Love to hate

Recently, my favorite listserve has been going on something of a bender. I missed the original post/question that sparked the fire, but the resultant damage is wide ranging, and it all has to do with literary vs. genre fiction or, perhaps more accurately, bestsellers being the shit-novels we love -- or, in this case, what we love to hate.

I'm certain you can think of at least one bestselling novel that you think is absolutely abysmally written. For me, I immediately think of ... well, that wouldn't be prudent to name. But needless to say, there are novels which I wouldn't put on my list of "shit novels I love to hate which are bestsellers" which other people proclaim need The Top Spot on said list.

And then somewhere along the line the conversation devolved into people arguing for the need for literary merit within the world of genre, and those arguing that pleasure reading needs no other merit than pleasure itself and ... holy cow, you know what? I stopped paying attention the first time the phrase "literary vs. genre" was thrown around.

When it comes to people debating "literary vs. genre," I will not tell anyone to get the hell over it because it took me a really freaking long time to get the hell over it.  Being a lover of fantasy and sci fi and romance who was actively engaged in an MFA and desperately trying to hide her genre-identity from the community like a gay teen in small town Texas, probably didn't help.

But let me say this: life has completely changed since I've gotten the hell over it.

It's like arriving in nirvana. I know that no matter what I do, someone is going to thumb their nose at me, probably because they're ignorant of the other side of "literary vs. genre." And I really don't give a fuck, a flying fuck, or a flying fuck shot out of a cannon.*

And, if I'm to follow my father's theory of life: If you're not pissing someone off, then you're not doing something right.

The whole debate isn't actually about writing (I say); it's about attitude. If your attitude is that writers have an audience that they need to appease, then you come from one mindset.  And if your attitude is that a writer has peers that should be appeased and impressed, then you come from another mindset.  Realize which you are, and accept that or change it -- either will do so long as your happy with the end results.

I no longer fume when I think of my MFA peers, nor do I brood when I think of how my genre work will be received by them.  Nor do I write "literary realism" and think about its merit vs its financial unsubstantiality. I do what I want because I want to do it. I've also come to realize that the biggest bestest literary markets will publish genre work if you coat it in chocolate, and the same goes for genre markets. If you mash the beets into chocolate cake, no one knows that they're eating vegetables for dessert.

And so I will once again not tell anyone to get the hell over it, I will merely recommend the health benefits, mental and physical, to letting it be and following what you love regardless of opinions. And that in not making your own opinion widely known on the "vs" debate (ahem, attempting to trump other opinions with your own), you save yourself a lot of stress and a lot of wear on your treads.

*Kelly Link story reference = 10 points for making reference, 100 points for identifying Kelly Link story to which "flying fuck shot out of a cannon" refers.  And another 10 points for choosing an author who is championed by both literary types and genre types without the other types actually knowing that she's being championed.  But I'm certain Link knows, and that she's quietly smiling and enjoying a glass of wine while everyone else runs up their blood pressure.
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Image credit: Skley on flickr

An Ugly Friday

I've barreled into my research project -- American women writers in the tradition of early SF pulp magazines -- and I've discovered that while there were over 300 women writing SF between 1920 and 1960, producing roughly 1000 stories, almost none of them are anthologized. And those that are anthologized have gender ambiguous pen names such as C. L. Moore and Leslie F. Stone. Some of Judith Merril's work from the 50s makes it into anthologies but I'm looking for WWII and earlier and Merril was a Canadian. Bummer.

It's not until Merril starts working as an anthology editor in the 1960s that more women start appearing in anthologies. Because of this I'm going to have to voyage to places with collections of the original magazines. Several sources (rightly) argue that women and other minorities were not banned or blocked from SF before the Women's and Civil Rights Movements ... but my own research shows that they might not have been precluded from the money making side of the industry, but they were precluded from attempts at any sort of lasting recognition.

That's about all I have of what needs to be a 15-20 page essay. But I have a couple months so no worries on that yet.

I meant to spend today reading and researching, but I'm coming down with a cold, and -- since it's the first day of Spring Break here -- it's snowing. Not pretty, fluffy, fun snow, but bitter, nasty, cold, blowing snow. No way am I walking to the library feeling like this in weather like that. It's an ugly Friday.

As it pertains to recent discussions here, I thought I'd make mention of the article "What makes literary fiction 'literary'?" in the April issue of The Writer magazine. The writer's strategy is to ask editors to define the genre for her. She gets around to what about plot? and garners the following quote.

It starts off strong -- If literary fiction doesn't have a plot -- then she hedges -- or narrative movement -- then she really hedges -- (even just in the inner life of the character), it won't hold the attention of the reader, won't be effective.

So ... literary fiction must have a plot ... unless it has narrative movement ... and that movement doesn't have to be physical or known by any characters other than the narrator; it can be completely internal narrative movement.

No wonder people reading literary fiction -- and attempting to write it -- come to the conclusion that it doesn't need a plot. Narrative movement in the inner life of a character. Sheesh.

To it's credit, the article does later hit on the head the truth of the genre: it's more about the character's psychology than the situation.

In my opinion this is far more important than phrases like "character driven." Literary fiction can no longer claim that it is that which is character (not plot) driven, or that it is fiction which is not formulaic. Read what genre editors are looking to publish and you will always see the phrase "character driven stories." There is almost nothing that is getting published today that fits the definition of "formulaic."

Reading the early SF stories has shown me what formulaic is. For the 60s it was (1) introduce world/setting/character (2) introduce SF element that makes this world unique (3) demonstrate flaw of human nature which is exemplified by the SF element. Fin. Compared to reading short SF that's been published in the past couple of years it's easy to tell that there's nothing formulaic about today's SF literature; it is about as character driven as anything else.

Worth Reading - Finds from the Online Lit Mag Scene and Beyond

Things I like and things I've seen all for free on the internet.

Short stories:

From anderbo.com: Samuel Patterson Stoddard's "The Common Cuckoo." I got to see this story started in workshop. I liked it then and I liked it now.

From Rumble Underground's Winter 2009 issue and winner of their short story contest: "The Thing with Feathers" by Evan Guilford-Blake. Heartbreaking.

