Why I Can't and Can Live My Dreams Through Fiction

My lifelong dream, the goal for which I've long yearned and pined, has always been to eat like a teenage boy and not gain weight. Unfortunately, I was not born that way. I have never been able to look at a pumpkin pie without imagining what it would be like to eat the whole thing at one sitting, just me, the pie, a fork, and good dollop of whipped cream.

Alas, it is not to be. As much as I love food, I've always had to cut myself off before things get out of hand... and then run several miles to try to work off whatever damage I did before the cut off. Even still, I'm still more soft than lean.

According to the common wisdom, it should be a blessing that I can write my fantasies, that I can live them vicariously through my invented characters. But I'm working right now to write a fourteen year old male speaker, and I gotta say, if I'm doing this right, if I'm fully imagining my character and his experience, all it does is make me hungry.

There's a metaphor there somewhere. Something about artistic hunger. Something about striving. Something about intensifying unfulfillable desire through language.

Lately, I've been wanting to buy some work by Jess Walter, whose story in the latest Best American Short Stories absolutely blew me away. I feel like this is a writer I always should have known. He's from Spokane, for goodness sake! How could I have not always been reading his work? I want to start making up for that right now, but MAN. Where to start? I'm scrolling through his novels, and the dude has been prolific.

Staring at the list of his books has made me hungry in a different way. Hungry to write, to revise, to finish and start again. That, at least, is a hunger I can satisfy by writing. May we all stay hungry, my friends.

A Little More On the Business of Writing (with just a little touch of Franco rant)

I wanted to say a few more words about "New Yorker Rejects Itself."

Shortly after The Review Review's story on the New Yorker rejecting one of its own previously published stories, Slate published this rebuttal, in which David Haglund argues that big journals have no time to respond to plagiarism with anything more than a form rejection. Thus, he suggests the journals recognized the piece from the start. Unfortunately, he offers no evidence to support this assertion.

My own experience (one year of working as a graduate assistant at the Georgia Review) contradicts Haglund's argument. The editors were as time crunched as any, yet they treated plagiarism with the utmost seriousness. They would definitely have contacted the author of a plagiarized submission had they recognized it--and would have told that author never to darken their door again. And I'm not just guessing that this is the case. While working there, I found a story that had lifted a line from a story I knew. I brought it to the associate editor's attention and watched the result first hand. What's interesting is that the Haglund does not seem to have asked the editors at the New Yorker what policies they have and follow regarding plagiarism. He only speculates.
 
Though Haglund's defense is based on speculation, I do think the New Yorker's rejection of a New Yorker story is defensible on different, more modest grounds. Every journal has its own style and space limitations. Just because a piece suited the taste of one editor at one magazine, no law states it must naturally suit all other editors' tastes as well. One New Yorker slush reader may have loved the story in the past and passed it up the chain. Another didn't. Or they did but this time, the story was up against unusually stiff competition and didn't make the cut. That hurts, but I understand that those decisions are part of the business.

What's less defensible and also sadly true is this: literary fiction magazines must sell copies to stay in business. Why else would Esquire publish this bit of dross by James Franco? Or Ploughshares for that matter? Why else would Graywolf accept his collection? Franco may not be a talented writer, but his name will sell copies. I won't launch into my full Franco rant, but this is where I get conflicted because, generally, yes, I feel optimistic about the business. I feel that if we strive and try long enough, we can make it. I wasn't simply blowing smoke when I wrote last week's post. But Franco still stares me in the face, contradicting that faith.

Here's what I don't know: will Franco sell enough copies to allow Graywolf to take a chance on an unknown writer? Will his name work like a carbon offset? Will Graywolf purge itself of the pollution of his poetry by taking on more projects from the kind of writers it has long been respected for--namely, the little known literary talent? Did Esquire and Ploughshares bring other writers, more talented but less known, into public awareness because they were in the same issue as his piece?

And I'm asking sincerely, because I do want to stay optimistic. And also because it fits with my experience with editors so far--including the many who've rejected me--which is that they care passionately about words and art and have suffered many years of low paychecks and long days to give that art a forum. I know that optimism tends to be read as naivete or, worse, stupidity, but the questions we face as writers are too easily written off with cynicism. It's equally simple-minded to be passively jaded or actively angry because of one instance of rejection. There is no one kind of editor or journal or publisher--and thank God for that. Every day, people sit down to their work at small presses and magazines and attend to their business with the same passion with which I sit down to my own work.  
  
The truth is, I have no idea what goes on in the New Yorker's editorial office. I hope and suspect they still are driven by passion, but I don't know firsthand, and it's fruitless to speculate. And you know what? At the end of the day, fretting over what they do or don't publish only distracts me from my own part of the writing business, the humble business of sitting my bottom in a chair, placing my hands on the keyboard, and writing.

If It Hadn’t a Been For That Horse: Semi-Connected Thoughts on Image and Strangeness

1. There’s a Louis Black stand-up routine in which he rants about two girls he overhead talking in a restaurant. One had said to the other, “If it hadn’t a been for that horse, I would have never made it through college.” Black did not have the opportunity to ask what this dropped phrase meant, and it drove him nuts that he would never find out. Like so much language, it dropped into his ear context-free. Worse, he could not imagine any context in which the statement made sense.

2. On an Air Schooner podcast, an interviewee discusses writing ekphrastic poems. She says, it isn’t enough to write about art from the outside; ekphrasis at its best imagines a way into the artwork.

