam said. "Another day of stubbing our toes as we walk about through these rocks." 

"Fuck off, Sam," Frodo replied, turning over to sleep some more. 

I often get irritated by silly people who describe their small accomplishments in epic terms. Calling a thirty-day detox/weight loss regimen a "journey," that type of thing. It seems to cheapen truly heroic deeds to describe our small lives in those terms. But maybe these people are right in a small way. There is at least some similarity between our hum-drum lives and the hero's journey. Both involve doing small things over and over until they add up to something. 

(But still, stop calling your new job at Cracker Barrel a "journey." Please.)

Zombies and writing

Writing is a zombie battle, too. It's getting up over and over and doing the same thing, mostly without any real hope of ever having a final victory. Why fight, then? Because zombies are there to be fought against. 

"If" for sedentary modernity

Life is more about resilience than anything else for most of us. Kipling told his theoretical young man that it showed real manhood to risk everything you'd won in life, lose it, and start over. But life for most of us is avoiding that drama--to never risk all our winnings on one game of pitch-and-toss. It's slowly building a 401K in the dullest fashion imaginable. It's college savings and making dentist visits on-time. It's doing what's in front of you to do, then doing it again and again and again. 

There must have been a point in Frodo's quest when Mount Doom ceased to even be a real thing in his mind. There was only thirst and soreness and boredom and fear. He kept going. That's a hero.

Years after Bilbo's great adventure, he was still somewhat romantic about adventuring. Frodo was not. He had obtained a deeper wisdom that comes of a more profound suffering. The point of all he did was precisely so people like Sam could carry out pedestrian accomplishments like having children and planting a garden. 

That's the gift this story has given me through this winter. Just keep walking. 

An obscure writer looks at Borges' "Secret Miracle"

A few years ago, a friend of mine shared his draft novel with me, the one he's been trying to find a publisher for for years. I didn't think it was very good; it was a Christian novel that also had vampires in it. Just because I didn't like it doesn't mean it wasn't any good, of course: I thought all the Twilight stories were terrible, but millions of thirteen-year-old girls can't be that wrong. I think he realized that he was fighting an uphill battle trying to merge Christian themes and vampires in a way that would appeal to any audience an agent could sell the book to. But when we were talking about the odds of getting it published successfully, he told me this: "I can't give up. If I gave up, I don't think I could go on with my life."

I can relate to that feeling, as can a lot of writers who don't write fiction as our main gig. Fiction gives us a feeling that we exist for something more than our day jobs, much like every waiter/waitress in Hollywood is really an actor or every waiter/waitress in Nashville is really a singer. Certainly, in my case, after several false starts in life, when I really started to write seriously, it was a moment in my forties when I was asking myself if the life I was leading was really all there was to it.

Like dreams of making it as a singer or actor or professional athlete, one could find fulfillment in the activity even if one never really "makes it." For simplicity, let's say "making it" means being able to make a living entirely off the activity. Even if you can't sing on Broadway or at the Grammy Awards (is that still a thing?), you can sing at Karaoke nights or in churches. You can act in community theater. You can play basketball in a rec league. Even on this much smaller level, talent and hard work will produce better results, so you can still use it as an outlet for your desire to better yourself.

But what if you knew that was as far as you were ever going to get? I suppose it's easier to realize this at an earlier stage as an athlete. For one thing, sports gives us more objective feedback about our ability; zero points in a game means something in a way editors quickly winnowing down the slush pile doesn't. There's also the age factor in sports (and, let's be honest, in acting and singing to a great extent), which doesn't really exist in writing. This makes it possible for a writer to follow a false hope for much longer.

This is a subject I've possibly beaten to death already, but it continues to weigh heavily on my mind. I've had some success in the writing equivalent of community theater, but I haven't had my big break yet. I wrote some stories this year that I really felt were my best yet, and I sent them to the top journals I'd been avoiding. I've had zero breakthroughs. The "right" thing for a writer is probably to just roll with those disappointments and not give them another thought, but I've never been one for doing things the right way. It doesn't seem like an overreaction after four years to doubt that the big IT is ever going to happen for me.