Blog posts:

From agent Jessica Faust on the BookEnds blog: writing what you love and loving what you write, "Be True to You."

From Margosita on Trusting the Process while embarking on the MFA thesis project. You never hear the MFA process as a "hand holding" adventure -- surely if they promoted it that way few people would sign up -- but along with the educational aspects of an academic study of writing and the process of writing the MFA thesis project provides many helpful (possibly necessary) tool for completion of the first novel: a deadline, a support group, a mentor, a critic, an editor and someone who doesn't think you're weird when you freak out about the project.

Francine Prose Reading

Last night Francine Prose came to town and read an as of yet unpublished short story. She swears that the Holocaust isn't the only thing that she writes about but this story was set in 1930s Germany. In the two novellas in Guided Tours of Hell one features a concentration camp survivor and the other a Jewish American male who harbors fantasies of living in WWII Paris and doing great deeds for La Resistance.

I still think she's a lovely writer. She does the writerly things I enjoy -- such as letting characters rethink things with similes -- without being overly corny.

In the Q&A session she got rather adamant about not needing to think about form. The question was how do you know what form to put a piece into: shorty story, novel, non-fiction, etc. Ms. Prose doesn't really work in poetry [insert pun about the appropriateness of this given her last name] so she didn't address that at all, but was forceful -- even cut the woman off -- in saying that it is what it is! You either made it up or you didn't! There's no decision; it just is!

At the time I was left scratching my head at this response. But I may or may not have found the gap in communication between the two women.

Prose cited her book on Caravaggio as an example. It's not a novel because it's real; he was real. If I was more familiar with Prose's non-fiction I could tell you if all of it is factual, historical accounts, but given her comment I think it is. I think the woman asking the question in the audience heard non-fiction and thought creative non-fiction. Not histories but personal experiences.

What we should have asked, given the fact that she'd admitted one of the characters in Guided Tours of Hell is based off of a real person (which all the WMU faculty and half the MFA candidates know because he teaching in the Prague summer program), is how she decides to take a real experience of hers and make it fiction instead of memoir.

Sadly, it took me too long to understand all these disconnects. Probably another good reason that I'm not a lawyer, or at least not a trail lawyer: I'd make all my critical realizations after the verdict was announced. I need quiet meditation and time to digest stuff.

But back to the actual question. I wish the the question had been properly phrased because it is a question I struggle with. Up until New Years I thought of every experience I had, every person I met, every story I heard as fodder for my fiction. Now I'm looking at notes toward stories that I've written down to try and twist my life into fictional stories with other characters and I wonder why am I letting characters live my life for me?

No, actually I'm not wondering that. But it sounded poetic so I wrote it down.

What I'm wondering is does it make a better story when I add to it, when I purposefully mold twists and turns into it, or does it make a better story just as it is when it is my memories without any fictional muddying?

I don't have any good answers. If someone asked me this question I'd tell them to take it case by case. The only time I can't follow my own advice is when it comes to family-story.

There are thousands of little anecdotes that my family tells and retells -- your family probably has them too unless you were all raised to not be talkative -- I'll use different terms when I discuss these anecdotes but primarily I call them family-story or table-story. They are that which my family tells when together, usually at my grandmother's kitchen table. These stories seem to have none of the things that makes them good fiction: there's no character arc, the cast of characters is huge, you can't "get into" anyone's mind, and there's often not a point other than it being funny or nostalgic. Despite all this family-story draws me like a lodestone. I want to write it as non-fiction but I can't make the pieces add up to anything worthwhile, and so I have repeatedly attached these true family-stories to fictional characters in fictional scenarios. The fiction gives them a character arc, it gives them lovely neurotic tendencies and other things which are very helpful in telling a story and the family-story gives them life and breath, a history to root themselves in. I hate using family-story in fiction. It feels like a misuse of rich earth. But right now I don't have a way to use it properly.

I came back home and worked on fiction tonight, characters who could never ever be myself are starting to appeal to me in fiction. (Perhaps because I want to turn characters who are me into me?) And accidentally started reading an article in Poets&Writers on what differentiates memoir from personal essay from literary journalism from journalism. The article is written by an angry journalist-type, but once you remove his skeptical slant from the piece there is quite a bit of information lurking underneath about creative non-fiction as a genre with many forms. Article: "Green-Haired Gumshoes or Hidebound Hacks?" by Michael McGregor.

Real People, Fictional Writing

notes (questions) on craft

I've been considering something lately and I'm curious for every one's thoughts. How would you address adding real people into fictional stories?

Maybe this is timely given the inauguration. Say you want to put, oh maybe, Barack Obama in your fictional story. How do you do it? But how much of a real person can you incorporate into fiction without harm or offense (assuming your intent is not to harm or offend)? Where on the character spectrum can a real, well known person fall? More integral than a reference, name dropping, vague appreciation that he is out there in the world somewhere, and yet less important (less manipulated) than any of your main characters.

Wait ... let me back up.

Context: I have written a short story that goes up for workshop tonight that features a certain real life violinist. The facts pertaining to the violinist's actions are all true, if interpreted through the lens of a less than enthusiastic narrator. The violinist appears, physically, in the story, but doesn't have any sort of a character role.

Is this heinously wrong of me to do?

My intent was to have the violinist frames the story (both in sense of time frame and inducing the protagonist's state of mind), as well as acting as a foil for another, more directly involved character. And as a tool, I think the violinist's presence in the story functions really well. Take him out and the story falls apart.

But, should I have even gone there? Does it matter that I've created all these technical story-telling justifications for using him?

So, other than reading the 5,000 word draft of the story I'm referring to in order to understand my babbling, I'll create a short example: Say you wanted to write an inauguration day story. Say you wanted to put it from the point of view of someone managing one of the events, the oath swearing, or one of the balls or the parade or something. One of the women with clipboards and headsets who tells the elected people and their escorts where to go once they get in the building, who gets to hear their conversations or something like that. Would you do it? Would you write the story about the people organizing the event and their lives and use the arrival/departure of the Obamas as the tipping point? Is that too real? Or is it just detached enough that it could work?