3. Yesterday morning, I had the pleasure to attend an AWP panel on Larry Levis, put together by poet Joshua Robbins, whose book Praise Nothing has just been released. One of his fellow panelists, Kathy Fagan, talked about the Levis poem “Sensationalism,” collected in Winter Stars, an ekphrastic poem responding to Josef Koudelka photograph of a man talking to a horse. It struck me as a perfect example of a writer imagining himself in, as Levis begins to imagine the absent context back into the photo. He writes, “I begin to believe that the man’s wife & children/ Were shot & thrown into a ditch the week before this picture,” and continues his imaginative flight from there.

4. As writers, we strive to find what Eliot called the “objective correlative”—the concrete image that captures an abstract emotion and thus creates that unnamed emotion in the reader. It strikes me now that there is an implied formula here: 1) Locate emotions you want to write about, 2) Substitute things to create that you hope will emotion, 3) Remove traces of abstraction so the images can do their work.

What I’m wondering now is whether this formula is accurate. It seems to me what makes Levis’s poem so successful is that he finds the strange image, the one without context, the one that has no implied response, and then contextualizes its strangeness into his own life’s story—the story with which he is most deeply familiar and with which he makes the reader familiar as well. I want to make a connection here to Russian critic Victor Shklovsky who said we must make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, but the interplay here is more complex. Strangeness and familiarity are intertwined, perhaps even parasitic.

5. Levis writes, “Once, I was in love with a woman, & when I looked at her/ My face altered & took on the shape of her face.” He tells us, “She went mad, waking in tears she mistook for blood.” The familiar, the strange, the imaginative leap from self to not self, the inability to recognize what we make.

6. Today, I want to find a piece of strangeness. I want to feel along the seams of its door and then climb into it like a sports car. I want to press the pedal to the floor and shove the gearshift hard into one place then another as I move from second to third and upward. I want to hear the tires of that strangeness squeal across the pavement and smell the rubber burning under my feet. I want to drive that strangeness hard and fast until it takes me where it always does: that place where horses speak and guide us straight into the truest and most distant part of the familiar, the place where art lives.

Literary vs. Commercial: A Panel Report from AWP 2013

Yesterday, I went to a talk on bridging the gap between “commercial” and “literary” novels. The speakers (Ed Falco, Julianna Baggott, Lisa Haines, and Benjamin Percy) were phenomenal. They were the kinds of writers you want to be friends with so you could sit over beers late at night talking about favorite books. They were all that a panel should be—funny and insightful, approachable but authoritative—and they made a number of comments that I’ve been mulling over ever since. For example, I liked Ed Falco’s point that we should not be judging books by genre but by quality. He rightly argued that there are badly written literary genre books and well-written commercial ones, and that the quality of goodness or badness in the writing itself (rather than genre) should determine how we judge it. He said that the text, once done and sent to the publisher, is not inherently “literary” or “commercial.” It’s the author’s attitude when writing the book that puts it there. If you’re thinking only about your needs as an author and what you feel you must write, you are writing from a literary impulse, but if you are thinking about the audience and how the book might appeal to them, then your impulse is commercial.

Perhaps it is because I agree with him that I found the question and answer portion of the talk to be a bit frustrating. A young writer behind me asked about how the literary/commercial distinction affected the writing of the book—a good meaty process question—and the panelists (I want to attribute this answer mostly to Haines and Baggott, but more might have chimed in) responded that you write what you feel you must write, ignoring the generic question altogether. I am sure this answer feels utterly true to them, and I’m also sure that it is the best answer available, but I have to say, I can’t help but recognize it as an oversimplification. After all, anyone who has written creatively has faced the wealth of artistic choices, each beckoning with its own siren song. We have ridden through the yellow wood and faced, over and over again, the divergent paths. Sometimes, the street signs on those paths might as well be labeled “commercial” and “literary.” They lead us to different ends, but it isn’t always clear which is the better path.

Let’s be honest: our choices determine the book’s audience and the level of respect it earns with The New York Times book review or, as Haines pointed out, a tenure committee. Haines and Baggott both said that their most commercially successful books were left off their academic CVs or listed as supplementary to their other work because they knew those books would hurt rather than help their cause, and failure to make tenure means the loss of a job and the primary means to feed the family.

I’ve been at the cross roads with my second novel now for the past few months, trying to decide exactly how gritty, how “real,” I want this book to be, knowing that making it too gritty may not appeal to young adult readers who are likely to be its primary audience. The creative genies have yet to come to tell me which path I should take, and this fence rail has long become uncomfortable.

Who was it who said “the truth is rarely pure and never simple?” That’s the message I wish the panel had given the young writer in the audience struggling at her own crossroads. And maybe if they hadn’t been on the spot, under pressure to give the quick answer, they would have. Or maybe I am projecting too much. Maybe the choices have always been clearer for them. Haines and Baggott, after all, are talented and prolific—far more so than I am. Maybe they don’t get stuck on these questions as I am and have been. Maybe they don’t wallow in indecision. Maybe that’s the heart of genius.

Since I am not a genius, though, I will simply say this to that fellow writer and struggler who asked her bold question: many of us share your doubt. The answer Baggott and Haines gave is undoubtedly right—we must determine the road by being true to our work. Yet I come back to Falco (silent during this portion of the Q&A) who said that it is during process that we find ourselves following a literary or commercial impulse. Sometimes, those two masters give contradictory orders, and the writer must determine which s/he serves. The choice is rarely pure and never simple.

Donkey Spatula

My students were feeling their oats last Wednesday. As often happens in a writing workshop, the creative energies bounced off one another, colliding and colluding, building into a sort of fervid silliness. Wednesday, this silliness was taking the form of random word pairings and uproarious laughter that was eating into the start of our class. "We have to get to work," I told them, feeling that I had better take charge lest someone lose precious workshop time.

"We are working," the students replied. "We're being creative."

"No," I told them. "Putting random ideas together is not creative. It's just absurdity. I can't say 'donkey spatula' and consider myself creative. To be creative, the two words must come together to create something."

