Christine Sneed's Blog, page 3
May 26, 2017
Rated R for Racy: Writing Sex Scenes
As a graduate student in the mid-90s when I faced my first class of undergraduate fiction-writing students, it didn't take long to realize there were few things more daunting for young writers (and their writing teachers) than the moment they decide to disrobe their characters and place them in a compromising position. Or several compromising positions – whatever their preference might be. If we dare to write them, sex scenes offer writers the chance to reveal character in one of the most intimate situations conceivable, and they also show our readers how confusing or scary or beautiful sex can be.
The appeal of the romance-novel genre is well-documented, as is the success of pornography – a billion-dollar global industry. Whether we want to admit it or not, we’re a species as interested in sex as we are in money, revenge and power, and I think it’s safe to say that these impulses are all linked.
For one, scientists have shown that as the bank balance rises, so does the libido. (It seems that no matter what I write, there’s a pun in there somewhere – further proof that sex is in our genetic code. Or else I just have an inexcusably dirty mind.) And despite its ubiquity, few of us seem to tire of sex or sexual thoughts, at least not for very long. Romance-novel fans keep returning to this genre, comforted and reliably thrilled, in spite of its predictable story lines.
I don’t think many would dispute that our sexuality is as inherently a part of our identity as the face we show the world each day. Ours is also a culture that has transformed sex into an enemy – if you want it too much, you’re a pervert. If you talk about it too much, you’re a pervert. If you do it too much, ditto. But if you don’t do it, you’re missing out, and boy, do we feel sorry for you. What are you, some kind of freak? On more than one level, sex is also a political construct, and any idea or concept argued about in every imaginable public forum is going to hold most of us in its thrall.
If you dare to create characters who want to have sex with each other and then go ahead and do it, consider reading a smart, funny essay by Steve Almond, “How to Write Sex Scenes: The 12-Step Program,” from his book (Not that You Asked) (the parentheses are his).
A sampler: Almond advises writers not to use technical terms for body parts because “[t]here is no surer way to kill the erotic buzz than to use these terms, which call to mind—my mind at least—health classes (in the best instance) and (in the worst instance) venereal disease.” After reading this essay for the first time, I realized that when writing the scenes in a story that I didn’t want my father to read, I was trying to express in concrete terms the complicated mix of emotions that usually accompany two (sober) people taking off their clothes together for the first time. They are nervous, excited, afraid, possibly euphoric, but also mostly incapable of letting their bodies turn down the volume on their minds for a little while. They forget that the brain is the biggest erogenous zone, even if I try not to.
That’s probably the biggest challenge when you’re writing a sex scene—finding the right balance between interior and exterior states. What is the mind doing while the knee caps are being kissed? Maybe it’s noticing how stale the sheets smell and hoping the lover doesn’t have the same olfactory powers of discernment. As Almond writes, “The cool thing about sex—aside from its being, uh, sex—is that it engages all five senses.”
He saves what I think might be his best advice for the final step: “If you don’t feel comfortable writing about sex, then don’t.” Unless you’re ready to attend to the awkwardness along with the ecstasy, it’s probably best to remain a reader rather than a writer of sex scenes. Either way, if you’d like to make a close study of this specimen, some of the raciest books I can think of: Sabbath’s Theater and Portnoy’s Complaint (both by Philip Roth), Fear of Flying (Erica Jong), and Rabbit Is Rich (John Updike).
A pivotal book in my adolescence and probably in many others’: Judy Blume’s Forever, which I remember reading at twelve, and being bewildered by, what was for me, a new use of the word come. Why did Blume keep having her characters say it in such a strange context? My neighbor Lynn and I puzzled over this question at the bus stop one morning, she also having recently read Forever. Precocious and curious like so many others in our junior-high class, we were girls who had read a book too old for us, but it is one that I’m glad to have read when I did.
Blume’s sex scenes were real-seeming, not at all coy or melodramatic. She wrote the novel at her daughter Randi’s request, wanting to help her understand what happens when two young people in love go into a room for the first time and step out of their clothes. Their inhibitions might not be so easily shed, just as yours, the writer’s, might not be either. Nonetheless, you’re likely to think it’s still worth trying, and if you practice, you’re probably going to get a little better each time.