I'd love to hear what you think. How would you deal with this? Would you not even think of writing a story that does more than refer abstractly to "real" people? Would you attempt this if you had your facts straight? Would you read such a thing if you knew it was fiction? Goodness, is no editor going to touch this Frankenstein-baby I've created?

I'm certain the point will be addressed tonight in workshop -- I'm kind of dreading it, actually -- but I need to have the point addressed because all this has been running through my head for the past year and a half as I've slowly been working on this story.

The Sky is NOT Falling

A great article/blog post by David Lynn, Editor of the Kenyon Review over on the KR Blog about the state of literature, writing literature and teaching it.

Unabashed passion. Can we all teach with it? Can we bring it to our work without cynicism and disdain. Is the "I'm too cool for school" attitude that many students bring with them to the classroom (even in college) tainting the instructors? I've seen it happen.

Judging from a very small pool of first year college instructors, the key to their success appears to be how much passion they let the students see. Most of them have the passion or they wouldn't be spending their time in grad school, but the ones who hid it, or cloaked it with a too-cool, laid back, I-know-you're-only-here-because-it's-required-so-I-won't-get-too-excited demeanor struggled the most in their classrooms.

Sucks All the Energy Outta Ya

A post by Tanya recently got me thinking, and the fact that I read it Monday night after my workshop for the week got me writing this post.

The MFA workshop sucks the energy right out of you.

Most weeks I leave and all I want to do is put on my sweats and pour myself a drink.

The one time I walked away feeling truly energized was the week my story was critiqued by the group. I had all these new ideas for where to take the story and how to build my modest story (which I thought was finished) into something really cool. And then I read the written comments and that bubble burst but that's another story for another day.

I don't really have the problem where increased knowledge of writing and how it works correlating with decreased reading pleasure. Yes, I notice theme more readily now and I'm much more aware of the mechanics behind the work that the author has employed -- reading The List after taking Tara Ison's workshop I could totally see all the elements of structure she taught us about employed in her novel -- but that is fascinating in the same way that learning how movie special effects is fascinating; it still looks lifelike on the screen even when I know how it's done.

Any thing much deeper than that doesn't occur to me when I'm in the middle of reading.

In the midst of reading I love being caught up in the moment, in the emotion, in the beauty of imagery or the tension of the conflict and I stay right there with the story unless the author breaks it for some reason. This is what I refer to as the joy and wonder of reading. What is referred to in a recent edition of the Writer's Chronicle as "good storytelling" (and how it is frequently missing even unadulterated literary writing). I rarely develop any sort of notion for analysis (psycho, literary or otherwise) during these read through and keep myself wholly focused on the wonder of an unknown story. Then if I sit down and care to still think about it after I'm done reading I'll find myself able to draw those analytical conclusions.

For workshop: I read; I experience the joy of the unknown story (usually); and then, I sit and analyze. I analyze whether the mechanics worked and I analyze some deeper level of the story to see if it's there and see if I don't have any comments that could help the author in later drafts develop one. Although, I firmly believe that a moving, emotionally engaging, well told story doesn't need overt levels of meaning and that the author shouldn't try for them consciously. The four levels of allegory are what high school English teachers apply to fiction; they are not present when the writer writes.

Then, in workshop, the class destroys my joy. My awe. And any sense of wonder I may have had in reading.

They are overly critical and cynical (and rightly so, they know what a shortcut looks like because they've tried them). They've read a lot. Most of them, myself included, either read slush for a literary magazine or they work as an editor on the program's literary mag. They've seen a lot of "good" stuff and they've seen a lot of crap. This leads them to viciously attack anything they perceive as a weakness in the story.

No, workshop is not for the tenderhearted.

They do it in the name of what doesn't kill a story in workshop makes it stronger in the next draft, but, all the same, I'm glad I'm not asked to reread these same drafts after we've workshopped them because there is no joy left in reading it once it's been beaten and snapped at from all angles.

One form of badgering that has become particularly prevelant (and disturbing to me) is the use of the word "device." Every element of a story is now referred to as a "device." If it is what happens between the beginning and informs how we get to the important part or why the important part even happens, it's a "device." Occasionally it's a "good" term: the author used a really subtle device here. But it never feels like a good term, it feels like the naming of a cheap trick. Someone used it last night, and suddenly the story we workshopped (not mine) felt less like this heart wrenching slice of life in the world of a widower and deer hunter and more like a clock, or robot, or remote control. Device.

Maybe "device" is an appropriate word though. Given how we discuss stories and the kind of suggestions these writers make it seems more like they view themselves as builders, tinkers and puppet masters. They want to see how they can engineer a character's past and his emotions to make a better mouse trap.

What should a writer be?

I don't know. And I don't want to be prescriptive about it.

At times I find Natalie Goldberg's zen based writing philosophy too zen for me and yet I do not enjoy the writer-as-engineer philosophy either. There has to be some happy medium, don't you think?

Perhaps this is why I find myself ever more interested in writing good genre fiction opposed to bad literary fiction (see Writer's Chronicle interview with Nancy Kress and Poets & Writer's article by Mike Chasar, available in print only): because the genre writers are storytellers, they harken back to that ethnological desire of ours to spin tales, that biological need to relate to others even if only through the page.

Hope and Despair

So all this election talk with connotations of hope, change and progress has left me feeling ... well ... hopeful.

There was a great line from Obama's acceptance speech that I jotted down:

Our stories are singular but our destinies are shared.

And I thought, now wouldn't that just make the coolest epigraph on a collection of connected short stories?

But then I got thinking about it, more so, about the kind of stories I write, and I do not write hopeful stories.

The reason I do it is fairly obvious: I'm young and in order to appear like "part of the club" I feel that I have to take on serious subject matter. And serious means a lack of hope. It means cancer and marriages breaking up, it means running away and denial, it means a lack of money and a shady past, date rape and drug use, and who gets used by whom, right?

Wow. Incredibly depressing. No wonder so few people read literary fiction if this is what we think we need to do to write it.

I'm not sure if I even know where to start on writing a "hopeful" short story, or at least one that manages to be hopeful and yet not cheesy. There has to be some sort of line that can be walked between hope and despair in literary fiction, some sort of notion that out of the ashes of one rises the other, but it's a tough line to walk when you want to be both serious and happy, but not corny.