I should be crediting someone for this idea because I know it is not original with me, but my mind cannot lay its finger on the name. (Gardner? Roethke? Readers, you'll help me out in the comments section, won't you?) Nevertheless, the distinction is an important one. Two disparate ideas yoked together by force doesn't necessarily create something. It's the poet who puts the disparate together in a way that becomes harmonious and enlightening, that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. The words might create an idea or a setting or a character or a voice or perhaps even a sound, but unless something is created by the seemingly random pairing, then it has failed its work.

Our class has a running list of mottos we should put on class tee shirts. I'd like to nominate "donkey spatula" as a tee shirt idea and a reminder to all of us that creating is harder and nobler work than it may seem--but I'd like to nominate it, too, as a celebration of the silliness that allows us a much needed reprieve for that work.

I'm so grateful for my students, who add levity and light to every class.

There are many things I'm good at...

...but blog design is not one of them.

This week, my publishers at New Rivers Press sent me my cover design, giving me the first glimpse of what my novel will look like when it comes out in October. (Squee!!) I decided that, now that I have the art, I'd better redesign the blog to match, hopefully bringing the blog design more up to date along the way.

I'm no graphic designer, though, and I'm afraid it shows. I see how things could be improved but have no clue on how to improve them. I guess this is why it's my job to write the books and someone else's job to make a beautiful cover.

So, for this week, rather than a reflection on writing, I thought I would offer this writing prompt for a story, poem, or screenplay:

Write about a character whose heart's desire is to do a job well, but who has no talent whatsoever for that job. Let the job be one that others would see as mundane or easy. Let the character have another talent, perhaps one that would be lucrative, but let that talent be ignored or dismissed. Your character can't see how what s/he's good at is any help at all. The job has become his/her sole focus.

Genre and Its Discontents

Yesterday, I gave a lecture on selling a novel that I ended with the following advice:

There is no easy way to do this.
You will be rejected.
Rejection will hurt.
You will survive.

I told my students that success in this business relies on three things: talent, luck, and perseverance. We have no control over the first two, but the third trumps everything.

It is perhaps poetic justice that after such a speech, I had a story rejection in my e-mail inbox that night, gently letting me know I had failed to make the finalists of a short story contest I'd entered. I'll be honest, I set my hopes high on making the finalists. Worse, the rejected piece was the first chapter of my novel-in-progress, which I had adapted to stand on its own as a story. My first attempt at sending the book into the world had just been flung back. And I was right: it hurt. Though I have clearly survived, I have also been giving a lot of thought to the reasons for the story's failure, both because I want to persevere and send it out again and because the most important part of failure is learning from it.

In this case, I think my point-of-view character is a tough sell. He's a fourteen year old boy.

That may not automatically sound like a death knell to some readers, but in the literary fiction market, a young POV character doesn't help sell your book. I knew this going in, of course. I'd played around with young adult POV characters in grad school, and a professor had warned me that it marked my book as young adult fiction, which would prevent it from being taken seriously. "Try to think of one work of serious literary fiction that has a child as the point-of-view character," she said.

"What about Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird?"

She looked at me pityingly. "I would hardly call that a great literary novel."

I won't try to determine the literary merits of To Kill a Mockingbird here. The question, though, has stuck with me. Could you write a literary novel told from the point of view of a kid?

This question was driven home to me further this summer at a writer's workshop I attended. My workshop peers acknowledged the piece was well written, but they wondered whether "young adult fiction" was really appropriate in a literary fiction venue. The workshop leader, John Casey (whose work I highly recommend), came to my defense. "What makes you think this is a young adult novel?" he asked. "Just because we're in the point of view of a kid? This strikes me as literary."

The truth is, though, that I too had come to see book as a young adult novel. I had edited myself for language and sexual content that--let's face it--are a part of a real-life fourteen year old's experience. I came home and found myself writing a masturbation scene, and I'm happy with the results. In fact, scenes like this are becoming some of my favorite scenes in the book because I can feel the risk I'm taking there, and that risk feel authentic to the character I'm creating and the gritty world he inhabits. My rejection yesterday made me realize that I hadn't pushed the first chapter as much as I could--the character is still pretty squeaky clean there. I wasn't living up to the psychological reality demanded by literary fiction.

That said, the risk I'm taking by adding sex, drugs, and language back into the book takes me right out of the YA market, a market with significantly better selling potential than literary fiction. I'm happier with the book, but I may have just made it much harder to sell. The honesty required of literary fiction marks the book as "inappropriate" for younger readers, however more accurate it is to their experiences. Meanwhile, the fact that my POV character remains fourteen years old may make the book a no-go for literary fiction audiences. I want so badly for the book to be both literary and YA-friendly, but it seems I have hit a crossroads. I may lose both audiences by writing the book as I feel it should be written.

Should genre conventions govern the decisions we make as authors? On the one hand, surely we have to write towards Truth, or else what the hell are we writing for? On the other hand, if we want to have our book in the hands of readers, don't we have to acknowledge the realities of the market in at least some regard?

Yesterday, Richard Bausch posted the following advice on Facebook:

"Seriously, it's best to realize that it never does get easier, and the writer who thinks it should get easier is involved in a dangerous self-deception. Because as you go on and keep practicing this craft and art, you know more all the time, and are therefore apt to see with greater and greater clarity the large number of possibilities that exist in each line or gesture--and so the task just becomes all that much harder. And the heavy doubts never do go away. Better make friends with them now, because they really won’t ever, ever go away."

