MoBettaWriting

An Interview for Colorado Review

2011-09-10T13:45:00.000-07:00

The Wonder of It

I recently sat down with fiction writer, Colorado State University creative writing professor, and Warren Wilson MFA faculty member Steven Schwartz to discuss his new role as fiction editor here at Colorado Review. The conversation—meant to be about Steven—quickly evolved into an enthralling contemplation on fiction writing as a whole. Such an evolution of conversation perhaps says just as much about Steven—as a person, writer, and editor—as it does about Colorado Review’s evolving fiction pages.

I opened the conversation asking Steven how it was he first got involved with literary magazines. Here, I was expecting him to tell me about discovering literary journals in college or even graduate school. But no; Steven starting reading literary journals—quality literary journals like the Paris Journal, Partisan Review, and New American Review—when he was just fifteen or sixteen years old.

STEVEN: I was fascinated by the liveliness of the writing in these journals. It was like a secret pleasure that didn’t go well with what you’re supposed to be doing as a teenage boy – being a jock and all that. Literature was this very private world for me, and literary journals were the door to that secret world.

He did get around to that graduate school experience with literary journals; he helped start one – the Sonora Review, back in 1980. It’s safe to say Steven has rarely not been involved with literary journals, as he’s been an advisory editor here at Colorado Review for years, recommending author and judges as well as co-sponsoring—along with his wife Emily Hammond—the Nelligan Prize. It’s worth noting that Steven mentions these contributions as others might mention drinking coffee; it’s what he loves, so it’s what he does.

STEVEN: Literary fiction has to fight harder than ever to get published by the big publishers, but in literary magazines you don’t have that commercial exigency for the work to prove its worth; journals are still open to stories not being a product. You have the luxury to judge solely on the merit of the narratives.

ME: That brings us to the question you know I have to ask: What do you think makes a “good” story?

STEVEN: There’s something that happens when a story keeps reverberating out in circles. It resonates beyond its immediate span of perusal. You think about it the next day when you wake up. You tell your spouse or partner or friends about it. As a writer, you want to recreate the same effects in your own projects. It has a staying power, perhaps because the story evokes archetypal issues that make it operate on emotional, psychological, and aesthetic levels all together, and sometimes historic and mythic ones too. All this without the subtext screaming I’m important, read me!

ME: (Typing feverishly, trying to get this all down.)

STEVEN: You read it and think the writer can’t cannot tell this story. You know it’s a beautiful and often audacious mixture of imagination, insight, and feeling that’s woven together and when you find that—you as a reader—it doesn’t matter how experienced you are or jaded by too much media consumption, you’re refreshed by it and defer to the wonder of it. The fact that a writer can even approach that standard—perfection will always be elusive—is enough to say, “I love this and I want to print this.” It’s that expression of the unsaid or unvoiced.

ME: But somehow familiar.

STEVEN: Exactly right. Somehow recognized—a rarefied sensibility that insists on being sounded in that intimate gap between writer and reader.

ME: So what are your thoughts about contemporary fiction today, as a whole?

STEVEN: It’s very different from when I started; now there’s a real diversity of voices and content in fiction – there’s people from all sorts of backgrounds writing it. Today, it’s hard to categorize someone as a realist or experimental writer; people are experimenting and open to all sorts of things now. There’s no dominant rubric or methodology. Editors have their biases but, for most editors I know, it doesn’t matter – it’s just, does it work? Is it organic and fresh in some way?

We’re not so much in camps anymore as maybe we once were – postmodern in the 70s, people for or against realism or minimalism. A lot of these membranes have become permeable – boundaries have been broken down. It’s hard to keep the various creatures in their pens now, so to speak. And I think writers enjoy that – having something fantastic happen in an otherwise realist story. I just don’t see people having to declare their allegiance anymore. And despite what naysayers decry as the workshop story, I in fact see a pluralism in the working.

ME: How do you foresee your newly appointed role as fiction editor affecting the Colorado Review?

STEVEN: Well, you hope the magazine evolves in an expansive way, that you bring a kind of viewpoint that ultimately impresses upon readers the complexity and value of fiction – how important it is to tell stories and how many ways there are to tell them. It’s anything but a dead medium. Even with everything that’s happening around us—with such frantic demands fragmenting our attention—people still want the depth that fiction offers, that kind of vividness. People need stories in their lives – they’re never going to tire of them.

There’s a tenderness of understanding that’s lost in the world when everything is so fast and there’s a way fiction restores us at once to both a greater vivacity and a softer place in our lives. It doesn’t mean the stories aren’t tough or sometimes violent or tragic – and it has nothing to do with sentimentality. It’s this:
You feel and simply know at a deeper level after you read.

I left Steven’s office feeling more inspired than I have been in quite some time. I found myself refreshed, willing and eager to dive back into that deeper feeling – in my own fiction as well as in the fiction of others. Something tells me this same brand of expansiveness is going to bring much to the fiction pages of Colorado Review.

To listen or to read?

2011-06-09T18:51:00.000-07:00

I’ll admit it. I listen to books. But I also buy the hard copy and at some point, if I really love what I’m hearing I switch to the volume itself. I can’t help defaulting to the familiar and gratifying combination of holding what my eyes are seeing. How many times have I rested an open book against my chest and just sat there ruminating over a particularly rich or powerful passage. You can’t exactly do that with a Kindle—the hugging-the-book thing just doesn’t feel the same. As for listening, it’s not that great to keep hitting the rewind button and drifting off in a reverie while driving. Yet . . . what I’ve found by listening is the same thing that people claim who have bought Kindles or any other downloading device for books: I read (hear) far more than I would otherwise.

Not long ago an article appeared in The Atlantic (with a subsequent expansion into a book) called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The essential premise was that Google, and more generally the internet (aren’t they one in the same?), were ruining our attention spans. Fragmenting our ability to concentrate on longer tasks. For instance, those novels by George Eliot, once called “winter novels,” because they took a whole season to finish.

I don’t doubt the truth of this, because as the author pointed out from his own experience, he had just lost patience to devote to a massive classic. Breadth had replaced depth. Coverage not concentration had become the operable principal. In any internet reading, with all its embedded linkage, one naturally becomes a jumpy rabbit—by necessity. By checking out all those links you believe you’re actually gaining a more comprehensive view and not missing anything. Well, certainly sitting down and investing the time to read Moby Dick would make you think you’re missing something. Such dedication to a single book would drive a multi-tasker crazy. And the point is that we’ve all become more multi-taskers than concentrators. Surfing the internet—scanning—has become the means of not losing your place in the world. Quickness means you’re informed. Duration becomes a liability. Data replaces what used to be called knowledge.

So, given this, what hope is there for someone to spend his time reading Moby Dick or The Brothers Karamazov, two books that I now admit, alas, I did not read. I listened to all 25 and 35 hours respectively. Let’s put aside what this says about how much time I spend in my car. My main concern here is not whether I actually found a way to enforce my paying attention to these books that I otherwise would never have “read” (or reread), because I was too impatient or Googlized or tired and hyper to sit still without a windshield in front of me for that long. I’m interested in what is lost or gained in the transaction, just as what’s lost or gained in the transformation of any material from one medium to another: books to film or to plays, or these days from one “carrier” to another: iPod, iPad, Kindle, cellphone, PC, radio, and no doubt soon to be, hologram.