* This essay originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog.
The appeal of the romance-novel genre is well-documented, as is the success of pornography – a billion-dollar global industry. Whether we want to admit it or not, we’re a species as interested in sex as we are in money, revenge and power, and I think it’s safe to say that these impulses are all linked.
For one, scientists have shown that as the bank balance rises, so does the libido. (It seems that no matter what I write, there’s a pun in there somewhere – further proof that sex is in our genetic code. Or else I just have an inexcusably dirty mind.) And despite its ubiquity, few of us seem to tire of sex or sexual thoughts, at least not for very long. Romance-novel fans keep returning to this genre, comforted and reliably thrilled, in spite of its predictable story lines.
I don’t think many would dispute that our sexuality is as inherently a part of our identity as the face we show the world each day. Ours is also a culture that has transformed sex into an enemy – if you want it too much, you’re a pervert. If you talk about it too much, you’re a pervert. If you do it too much, ditto. But if you don’t do it, you’re missing out, and boy, do we feel sorry for you. What are you, some kind of freak? On more than one level, sex is also a political construct, and any idea or concept argued about in every imaginable public forum is going to hold most of us in its thrall.
If you dare to create characters who want to have sex with each other and then go ahead and do it, consider reading a smart, funny essay by Steve Almond, “How to Write Sex Scenes: The 12-Step Program,” from his book (Not that You Asked) (the parentheses are his).
A sampler: Almond advises writers not to use technical terms for body parts because “[t]here is no surer way to kill the erotic buzz than to use these terms, which call to mind—my mind at least—health classes (in the best instance) and (in the worst instance) venereal disease.” After reading this essay for the first time, I realized that when writing the scenes in a story that I didn’t want my father to read, I was trying to express in concrete terms the complicated mix of emotions that usually accompany two (sober) people taking off their clothes together for the first time. They are nervous, excited, afraid, possibly euphoric, but also mostly incapable of letting their bodies turn down the volume on their minds for a little while. They forget that the brain is the biggest erogenous zone, even if I try not to.
That’s probably the biggest challenge when you’re writing a sex scene—finding the right balance between interior and exterior states. What is the mind doing while the knee caps are being kissed? Maybe it’s noticing how stale the sheets smell and hoping the lover doesn’t have the same olfactory powers of discernment. As Almond writes, “The cool thing about sex—aside from its being, uh, sex—is that it engages all five senses.”
He saves what I think might be his best advice for the final step: “If you don’t feel comfortable writing about sex, then don’t.” Unless you’re ready to attend to the awkwardness along with the ecstasy, it’s probably best to remain a reader rather than a writer of sex scenes. Either way, if you’d like to make a close study of this specimen, some of the raciest books I can think of: Sabbath’s Theater and Portnoy’s Complaint (both by Philip Roth), Fear of Flying (Erica Jong), and Rabbit Is Rich (John Updike).
A pivotal book in my adolescence and probably in many others’: Judy Blume’s Forever, which I remember reading at twelve, and being bewildered by, what was for me, a new use of the word come. Why did Blume keep having her characters say it in such a strange context? My neighbor Lynn and I puzzled over this question at the bus stop one morning, she also having recently read Forever. Precocious and curious like so many others in our junior-high class, we were girls who had read a book too old for us, but it is one that I’m glad to have read when I did.
Blume’s sex scenes were real-seeming, not at all coy or melodramatic. She wrote the novel at her daughter Randi’s request, wanting to help her understand what happens when two young people in love go into a room for the first time and step out of their clothes. Their inhibitions might not be so easily shed, just as yours, the writer’s, might not be either. Nonetheless, you’re likely to think it’s still worth trying, and if you practice, you’re probably going to get a little better each time.
* This essay originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog.
May 16, 2017
Women, Men and Humor
Ellen, Whoopi, Tina, Roseanne. They’re women, they tell jokes, and their names are instantly recognizable. These comedians have imposing brains but often focus on their thighs: they write frequently about their relationship with food, this being one theme that connects them. Throughout 30 Rock’s lengthy run on NBC, Tina Fey’s character Liz Lemon was known for her sweet tooth and love-hate relationship with food. The other three comedians have also made time with their audiences by cracking jokes about their diets. Women and food, like men and flatulence, are one pairing that doesn’t seem to be in any danger of disappearing from the stand-up circuit. It’s not that I want women to tell fart jokes as often as men do, but I’ve been thinking lately about how funny women and funny men differ.