Borges' Secret Miracle

I've referred to this story before, because I can't stop thinking about it. If you haven't read it, there's a decent-ish translation here, but the synopsis goes something like this: Joseph Hladik is a literary critic in Prague of mixed Jewish ancestry who is arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 when they take over. He is condemned to death and spends a little over a week contemplating his life and impending execution. His life hits home for me:

Hladík had passed forty years of age.  Apart from some friendships and many habits, the problematic study of literature constituted his life; like every writer, he measured the virtues of others by what was done by them and asked that others measure him by what he glimpsed or outlined.  All the books he had given to the press infused him with utter remorse.  In his examinations of the oeuvres of Boehme, Abenesra, and Fludd, he had essentially taken part in mere application; in his translation of Sephir Yezirah, in negligence, fatigue, and conjecture.  The Vindication of Eternity he judged to be perhaps less deficient; the first volume recounts the diverse eternities that men have devised, from the motionless Parmenidean One to Hinton’s modifiable past; the second denied (with Francis Bradley) that all the deeds of the universe integrate a temporal series.  It argues that the number of man’s possible experiences is not infinite and one sole “repetition” would suffice to demonstrate that time is a fallacy... Unfortunately, the arguments that demonstrate this fallacy are no less false; Hladík used to go over them again with a certain scornful perplexity.  He had also written a series of Expressionist poems; these, to the poet’s embarrassment, figured in an anthology of 1924, and no anthology after that failed to inherit them.  From all of this equivocal and languid past Hladík wanted to redeem himself with the play in verse The Enemies (Hladík praised verse because it impeded spectators from forgetting unreality, which is the condition of art).

So he's had some small successes, and he's been able to glimpse some big ideas, but hasn't really realized them. And now it's too late, because he's about to die.

So Hladik asks God to help him finish the one work he thinks will justify his existence. "In the darkness, he spoke to God: If I exist in any way, if I am not one of Your repetitions and errors, I exist as the author of The Enemies.  To come to the end of this play which can justify me and justify You, I require one more year.  Grant me these days, You who are the centuries and time.  It was the last night, the most atrocious, but ten minutes afterwards, sleep had washed over him like dark water."

In the end, God grants the miracle, but it is known only to Hladik. As Hladik stands before the firing squad, God halts time, but only Hladik is aware of the miracle. Hladik cannot move, but he can think, and, helped by the metrical nature of his play, he is able to write the play entirely in his head. It is slow going, but he keeps at it--what else is there to do?

Interestingly, he is not writing the play for God, who created the miracle: "He did not work for posterity, nor even for God, of whose literary preferences he knew little." For whom is he writing it, then? I think the answer is in Hladik's prayer: to "justify me and justify (God)." Merely to have written the play will accomplish justification. It is not necessary that anyone should read it.

That's a nice story, but do I really believe this?

A good friend of mine keeps telling me that since I seem to have a predilection for writing fiction, I should just accept that the odds are always going to be long that I'll "make it" and write for myself. Joseph Hladik, standing secretly in an alternate reality before the firing squad, would probably agree with my friend. But is this just mystical hogwash? What difference does it make if I write a story in my head, or--as has really happened--a novel and other stories I'm having a hard time getting published? Does this really justify my existence?

I've often stuck to the line that if I knew, through some divine messenger, that nobody would ever read what I wrote, I'd stop writing. Although I wonder if this is true; I write on this blog without a terribly large audience. I get between fifty and a hundred hits after each post, more or less. I assume half of those are bots or some other kind of Internet weirdness. Maybe there are a few silent folks from my target audience of struggling writers out there, but if I quit writing this blog tomorrow, the world wouldn't notice. For some reason, though, that really doesn't bother me with the blog. I write the blog to help people if possible, but also just to put words to thoughts stuck in my brain so I can then move on to other thoughts.

When I write non-fiction for this blog, I write like my friend would want me to: for the sake of writing itself. But when I write fiction, I take things personally. Rejections hurt--every damn time. Does that mean that I'm actually a non-fiction writer mistaking myself for a fiction writer? Since I can do the former without really caring about the results, is that my real "calling," the real thing that justifies me and the clunky creator who made me?

That's a possibility that occurs to me more and more as time goes by, but I still keep feeling compelled to write one more story. Blog posts generally feel breezy and--with some exceptions--come without me chasing them too hard. Most of the stories I write seem to run from me like Jonah ran from God. They cost me a lot of work to write, which is why I can't help but wonder why I write them when I fail so often to get anyone to read them.

The world seems a graver place to me every day, and I continue to get older. I may not be sentenced to die tomorrow, but the end will come sooner or later--sooner today than yesterday. In 2018, I'm moving in one direction or another with writing. I'm either going to take a long break from it to see if I still want to do it, or I'm going to double down and write a lot more. I haven't decided yet. Eighteen months ago, when I finished my novel, I thought I had already had my moment of justifying myself and God. Maybe God is just taking a long time to decide what to do with what I made. 