I have a feeling that if I brought in a "hopeful" story to my current workshop I would get reamed. And if I can't even write one hopeful short story, how on earth do I expect a collection to make use of that epigraph?

Michael Chabon Single Handedly Redeems Genre Fiction!

(or something like that)

I'm behind on my interneting so this interview with Michael Chabon is from mid-late August but I've just gotten around to reading it now thanks to Jolie's blog.

Chabon reminds us not to think of writing in terms of good and evil (a dangerous paradigm in any situation) but to instead realize that the great majority of genre writing is crap. 90% as he names it. But that about 90% of literary writing is also crap. About 90% of all writing is crap regardless of genre or pedigree. Good point.

What is literary fiction?

Damned if I know. Actually, I hold the "I know it when I see it" position. I've tried again and again to define it for people over the past couple of years with hit or miss success. So now over to agent Nathan Bransford for his take on it.

Some Poor Bastard Owes Me

I've mentioned before that I'm a reviewing editor for an online literary magazine (I read slush). But last night before I sat down to read submissions I read a short story by Alice Munro. More specifically I read the short story "What Do You Want to Know For?" which was a 2008 O. Henry Award winner. It's an amazing little story.

After reading that I decided that it wouldn't be fair to read slush until the next day.

Yep, someone out there owes me.

Finally!

Notes on Craft

Finally! A constructive critique on what is wrong with contemporary literary fiction. So much of the bitching and moaning about lit fic is that it's dead. It's dying. No one's buying it and fewer people are liking it. Well, if this is the case lit fic has been pulling a Hamlet for the past 40+ years in that it keeps coming back from the brink to deliver another little jewel to all of us.

This is a two part blog by contemporary lit fic (gasp) Darin Strauss. Part 1 and Part 2 have been extremely thought provoking. Not in the I see the light! Save me Jesus! sort of way, but in it got me to rewrite the opening to a novel I'd been toying with for a while but I thought was too much like a movie and not enough like "literary fiction" for me to write. (And I think it's a pretty hot little beginning now, too.)

What got me going was the PTA laundry list that he describes. Seriously, it's an atrocious opening to a novel -- who wants to listen to PTA minutes ever? even if you're on the board you want to be someplace else when that happens -- but for some reason I probably would have just patiently swallowed it. I would have likely put down the book in the first thirty pages, but never would I have that God what an awful opening! Why isn't literary fiction giving me drama! And it might be because I'm (sadly) growing acclimated.

Strauss makes reference to

Dreiser — who understood the advantages of thrill-ride storylines — was also the first post–Civil War writer really to show poverty and the everyday defeat of American morals. He was a social novelist. And he wanted to get at the full spectacle of our native life with blood-and-thunder plots. ... Henry James, on the other hand, didn't write much about what his contemporaries feared, but what they actually lived through — the great trailblazer of psychological and artistic intricacy ... lyrically, and without relying on complex plot machinations or gauche devices.

and he refers to all this as the split that occurred after Melville. But more important than the split is the fact that Melville had it all. The implication being that contemporary writers should give it a go and try for that "all" thing.

I, sadly, read some other blog (where the commenters obviously skimmed the article and didn't latch on to the key points) and someone cried out salvation lies in genre fiction! All hail the pulp novel, it is our promise land! While I've got nothing against a good genre novel now and again, the way to make literary fiction go from boring to intriguing isn't to scrap it altogether.

Obviously, Strauss doesn't go far enough with his train of thought for the flock to understand where the promised land is. I don't think I've found it, but my guide through the desert is something from Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream. He states that the one thing genre writers have in heaps, the one thing they never forget to give their characters and share with their readers is yearning. The girl wants to fall in love, the boy wants to slay the dragon, the agent wants to stop the IRA terrorists and save his pregnant wife. So often literary writers forget to let their characters yearn and to let that come through the page. Instead they walk around entire novels just seeing faces and touching objects.

There's more to writing stories well than just writing well.

More Questions, Few Answers.

Notes on Craft cont.

First I’d like to make a distinction not made in the previous post/discussion to help with the clarity of this post: There's stealing from Life as it surrounds you and then there's deliberately excerpting your personal-life for fiction. I know the first story I turned in as an undergrad was entirely a patchwork of things that had happened to me over the past five years and focused by a then recent breakup -- which is much different from lifting the conversation of the people at the booth next to you whom you have never met.

So I'm still wondering how much of a main character is you the writer? How much (how many elements, if any) of a main character have to be the writer in order for the writer to be sympathetic to her own character?

I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer. I don’t think there is one way of doing it that is better than another. I think it is completely possible to write an entire story, polish it until it shines and then look at it five years later and realize that the narrator (who may have been so not-the-writer that he was even a different gender) really was you just in different underwear.

In the comments section of the last post, Margosita brought up an author she had been discussing in her MFA program where the author had suffered the loss of a parent at a very young age and many of his characters dealt with the same kind of loss in his novels. I often look at those kinds of correlations as fiction-as-therapy. When a reader brought up to Brad Kessler that after reading the opening chapter of his novel she [the reader] thinks about it every time she gets on a plane he first apologized (it's ruthlessly emotional) and then said "I was really working through something at the time." If that is his form of therapy then I want the man to have more issues because that was definitely a wow-moment for the reader.

But I start to wonder do writers use those characters because of functionality? -- That they "worked" as realistic narrators. -- Or because the author found them compelling enough to drive the conflict? Or because they were characters that the writer was sympathetic to and could spend months and months of her life with?

I agree with Mella/Melanie that often not thinking about [the above questions] while writing is the most productive means to the end. Character development is definitely on art end of the art-craft spectrum of writing. How many times have you heard writers talking about having conversations with characters or going on a date with their characters or that a secondary character clamored for attention and it turned out the novel was really about him, or that the novel – like a river or a living, breathing thing – went in an unplanned direction and couldn’t be reined back in because the characters refused? I think these are all just means of personifying and explaining that it’s an art that comes more from the subconscious and is tooled into something well structured by the conscious -- left brain, whatever -- and that too much conscious thought can kill it. And that letting the character grow organically into a person is useful.