Comedy isn’t a field that has traditionally offered women ready access to its highest echelons, but I suppose you could say that’s true of many fields. To uphold their end of the social contract, women are expected to be cute, even when they’re cracking jokes.
A few well-known female comedians, Sarah Silverman and Margaret Cho, for example, often eschew cuteness in favor of crassness, sometimes to great comic effect and financial success, but I’m not sure if Justin Halpern, the creator of the Facebook phenomenon ”Shit My Dad Says” (which resulted in a TV series and a lucrative book deal), would have had the same success if his brainchild had been “Shit My Mom Says.” A woman spouting wry or profane pronouncements about her aging body and the stupidity of the world is often the focus of a variety of malice so stunningly malignant (ref. Twitter) you’d think she’d committed an actual crime. I can’t see this trend improving while the current administration continues to occupy the White House, either.
What is it about women making jokes that turns some spectators into prudes and/or monstrous misogynists? It can’t only be our puritanical roots and the Calvinist principles that dominated America’s early years. Like children, women--we’ve been told by our patriarchal media and so-called mentors--are meant to be seen, not heard. After all, it was less than a hundred years ago that women won the right to vote, and if women were going to be bold enough to stand on a stage, they had better sing, wear a swimsuit and a sash, or else play the sexy sidekick to the male magician or Vaudeville star.
There’s no question, however, that women, can be as funny as men. From a literary standpoint, Alice Munro has written many memorably comic stories (“Wigtime” and “Some Women” are two of my favorites), but I don’t know if her comedic skill is the first thing that comes to her readers’ minds. I usually think of her range and her ability to write sentences that are simultaneously effervescent and devastating. A more obvious example of a funny female writer is Lorrie Moore, one who has made a successful career of writing comedic stories with sharp teeth (see “You’re Ugly Too”). She has also done cute, this being one aspect of her writing that critics are divided over – is she too cute? Too enamored of puns and clever turns of phrase? Moore is very witty but some reviewers have said that her jokes aren’t subtle enough, and as a result, her characters come across as caricatures.
One of my favorite writers is Penelope Fitzgerald, an English novelist who wrote subtle, brilliant and very funny short novels – The Blue Flower and The Beginning of Spring are the two I remember most readily. The Blue Flower earned her a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995, and it is one of the wittiest novels that I know of. In it, Fitzgerald imagines the life of late eighteenth-century German poet Novalis and presents the marvels and curiosities of his life and times (in many households of that era, for example, laundry was done once a year, on a day dedicated solely to this task) with grace, much humor, and skill.
For the foreseeable future, men are most likely to continue dominating the stratosphere where jokes are created, told, and sold in book and comedy-special form, but if between viewings of streamable 30 Rock and The Office episodes you’d like to read some funny contemporary women writers in addition to Munro and Moore, here are a few I recommend: Jean Thompson, Lori Ostlund, Elizabeth Crane, Karin Lin-Greenberg, and Deb Olin Unferth. And one of the funniest stories I’ve ever read, Rebecca Evanhoe’s “Snake,” which first appeared in the November 2011 issue of Harper’s.
-A version of this essay first appeared on the Ploughshares blog.
Comedy isn’t a field that has traditionally offered women ready access to its highest echelons, but I suppose you could say that’s true of many fields. To uphold their end of the social contract, women are expected to be cute, even when they’re cracking jokes.
A few well-known female comedians, Sarah Silverman and Margaret Cho, for example, often eschew cuteness in favor of crassness, sometimes to great comic effect and financial success, but I’m not sure if Justin Halpern, the creator of the Facebook phenomenon ”Shit My Dad Says” (which resulted in a TV series and a lucrative book deal), would have had the same success if his brainchild had been “Shit My Mom Says.” A woman spouting wry or profane pronouncements about her aging body and the stupidity of the world is often the focus of a variety of malice so stunningly malignant (ref. Twitter) you’d think she’d committed an actual crime. I can’t see this trend improving while the current administration continues to occupy the White House, either.