My roller coaster goes up

I apologize if any of my posts, such as the last one I wrote, come across as entitled or pouty. I've committed to blogging about the struggle to find my way as an unknown writer of what I hope is serious fiction. That's going to involve some dark nights of the soul. So I don't shy away from writing about them, because to do so would be dishonest.

I was looking up some information about the Pushcart awards yesterday when I stumbled onto this article. It's an "open letter" from some guy who advises writers not to list Pushcart nominations in their biographies.  I thought it was ultra-fastidious and ridiculous. He argues that because a Pushcart nomination is common to thousands of writers, it's meaningless. This strikes me as nonsense. In the first place, as I've said before, your credits really aren't that important. They might get you a more sympathetic reading, by which I mean if I don't like something, I might give it a page longer than I normally would if you have a top-shelf credit to your name. But 95% of my decision comes just from the story there. I usually don't even look at the bio before I start reading the story.

To me, a Pushcart nomination means someone not only published your story, but thought it was one of the better ones they published that year. It's not a huge deal, but it's certainly not a negative.

One commenter really nailed it. Here's an edited version of what he wrote:

Publishing a story anywhere is goddamned hard enough. You... should tout that journal and then go around and brag the hellz about it because here’s the deal:

No one flippin’ cares anyway.

Not your writer friends. Not your mom. Not your priest. Shit. Even if you get a notable publication in a place high up on Perpetual Folly’s Pushcart nomination list... find someone who gives a shit. ...

You know who does care. The damn editor who accepted your piece in the first place. Listen to him or her, strangle-hug him or her, and bragz the flying F out of their zine because the chances of you convincing another schmuck to like your crap is a million to one. Literally. There are a million lit journals and you happened to find the one journal that liked your stupid story. And you’d turn your nose up at that?.. Who the hell are you?

Unless you’re one of five writers in America (and I suppose Canada and maybe a few other quasi-American speaking countries) who can expect a call from the New Yorker, you should just assume your story is shit and it won’t be read by anyone. So, writers-who-turn-their-noses-up-at-the-only-lit-ragz-they’ll-ever-get-published-in, I bid thee thus: Play with the first damn dog who sniffs your butt. Then yip your nutz off.
100% of the world doesn’t care where or how you were published and the infitesimally small percentage who does care knows how flippin’ hard it is to get someone to, first, read your work and , .B., get someone to actually like it.

Be one of the 60,000. Print out your Glimmertrain finalist certificate and paste it to the back window of your car. Goddamnit. Make a bumper sticker that says “I’m a published Hint Fiction author.” And tell all your cousins that you placed a poem at poetry.com and you have the 1996 anthology to prove it.
You’re writers, you bitches. Everyone hates you and no one cares.
Jesus.

Normally, the comments section anywhere on the Internet is a source of despair. But strangely, although this comment doesn't really offer much hope that anyone will ever notice what I do, I find that somehow hopeful. It was very hard to get my book published. It's an accomplishment. If nearly everyone now ignores it, that kind of just means I'm doing it right. 

I can't give you science, but I can give you Kurt Vonnegut

Sometime in the long-ago of this blog, I wrote about finding Peter Thorpe's Why Literature is Bad for You in the library at University of Illinois at Chicago and being fairly blown way by it. It made some fairly cogent arguments for why reading novels--the very thing we treat like they were vegetables for the brain--are actually not good for you. My only disappointment was that there weren't actually all that many arguments from logic, and none from real research. A fair amount of it came down to anecdotal evidence based on what a bunch of jackasses the professors he worked with who spent all their time with literature were. Still, it was kind of compelling based on my own experience, and I wanted more.

I haven't found any research on this since. I've seen a few assays into similar theses, like this one that says stories are bad because they're like religion and lie to us, and this one that says literature is bad for us because it addles our brains (kind of similar to Thorpe's argument). But really, it's not something I can find that researchers have looked at seriously. There was this story a few years back about how reading literary fiction improves empathy. But nobody has tried to study whether it makes us so empathetic, we fall for terrible ideas, which was Thorpe's argument.

I don't have any science to offer on the subject. But I have this wonderful passage I came across while re-reading Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions this week:

I had no respect whatsoever for...the novelist. I thought (the novelist) had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning a middle, and an end.