He's right in so many ways. There are endless possibilities in the line and gesture, and so many more in each scene added or deleted. I've signed on for the long haul; doubts will be my road companions. Perseverance is more than just sending out again after rejection. It's about facing your work every day knowing that each decision you make as a writer is going to be rejected by someone, and trying to determine what decision is the necessary one for you. It's about conjuring these decisions out of air and trying to make something that is authentic. There is no easy way to do this.

25% of the Time: Questions of Process

I watched the documentary Bad Writing for free on Vimeo last month. The film maker Vern Lott (whom I learned from watching was a fellow University of Idaho Vandal--woot woot for Brink Hall on film!)

did a remarkable job of collecting interviews with some of the best writers and writing teachers working today, including George Saunders, Steve Almond, David Sedaris, Margaret Atwood, among many, many incredible others.

The film is a wealth of thought-provoking insight, but in particular, I find myself coming back to a comment from Daniel Orozco, who commented that he loves writing 25% of the time and hates it the other 75% of the time. I'll be honest, this made me sit up, say, "me too!" and feel awash in all sorts of warmth and kinship. What's made me keep thinking of it, though, is what he said next--that drafting is least favorite part of the process. For him, to draft is the painful process of forcing down words when he can see that the syntax and words aren't working and everything is so, so bad. Revision brings the joy of relief, when he can make the language do what it needs.

For me, the reverse is true. I love the magic of discovery when I write into a scene and begin to envision the place and start to understand the complex reactions of my characters to their private and public conflicts and feel their humanity. I love getting carried away by a sentence and feeling like I'm an oar-less canoe floating along its whorls and eddies.

Revision, though? Oh revision. It would be unfair to say I hate it. Hate is too strong. As I tell my children, I'm too young to hate. I don't want to hate or be hateful. And honestly, I don't hate revision. Dread, yes; hate, no. Revision can offer the same magical and exciting surprises, the same writer highs, the pleasure as drafting. Unfortunately, they're often fewer and painfully far between. Revision is the necessary work, the moment where I acknowledge that the draft that carried me away is nowhere near good enough, the part in which I tear the scenes along their seams to try to determine what stuffing is missing.

The thing is, I probably spend 75%-80% of the time I'm "writing" a book locked in this final battle, trying to revise it so that the text resembles the vision at least in small part. And I'm wondering whether, for Orozco, it's the reverse. Does it take him 75% of the time to ache out a draft so he can have a joyous 25% time revising it? Do writers, by our natures, rush the part we love in the frenzy of our delight only to slog through the other part, and vice verse? If so, can--or should--we spend more time in whatever phase is the "good" part?

Ultimately, I find I don't trust the desire to prolong the joy or to mediate the hard parts. As masochistic as it may sound, I suspect that the painful 75%, wherever it lies, is the part that actually makes the finished book good. It's the part we can be proud of later. I suspect that, whatever the painful part of writing is, we avoid it at our work's peril.

The Next Big Thing

NOTE: The Next Big Thing is a blog series, winding its way through the internet. I was invited by writer Eric Sasson, whose short story collection MARGINS OF TOLERANCE is published with Livingston Press. Check back next week for the blog addresses of the other writers whom I've invited into the challenge.

What is the title of your book?

Borrowed Horses


Where did the idea come from for the book?

The novel started as my dissertation at the University of Georgia. For a long time, I'd resisted writing about horses or riding. They were my passion, but I felt that few readers would share that passion. I couldn't stand the idea that the thing that I loved might bore other people, so I silenced myself rather than taking that risk. Then one day I stumbled upon Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, which had only recently come out. I knew nothing about her or the book and hesitated to buy it because it was about opera and what did I know or care about opera? But for some reason, I did buy the book. I immediately fell in love with it. She wrote so beautifully about opera that it made me care. I thought, if she can do that for me with opera, then I must try to do the same thing with horses. I realized that the wonderful thing about great language is that it can transcend our prejudices and biases. The root passion is what we respond to, even if that emotion triggered by different objects for the writer than it is for the reader--which is ironic because, to transmit that passion, one must write in images and things. That's the paradox of fiction and what makes Eliot's idea of the objective correlative so sticky. It's what Patchett had realized and I had to learn from her. If the language is right, the writer's feeling for the objects trigger the necessary emotion even if readers do not share the writer's emotional associations with those objects.

Patchett's book gave me permission and, thus, I had a subject to write about, but not a plot. In fact, I was frantically plot-less for quite some time, which is terrifying for any writer but especially one with a self-inflicted deadline. (I was bound and determined to finish my PhD in 2006, come hell or high water.) Aside from journaling and note-taking, I stopped work on the book while I was studying for my comprehensive exams, simply because I was spending nearly every waking moment reading. About midway through that terrible nearly writing-less year of relentless speed reading, I re-read Jane Eyre for my Victorian exam, and as I was reading, I kept thinking about what an amazing book it is. I first read it when I was thirteen, and I've read it over and over since, and every time, it holds up. I kept thinking, I wish I could write this book, and then I started wondering if I could... Would the plot bend to the characters I envisioned? My speaker was no Jane, but she might be a Rochester. I started to wonder if I could tell his story through a female speaker. What would happen if my main character had a mad man who wouldn't stay safely in her past? I worked from that idea forward into the book.


What genre does your book fall under?

I like the word choice "fall under" here. I'm imagining a steam roller called genre about to roll me over. I imagine myself tripping on a curb and being pressed into steaming tarmac.

I call Borrowed Horses a "literary pot boiler." I don't think book stores are using that genre label yet, but wouldn't it be cool if they did?

 
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I kind of love this question because when I was workshopping early chapters, Jeff Newberry, who is a good friend and an amazing poet, said that he pictured Dave (my madman) as Matthew McConaughy, an actor whom I adore, and it really helped make Dave clear in my mind.