But – to establish yet another unnecessary analogy – when you give birth to a child you know logically that half of his genetic material is your own, but that doesn’t mean he won’t look exactly like his father and nothing like you.

Okay, I don’t even know what I mean by that last thought. But it’s something else for me to think through.

I know I can’t analyze the characters of the projects I’m currently working on because I have a limited sense of who the character is at the moment -- but as a retrospective question I’m fascinated by it. I know it’s not a question writers care to answer. I hated when the damn English literature majors in my writing classes would get all analytical with unfinished work (I was an English writing major and we were much more chill) but on this question I would be interested to think further.

And to drop in another related yet unhelpful thought: in the movie The Martian Child the John Cusack character opens the movie being interviewed on some sort of “Book TV” show about his wildly popular science fiction novels. The interviewer asks him if he’s put himself as a character in any of his novels and he responds [paraphrased] “Oh yeah, I think I’m a character in each of my novels. Not always the same character though. That changes with each book.” The interviewer prompts him, and in this book? “In this book I’m the monster.”

Real Life in Fiction?

Notes on Craft



Family Guy is amazing.

But that made me start thinking about the conundrum that is fiction. Sure it's easy to say it's all made up -- and that's how we proceed through workshops because assuming any of it actually happened to the writer gets uncomfortable at best and down right mean and harassing at worst -- but how much of that is really true?

How much of fiction is real? And what is the dividing line?

I know that I will never write about a physical location that I have never been. There are just too many interesting details that you miss out on when you have to guess or do "research" on a location. If you haven't lived it can you really say that the cicadas were chirping that night? Or would it be crickets? Or frogs? Or - god help me - some infinitesimally grosser insect?

Those well chosen physical details make the situation real. I have heard tell of romance authors staging characters on every country and continent they can make the least bit romantically appealing and these women haven't ever been over state lines [exaggeration]. But their stories show as much. They may have fabulous imaginations that dream up details but the only reason the novels work is because they are reliant not on an experience but on a romantic love story.

So if you don't have that, you have ... what? True to life details.

Sure, you get to pick and choose. You get to take which details you've experienced and decide which ones your narrator would notice and why. Which ones the narrator would ignore. But if you had none of that, or if you had extremely generic details you might not feel placed as a reader.

Then there's the whole "emotional experience" bundle, and the "did this happen to you" bundle that may or may not have to do with the physical location.

When you first start writing, everything is about you in some form. It's all vaguely autobiographical (or it's piss poor writing). But that use of true to life experience allows you to learn how to write, and the more you learn the less you need to lean on your own life.

Sometimes.

Sometimes I just love to steal from my own experience. Pretty quickly though, often in that first draft when I'm typing things out I end up taking my life weaving it in then twisting it to make it more interesting. Wouldn't it be great if ... or If he thinks such n such here then it'll parallel with the opening and suddenly my life is way more literary.

Any thoughts? How much of fiction is real life? How much should be real in order to make compelling fiction? Or should the author completely distance herself from her work?

Embrace the Inner Creepy

So I was flipping back through my Kenyon notes and now that I've accepted that I am capable of creepy I found this snippet hilarious:

I struggled. I really did. I wrote three beginnings that I ditched because I didn't know what happened afterwards and they seemed to ominous to me. They say this really happened to Melanie Kirowitz. After she married the man from Ishpeming. Or was it Oscoda? Well, that doesn't really matter but the two of them moved down state to Bloomfield hills (he was a doctor) and kept a lake house up in Black River. ... And then there were a couple others and all of them felt that with the kind of opening I had given them someone needed to die. Or if a character didn't die that they found a dead body. And ... well ... I'm not Stephen King.

Now when I read that opening that's in italics I'm like
hmm, I see potential there. LOL! When did this happen to me? Obviously it was sometime between Sunday night and Wednesday night. Then it took another couple of days before I embraced my inner Joyce Carol Oates. Argh. Maybe Oates is pushing it too far. Maybe I need to think of it more as the eeriness of poets James Tate and Thomas Lux because the two of them intrigue me but never cross over that line to truly upsetting me or just plain freaking me out.

On that note, I have a problem. I've introduced a switchblade into a story. But I have no idea how to bring it back. It's like Chekhov's gun: if you introduce a gun in act one, the damn thing needs to be fired by the end of the play. But what happens to this little switch blade? I've already figured out how to kill off every one who needs going ... *sigh*

I Made It Here!

Day One (ish) at Kenyon Review Writer's Workshop

I've made it this far. Got down here with no problems and gorgeous weather. Seriously, this country is beautiful in mid to late June. I've got oodles of pictures on my phone already but I forgot the cord to get them off of my phone to share with you. I'll have to do a "photo tour" when I get back.

Met the other people in my group and sat for my first workshop/class today. We're not really working over people's writing in these workshops but we're reading to find what the value is. We're working very closely with prompts to produce small pieces that can then be used as teaching tools. Really, I think it is so much more effective learning this way. Because you go and try it, and then you are introduced to the big picture concept that you're looking at and then you get to hear examples of how each person managed to balance the prompt and the narrative as well as see how the concept you're focusing on for the class plays into it (or distracts, or messes you up or enhances the whole thing silently to WOW! status).

Today was about form. The assignment we were given last night (shortly after arriving -- and yes we were the only ones to be assigned homework on such short notice) was as follows:

1. Write a story in exactly 26 sentences.
2. The first sentence will start with the letter A, the second with the letter B, and so on through the entire alphabet.
3. One sentence must be exactly 100 words long.
4. One sentence must be exactly one word long.
5. Play with punctuation as much as you need to make it work.
6. Paragraph breaks may be placed at your discretion.

I challenge any- and everyone to do the same prompt. Either leave it in the comments section for me or post it on your own blog and drop me a link in the comments because I'm curious to see more of these "now infamous Alphabet exercises." Why now imfamous? Because last year Ron Carlson came to Kenyon as an instructor and brought this exercise with him for the same purpose (a lesson in form for fiction writers) and during the participant readings at least four people read theirs.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes! It sounds simple but is harder than it looks.