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

And so on. Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

Some of this is similar to Thorpe, only a lot funnier. Obviously, Vonnegut kept writing novels, so he only partly meant what he said here.

I've been writing for a while now, partly, I think, to give myself something to focus on in life so I continue to think life is worth living. But I wonder if I wouldn't take it more for granted that life is worth living if I just hadn't read so many stories to begin with.

The best answer I have to give to the question I raised myself

I realize that much of this blog has been taken up in its three-year history by me trying to answer the very tiresome "why write?" question. It's not lost on me how tiresome this line of questioning is. Honestly, though, I don't indulge in it over and over to be theatrical. It's an honest, ongoing internal debate I have going with myself. I share my thoughts out loud just in case it resonates with another writer out there.

To question, to be as specific as possible, can be put in three parts:

1) What benefit do I hope to obtain or bring to others through writing stories meant to be published in books or literary magazines?
2) How likely is it I will see this benefit realized?
3) Are there other activities which, if I put equal time and effort into them, have a better product of  <benefit X possibility of achievement>?

To recap, a week ago, I was wondering about the relevancy question. If part of the benefit I seek to bring is to share some sort of wisdom I think I might have to impart, what good is it to share it in a format that is mostly ignored in the modern world? Does it seem ethical to write stories that examine the minutiae of romantic relationships or the psyche of first-world folks struggling to figure it all out when the news sometimes really makes me worry if we aren't near our Great Filter event.

This is, of course, just one aspect of the "why write fiction" question. But it's the one that's been on my mind lately, so here's what I've come up with in the last week to answer it.

Answer #1: You've got to do what you're good at

I read an article not too long ago by Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg saying that he intended to take the show in a more political direction in order to adapt to the new reality: 

“I think BoJack is definitely very much about kind of the burdens of being comfortable,” Bob-Waksberg told Indiewire. “I don’t know if those are the kinds of stories we’re going to be as interested in moving forward. I know I’m certainly less interested in exploring the small hypocrisies of rich liberals. 

“I’m not in the mood to poke fun at those kinds of people when there are real, real problems that we need to talk about.”

I understand where he's coming from, but at the same time, I couldn't help but be disappointed reading this. I get plenty of commentary on Trump from plenty of places. Not saying the creator of this brilliant show couldn't do it better (sorry, Karen--I know you're not a huge fan of this show), but why would he? That's like saying that because vegetables are the most important food to eat, you're going to stop making pizza. And Bojack is really, really good pizza.

If I feel this way about someone else's stories, I ought to give myself the same slack.

Answer #2: Soccer team theory

If everyone goes after the ball, you just have a mess of people in a big mass kicking each other in the shins. It's not an original metaphor, but it serves: here, of course, the ball is whatever the political issue of the day is. Yes, right now, everyone is gathered around the ball of whatever Trump said last night or what happened last weekend at some rally. But eventually, people will want to know about something else, and when that happens, you need to be in position.

Writing stories in this day and age might be like being a wing way off in the distance. I might only get in on a play or two. But it's better to do well on that play or two that are in my wheelhouse than to play the whole game at a position I'm not suited to.

Answer #3: The world hasn't always been like this

It's important for someone out there to have a sense of history. The news seems to only remember the last 72 hours, and this ends up having an affect on all of us. We have to keep some sense of where today's events lie on the long timeline of history. Writing stories that inherently take some time to write helps with this. In an intellectual fast-food world, it's important for people to eat slow cooking once in a while.
 

Answer #4: Politics isn't the most important thing in the world

We're all born into a weird world trying to make sense of absurdity. It's important to keep life going, so politics isn't something we can ignore, but honestly, if it takes up your whole life, I'm not sure that's a life that's much worth living.

There was a time when devout Christians in America mostly kept out of politics, believing that they were supposed to be in but not of the world. The fact that so many of us are now in on the left and the right with so much fervor is directly related to the increasing view on both sides of politics as continual confrontation. We could all stand to be reminded that the outcome of an election is not the most important thing in our lives. If that sounds like privilege talking, so be it. I don't think things will improve by revoking my own privilege to regard other things as more interesting and life-affirming than they really are. I think things get better by sharing that privilege. 


So that's what I've come up with. It's not a knockout answer, but it'll serve. Of course, there are many other reasons to wonder if writing stories is worth it than just relevancy. Money is one that I've been thinking of lately. This hobby takes more money than it gives, and maybe I ought to be doing something with my spare time to advance my family's position. But that's a post for another time.