This all comes down to voice. I cannot, for instance, get over that despite my best efforts to be open, the reader of the audio book of Joyce’s Dubliners when doing Gretta’s voice in “The Dead” sounds like Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire. Perhaps if I hadn’t read the story (and taught it) at least thirty times, I could be more generous. Part of the problem is that once you hear a voice in your head, that is, the voice as translated from the page to your ear by your own perception of the syntax, rhythm, and spatial layout, it’s hard not to resist the vocalizing as a false impersonation, especially if you’ve heard that voice so distinctly (think Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird or Holden in Catcher, to site two well-known narrators). There’s probably a good reason why Salinger never wanted Holden to appear on stage or screen and refused to sell the rights to the novel. But even then, when a book is made into a film or play it’s adapted, changed, and the actors have to flesh out a director’s vision of the characters and story. In hearing someone read a work verbatim, you have no modification, just that reader’s voice, and you either take to it or not. It can and often does grow on you. But it can also grate.

Jennifer’s Egan’s admirable novel, A Visit from the Good Squad, has a female reader for its entirety and its wide cast of characters. One can’t help but be taken by the character Sasha channeled in the opening chapter. Sasha, a kleptomaniac, finds the right combination of sultriness and vulnerability in the audio reader’s rendering of her. The male characters are another story; they sound too much alike and they sound too much like slackers or dudes with issues. What gives, say, Sasha mystery, subtlety, and allure becomes a deficit when the reader speaks on behalf of another character Benny, who in his dialogue cannot escape a whiny flatness that isn’t in the well-developed character himself. And therein lies the problem: reading to yourself you hear the repository of female or male voices long accumulated in your consciousness. Hearing that same character read to you, the voice is no longer being created by you in conjunction with the author: it’s the audio reader’s interpretation alone.

You might get the impression from these examples above that the problem is gender: female doing male parts, or males doing female ones. But I never got used to the celebrated Flo Gibson’s reading of James’ The Portrait of a Lady. I know I was supposed to find it masterful—Flo, who died recently, was known as the grande dame of audio recordings—but frankly I found it overweening, or maybe that was James himself.

In any case, the audio reader’s voice must be wrestled with a bit at first, especially to integrate it with the author's. Try reading your own work aloud if you want to get a sense of this (and catch mistakes and lumpy prose while you’re at it). You supplant as much as echo the sound already there with a different version of the intimate words you first heard in your own mind.

On the other hand, when it works, it’s simply lovely. I couldn’t get enough of the perfectly matched narrator and the audio reader in Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin. Here you have power and bitterness, yearning and resignation in the reader’s presentation, the reader in tune with the darker narrative but allowing just enough light in her voice to keep breath in the tale. Likewise, the reader of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go has a bit of English propriety in her voice, mixed with a dreaminess appropriate to a story of a clone created for her consumptive value in a futuristic society. And the reader of Marilyn Robinson’s novel Housekeeping tells the story with such a pitch-perfect combination of composure, retrospection and keen immediacy that you can easily juxtapose the simplicity of a sentence like “Lucille turned out the lights and we sat at the kitchen table, trying to name the states of the union” with a poetic nugget such as, “Bones, bones, I thought, in a fine sheath of Sunday gloves.”

It’s this very elasticity of voice, as in the last example, that the author must make work on the page but the audio reader must capture without either over dramatizing or missing nuance and subtlety. Resonance itself is a different animal when read than spoken, and the delicateness of that task, which authors tirelessly work at to convey without ruining its effect by being too obscure or direct, can so easily be pummeled by poor spoken expression. Rhythm on the page, for instance, is not just choosing a speed of speaking: commas and semicolons don’t translate so easily. They are the writer’s silent markings of pacing and thought. Sound unifies a work just as much as sense, perhaps even more so in a literary work where content is an equal partner with style, and the latter not just in the service of the former. Voice for a writer is more directly—and intimately—associated with interiority than exteriority. After all, a writer hears the sound of the words in her head when she puts them down and may never speak them aloud. And even when one gives a public reading of a work, the overlay is of this original and more subterranean expression that was first heard in the composing. As one writer has said, to know the voice is to follow a whisper

In a novel such as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close the audio can’t reproduce the explosion of graphics, illustrations, and photographs: Oskar Black’s business card (inventor, jewelery designer, jewelry fabricator and fourteen other professions); the pages of colors in opposing colored ink; the single line of “I’m sorry” followed by “I’m still sorry” on the next page surrounded by a sea of white space; the interview format or the block paragraphing or the kinetic cluster of dialogue between Oskar and his therapist Dr. Fein; all the sheer inventive funness, and often sad presentation, of a crazy quilt of visuals, the most striking being the much-noted novel's end pages that can be flipped forward to move a falling body up the World Trade Center or backward to poignantly see it dropping down. In one sense, what Foer does with Extremely Loud is exploit the novel’s bookness, stretching the use of the printed page. The audio version meanwhile has three different readers for different character parts and does a fairly good job of doing the book justice. But you can’t both read this book and listen to it and not expect to have two different encounters. The textual innovations, the graphic elements create an even greater division between reading and listening, and one must almost make the choice of which experience you desire more, unless you’re willing (and have the time) to do both.

I for one have resigned myself to stop fighting the changing technology of the book and just embrace all its forms, drawing the line at any abridgment of the text—that is messing with the words themselves. In their nakedness, they remain supreme.

How to Give a Reading

2011-04-08T16:27:00.000-07:00

Don’t look the first row in the eye; they have been forced to sit there because they got here late.

Don’t be disappointed by your host’s introduction, which has consisted entirely of reading from your book jacket.

Try not to drool on the microphone like last time.

Try not to think about that dream you had last night when you turned page after blank page of your manuscript until coming to the very last page that had the single word “minimalism.”

Pay no attention to the man in the ski mask who is walking toward you. Surely there is a simple explanation, given that the room temperature of sixty degrees could be considered cold if you are a reptile.

Do not under any circumstances engage with the girl in the first row who is an eye roller. Tell yourself things could be worse; she could be sticking a finger down her throat.

Ignore the large man in the front row who is eating a monstrous, dripping sandwich that reeks of eye-stinging onions and that he masticates into submission until there is only a tiny bite left and that—seeing you glare at him—he gestures toward you to share.

Tell yourself that you are a professional and that the furious texting by the entire second row is not a comment upon your performance and simply indicates that such individuals are accomplished multitaskers who no doubt are also exceptional at thumb wars.

When you glance up do not be disappointed and lose your place because the lovely, smiling young woman in the third row, whom you were absolutely sure was your ideal listener, has gone over and stood next to the man in the ski mask and they are both writing in identical black notebooks and whispering in Russian.