For satisfying your curiosity (not saying that this was the creme of the crop) my fiction response:

As preparation for leaving my father, my mother would iron. Because she could not leave with unpressed slacks. Clothes were whisked from the basket, piece by piece, while my mother rattled off the offenses against her. During this time my father’s shirts were never touched, that’s how I knew she was serious, how I knew this complaining was different from the every day complaining she did. Even dresses she didn’t wear anymore were ironed along with her slacks and collared shirts, each one pressed and hung on a hanger.

Frantic as I was to make her stay, I didn’t realize until years later that she never packed a single garment into a bag or a suitcase. Given my age at the time I doubt I would have even figured out what was going on if she hadn’t walked into my room and announced it to me.

How it started between them each time I never knew, but it always ended the same way.

“I’m leaving; you can live with your father.”

Just that.

Knowing nothing else but her, I would trail her to her room, watch her iron and beg her to stay.

Lighting does it for me sometimes: if there’s a room with just one lamp on and the night trying to creep in through the cracks and the windows I remember the ironing; I remember the crying; I remember trying to take up as small a space on the carpet as I could because I equated smallness with something that made me more livable, likable; that if I was compact and appropriately remorseful that she would take it back and say she was staying, or if she insisted that she was going that she would at least take me with her.

Maybe, in retrospect, her leaving my father wouldn’t have been such a bad thing.
Now when I must iron, I iron by daylight. Only when in desperation, or because of Peter’s forgetfulness, will I iron after dark. Perhaps it’s stupid of me to be afraid of it, but I think I am.

Quixotic dreams have me telling Peter about it, have me elaborating to him about how I want things to be better in my life than they were in hers; he would tell me that he understood, and he really would, and he’d prove it by always remembering to take his damn shirts to the drycleaner.

Reciprocal sharing would then occur.

Sure.

There are better things to waste my time thinking about, so instead I wonder what happened to her, what her reason was. Under what circumstances did she crack to that point? Verbalizing the departure, but never making good on the threat. When you think about it the other way it’s easy to see why she stayed. Xenophobia, fear of change, and money.

Yet, why the declaration, why the pale room, why drag me into it?

Zoom forward to the present and I know I’ll leave Peter, I’m just waiting for a good enough reason.

Suggested Lit Magazines

Word Count: 4593
Notes on Craft

After a previous post, Taggie7 left me a question that I've been thinking on trying to come up with as good an answer as I could find. The post was about which literary journals were best suited for submissions from undergraduates or recent graduates, and you can read my answer here. Taggie asked me if there were any magazines that I highly recommended and I told her I'd have to get back to her on it.

I've really been struggling with an answer because I'm just as much of a learner as anyone else. And according to Poets & Writers there were over 600 literary magazines and journals last count, so needless to say, I couldn't possibly have a finger and the pulse of the market.

Speaking of P&W, I highly recommend their May/June 2008 issue, about a third of which is dedicated to something they call "Project Lit Mag." They interview editors of lit mags and then profile 20 new lit mags that they recommend you send your work to now. Given their urging, I'm certain that Alehouse, Alimentum, Barrelhouse, Bateau, Cadillac Cicatrix, Cave Wall, Coal Hill Review, Ecotone, Five Chapters, Fringe Magazine, Grist, HoboEye, Lumberyard, Make, Marginalia, One Less Magazine, Palabra, Quiddity, Slice, and Subtropics are now swamped with more slush then their volunteer editors can deal with. Said editors have kissed their spouses and children goodbye and have little chance of seeing them again until Christmas.

I know nothing about the 20 above mags other than they're new and recommended by P&W.

Personally, I always give Glimmer Train first crack at my work. They're yet to be as impressed with me as I am with them, but I'm keeping up the tradition nonetheless.

Some people start off by submitting their short story to The New Yorker first and then go from there. I'm yet to try this tack although I see the merit in trying to break into the undeniably most powerful short story market in America. BTW, finding the submissions guidelines and appropriate address for The New Yorker is something of a task, a first (if small) hurdle to discourage the lazy and half hearted. But back to Glimmer Train.

GT does everything online so turn around time is good and they reassure everyone that they really do read the entire story every time. They run a contest a month as well if you're willing to pay the entry fee. The magazine is known and sold across the country, and the stories have a decidedly upbeat tilt to them that makes them a pleasure to read. Not that they're all rainbows and peppermint waterfalls, but I was reading a story about a guy who had just had a heart transplant and the anti-rejection drugs he was taking were eating away his other organs and I wasn't depressed by the story. That's the kind of tilt I'm talking about.

For some reason, I've always placed some sort of mystique around The Kenyon Review. It is a very well known magazine and I think some of it's stories got nominated for Pushcarts this year. They've recently launched the Kenyon Review Online which is a supplement, not a replacement, to the print version of the KR. The KRO is free, and therefore an easy way to familiarize yourself with the type of material the KR staff seeks out. And there is a certain aesthetic to the KR (one David Lynn keeps a thumb on as Editor in Chief). The stories they print have a certain gritty edge to them. Where GT leaves me feeling hopeful, KR leaves me feeling slightly horrified. It's a thrilling, mind racing feeling, but not one I think my own work invokes. I've yet to submit anything to them because of this.

I'm a fan of the Southeast Review. Their staff has a decidedly light, playful side to them. The SER also hosts the WBSSSC (World's Best Short Short Story Contest) which comes out every year in their spring issue, which, coincidentally, is when the WBSSSC opens and closes for the next year. Winners are announced in June and, darnit, I'm not one of them this year.

I'm in love with the notion of One Story magazine, and will probably get a subscription once I move and get my new address. The idea is that you always have time for just one story; so every three weeks they send you one new short story. While they only publish one author an issue, they will never repeat a writer. So, for once in your life you can be certain you are not competing with Ron Carlson (he already had his one story).

The Michigan Quarterly Review is the one magazine which sent me a personalized rejection letter (for poetry). This is perhaps because I studied all the online offerings for the MQR and really thought about what pieces I was choosing to submit.