What is it about women making jokes that turns some spectators into prudes and/or monstrous misogynists? It can’t only be our puritanical roots and the Calvinist principles that dominated America’s early years. Like children, women--we’ve been told by our patriarchal media and so-called mentors--are meant to be seen, not heard. After all, it was less than a hundred years ago that women won the right to vote, and if women were going to be bold enough to stand on a stage, they had better sing, wear a swimsuit and a sash, or else play the sexy sidekick to the male magician or Vaudeville star.
There’s no question, however, that women, can be as funny as men. From a literary standpoint, Alice Munro has written many memorably comic stories (“Wigtime” and “Some Women” are two of my favorites), but I don’t know if her comedic skill is the first thing that comes to her readers’ minds. I usually think of her range and her ability to write sentences that are simultaneously effervescent and devastating. A more obvious example of a funny female writer is Lorrie Moore, one who has made a successful career of writing comedic stories with sharp teeth (see “You’re Ugly Too”). She has also done cute, this being one aspect of her writing that critics are divided over – is she too cute? Too enamored of puns and clever turns of phrase? Moore is very witty but some reviewers have said that her jokes aren’t subtle enough, and as a result, her characters come across as caricatures.
One of my favorite writers is Penelope Fitzgerald, an English novelist who wrote subtle, brilliant and very funny short novels – The Blue Flower and The Beginning of Spring are the two I remember most readily. The Blue Flower earned her a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995, and it is one of the wittiest novels that I know of. In it, Fitzgerald imagines the life of late eighteenth-century German poet Novalis and presents the marvels and curiosities of his life and times (in many households of that era, for example, laundry was done once a year, on a day dedicated solely to this task) with grace, much humor, and skill.
For the foreseeable future, men are most likely to continue dominating the stratosphere where jokes are created, told, and sold in book and comedy-special form, but if between viewings of streamable 30 Rock and The Office episodes you’d like to read some funny contemporary women writers in addition to Munro and Moore, here are a few I recommend: Jean Thompson, Lori Ostlund, Elizabeth Crane, Karin Lin-Greenberg, and Deb Olin Unferth. And one of the funniest stories I’ve ever read, Rebecca Evanhoe’s “Snake,” which first appeared in the November 2011 issue of Harper’s.
-A version of this essay first appeared on the Ploughshares blog.
May 12, 2017
Summer Reading
That 800-page biography of one of the Founding Fathers and 700-page Pulitzer-prize-winning novel have been on your nightstand since the holidays. You've been telling yourself for months that as soon as the flowerbeds are in order, the kitchen freshly painted, and the children are off at camp, you'll at last crack the spines on both of those tomes.
You're not sure how your friends manage to read amid the time-consuming demands of their daily lives, but in your case, the newspaper and a few subscription magazine articles are all you can get to with any regularity.
Publishers, however, continue to release some of their most anticipated titles in the summer. There's also a whole category called “beach reads,” frequently aimed at female readers, often in paperback original format with pastel covers, that feature stories of mothers and daughters, whirlwind romances in glamorous foreign cities, girlhood friends reunited after divorce or other personal catastrophes.
Beach reads are meant to be fun and uplifting — no Gulag Archipelago or The Stranger here (unless you’re reading it to bone up before writing a parody: The Stranger and Zombies, but that hardly has the ring of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies).
As a fiction writer and a part-time creative writing instructor, I spend a lot of time during the academic year reading the books that I've assigned to my students, along with the stories and essays they turn in at regular intervals. I've also gotten into the habit of attempting to read several books simultaneously, something I blame on a compromised attention span due to the purchase of an iPhone.
For example, I might be enjoying a chapter in Rosellen Brown's harrowing, virtuosic novel Before and After when the thought arrives that I haven't checked my email in eight or nine minutes. I might race through the first half of Just Kids by Patti Smith one afternoon but then remember that the other day I started Elizabeth Crane’s novel We Only Know So Much and in the next minute, I find myself checking in with those characters (after checking email.)
My shortened attention span doesn't recognize variations in the seasons, though. I read at more or less the same pace throughout the year — alternately manic and stately, depending on how many papers are waiting to be graded and which library books are perilously close to being overdue.