Remember not to speed up because you fear you’re losing your audience’s attention during the long section that for verisimilitude sake lists every Greek god from the first seven chapters of The Iliad. You knew this would test your listeners’ patience and you are glad that though several of them have clapped their hands over their ears, the majority have demonstrated their stunned appreciation by the slackness of their jaws and their lolling tongues.

Spit out that word hibernaculum that gave you such trouble when you were rehearsing it. Let it roooolll off the palate with the sonorous joy that you first heard it in your head. It goes well with the fire alarm that has just sounded.

Take a moment to relax and center yourself while your host explains that it is only a false alarm and that there is no need to leave the building despite the shouts of Hallelujah! and the wild stampede by half the audience out the door while the other half have had their exit blocked by your host who is threatening them with a fire hose if they try to leave. All in good fun you are sure.

Remember to read the dialogue with great declamation even though it is a long scene that has no quotation marks and you cannot remember who is speaking. Do not be concerned during this operatic showmanship that your host is literally dragging one member of the audience back to his seat by his ankles.

Pace yourself as you come to the dramatic close of your ninety-three minute reading, raising your voice with grandiloquent, rhetorical flourish to signal you are approaching the end, and then, after your final words, fix your audience with a meaningful stare before saying, “Shall I continue?”

Updating Your Fiction

2011-03-03T15:04:00.000-08:00

Really, I don’t remember this being such a problem before. That is, how swiftly things become anachronistic now. I was working on putting together a collection of stories, most of which were written over the past five years. Wait. Did I say “written”? I mean, published. They actually took their sweet time getting published, so that means I wrote some of them much before that five-year period. And that’s the problem: when you’re writing a story, let alone a novel, by the time you finish and, if you’re so lucky, get it published, characters no longer use pay phones, much less call collect when long-distance is included on their cell phones. They no longer do IMing (“Instant messaging is so old,” writes one former user); they might not even be writing blogs, according to a recent news article that stated it’s all about tweets, Skype, and speedier and broader social networking tools now.

So what’s a writer to do? Do you go back and replace all those clunky landlines with cell phones? Somehow put that smartphone in the hands of the character who’s searching in the torrential rain for a pay phone to save his life (marriage, etc.), a frantic quest that you thought gave the scene so much expediency? Why doesn’t he just whip out the ubiquitous cell phone (or borrow one) and text his recipient?

I wish I could say the answer is as simple as ignoring the whole problem. But when I was reading over my stories, any obsolete or dated technology pulled me up short. It’s one thing if the work has already been published and the copyright dates it, but it’s another if enough time has passed to make readers wonder why the story is supposed to be set in the “present,” but markers keep popping up that identify it as the past.

This is not a new question obviously. The writer has always had to take into account such changes. If you started writing a novel before September 11, 2001 and have the World Trade Center in your story, and intend the narrative to be current, then you’re going to bump most of your readers out of the narrative. If you mention a TV show or movie, and that show or movie is long gone, do you worry about it dating the work? Not necessarily, especially if the mention has thematic significance. Or maybe they’re watching cable. Readers often will provide their own explanation for the outdated. If the usage is arbitrary, however, then why not find a more current replacement, just to keep ahead of the game. Does your character, originally conceived pre-hurricane, really need to be named Katrina?

Though fiction has to reflect that it’s “of its time,” the challenge is how long that time lasts exactly. Writers, unless they’re composing a work set in a definite period (or you’ve decided to date or arrange your work in order of publication, say, for a volume of collected stories), usually want an unspecified time period to suggest the “timeless present.” The writer, oblivious to the future, conceives of it not as a retrospective work but as a contemporaneous one with the urgency of the now. It’s when one goes back and rereads the manuscript from the beginning a couple years later that you realize some of that urgency of the intended time period—the unresolved issues of the day; the pressing cultural, social, scientific questions—has gone slack and no longer imbues the fiction with the same immediacy. The question then becomes how much you can—or should—do about it.

One has to consider that in the course of writing the story, certain decisions were made that aligned with the narrative as a whole, not just for its time period. And tinkering too much too update the work can make it self-conscious in a way that sacrifices wholeness for relevance. The greater good may be served by just accepting the story in its entirety as a product of the original forces that conceived it.

On the other hand, if no harm will be done, nothing is wrong with being flexible and performing some due diligence and going through the manuscript to revise with an eye for keeping it as current as possible. If you have teenage characters (or anyone under twenty-five), it’s more than likely they won’t exclusively be having conversations on the phone; they’ll be texting. If you have a character repeatedly asking directions, you’ll really have to wonder if they’ve heard of MapQuest or have activated that GPS app on their phone or why they’re not using an iPad-plutonium, since now, in the year 2020, when you finally get the book published after working on it for ten years, laptops have gone the way of the IBM Selectric. Of course, you can go overboard, as I said, to the point it just sounds as if all the updating is contrived, like bad product placements. You can only retrofit so much into the context of a work that just isn’t meant to accommodate the newfangled. And in that case, it’s best left alone, letting the reader just accept the work as written, proudly (or defiantly) standing up for itself in its own time.

I’m sure others have their own experiences with this issue (poets?), so comments are welcomed.

Nine Signs You're a Neurotic Writer

2010-11-30T07:19:00.000-08:00

You subscribe to eight journals but only read the contributor notes when they come.

You are on page 50 of the first draft of your novel but have rewritten the opening sentence 60 times.

You write an angry letter to the editor who has held your story, essay, or poem for six months without a response. Then delete it and decide you will call instead. You decide a phone call is too uncomfortable for you, so you rewrite the e-mail. You decide to reread the story, essay, or poem before you send the e-mail. You further decide the editor is right even though you have never heard from him. It’s shit. You get up the next day, rewrite the e-mail, threaten silently to send it, and then delete it. You reread the story, essay, or poem again. You can’t admit to anybody how much time you've wasted doing this.

Your author’s photo for the planned first novel, of which you are still stuck on page 50, is now four years old. You had it taken, well . . . in anticipation and just because you looked so really good that day. You spend the morning talking on the phone to your best friend about whether you should update the photo or not. “Do you think it still looks like me?”
“Have you finished the—“
“Never mind,” you say, cutting her off. And hang up.

You send an e-mail to yourself convinced that those same editors you are mad at have failed to contact you because your server is down. When your e-mail goes through, you delete it, and then stare at the empty space.

Your spouse, partner, child asks you, So what have you been up to today? and you answer, “What’s the point? What’s the goddamn point! Fine, you want me to quit, is that it! Okay, I quit, satisfied now? Are you goddamn satisfied? You want blood? Is that what you want? I’m fucking slicing my arm right now. Happy? Happy?”

You have an idea. You will read aloud the first fifty pages of the novel that you are stuck on and finally determine whether it’s worth ever finishing. You close your office door so no one will hear you, stand at your desk, pick up the first page, and commence reading in a strong voice. Suddenly it hits you. You know what’s wrong. You sit down and rewrite the opening sentence for the 61st time and never make it to page two.