Beyond that, I'm afraid I'm going to run out of answers quickly because I am really bad with celebrity knowledge. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think the characters shouldn't be played by known actors. I often love movies best when I don't recognize any of the actors and can, therefore, utterly buy the idea that they are exactly the people whom they play on the screen. It removes a layer of artificiality for me. In Borrowed Horses, the male and female leads would need to feel authentic. Joannie sees herself as a kind of Clint Eastwood/ Spaghetti Western character, in spite of which--or perhaps because of which--she is extremely attractive to men. She's athletic and smirks a lot and has curling dark hair. Timothy is tall and thin with hazel eyes and a kind of punk-ish vibe, but also exudes a lot of quiet wisdom. The actors who played these two would want to embody those kind of traits.


What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Borrowed Horses retells the love story of Jane Eyre, inverting the genders and re-setting the story in Idaho with lots of horses and fence-jumping.


Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Borrowed Horses will be published by New Rivers Press in October 2013.


How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

This is a tough question because I had been taking notes on the book and letting ideas percolate for about ten years before I started writing the novel in earnest. I'll say though that I wrote the first draft in roughly a year and a half, and then re-drafted for the next six years--including rewriting the entire manuscript from page one. The novel that will be published is a far, far different book from the one I defended as a dissertation in 2006.


What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

It seems somehow egotistical to compare my book to those that I love, so rather than comparing, I'll just mention a few books that I admire and wished to emulate: Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, everything by Louise Erdrich, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (of course), and Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow. I'll also say that I had Sherman Alexie much on my mind, both because he and I write about a similar region and because my character Timothy is part-Native American, from Spokane like Alexie, and I wrote very much afraid that I would fall into stereotypes or, inversely, that I would fail to capture the culture. It was really important for me that Timothy be a person rather than a caricature. Alexie's poem "How to Write the Great American Indian Novel" was very much on my mind. I don't want to be the writer he parodies there.


Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I was inspired by two of the great loves of my life: horses and Idaho. I wanted to capture the feeling of flight a rider has when jumping a fence, and I wanted to give the world a glimpse of some of the most beautiful landscape this country has to offer.


What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

Joannie is an x-ray technologist, so I did a lot of research into bones. I don't know if that actually peaks anyone's interest, but our bones are amazing, fascinating things, and far, far stronger than most people would imagine. I worked a lot of bone research into the language because I found it so beautiful and inspiring.

Also, I know writers are supposed abhor cliches, but I've always loved the old saw "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger." This book is an exploration of how true that is for my main character, but also of the ways that personal strength, if it becomes cold and removed, can become its own brand of weakness.

Voice

I love having caller ID. When an unknown or an 800- number comes up, I rarely answer. I figure, this saves both me and the telemarketers trying to call me quite a lot of grief. Today, though, I'm waiting for the plumber to come fix my toilet, so when the unknown number came up, I took a chance and answered, thinking it might be him.

It wasn't. The call was from somewhere in the subcontinent, from a man who claimed to represent Microsoft. He asked, how I was doing? On this side of the phone line, I gaped, unsure whether to say anything. In fact, even as naturally suspicious as I am, it took me half a minute of silent gaping to realize I needed to hang up. I didn't know if he was from Microsoft. I doubted it. Everything from the series of numbers and letters that had appeared on my phone read out to the pause while it connected us to the distance in the line suggested that maybe I shouldn't trust this situation. All this was almost tipped by one enormous fact: the fact of his voice.

The lilt of it, the pitch of it, the seeming sincerity when he asked how my day was--it all reminded me strongly of a colleague at work of whom I am quite fond. That half-moment when I didn't hang up? It was consumed with the need to remind myself that this wasn't the man I knew, and that it was OK to hang up.

Still, I was strangely shaken. I felt I'd been discourteous to a stranger--this even though I myself have worked as a telemarketer to help support my family over the summers while I was in grad school. I know from experience that a hang up isn't an insult; it's just a reason to move to the next call. But that human voice... that unique timber that no robocaller has ever replicated...

Because I'm working on manuscript revision today, it struck me how crucial this element is in writing. If I can make a voice that personal on the page, it's hard to hang up on. Our love for the sound of our fellow beings is one of the things that pulls us into story, whether we know it or not. It's what we most enjoy when we sit round a campfire and speak of ghosts. It's what makes us crave stories when we're alone and need the comfort of voice.

As writers, we're the ultimate scammers and salesmen, pitching a line we acknowledge up front to be false, and expecting emotional payment regardless. Any number of craft elements help make this possible, but I rarely give voice its due. Today, I'm rethinking this.

Plot, Structure, Through Line

From the 2012 Sewanee Writers' Conference

The other day, I was standing in a line of writers at Sterling's waiting to get a hazelnut latte when I heard two others talking about their workshop. "How did it go?" writer #1 asked. "Great," writer #2 said. "We talked a lot about plot. You know, it's funny, but we don't tend to talk a lot about plot in writing workshops. We talk about structure, but not plot."

Yesterday, I was listing to the Tin House writing podcast as I went for my morning run, and the subject of plot came up again. Steve Almond and Aimee Bender talked over many pitfalls writers face, one of which is giving a character problems (terminal illness, dying parents, etc) out of fear that if we don't, there will be no plot. Bender quoted Ray Bradbury, "plot is no more than the foot prints in the snow left after your characters have run by." (I believe she left out the end of that quotation, which is "on the way to incredible destinations." I suspect that ending is crucial for Bradbury [ahem, dinosuars; ahem, book burning--Bradbury is not exactly plot-light], but I'll leave it aside for now.)

In my own workshop with John Casey and Christine Schutt, one of the workshop participants mentioned a narrative having a "through line." Casey asked if through line meant the same as plot and the writer answered that no, he thought it dealt more with an idea running though the work (what we might also call theme).