I asked a few friends if they read differently in the summer, and was surprised to learn that to some extent, they do.
Don De Grazia, author of American Skin: “I guess I've never really understood the beach, let alone beach reading — you're awkwardly reclined, covered in grease and sand and sweat, little kids are running around screaming. ... But, for whatever reason, I do really love to read at sidewalk cafes. That's my idea of a good time. I probably do about 90 percent of my fiction reading from May through September.”
Adam McOmber, author of the forthcoming story collection My House Gathers Desires: “I read at pretty much the same pace throughout the year. For my writing, I do a lot of research, so that takes up most of my reading time. Over the summer, though, I try to find one novel that's purely fun to read. A recent example would be Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton. Something that's plot-driven and smart. I read slowly; if I find a novel I like, it might take me all summer to finish, but there's a pleasure in that.”
Patricia Ann McNair, author of the story collection The Temple of Air: “After reading reams of student work and thesis projects, and rereading assigned texts I use in my classes, I look forward to the leisure of summer reading. Summer allows me to read like a student — not in that frantic ‘I-gotta-get-this-read-by-tomorrow-morning' way, but in that way of reading to discover, to learn new things and ways of telling stories.”
Inspired by Don, Adam and Patricia, I decided to put together a short summer reading list. First up is Cristina Henriquez's The Book of Unknown Americans; after that, Lucia Berlin's A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories; Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; Joan Wickersham's Suicide Index; Scott Spencer's River Under the Road: A Novel; and William Finnegan's Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.
And I'll try not to check my email more than once every 15 minutes.
A version of this essay originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune's literary supplement Printers Row Journal in 2014.
You're not sure how your friends manage to read amid the time-consuming demands of their daily lives, but in your case, the newspaper and a few subscription magazine articles are all you can get to with any regularity.
Publishers, however, continue to release some of their most anticipated titles in the summer. There's also a whole category called “beach reads,” frequently aimed at female readers, often in paperback original format with pastel covers, that feature stories of mothers and daughters, whirlwind romances in glamorous foreign cities, girlhood friends reunited after divorce or other personal catastrophes.
Beach reads are meant to be fun and uplifting — no Gulag Archipelago or The Stranger here (unless you’re reading it to bone up before writing a parody: The Stranger and Zombies, but that hardly has the ring of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies).
As a fiction writer and a part-time creative writing instructor, I spend a lot of time during the academic year reading the books that I've assigned to my students, along with the stories and essays they turn in at regular intervals. I've also gotten into the habit of attempting to read several books simultaneously, something I blame on a compromised attention span due to the purchase of an iPhone.
For example, I might be enjoying a chapter in Rosellen Brown's harrowing, virtuosic novel Before and After when the thought arrives that I haven't checked my email in eight or nine minutes. I might race through the first half of Just Kids by Patti Smith one afternoon but then remember that the other day I started Elizabeth Crane’s novel We Only Know So Much and in the next minute, I find myself checking in with those characters (after checking email.)
My shortened attention span doesn't recognize variations in the seasons, though. I read at more or less the same pace throughout the year — alternately manic and stately, depending on how many papers are waiting to be graded and which library books are perilously close to being overdue.
I asked a few friends if they read differently in the summer, and was surprised to learn that to some extent, they do.
Don De Grazia, author of American Skin: “I guess I've never really understood the beach, let alone beach reading — you're awkwardly reclined, covered in grease and sand and sweat, little kids are running around screaming. ... But, for whatever reason, I do really love to read at sidewalk cafes. That's my idea of a good time. I probably do about 90 percent of my fiction reading from May through September.”
Adam McOmber, author of the forthcoming story collection My House Gathers Desires: “I read at pretty much the same pace throughout the year. For my writing, I do a lot of research, so that takes up most of my reading time. Over the summer, though, I try to find one novel that's purely fun to read. A recent example would be Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton. Something that's plot-driven and smart. I read slowly; if I find a novel I like, it might take me all summer to finish, but there's a pleasure in that.”
Patricia Ann McNair, author of the story collection The Temple of Air: “After reading reams of student work and thesis projects, and rereading assigned texts I use in my classes, I look forward to the leisure of summer reading. Summer allows me to read like a student — not in that frantic ‘I-gotta-get-this-read-by-tomorrow-morning' way, but in that way of reading to discover, to learn new things and ways of telling stories.”