One day, after checking your e-mail, you see a message with a subject line of your story’s title. You click hurriedly and the first word is “Congratulations.” You read on. Your story has been accepted for the next issue. They are very pleased to have it and thank you for sending it—they are thanking you! Proofs will be sent, and as stated they are paying forty dollars per published page. You’d given up on ever hearing from the editor after composing daily e-mails to him that you never sent. This is by far your best publication yet! The very motivation you need to get past page 50 on your novel. No one can deny the prestige of this publication. You go online to post your good news on Facebook. You see that someone you know from graduate school has just had a story accepted by The New Yorker. You cannot believe how disappointed you feel.

You get over your disappointment and write the editor a gushing thank you note. You tell him what it means to be published in his amazing, wonderful, venerable journal and how you never thought you’d ever have a story in such a good journal. You thank him again, promise to send your contributor note that you will spend two days writing and say once more how delighted you are. Then you add a P.S. It is only a small P.S. and will not take up much room in your otherwise grateful thrilled stunned message thanking him.
P.S. Would you mind reading the first sentence of my novel and giving me your opinion . . .

Henry James Makes the Leap

2010-11-19T10:13:00.000-08:00

Henry James is not the first author I would insist someone read (that would be Chekhov). As an undergraduate I’d read The American, The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller, and The Beast in Jungle, among some other works. And I became a convert. If you were interested in psychological realism, as I was then, James was your man. In graduate school, I read more, but Wings of the Dove did me in. It was to be the last James novel I read for many years, confounded by or just plain impatient with, for me, its unprofitable density, questionable structure, and tedious pacing. Of course some of this is what you sign up for when reading Henry James, and some of it in Wings of the Dove was James out Jamesian himself. I made it through, however, wrote my twenty-page paper, and didn’t go back.

Until recently. On a binge of reading classics I had neglected, The Brothers Karamazov, Moby Dick, Great Expectations, I thought, why not. Let’s visit the master again and see if I can renew my initial idolatry before I turned on the great man. I chose to look at A Portrait of a Lady, one of his most celebrated works of his early period.

I’m still a bit of the school that agrees with H. G. Wells, who in his satirical novel Boon compared James’ prose style to that of a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea in a corner. But once you get by that and say to yourself, well, it’s sort of interesting that a hippo can do this, you come away marveling at the intricacy of the prose, the sweep and sheer multitude of the characterizations, and the depth of feeling for an entire other continent—Europe—that goes into this book. As a writer, you also come away with a great appreciation for how much James instinctively knew about craft, especially the permutations of point of view.

One movement—and I mean that almost as one would in composing a symphony—struck me in particular. It occurs in Chapter 36. After intensive efforts by several men to marry her, Isabel Archer, the novel’s very central character (more about this in a moment), chooses Gilbert Osmond. Up until this point, the novel has completely revolved around her and her somewhat obscure intentions. Everybody falls in love with this woman and admires her intelligence, charm, grace, beauty, compassion, education, cleverness, humility, and many other appreciable assets. The men want to marry her, the woman want to have a hand in who does, and yet Isabel Archer has undisclosed, almost ineffable reasons for not cooperating, much to the chagrin of the crowd of her admirers who all believe they have her best interests at heart. When she finally does choose Osmond, wrongly as it turns out, we see and learn relatively little of why she does so, considering how James can expound on motivation.

It should be noted that up until this moment, which takes us into chapter 36 of the novel’s 55 chapters, we never stray far from our focus on Isabel, even if we depart from her point of view. The novel is simply all her. It’s called A Portrait of a Lady, but it might as well have been entitled Isabel in the eponymous fashion of Emma Bovary, Emma Woodhouse, and Ann Karenina.

Perhaps James, in the convention of Victorian stories, could have wrapped up the novel with Isabel’s marriage to Osmond. But of course that’s not what he’s after. Questions of destiny and freedom must be played out in the novel long beyond whom Isabel chooses to marry. The challenge is, and it’s one that confronts anyone trying to write a novel that having fulfilled its trajectory at midstream has little use for continuing as is, how to keep the story growing. Isabel has chosen; she’s no longer available; our involvement over whom or if at all she will marry and what her recondite reasons are for doing so or not—after all, she’s not seeking the usual ends of fortune or position in society—have expired. Now what?

And James does what is so necessary but so difficult: he “resets” or restarts his novel. That is, he seeds a narrative path whose beginnings have been stubbed out earlier and will now take a lead in the novel.

When Chapter 36 opens, a number of years have passed. In the interim Isabel has married Osmond. But James doesn’t focus immediately on their marriage or on, as he’s done, Isabel. Instead we get a scene of Madame Merle talking with a gentleman, Ned Rosier, whom we’ve only had the faintest acquaintance with and who wants to marry, we eventually learn, Pansy, the daughter of Osmond and stepdaughter now of Isabel. What’s marvelous about the scene as a transitioning device is that we become completely caught up in this present action. After all, the last time we’ve seen Pansy she was a shy young girl with convent training who had rather lackluster attributes to offer any suitor, especially compared to the elegant, consummate Isabel. We’re dying to know what’s happened to Isabel during these intervening years. Her place in the novel has been hitherto so closely held; we rarely left her side or strayed from a character who wasn’t talking or thinking about her. She’s been in the novel’s consciousness at all times. And now she’s . . . absent. Or suspended.

It’s a bold move, to take her so much out of play and replace her predicament with that of the modest, demure (if fetching in her own way) Pansy’s. But it works. And it works because Pansy revitalizes the novel’s romantic urgency, while placing Isabel offstage for the time being, thereby increasing the mystery about her and our interest in when she will return. In other words, Isabel’s central role is reanimated not by having something momentous happen directly to her or by having other characters continue to discuss her with fascination (enough already), but by having Pansy rise from a secondary position and seize our attention as an unexpected and fresh extension of Isabel’s world. We know Isabel will regain center stage. Soon enough, James will provide a long disquisition bursting at the seams with expository revelations about her unhappy marriage. But at this junction we’re almost relieved to break out of the continual orbit we’ve been in with her and have Pansy’s predicament bear some of the narrative load.

When the shift is made, it's not only to get attention off of Isabel, take a breather from her and the now familiar pattern of her behavior, "reset" things, but to begin the triangular forces between Pansy, her father, and Isabel that will limn the difficult issues of Isabel's marriage. In other words, the situation has to have complex enough potential aside from its own sake and to exert changes on the novel's protagonist. A very simple way to put this is that if Pansy doesn't matter to Isabel on some vital emotional level then the bridge will never be made back to Isabel's story. You might have all sorts of plot intersections but that won't matter unless Pansy's fate is tied up with Isabel's at some junction.

On the other hand, in more contemporary novels, these separate subplots often work more by association than by cause and effect. That is, thematic resonances may play out in parallel stories that don't have to intersect in the way one would expect from a more traditional novel. And I think the contemporary reader's expectations of how much "intersection" is necessary are different. Contemporary readers are used to discreet and even remote narrative lines that parallel rather than intersect or create a concomitant effect that feels resolved in its variations on a theme. Think of Borges, Calvino, and any modernist writer, including Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. And very recently, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is a pure example of these independent or interrupted story lines that willfully defy a funneling down into a single narrative stream.