With all this in the air, I've been thinking about the collision and collusion of our definitions of plot, structure, and through line, so I thought I'd do a little Internet browsing this morning to see what Dr. Google had to bring to the table.

I have to admit, my own definition of "through line" (admittedly one I invented from the contexts in which I'd heard the word rather than on scholarship) has much more to do with narrative threads and arcs than strictly themes. For me, the through line is closer to one of Aristotle's unities. For him, time and space helped define the story and give it a kind of cohesion. As we've abandoned that unity and opened narrative to longer forms, we've needed to find substitute unities. Yes, a story's themes are among these threads, but I would say characters, too, can be threads running through a story. Dickens, for example, wrote a cast of characters who were related in surprising and often absurd ways. As we've become increasing suspicious of coincidence, recurring images have added another thread. Asked to define a through line, I would have said that, like any good rope, it is a braiding of all these threads and to form the line that ultimately pulls us over the narrative arc (which I'm using here as almost synonymous with plot).

Thus, for me, a through line combines elements of character, imagery, thematics, etc to pull us over this mountain:

But checking in with Wikipedia this morning, I found that my definition, though pretty, is not accurate either. It offers this:

"The through line, sometimes also called the spine, was first suggested by Constantin Stanislavski as a simplified way for actors to think about characterisation [sic]. He believed actors should not only understand what their character was doing, or trying to do, (their objective) in any given unit, but should also strive to understand the through line which linked these objectives together and thus pushed the character forward through the narrative."

Here, the through line resides strictly in character and motivation, but if we lay Bradbury's quotation ("plot is [...] the foot prints in the snow left [by] characters") alongside this, we find ourselves back at the deep and abiding relation of plot to character.

A Google request for a definition of plot added this:

plot/plät/

Noun:

A plan made in secret by a group of people to do something illegal or harmful.

Now, I realize of course that this is not how writers tend to use the word "plot," but I kind of love the idea that something subversive is going on here. Hopefully, our plots are not illegal or harmful outside of the world of the fiction (honestly, I hope my writing aspires to do more good than harm), but it seems to me that, while writers may have a plan for our book, it often feels like something outside of us, something residing in the art itself, will not always allow us to follow that plan. Our characters don't always behave themselves. The subvert and foil our best laid plans. I'll argue that this is a good thing--a sign that we've just started to make the characters complex enough. The through line may be a way to simplify their personality into something comprehensible for a actor or writer, but it should never serve to make their actions any less authentically human, and therefore, surprising.

I'm no closer to parsing these definitions into neatly defined territories than I was was when I began writing this post, but somehow, I find the blur between these elements deeply satisfying and far more useful than easy classification would be.

In Defense of the Hook

It seems like it has become morally suspect to suggest that a book, essay, or story should have a "hook." The implication seems to be that it's a contrivance or a gimmick, and as such, I understand why it has become unfashionable to use the term. Still, I think there is something to be said for thinking in terms of a "hook," and so I'll try to say that something.

Perhaps the problem is the term "hook" itself, which implies the reader is a fish. The reader is not a fish. The reader is an intelligent human being with many demands on his/her time--but in abandoning the term hook, it seems like too many writers also forget this crucial fact of the reader's humanity. Too often, I see writers who seem to feel that the reader owes it to them to slog through pages or attempt to penetrate their word puzzles and mind games just because the writer bothered to write the pages in the first place.

The reader, however, owes the writer nothing. In fact, it's the reverse. If someone has been gracious enough to spend time and money to read our efforts, we owe them.

What I like about the term hook is that the metaphor implies the writer should offer the reader some morsel up front--something we can see and smell and taste just as much as we can see, smell, and taste the barbed hook itself. The writing needs to establish a reason for us readers to willingly sacrifice our time.

Ultimately, the hook should not be a gimmick. If it is, chances are the reader will be disappointed in the work. Readers will rightly feel cheated. Instead, the hook should offer readers a glimpse of what the rest of the piece promises to give: romance, tragedy, mystery, comedy, philosophical questions, etc. The hook establishes the art of the book. It is the offering the writer makes for the reader's time. The best hide hooks themselves because, like well-tied flies, they feel a natural part of the narrative landscape. When those lures are artfully done, I as the reader will bite every time.

------

PS. (ten minutes later)
After writing this I stumbled across Julie Ritter's poem "Ravi Shankar Hand Dip" at http://pbq.drexel.edu/pbq/archives/462. Synchronicity?

Quick as a fishhook flared into the water,
the way hip rubs against hip intentionally
unintentional on the dance floor, furtive
as a glance at someone else’s bank
statement, palmed like a cigarette in the rain,
the fingers exploratory, an insect’s antennae,
twitching to capture texture to populate
the hinterlands of a long winter night alone,
a maneuver not catalogued by the Kama Sutra,
but full of nervy frottage, pervy wattage,
a slip of skin on skin thin as a wine glass stem
and more circumspect, harder to unpack
than a tackle box and oft-deployed in subway
cars and murky bars – that’s the hand dip.

A Dragon For Spec Fiction: It's been a good semester, my loves

This semester, I ventured into terra incognita. Worlds unknown and becoming known. I dabbled with magic systems, mingled with strange races, and wielded sharp blades. In short, I taught my first course on writing the speculative fiction novel. Tonight, it came, with the semester, to a bitter sweet end. These students wrote their hearts out this semester, spilling them drop by drop onto the page in the best of all possible ways. They wrote with the passion of the faithful. (There was a curious lack of dragons, but we'll let that pass.)