A man crush leaves a comment, so I write a critique which is actually more of a general aesthetic treatise

A few posts ago, Anis Shivani, or someone doing a cyber impersonation of him, left a comment after one of my posts. This was pretty exciting for me, since I've quoted him a lot on here and really find a lot to love in his Against the Workshop. He has given voice to a lot of misgivings I've felt not just about workshops and writing programs, but the modern fiction establishment. I suspect when he writes these critiques, he's saying things many have felt, but few have the courage to proclaim.

I decided to read and then write a critique of his first book of short stories, Anatolia and other stories. After reading it a few weeks ago, I've been stymied about how to write this critique. I'd hoped that I'd find in his stories an alternative aesthetic I could aspire to, something different from what dominates the journals and winning short story anthologies year after year. Turns out, I didn't really connect much with this group of stories. I liked them less than I like most modern fiction, not more.

Which led me to ask myself: have I become so inured to a certain hegemonic aesthetic that I'm incapable of responding positively to alternatives? This is a strong possibility. So, rather than write a straight critique of Shivani's work, I've decided instead to try to trace what it is that makes his writing different, what there is about it that makes it belong to another time, and then interrogate my own assumptions about fiction that make me prefer a modern approach, or at least an approach that's more ubiquitous in modern literary fiction.

Hopefully, this will also serve as something of an answer to a friend of mine, who has sent me his fiction before, and I've found myself saying "I like it personally, but I don't think I'd publish it if you sent it to me, because I don't think it succeeds at certain things." I hope this will explain what I mean better than I've done so far.

Distance between author and narrator

One characteristic of Shivani's collection that's different from most modern fiction is that there is very little daylight between the point-of-view of the narrator, in whose voice the stories are told, and the author, Anis Shivani, lurking behind that narrative voice. Modern fiction-writing theory teaches writers to practice a form of Shakespearean negative capability popularized by the Romantics, that we should withhold ourselves from interjecting too much of our own selves into the work. Shivani (and my friend) are nearly opposite this kind of approach: the author and narrator are often almost one and the same (or the main character is antagonistic to the author's philosophy, and there as a cautionary tale). It's fiction that's strongly tied to the philosophical novel.

Shivanian aesthetic

I know where Shivani, the author behind the works, stands on each piece of fiction in this collection. Because one story is about a writer who goes to a sham of a writer's retreat called "Go Sell it on the Mountain," I don't even have to guess what Shivani's aesthetic is. He tells us. His first-person participant in the retreat says the following lines, both to reject the writing he sees others writing and to describe his own type of story-telling, which is rejected by other participants:

Her ((another writer at the workshop)) writing was curiously glassy on the surface: it gave you no entry point, no means to project your living, breathing mass of flesh onto the consciousness of the author. This kind of writing was in vogue now, while I wrote in the old-fashioned raconteur's spiraling manner, leisurely getting to the core of the story. My models were the forgotten writers of the thirties, forties, and fifties, like Roderick Lull and Morley Callaghan, who killed you with their explosive revelations of your own culpability in injustice.

Or, in another instance, the narrator shares these thoughts in a workshop with another writer, only to have his thoughts attacked by the workshop moderator:

"...what is the narrator's moral stand toward the lead character's afflictions? Does she have a moral opinion? Or is she neutral to her ups and downs? I don't see the author present behind the scenes.

The author in Anatolia and Other Stories is always visible, and often barely behind the scenes. In addition to the story of a writer finding his aesthetic out of place with hucksters selling false hope to the talentless, there is another story of Arthur, an old professor who feels out of place because he is being crowded out of the world by an academy and wife who espouse theoretical notions he thinks are ludicrous. Change "Arthur" to "author" on that one, too.

Summarizing

This voice where the thoughts of the author are often pushing into the narrative has a certain feel to it, like we can only proceed so far before we get a summary of what we've just gone over. There are frequent insertions of phrases like "Of course," usually preceding a sneering recounting of some fallacious habit of some character. (There are 43 instances of "of course" in the book.) In another place, it's "Oh, I'm sure he said something about the need to pace ourselves..."

I used to hate hearing the workshop stock phrase that a story "floats," meaning it doesn't have enough flesh and bones to tie its ideas to Earth. But these stories float a lot. There are powerful ideas in play here, so powerful, in fact, that there cannot be any shortcuts past incarnation. But in many stories, the word comes to dwell among us without first being made flesh.