Regardless, at some point in writing a novel, you realize you can’t keep doing the same thing. Even if it’s been working. Some major shift has to occur that creates an action in the narrative, or plot, if you will, that continues the original thematic trajectory and conflicts of the novel but doesn’t keep repeating the tactics and tropes. Isabel Archer can only go on so long refusing proposals while serving as James’ model for at least one sort of independent American sensibility, and being more pure of motive than any other character in the novel. James slips our attention away from her but he really doesn’t actually;it’s more as if Isabel is backlighted behind a scrim. You can see her there dimly, make out the outlines of her impending significance, but you’re unaware as to how exactly she will recapture the spotlight. This “shadowing” or silhouetting of Isabel keeps Pansy’s involvement from running away with the story on its own while holding Isabel in the wings.

James must have had a sense, even being Henry James and guilty of the longueurs that can characterize his writing, that his narrative was in danger of Isabel becoming overexposed as a character. Making an abrupt shift to Pansy’s situation takes some of this heat off of Isabel so she can cool down a bit as a character and not be overdone at the wrong time.

The question inevitably arises how many of these resets or shifts should occur in a novel. And the answer of course is as many as it takes. Which means not so many as to be a distraction, and not so little as to have the narrative become monotonous. Diverting our attention from a character or situation that has been so deeply invested in by the author takes a risk. Yet that’s precisely the reason to do so. The author has to sense, before the reader does, when the story might go stale and then make the leap to breathe new and necessary life into the fiction.

The Ten Most Obnoxious Comments a Writer Can Make

2010-11-14T13:10:00.000-08:00

I have too much free time.

I’m exhausted from my book tour.

My agent wants me to go on The Daily Show. Should I?

I wish my publicist wouldn’t call so early.

Are stocks still the best way to go for such a large advance?

I got a headache reading over my 23-page contract.

My assistant handles that.

My hand is tired. Would you mind if I use a stamp to sign your book?

I remember what it was like to be rejected.

I can’t remember all my titles.

And (from Antonya Nelson) it's been so difficult after winning the Pulitzer.

That's Private

2010-10-11T17:58:00.000-07:00

A word about my father: If there’s anyone I’ve written about directly it would be him, a born salesman who sold furniture for fifty years, working since he was thirteen and taking over as head of the family when his father died. And who called me Stevie all my life, as in Stevie, tell me everything, and then would cut me off after the first sentence with “That reminds me of when I was in Paris!” and launch into his own tale. I remember his reading one of my stories, clearly based on him, slapping the book closed afterward, shaking his head with great mirthful incredulity and proclaiming about the main character, “Can you imagine anyone acting this way!”

There are two kinds of families: those who see themselves in everything you write and those who never do. Fortunately, regarding my father at least, the mirror was always opaque. It affords a great freedom, especially when your material is largely drawn from your family. The other option is to say the hell with it and write about them anyway, under the threat of being disowned or, maybe worse, subjected to their hard, enduring silence, as if you were not an author but the family exhibitionist.

Joyce Carol Oates, who’s received her share of criticism for using—some would say exploiting—the tragedies of real people in her fiction, writes in the New York Times that it’s a murky issue ethically and legally as to who has the right to publish private letters. Oates cites the case of Robert Lowell who included intimate letters from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in a book of his poems. When asked what gave him the right to do this without her permission, Lowell responded, “Why not say what happened?” Oates goes on to warn “that anyone who confides in any writer risks being transmogrified into art if he or she is sufficiently interesting. The best protection,” she advises, “is to be dull, bland, and predictable.”

But when exactly does a private experience become a public fact? At what point does the private boundary protecting the material dissolve?

About six months ago I gave a reading of a story that used some facts, and I mean the straight facts, about an accident that was fatal for a colleague’s wife. My colleague, Dick, and his wife had been driving to their family farm in Nebraska from Colorado when they were hit broadside by another car driven by an elderly lady. My colleague’s car overturned and in the immediate aftermath, while they were upside down, still in their seat belts, he asked his wife if she were okay and she answered, “I don’t think so.” Those were her last words.

There was another detail I used: Because the car was totaled and their luggage along with it, Dick, who was staying in a motel across from the local hospital, had to wash the clothes he’d been wearing in the motel room sink, wring out the blood, and put them back on again. I didn’t hear these facts from Dick directly but they were well known within the department.

At the reading I knew it wasn’t a good sign when one of my closest friends, a colleague, too, left immediately afterward and didn’t contact me until a few days later to say he was upset about my using the details of Dick’s wife’s death in the story; he felt the story didn’t rise to the appropriate level of seriousness to justify using such intimate and tragic details. It would have been easy, my colleague pointed out, to change these facts about the accident.

But that’s the point: it would have been too easy if not right, right for me, that is.

The fact is I was very affected by what happened to Dick and his wife. I’d known them for years and like everyone felt great affection for them. But Dick was an English professor, not a geologist as in my story; he didn’t have children as the main character does in my story; and he and Sally were not on the verge of divorce as was the situation for the husband and wife in the story I wrote. So why not change the other “real” details?

Because they’re the very ones that made me believe in the story enough to write it in the first place, the cornerstone of its imagined existence. And of its promise. Put another way: to include those true details is a constant reminder that a person’s life is on loan to you to make use of—good use—as a character. Implicit in that agreement is that the author honors the compact by not blowing the opportunity. Have you trivialized those true details taken? Made fodder of the person’s life for gossip? Extracted only spiteful revenge without redeeming artfulness? Or just as bad, falsely glorified or sentimentalized someone by a poor treatment of the material? Yes, it’s a sort of tacit agreement with the person whose life you use, but it’s a covenant of one, and only the author knows when it’s broken. Though it might seem like stubbornness, my insistence on keeping the actual details are a footprint of the world the story came from and a lasting mark for me of its necessity to exist.

The question arises, of course, why didn’t I show Dick the story first before I published it? Chances are he would have given his approval. Was it because I feared he wouldn’t like it? Be offended? Threaten to sue? I didn’t show him the story for the reason I don’t check with anyone before I write something: If I did, I’d be wanting preapproval. But fiction doesn’t work like that; there are no guarantees that it will be acceptable, and to seek such assurances out in advance is to deceive oneself about the difficulty of the work ahead. Writing with someone’s okay in mind places you in the position of having made a bargain with an outsider. No matter how much you try to put that person out of your mind—and your writing—he or she will become an unseen influence, a faux collaborator, a silent colluder. I have to put myself, my family, and my friends on the line every time I sit down to write. And I have to determine each time whether “it’s worth it”—those three nagging words—to those I might harm, offend, or embarrass in the process. Any writer telling you otherwise is lying to himself.

The answer will never be easy. Some people, such as my father, no matter how much you cull directly from their lives, never will be troubled. Others never forget or forgive the invasion of their privacy. Perhaps, though, it’s not so much invasion as distortion that bothers people when it comes to fiction. With nonfiction, people often resent the sheer naked exposure of themselves. But in fiction, it’s more, So that’s what you think of me! The mousy face; the dirty, limp hair; the purple-veined nose. And my dog is not fat and he doesn’t have an overbite! In fiction perception is character and makes no attempt to be otherwise objective. So the question and challenge in fiction becomes how successful the writer is at freeing the character from the person. If there turns out to be on balance more person than character, then you’ve shortchanged both the writing and the individual whose life you’ve appropriated.