I've loved teaching this class, which is interesting given its history. The course has never been offered before because, though the department knew there was student interest, no faculty member particularly wanted to read multiple chapters from early drafts of speculative novels. That's just not their bag, baby. And I understand their position. I, too, am a fan of literary fiction. It's what I write and it's what I read, but I think there's something to be said for teaching speculative fiction. So I'm going to say it.

A quick list, as it were, of just a few things writing spec fiction brings out of the students:

1) Passion. The students who took this class were a self-selected group. Many have been working on spec fiction novels from their early teens. These writers were absolutely committed to the job of writing, and dedicated to finding the awesome in their stories. Their passion rejuvenated mine as well, reminding me that, after all, finding the awesome in any story *is* what it's all about.

2) Knowledge. When I teach a standard literary fiction writing class, part of my job is to educate the students about the writing that's out there. Most of the literary writing students know is dated (Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway), and I have to bring them up to speed with recent trends--something that's difficult to do in a semester when I'm also trying to teach basic writing craft and workshop their stories. In this class, however, the knowledge of the literature was reversed. They know contemporary spec fiction far better than I, so I could teach them about craft while they helped educate me and each other about the current trends in the field. I did a ton of reading to prep for this class, but the students had years of lead time to out-read me. It created a great collaborative dynamic, allowing them to really apply what they knew to the writing they were doing.

3) Willingness to be challenged. I started this class with the premise that, if they were still working on Dragonlance-style fantasy hoping that it would be good enough, they were wrong. (And yes, there were some writers who thought exactly this.) We talked at least about how the field was shifting, how electronic markets and intense competition was driving the quality of writing and invention up, and how they were going to have to be better than they imagined possible to compete. Because they had the passion and the knowledge I mentioned, they drove each other and challenged themselves to levels of extraordinary growth.

4) Invention. Every fiction writer invents, but those working in spec fiction bare a burden of world building that I am happy to forego. The critical thinking these students did about everything (from ecosystems to governments to the cost of magic to space travel) was humbling. I often wished my peers in other departments (Biology, Economics, Physics, etc) could have been there to hear the application of so much college learning to fictional worlds. Fiction allowed these students them a place to put all their learning into action in a way that was truly exciting to behold.

I'm going to miss these kids. And so, here's a dragon heart for them, one that I hope will continue to breathe fire into them as they breathed their infectious passion into all they did this term.

Painting the Kitchen and Why It's Like Writing: A Defense of Journaling

I came pretty close to a nervous breakdown over spring break. Maybe that's an overstatement, but it sure didn't feel like one at the time. I should add that, generally, I like to think of myself as a fairly stable kind of person who is able to handle life's ups and downs, but last Tuesday, I realized I was nearly half way through the only break in this incredibly busy semester, a semester that will bleed into my summer school courses without any time off, and I was still getting up at five to write and working all day and feeling just as stressed about the papers I needed to grade and the power point presentations I needed to write as I do on any other work day. My mood was foul and I was prone to lash out and say damaging things. Seeing this, my husband, being a sensible man, took me to Lowes and we bought two gallons of bright blue paint.

I spent the next day and a half working steadily on making our kitchen blue. It was good. Yes, I was working, but it was physical work, and it was something I have wanted to do for a while and haven't found time for. It was a chance to get out of my head for a little while--or, perhaps, in the millions of little whiles in between the thoughts that will bubble up when you aren't doggedly pursuing thought.

I'm a big believer in removing switch plate covers. It takes under a minute to take them off and painting easily goes that much faster because they're off. But I've painted a lot of rooms in a lot of houses and apartments, and I know that many people try to paint around the switch plates. No matter how painstaking their efforts, it never turns out well.

So I got to thinking, is there a writing equivalent to removing switch plate covers? That is, is there something writers can do that takes almost no effort to do but substantially improves the work?

The answer, for me at least, is the writing journal.

I recently gave myself a stern talking to about journal use. Like so many painters, I sometimes try to take what seems like a shortcut, jumping straight into the novel manuscript I'm finishing. Sometimes it works, but often I stall out. I do a lot of my writing at 5AM, even though my brain has not started to really function yet. It's a good time to be productive because the kids aren't up yet, but not so good if I can't get my mind going. If I start fresh, it might take me a half hour or more of staring at the screen to come up with an idea. Even then, ideas come in fits and starts, which means I'm barely started on it before the kids are staggering out of bed looking for breakfast and I begin asking myself why I woke up so early at all.

To prevent this, I've been trying to finish those morning writing sessions by stopping work on the novel earlier--even, and maybe especially, when I have a sense of where I'm going and it's hard to stop, and switch to writing notes for the next day in my journal. That way, I can start the next day at five with a plan. I start with direction and purpose. Almost always, my writing is better and more productive as a result.

Another benefit? Like the thoughts that bubbled up while I was painting and not trying to think about anything, thoughts can bubble up during the day when I'm not focused on the manuscript and trying to come up with them. Because the journal is so low stakes and because I rarely strive for a complete sentence, let alone a well crafted one, I keep jotting things in it all day. It's not an intimidating or impatient as the blinking cursor. And after all, if you start writing something at five in the morning, chances are your mind will circle back to it, and while I may not have the time to write those circling thoughts into the manuscript, I do have time to catch some of them and make notes in my trusty, beat-up comp book. Just like removing a switch plate, the relatively small time investment has a big pay off.

----

Other random painting thought:
"lying on the beach perpetrating a tan" is almost as amazing a verb use as "vexed to nightmare" or "slouches towards Bethlehem." Almost. There's still no one who can deploy a verb like Yeats.

Who Cares? (The Most Important Question We Never Ask)

For the past few years, I have started every creative writing class by telling my students that there is one question that I can't ask but that is more important than any other. "Who cares?"