In no story was this more evident than "Repatriation," a frustrating, semi-apocalyptic tale of people not sufficiently Anglo-Saxon enough being shipped out of the United States to...well, they never do make it anywhere. The story is nearly haunting, nearly palpable, but it keeps resorting to summarizing statements of how we got to where we are, brief quips from a fictional history. There is a tantalizing line in the story about how the refugees on the ship, not allowed to have books with them, "trade in poetry." I wish the whole story had been about that. Instead, it's part tirade, part oh-yeah-by-the-way-some-things-happened-on-the-ship, part details from the life of a hazy first-person narrator before the roundup.

Telling over showing

"Show don't tell" is one of those workshop mantras that rightly deserves some rebellion against it. It's not historical. It rejects the "instruct" in "instruct and delight." It overlooks that wanting moral instruction from stories is a core aspect of human nature.

Shivani tells a lot. Even when he shows, he often follows it up with telling. In "Independence," we get this summary of a character, rather than hints from action, dialogue, etc.:

Was it that he faced his mortality in the mirror the innocent boy held up to him? Was it that he saw in the boy's mindless questions and motiveless harmony some challenge to the ordinary man Saleem himself had become? Saleem had never been a rebel; he'd never gone through the wild phase his university classmates had, putting their fathers through the ropes, driving their poor mothers to distraction.

In one instance, right after we have a scene rendered, with Julie pinching the cheeks and ruffling the hair of her child, we immediately get an explanation of what those actions meant: "The good thing about Julie was that she didn't jump into defending her mothering skills when Saleem accused her of shortfalls in that area. She listened seriously, like a good pupil." Or later, "Their father pinched and rolled his chin, in an expression of concern." That's showing and telling in one sentence, the action and the explanation of the action all in one.

I'm not really criticizing this trait; this is more of a description of where Shivani lies on a spectrum of descriptive and prescriptive narrative. I'd like to see more fiction written near this end of the spectrum. I just didn't find this collection was a particularly effective representative of its spectrum.

Or am I just a tool of my environment?

Shivani the critic has convincingly--to my mind, anyway--attacked the modern academia-publishing complex in serious fiction for its dogmatic insistence on an unimaginative, bourgeois form of realism, what he would, after over a decade of developing his thoughts, come to call "plastic realism."  I realize that in my critique of Anatolia, I've assumed a position well within the mainstream of this kind of realism. Perhaps, as much as I've railed against M.F.A. programs and suggested I don't find much on the scene that deeply inspires me (all of my top five authors are dead), I have, without meaning to, been commodified by this system. Maybe in the process of trying to get published by literary journals, I've ended up adopting the aesthetic I think is likely to get me published by them, and become, in the process, the sort of person who can't appreciate something like Anatolia that doesn't conform.

I don't think this is the case. I wanted to like these stories. I admire Shivani the critic so much, I was dying to love Shivani the story teller. He commented on my blog. I wanted to write about how I really got his fiction. I just didn't. Not that there was nothing to like in these stories, but nearly all the gold in it were thoughts similar to what Shivani has penned elsewhere in non-fiction form. As a story teller, I think he's a very good critic.

The stories I want to read and write

I don't mind being told how to feel about a story. I like it. I prefer it. But the moral grounding has to come organically from the story, or at least feel like it does. When Dori tells Marlin "It's time to let go!" it's pretty clear we've come to the climax of both the story and of Marlin's narrative arc. There's nothing thematically subtle about that line. But that line also works, because it is grounded in a real drama of a guy trying to find his kid. 

I once tried to write these types of philosophical narratives, where I'd have some thought about the world, stick it into a character, and then try to make that be enough to bring a world to life. It never worked. Jonathan Franzen's intellectual characters work not because they have brilliant thoughts--although they sometimes do--but because their brilliant thoughts do not solve all the problems in their lives. Sometimes, they are the source of nothing but anxiety. Franzen's characters do not exist just to have thoughts Franzen wants them to have. They have thoughts because that's part of what they do as fully formed characters. They might be characters similar to Franzen, but that's not the same as saying they're puppets Franzen has giving us his prophetic vision of life through the guise of a nominal story.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm a Philistine, or just an unimaginative critic. Maybe I'm unable to transcend the bourgeois tastes of my time. That's completely possible. Maybe I've developed such a knee-jerk response against what I think won't get published, I've equated it with something that shouldn't get published.

I might be wrong about what I like, but I don't think I've confused what I like for what I ought to like. Not yet. And my requirements for what I like are definitely not modern. I've never improved much upon Horace's "instruct and delight."