Yes, I could have changed the specifics of the accident, not made it happen in Nebraska, not had Dick washing his bloody clothes out in the sink, substituted instead parallel facts—after all these true details amounted to only a couple hundred words at the most out of the seven thousand in the story—but these “actual” details were the very ones that gave me permission to write the story. That is, the permission to write about anything, whether it be another’s gender or race or history, your family secrets, the illness your child almost died from, any of the tender, difficult, and personal subjects, this permission comes not from the outside but from oneself.

I’m not sure what that appropriate level of seriousness a work of fiction has to reach to justify using someone else’s tragedy. Who of course is to be a judge? You can’t worry about any of this as a writer or you’ll never write a lick of anything from another’s life that’s become personal to you. Something about that life holds something vital and precipitating for you as a writer, and there may be no way to excuse it other than to say Thank you, I apologize, Vaya con dios, and Please contact my lawyer. Invading one’s privacy in writing is a very complicated issue. Families are ripped asunder for such actual or perceived transgressions. But all writers committed to the process have to wrestle with the question of using the lives of others and deciding whether they can live with choices that offend more than please, risk being misunderstood more than celebrated, and justify themselves only to themselves.

Pilgrimage

2010-09-13T18:33:00.000-07:00

After dropping our daughter off for her first year at Hampshire College, we took a buffer trip around the Berkshires before heading home to the prospect of an empty house. Unexpectedly, because I only dimly knew it was there, we stopped at Arrowhead outside Lenox, Massachusetts, Melville’s home from 1850 to 1862, where he wrote some of his most famous work, including Moby Dick, The Confidence Man, “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby.”

Bartleby was written on the porch or piazza (see above photo) as Melville called it. The house and grounds couldn’t be further away in spirit from the deadening Wall Street of the story and its unnamed narrator’s lock-step existence. Surrounded now by fields of crisp yellow flowers and woods at the perimeter, in Melville’s time it was a working farm where all 11 family members pitched in while the author wrote from early morning to late afternoon in his study above the piazza.

After Melville wrote Moby Dick, looking out his window at Mount Greylock, which indeed, as it was said to have inspired the tale, does look in silhouette like a great leviathan, he virtually stopped writing for the next forty years. He moved the family back to New York and worked at a customs house for four dollars a day.

Melville’s troubles are fairly well known: the rebuke to his writing with the failure of Moby Dick. Readers found it too expensive ($1.50), profane, and, well, if you’ve read it, hard going. He never quite recovered: he drank more, endured the tragedies of three of his four children dying from illness or in one case his son’s suicide, and--the bitter fruit on top--a mother in law who disliked him second only to how much she disliked his writing

Standing there on the porch at Arrowhead I could only imagine how hopeless he must have felt to leave this beautiful place and have to return to New York to try to make a “real” living. You’ve written a masterpiece of American literature, you’ve penned (literally, in his rocking chair on the piazza)the magnificent “Bartleby,” and you have little to show for the efforts other than a mother-in-law who harangues you about not making a decent living for your family and hates your writing.

I went around touching all the articles--the steamer chests, the wooden toys of the children, the trundle bed--that actually belonged to Melville and his family and weren't replicas, and hoping as if by some animism I might absorb the spirit of this most prolific period of the author’s life before dissolution and failure set in.

Any visit to a great writer’s house is a pilgrimage at which one--another writer, that is--tries not to feel too self-conscious about his own insignificance in being there. I certainly felt that way when I saw Faulkner’s home in Oxford and his very, very tiny typewriter and comprehended that he wrote those densely packed works of often opaque modernism on an instrument barely the size of a large man’s palm. No fancy software to do that magic; it instantly disabused me of thinking any auxiliary object, pen, pencil, computer, the perfect writing room, could compensate for talent. And a writer’s will to persist.

But of course the question arises as to what happens when the will flags? And flag it will. At Arrowhead, the question cast a dizzying spell over my visit there: how bad does it have to get before one gives up (or the world causes you to give up on yourself)? If someone with Melville’s literary powers could be defeated, how can we mere mortals hope to go on in the face of rejection and doubt?

One of my favorite quotations is by Jean Rhys:

“Listen to me. I want to tell you something very important. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are trickles like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters.”

Equally appealing is Flannery O’Connor’s infamous retort when asked if universities stifle writers: “My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.”

As a teacher I tend to share Jean Rhys comment freely and hold back on O’Connor’s. But they actually make a complete set. At any given time, the writer has to be willing to subjugate the ego enough to persevere, humble oneself to accepting that you will be only a small trickle and that as such your work may never see the light of day outside the confines of your house. And that this is enough reason to go on, and indeed the only reason to go on: that you are making something of importance aside from any grand notions you might have of quenching the thirst of millions with the great river of your work. Only the lake matters, which no one owns, no one controls, no one can tell you to stop so barely trickling toward.

On the other hand, there is O’Connor with her inimitable blunt wryness telling us to put a sock in it, stop the madness, kill all the writing programs and the wannabes, cease and desist from subjecting everyone to your neurosis, your hand-wringing failure over your career, your pus-like envy of those more successful than you. This is valid too, but not in the way of it being more truthful than Rhys. Rather these two represent the poles that writers have to live with every day, with every work begun or finished, whether there’s the glow of success or the shame of a public flogging, exultation and celebration or paralysis at trying to write a single word.

After Melville finished Moby Dick, he famously wrote to Hawthorne “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb." And then began the wait for recognition that never came. So obscure was Melville by the end of his life that the obituary in the New York Times referred to him as “Henry” Melville.

Some very fortunate few may have consistently lasting and unbreakable doses of confidence in themselves that never fail them. But for most of us, we vacillate between writing for favor and writing for ourselves, convinced that we should be praised one moment, stifled the next. Melville of course, as few will, did have his great audience, if years after he died. In the meantime, he reduced his efforts to writing a book of poetry for his wife alone. Such are the vicissitudes of the profession. You come to accept the mysterious design in all its disappointment, satisfaction, occasional glory, and guiding humility.

Shape-shifting

2010-08-10T15:03:00.000-07:00

Always the question: what to do next? After finishing the story, essay, poem, fill-in-the-blank, where do you go from here? Back to something you started and abandoned? To a single image or line of dialogue logged in a journal? To an anecdote too good to be true and therefore confounding as to how to make it into a story (or essay)?

The in-between time, as in “I’m between novels,” always does sound like an apology for not having any idea what “job” you’re going to get next. This becomes even more complicated when you’re trying to decide what form you want to work in: A story? A novel? A personal essay? A literary essay? A—horrors!—screenplay? And then there are those true switch hitters who write poetry as well as fiction. One often spends an inordinate amount of time trying to determine what literary mode calls out and how to decide. By mood alone? By looking through old journals and trying to assess if the material will dictate the form? By just “knowing” such and such has to be fiction or told as putative fact in an essay?