The Alaska Quarterly Review has been keeping itself in the news of late. I'm always impressed to see far off presses that are regularly sold at book stores here so kudos to them. The stories I've read from them did sort of suffer from the "not much happens" syndrome of undergraduate workshops, not that this makes it that much easier to crack the market.

Which brings me back to the real point of the question: I don't know which ones are the "easiest" to crack. I just know what I've read and then I apply a couple of strategies to that.

There's a struggle to find a balance in submitting. You want to be accepted by the biggest market possible, but you also want to increase your odds by submitting someplace that isn't getting a lot of gems sent to them. But more importantly, you want those magazines to be reliable: not author traps, and not going to fold before your story goes to print.

Some people approach this problem as I mentioned before: they start with The New Yorker and make their way down the list. If you're me, you're looking for magazines you know exist. Magazines I can find on the shelves of the bookstore. (On the bottom shelf of the magazine section under food and wine). But that's not a bad strategy. All the magazines I've listed I know are reliable journals. I've seen them in print and (most of them) being sold in my home town.

Short of that you can pick up a copy of The Writer's Market and start thumbing through it. It costs about $30 retail and a new edition comes out every November or December and most libraries carry multiple copies. Right now I've got a 2007 copy checked out from the library because I figured that there would be fewer hold requests placed on last year's copy while the information is roughly the same. And it's paid off. I've successfully kept my copy checked out for six months now.

If what you want is publishing credit and want it now, keep your eyes open for local contests and presses. Occasionally a newspaper will run a poetry contest. There is a publication called "eCurrent" around here (they focus on food/entertainment/culture) that runs a poetry/short story contest once a year open to people who live in the county and I won an honorable mention one year for a poem.

If you're writing in genre that changes the game entirely. Everything I just mentioned is for "literary" fiction. In genre, again, go to the book store and see what magazines they have. What you see there are the heavy hitters. "Asimov's" or "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine" or "Science Fiction & Fantasy" or ... I don't know a romance mag off the top of my head but I'm certain they're there, although Harlequin now e-publishes short stories if you meet their "line" guidelines. These are all big, well paying publishers. If you're looking for $20 and some spiffy cover art try ElectricSpec and it's brethren - which will take some hunting to find and some more hunting to find out if they're credible.

Right now I'm trying to get as good a feel as I can for magazines by reading them, but every time I'm ready to submit (simultaneously) I always throw in a couple markets I haven't read that I fit the guidelines for. They claim that if you read the magazine, and truly follow the guidelines (right material, right format) that you're already ahead of 80% of your competition.

Hope there's some sort of help in there. I'd love to hear anybody else's take on markets, so leave me your blog address if you've done a similar diagnostic.

Edit: There's also FAWLT magazine which is new and advertising on the MFA Blog. Obviously odds are better at someplace that's just starting up and targeting MFA candidates and applicants.

New Fiction Friday

It's a new old project. Something that started itself unexpectedly while I was at the Kenyon Review Workshop last summer. That means it's almost been a year! Maybe revisitng this project means I should make it my June project. This June I will be going for another 50,000 words on just one project.

Set in suburban Detroit, present day. This scene begins the first chapter.

“My John wouldn’t have done that.”

It was a phrase she had grown up with. Grown used to. Grown to expect. To anticipate like a switch. Every time she’d done anything wrong, every time she’d gotten caught in a failed but inventive scheme she’d heard it roll off her step-father’s lips. “My John wouldn’t have done that.” For the past eighteen years she’d been forced into a comparison with a man she’d only seen once and had never really met.

And now, what did her step-father want? He wanted her, her specifically, to call John and bring him home. That’s why she was sitting on the side of her bed dialing the numbers yet again to reach a man who hadn’t lived in the same state as his father for the past twenty years. Hadn’t even lived in the same country for as long as Rebecca could remember. She’d tried to reach him from her step-father’s house twice that morning with no luck. Or maybe more luck than she knew. Frank wouldn’t let her just leave a message. She needed to talk to him, have an actual interactive conversation. So she’d gotten cruel. She knew it wasn’t even 6:00 AM in France and, frankly, she didn’t care. She was the one making a phone call across an ocean at forty dollars an hour.

A woman’s soft, sleepy “Allo?” came across the line followed by what she assumed was pissed off French. She stared at her nails grimacing at the thought that she’d have to get them filled soon.

She wondered briefly if it really was pissed off French or if all French just sounded pissed off.

“John Ramsey,” she said into the receiver not even attempting to speak the same language. It would have been a pointless attempt anyway, she’d forgotten all those basic phone conversation skills Madame Cardner had attempted to drill into her in high school.

No, that was a lie. She could have said “please” to this pissed off French woman that she’d woken up at the crack of dawn. But why would she want to do that? This woman was sleeping with the favorite child, she didn’t need Rebecca’s love.

She listened to shuffling noises through the receiver and more sleepy French in the background. She didn’t attempt to follow the conversation. A man’s voice came on the line.

“Allo?”

Damn the French and their allo’s.

“Is this John Ramsey?”

A silence followed without any further French. A gruff “Yeah” followed eventually.

Yeah? At least now she was more inclined to believe this was a guy
who’d grown up in California. “My name is Rebecca Stiehl. I’m calling about Frank Ramsey.”

A delay followed, whether caused by distance or sleep she didn’t know.

“Frank?”

“Your father.” This idiot was who she’d been compared to all her life?

“Yeah, Frank. What’s the old bastard up to now?”

She drew in a deep breath. “He’s dying.”

Nothing. No words, no sound, just the crackling of the line costing her a small fortune.

“They’ve given him a couple of weeks, maybe less. He wants you to come home.”

“Oh, God. He...what?” Waking up quickly was obviously not this man’s forte.

“He’s dying.”

“I caught that part, sugar.” His voice pulled the last word out with a drawl she could have sworn was southern. She got angry fast. Angrier. She was not going to be demeaned by a man who
couldn’t figure out where the hell his accent was from.

“Then what do you need clarification on, sir?” It was her fallback voice. Her bestyour pissing me off but I’m in customer service voice.

“Why the hell he wants me home.”

“You’re his son.”

“And why does he want me home?”