I tell them this on the first day of class, before I've seen any of their writing, because I can't read their stories, the ones they've worked so hard on, the ones they've poured so much of themselves into, I can't hold those narratives up in front of all their peers, and say "honestly, y'all, who cares?"

To do so would be soul crushing, and it is neither my job nor my desire to crush souls. Still, before we've read any stories or can attach the question to any one writer's work, I have to put the question out there because, if we're serious about writing for publication, then our writing must above all other things make someone care.

Fiction, when it works, works like a gut punch. Whether we're out to make someone happy or sad, the purpose of fiction is not to move someone's rational mind, but rather, to move them emotionally. That's not easy to do. Most people are tired at the end of the day.

Flannery O'Connor knew this and wrote brilliantly about it (see her essay on "The Tired Reader" in Mystery and Manners).. The only problem is, she blames the reader, writing “I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.”

Now, I love Flannery O'Connor, and, though I know she is in part being facetious, I also want to believe that she is right because so many people are moved by her writing. Still, I wonder if the less-talented rest of us can get away with this attitude? Don't we have to go after those tired hearts and, if not uplift them, make them at least care a little about the characters we write? If we're moving hearts, and then minds along with them but hearts first, isn't making someone care the single most important function of a piece of writing?

I'm not advocating we start asking "who cares?" on any student's story. As I said earlier, I believe it would be destructive and harmful in the long run... Still, I'd like to throw the question out there as one we writers should be asking ourselves. We may not live in the sentimental age of the Victorians, with their love of melodrama, but nonetheless, readers turn to fiction because they do want catharsis; they do want to care. Our job is to provide matter worth caring about.

In Defense of Teaching Fantasy Writing

Speculative fiction is big in Utah. Writers Orson Scott Card, Brandon Sanderson, Brandon Mull, Stephanie Meyer, and many, many others have all called Utah home, and most of my Advanced Fiction writers are working on fantasy novels of their own, so perhaps it is unsurprising that in my first year here, I find myself teaching a course devoted exclusively to writers of Speculative Fiction.

I'll be bold and venture this generalization: most creative writing programs in the country look down on genre fiction in general and spec fiction in particular. Most graduate programs and many undergraduate programs will discourage their young writers from "wasting their talent" on writing sci fi or fantasy novels, and they have some good reasons for this, the best being that many writing students fall back on writing flat, stereotypical characters who follow expected plot points. Teachers argue that writers of genre fiction aren't challenging their imaginative abilities by creating something wholly new.

The problem with this argument is that it ignores the same pitfalls in literary fiction. I've heard agents complain about "MFA fiction," for example, by which I suppose they mean the beautifully written novel about nothing in particular. I've heard others complain that all MFA writers write about is cancer patients or self-absorbed twenty-somethings, the stock characters of literary fiction. I don't want to denigrate my peers by implying that these stereotypes are just; they may have some grounding in fact, but they overgeneralize. However, the best literary writers break from these stereotypes to write moving stories that get at core human truths. And therein lies the problem with the argument against allowing students to write genre fiction, because I would argue that the best spec fic aspires to the same purpose of illuminating what's best and worst about humanity.

When I began prepping my spec fic writing class, I was the first to admit that I'd shunned SF for quite some time and that I had quite a lot of reading to catch up on. I had read The Hobbit, LOTR, and waaaaaay back in my youth, the original Dragonlance trilogy, but I had no idea what SF looked like now. I asked my students, friends, and colleagues to help me generate a reading list, which included Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones, Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson, etc., etc., and what I quickly discovered was that my own assumptions about fantasy--and those of my colleagues--were well and truly out-moded. The best fantasy novels had long moved on from the stock character types of Dragonlance and into political dystopias with keen attention to plot. Good Omens was a romp, the voice of which kept me engaged from page one to the end. Gaiman's American Gods paired and inventive premise with an engaging literary writing style. The characters in Joe Abercrombie's Heroes were as complex and nuanced as any I'd read in literary fiction, and while I have some issues with George R.R. Martin's love of the word jackanapes and his need to cling to the phrase "game of thrones" once he'd discovered it, I can't fault his ability to offer compelling imagery or his deft juggling of multiple viewpoints over a sustained narrative.

I quickly realized too that I had read far more SF than I thought I had. Because Margaret Atwood and Neil Stephenson are often housed in the literary shelf at the bookstore, I hadn't thought of Oryx and Crake or Snowcrash when I assessed my own reading tastes as strictly literary. Acknowledging that the boundaries are far more permeable than we sometimes imagine, I quickly listed other spec fic novels: Gulliver's Travels, The Monk, The Mysteries of Udolfo, Frankenstein, Dracula, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and so on. I realized that my friend Kirsten Kaschock's brilliant novel Sleight was speculative, as were the works of Italo Calvino, Aimee Bender, Anne Carson, and Franz Kafka. In short, I realized that "speculative fiction" is a false label wrongly associated with escapism and a sort of childishness, when many current SF writers are doing far more politically and artistically important work than is commonly acknowledged.Yes, there is still a good deal of bad writing out there, but the genre is deep with quality writers and writing.

Whether the average MFA program acknowledges it or not, speculative fiction is becoming a dominant literary form, not merely a pop genre. (Perhaps I should say "again becoming" since critics now acknowledge some of the best gothic fiction as literary.) The problems students encounter in trying to write spec fiction (hackneyed characters, insufficient attention to plot structure, etc) are common to all genres of writing including literary fiction, and the world building spec fic writers must do deepens their awareness of the necessity of setting and its affect on character and plot in ways that are deeply educational. There's enough to say on this point to write a whole post, but I'll stop there for now.

Thankfully, some writing programs, such as the one I teach in, are starting to be more open-minded and accepting, but the bias is still all too present. I had it myself. I'm glad to say, my students have educated me, and I have come to know better.