I can more easily talk about the benefits of moving among modes than how to pick one on any given day. I’d never considered writing personal essays until a journal solicited a piece for a special issue on Jewish writing. Once I got past the hang-up of being pigeonholed or my writing being as such, I found having “an assignment” just the motivation to do something I wouldn’t have tried on my own. That solicitation, which by the way didn’t appear in the original journal (a long story) but somewhere else, started a run of such essays that helped me out of rut in writing fiction. I’d been stuck or maybe tired of my own voice in fiction or perhaps just weary of having to make up a world rather than investigate one I already knew well. Eventually I went back to writing fiction but with a renewed sense of purpose about it. And this was mainly a result of having been able to exercise my voice in a way I’d never allowed myself in fiction. I’d permitted myself to analyze more directly, indulge in introspection and in turn bring that to characters in my fiction. In short, I could have them think. This may seem like non-problem for most writers, but I had grown up during a time when minimalism reigned and telling was verboten and in general the more your characters thought, that is, had ideas, the more archaic your work was considered.

But still the problem persists: what form best suits the subject? The biggest surprise for me when I started writing nonfiction was that I could use the same material that I thought I’d exhausted in fiction. In my mind, there was a prohibition about writing, say, about my father’s troubled relationship with his two brothers in the furniture store they ran together for 40 years. Done that, been there, etc. And why repeat myself? Hadn’t fiction done the subject more justice than I could by directly apprehending the experience in an essay? And furthermore, there was always the possibility that because I hadn’t written about the subject directly I could still mine it for further projects. If I wanted to keep the material alive and fruitful I’d best not tell its secrets nakedly.

So it surprised me to find out that one can indeed reuse material not only in the same form but in other modes as well, and that the result actually can add to the overall sum of work without being seen as the definitive word on the matter. What might, for instance, be the focus of a fictional work—in my example here, stealing money from the store by my uncle—received only a passing mention in a personal essay that instead dealt with issues of money problems passed down by the generations to my brother and me. In fiction, my narrative needed a central dramatic event with the opportunity for elaboration; in nonfiction, I could take a much broader and retrospective view and assess a family history without being as bound by the demands of all the narrative requirements in fiction.

Importantly, I think switching between forms allows the gears to unlock that may have seized up from trying to over think a particular project. Just changing the “company,” that is the implied audience and the writer’s attitude in relation to the form, often creates a shifting and fresh perspective: stale imagery in one mode becomes reworked to advantage in another; narrative dribbling becomes undammed and gathers force in a new context; characters who refuse to pop out dimensionally take on an inherent presence when inventing an identity from scratch isn’t the challenge.

I know several writers, highly successful at prose, who have lately taken up poetry, renewed by working within its general parameters. But I don’t think you can just arbitrarily decide, oh, I’m going to write a poem today. Or a play. I think there has to be something within the material, in combination with the writer’s ambitions, unconscious as they may be, that dictates the form. One has to start with some intuitive understanding of how the imagination will interact with one's previous knowledge of the subject. It’s true, as has been said, that material is often neutral and waiting to be shaped by the writer. But that doesn’t mean that on any given day—factoring in the writer’s curiosity, past work, rustiness or flexibility, current reading and impressions, and expectations for one’s voice—that you won’t find a subject almost whispering its intentions for a suitable form.

Skimming and Glancing

2010-08-01T09:34:00.000-07:00

Writing is as much movement as it is sitting still. Everyone has had the experience of their fingers literally dancing over the keys. Things are cooking, and you can barely type fast enough to keep up with making the letters match your thoughts. Granted, it’s a rare experience, but the sensation indicates just how much writing is located in the body as well as the brain, how even for someone who lives in his head as much as I do and equates exercise with the joy of cleaning out the garage, I can barely sit still when this happens. On occasion, I’m embarrassed to say, I’ve even stood up, as if I were playing an organ keyboard. Is the result any good? Never mind about that right now.

For sure, some sort of a current courses through the body that suggests language being accessible at high speed and a nearly indestructible focus. Try disturbing the writer during such a moment: you’re blown back by the sheer force of the wild and crazed look you will get.

When I’m going over a work at this stage of early revision, I notice that I’m often a little more physically distant from my screen, or if reading a hard copy, I’m holding it at a bit of a remove—as if to get a more objective view. I’m also, if this makes sense, “running” my eyes over it at a much faster pace than I would if, say, I were further along in the revision process.

A writer only has so many objective readings for each given piece. They can be renewed by time passing, like getting additional minutes on a phone card, but essentially taking advantage of unfamiliarity becomes limited. The value of glancing or “skimming” one’s own writing comes into play here. For it’s in skimming that many intuitive decisions are made about the larger structural issues of a narrative. You can get a good idea of where a significant wrong turn or choice has been made for the narrative on an early reading of a draft. As I said, because we have a limited amount of objective readings in us before we turn to someone for editing, the key seems to me to be preserving that productive separation between oneself and the text, as if restricted airspace, and not violating it by losing one’s commitment to instinct at this stage. In short, don’t get too cozy with your work before you’re really ready to sleep with it.

One of the biggest shifts in the revision process is when you decide to show the work to someone. At that point, you no longer have an exclusive relationship with the writing. Someone else’s eyes have set upon it for better or worse, and you’re now collaborating. Collusion is not a bad thing. But the trade-off is that there are two (or more) of you judging any given aspect of the work. The taut distance you’ve previously established, that “running” across it with your eyes under the auspices of your sole attention, is modified by this new cooperative relationship.

This is the best reason to keep a piece of writing to yourself for as long as possible, so you can figure out its intention on your own. Of course this can prove especially hard with a novel, when you crave validation and encouragement, if not an outright guarantee that your loooong project is worth pursuing. But again, it’s a trade off. Certainly, someone can save you a lot of time if you’re immersed in an unproductive eddy (see previous post on “Bogs”), but doing so prematurely may result in abandoning the authority of your own judgment in favor of an internal debate with your readers (“But he really liked this part, though she didn’t, but her friend did, but wait that was someone who hates everything I write . . .).

It goes without saying that writers all have their own approaches to revision. Some writers, Cynthia Ozick comes to mind, craft each sentence until they’re satisfied it’s finished if not perhaps perfect and don’t move on until they’ve done so. Others, verging on hypergraphia, write multiple drafts, slashing and burning with reckless abandon. Most of us, however, fall in between these two poles and make our way as best we can.

My sense is that one has to keep the major parts of the work as flexible as possible before they’re fixed in place, as if moving heavy furniture around a room. Your eyes are actually doing the heavy lifting, comprehending necessary changes before your reasoning takes over (certainly important at other times in the process). But during this time sound and sense are keen prognosticators of what changes have to be made: the very glancing or skimming that you’re doing allows you to also hear the authentic voice of the piece, and make changes based on the confluence of sight and sound.

What's Happening?