Because you’re the perfect one, she thought. “I don’t know why, I didn’t ask why, I was just given this number and told to call. Once you make arrangements to come to back to Detroit let me know and I’ll see that someone picks you up from the airport. Let me give you my number.” She waited for him to find pen and paper, murmuring in French to what she assumed was the woman on his side of the phone. She watched the hands of her beside clock ticking off the dollars.

He finally told her to go ahead and she recited the numbers. He repeated them back to her. “And you’re…?”

She told him her name again.

“Yes, but who are you? How do you know Frank?”

She closed her eyes and wished she didn’t. Wished she didn’t know his son. Wished she didn’t have to do any of this.

Up Next: Ad of the Week

Memoir vs. Novel

People still ask me what memoir really is. Despite everyone loving to read memoirs recently, no one seems to be able to nail down the particulars of what it is they’re consuming. Then you go and add A Million Little Pieces and its “sequel” to the mix and you’ve got a big bag of WTF? So today I'm answering questions.

Memoir’s basically fiction, right?

No. Memoirs are not fiction. They are about real people and the things that actually happened in that person’s life.

But then why does it read like a novel?

In memoir the author employs all the devices and methods of a fiction writer. They deal in tone and selective description. The authors get into artistic imaginings of physical things. In factual writing an artistic description of how the wind sounded or the way the smoke swirled upward would never be printed, but memoir allows for such artistic flourishes. They build the story of the life around a theme, leaving out large parts of their lives that have nothing to do with the theme and focusing in on events that do.

The best example of theme in memoir that I know is Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, where author Nick Flynn builds the memoir around the theme of homelessness. This means that he focuses on his experience working in homeless shelters and his father’s experience being homeless. Because the father-son relationship is viewed through this lens some aspects of his life come into sharper focus and some fade out. When asked about his relationship with his mother, the author stated that his relationship with his mother was extremely important to him and that he and his mother have always gotten along; however, you would not know this from reading the memoir because he allowed the narration of the mother-son relationship to fall away from the attention of the reader.

So how’s it different from an autobiography?

Autobiographies have (thankfully) gone out of style. Pretty much the only people who wrote autobiographies were people who had somehow been deemed “important” public persons, and because they were “important” we, the public, would then want to read all about the experiences that shaped their life and the events that lead to them being “important” and famous.

Memoirs have no such notion of importance. They are the (hopefully) entertaining and moving account of everyday people who have something special to say. Read The Black Dog of Fate if you don’t believe me; the first third of it is about watching baseball on TV with his grandmother. The second third is him realizing she survived the Armenian genocide.

It's not fiction, it's not autobiograph; I still don’t get it.

Most casual readers want to view memoirs as readable autobiographies, and therein lies the problem. An autobiography is fact checked at some point, extensive interviews with witnesses are done, and usually revolves around events so large and well documented that all of this is possible. Memoir doesn’t presume to be the entire truth.

The simplest and most succinct answer did not dawn on me until I read an interview with literary agent Lynn Nesbit where she stated that the thing about memoir is that it involves an unreliable narrator. That was the moment of truth for me.

Memoir is the truth, told with literary devices to make a good, interesting, solid story, told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator. The narrator (author) is limited to only what he knows himself. He cannot know what those around him were thinking or what their reasons were, he can only assume them. He can assume reasons for actions toward him. He can assume people’s histories. He can assume events that went on with out him happened a certain way but the narrator will never know with any certainty because the narrator cannot leave his own mind.

What's an unreliable narrator look like?

Certainly you have a friend who always takes comments too critically, right down to the way someone greets her in a store. Because of this, when she tells you a story about her feeling slighted because of a store clerk you know to take it with a grain of salt. As goes that friend, so goes the memoir.

So why are people upset with this Frey guy?

I haven't read it and don't intend to. As I understand it his novels (which he sold as "memoir" after publishers didn't buy it as fiction), he dealt with a narrator who was a drug addict and overcame addiction, and a narrator who spent time in prison. Frey may have experimented with drugs but never was an addict, never went to rehab, and never spent time in prison. Addiction counselors are afraid that people will think they can deal with addiction on their own “like this guy did” when he really doesn’t know shit about rehab.

That and he made Oprah look like a fool. And you don’t mess with Oprah.

Up Next: Ad of the Week

The Whereabouts of Scott No. 517 -- Installation Eight

(fiction; continued from previous)

“Sorry,” the woman [she is generic] apologized, “I gotta fix your tie.”

“Aw, that’s alright—”

“You look really sharp.”

“Seriously?” Scott No. 339 stopped dancing so that she could straighten his tie. He sounded shocked.

The woman’s hands [she is afraid of being generic] touched the silk and the action felt so caring, so domestic that her hand stopped moving. She gave a half hearted tug so that she didn’t appear a complete nutcase [she is afraid of being the generic little wife] and waited for her sanity to return. She didn’t know how long it would take for it to come back as it had taken off at a pretty good sprint when she realized what she had been doing.

“I went down into the costume shop to see what I could dig up.” [He needed help.]

She laughed. “You got this out of the costume shop? Out of that dingy room in the basement came something this nice?”

“This is far nicer than anything I actually own. So I just take things from there.” [He needed help but generally refused it.]

“So every morning you roll out of bed and go get dressed in the costume shop?” [He needed help to be normal but generally refused it.]

He furrowed his brow. She just laughed at him.

“Are we going to dance?” Scott No. 339 held his hand up and they continued.

* * *

Scott No. 331 always took his coffee black. This was true when he was at an all night diner where the coffee was always greasy and slightly weaker than coffee should be.

Scott No. 331 always took his coffee with creamer. One scalloped packet of half n half per cup filled. This was true when he was at a greasy spoon which was not an all night diner where the coffee was only mildly greasy and often a smidge stronger than coffee should be.

Scott No. 331 always added flavored powdered non-dairy creamer to his coffee before toping it off with 2% milk. This was true when he was at work pouring coffee that was too strong from a pot that had not been washed in recent memory but still made the coffee taste like soap.

Scott No. 331 never took his coffee from Starbucks. He did not believe that sugar or other fluffy shit should be added to coffee. Nor did he believe that having someone dress his coffee up in frills and lace is a reason to spend three to five times the daily wage of the average Indian worker.