2010-07-28T12:05:00.000-07:00

At the recent Warren Wilson MFA residency in July, there was considerable talk about the pesky question of making something happen in fiction. And indeed this is much of the problem with early drafts of stories: the elements are all set up and then . . . the story comes to a slow halt like a tired old dog, panting away its promise and its premise.

I've been thinking a lot about why this is, and why, in many ways, it's a natural part of the draft process and unavoidable. Part of the reason is that any story needs time for gestation. The writer's impatience for the story to work is usually greater than the time it takes to make the various elements braid together into a strong narrative cable. For instance, one character's trajectory might occur easily on a first draft, while another character might confound your best efforts to make her significant. This is more apparent in a novel than a short story, when there is more of everything, of course, and you may completely know one character's purpose in the book--and her path--but can't seem to incorporate the laggards who appear to be standing still and without a destiny.

Only time takes care of this, trying first to see if a particular character does in fact have a role (or can be made a composite with other characters) or somehow has just not lived up to his potential.

Which can lead to the problem of finding out "what happens" in a story. The secondary characters, often overlooked in favor of the main or viewpoint character, have not been properly developed so that the (forgive me for this dirty word) plot may proceed. The author has made great efforts to move along the story, find that "defining" or "transformative" moment when things will never be the same and then, zzzzzz, it's a dud. The whole feels less than its parts; the narrative cable that you were counting on to become a tight steel braid suddenly unwinds.

At this stalled moment, I often look at who is missing in the story. Who has gone AWOL. That is who can make a difference and needs to step up (or return from AWOL), which character can come in to “reset” the story and create the necessary dynamic that will put the events in motion again. Yes, the story may be stalled in terms of not enough action but the key to which action that should be can become clearer by investigating the thinner parts of interaction among the characters. Rather than trying to impose a contrived event on the story, the solution often lies in reexamining what you already have going on in the fiction, frequently in terms of your secondary characters, and how you’ve kept them on too short a leash to be effective. And frequently too the author has laid down some "clues," almost unconsciously, that indicate where these thin places exist that need to be strengthened to prepare for the “something happens.”

Recently I was working on a piece that had lost its way. I imposed an event on the story, an occurrence that had a certain degree of wackiness, ghostly implications, and head-scratching meaning. Once I started along this line, I felt it necessary to keep going, wedded to the direction, and the next thing I knew my main character had died--or had he? Never mind. The point is my understanding of "something has to happen" was in terms of forcing the story to take a turn for the sake of surprise. And surprise is not enough, or not by itself. The narrative needs something else.

Surprise alone can produce breadth without depth, intrigue without insight. Oh! but no Aha. What’s missing is revelation. If you think of "something happening" as a continuum, with one end being surprise (the O. Henry twist), and the the other end revelation (e.g. Joycean epiphany, consider "The Dead") then it's easier to envision which way your narrative will lean.

But the ideal, of course, is in combining the two, surprise and revelation. "The Dead," after all, takes us by surprise, Gretta's confession of having loved another, but also offers astonishing revelation in Gabriel's penetrating sorrow and contemplation of mortality.

There are a great many stories where surprise is predominant: think of Tobias Wolf's much anthologized and very brief story "Bullet in the Brain." It takes us by complete surprise, but the revelation comes in what actually happens inside Anders’, the main character's, head once the bullet enters his brain: wild technical effects of language mixed with an ending of great pathos. In Robert Coover's “The Babysitter” the something happening is that it keeps happening--to the point that we can't tell what is real and what isn’t. Each time the reader believes he's discovered the actual version of events, Coover thwarts our expectations. The surprise is that you'll never know what really happened--"the truth." The revelation is that your expectations about fiction and reality are undermined to the point of frustration and embarrassment at one’s fierce desire for and dependency on objectivity, despite ample evidence to the contrary. In Susan Minot's "Lust," a story made of short vignettes that eschew chronological order and that defy us to chart neatly any so-called narrative arc, the surprise is that there is no surprise--the vignettes are glimpses or angles on the same problem--but the revelation is how deeply and emotionally the narrator's voice alone compels her story to be told and heard. In all these stories, whether realistic or experimental, linear or associative, narrative or lyrical, surprise and revelation forge a simultaneous alliance: your attention is gotten at the very moment that you realize something you didn't before. In fact you not only know it, you feel it, the two in tandem being the verifying evidence of having made “something happen.”

How to accomplish this? As I said in a previous post, I don't see any way around trial and error. My elaborate and bizarre choice of action for my character spun out for eight pages before, while walking our beagle, I thought, of course, it's so simple—just consider what the character really needs to happen, not what you want to happen to him. Easier said than done of course. In the meantime, one creates placeholders to make bridges to the next draft.

Bog On

2010-07-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

A frequent question for writers: How do you know when a piece of writing is finished? One famous reply to that question: when you put back in the same periods and commas that you just took out.

My own experience, just recently, has to do with "bogs." That is, those morasses that writers sink into when trying to make their work perfect or, let's be frank, invincible. Standing up against any anticipated criticism. So here's an example.

I just wrote a story and one of the sentences that I kept trying to work in was "Janice could almost be alive in Las Vegas." I'll skip the story summary; in fact, I'll skip any context, and just tell you that I worked with this sentence, with some coffee and bathroom breaks in between, for 3 hours, a long time for one sentence. I tried rephrasing it: "Janice, Gene realized, with stinging regret, could almost be alive in Las Vegas" and "Janice, Gene realized, with stinging longing, could, in this city of might happen, almost be alive out here." But wait! It changes everything when I use an em dash: "Janice--he realized with stinging longing--could almost be alive out here."

If that wasn't enough, I tried it in parenthesis; in a paragraph by itself; as part of another sentence; at the top of the page; at the bottom of the page . . . you're perhaps getting the point. What I wanted from this sentence wasn't possible. I wanted it to "explain" the story, that is, bring all the ideas, subtext, conflicts, themes to a head and make it the zinger that would perfect the piece.

But of course this is impossible, and happens when the ego gets too involved in trying to make the story's meaning foolproof. So much stress is put on the revision process to make a story "fully realized" that one often pursues a quixotic search for readerly clarity at the expense of, if I may, a story's confidence. The story has to have confidence aside from the author's own intentions or wishes for it. Such confidence necessarily requires a certain degree of ambiguity that actually lends the story authority. Once you start searching for the definitive sentence or paragraph, the ultimate line of dialogue or story's final word you can be pretty certain you have lost the initial thread that allowed you to subordinate and proportion all the complicated fiction elements in their proper places. Yes, Mark Twain memorably said that the difference between the right word and the next to right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. But the right word has a spark of spontaneity and grace to it; the perfect word has a whiff of sweat and pushiness.

In other words, you need to back off and let the narrative take its chances. This is not overwriting, for who knows when that is exactly, as much as clinging, and you'll feel it in your body as a slight revulsion. You're in a bog and struggling to get out. Stop flailing, turn off the power to your computer, take a walk, wait twenty-four hours, reread the twenty drafts of the obsessive line, word, or passage and then watch how easily it peels away like a fatty tumor. And what have you lost? Nothing. And was it necessary? Yes. You'd have no way to know otherwise.