Inspired by Don, Adam and Patricia, I decided to put together a short summer reading list. First up is Cristina Henriquez's The Book of Unknown Americans; after that, Lucia Berlin's A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories; Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; Joan Wickersham's Suicide Index; Scott Spencer's River Under the Road: A Novel; and William Finnegan's Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.
And I'll try not to check my email more than once every 15 minutes.
A version of this essay originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune's literary supplement Printers Row Journal in 2014.
April 29, 2017
In Praise of the Diary
It started in junior high when I developed a number of passionately one-sided crushes on classmates who were embarrassed to be seen standing within shouting distance of me. I was a mousy girl smitten with boys, books, and Day-glo pink socks – your average pubescent train wreck, I suppose.
Eventually I turned to my Judy Blume diary, a holiday gift from my grandmother. It had a rainbow-colored cover and quotes from Blume’s young adult novels liberally printed on its pages. I filled it with feverish laments about how D. was absent for two days in a row! How our social studies teacher threw an unruly S. out of the room when he wouldn’t stop making rude noises with his armpits.
By college, I was buying sober accountants’ ledgers for my diaries: slender, hardbound books with lined pages that I took to Strasbourg for my junior year abroad. I keep three separate journals now (shades of OCD? I hope not) – one for legitimate worries and psychological piffle alike, another for informal reviews of books and films, and a third for story ideas, titles, plot threads.
There’s a long history of writers keeping journals, many of them published posthumously. In Darkness Visible, a 1990 memoir about his long struggle with depression, William Styron confesses that he realized he was in life-threatening emotional distress when he destroyed the one journal that he didn’t wish anyone to read after he died. But not all writers have the presence of mind or physical ability to take these steps, most having no idea which day will be their last. Instead, they leave the fate of their journals in the hands of their heirs, which is what, for example, Susan Sontag did.
Several years ago, some of Sontag’s journals were edited and published posthumously by her son, and both critics and fans excoriated him for including early passages that they argued would have embarrassed his famous mother. It’s old news that writers live dual existences, to some degree: the public, authorial persona sometimes at war with the private man or woman who spends many solitary hours at his or her desk. Reading about Sontag’s diaries and the related controversy, I wondered if she really would have minded what her son chose to publish of these private papers – the controversy surrounding his choices was one way, after all, for her to remain present in her readers’ minds.
Nonetheless, I wondered if she would have made a few different choices than those her son made. Passages concerning her formative sexual relationships might have been left out, although Sontag was known for her candor.
I don’t expect people to be lining up to publish my journals after I die, but I can’t say that I’d like to have their contents made public, especially not the pages on which I bemoan various romantic and professional disappointments, or how infuriating it is when people don’t say thank you when you hold the door open for them.
Looking back on these journals now, something I rarely do, I feel a mix of sadness and nostalgia and often close the notebook after only a minute or two of skimming. All that energy expended on worries and doubts that mostly proved to be as ephemeral as an afternoon’s cloud formations. All the people whose names I have forgotten, along with the hours that we spent together. How could I have forgotten so much? But of course here they all are again, if I have the curiosity and courage to revisit them.
I think sometimes of the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin – many volumes of ruminations on their day-to-day experiences, their personal relationships, and the literary themes and mores that preoccupied them.
They were writing in part to make sense of their lives, to categorize and preserve its ephemeral hours. There seems no better reason to keep a journal. It is a gesture toward immortality, one of the few permitted us, though who will read these words, if anyone, after we’re gone, remains an open question.
Eventually I turned to my Judy Blume diary, a holiday gift from my grandmother. It had a rainbow-colored cover and quotes from Blume’s young adult novels liberally printed on its pages. I filled it with feverish laments about how D. was absent for two days in a row! How our social studies teacher threw an unruly S. out of the room when he wouldn’t stop making rude noises with his armpits.
By college, I was buying sober accountants’ ledgers for my diaries: slender, hardbound books with lined pages that I took to Strasbourg for my junior year abroad. I keep three separate journals now (shades of OCD? I hope not) – one for legitimate worries and psychological piffle alike, another for informal reviews of books and films, and a third for story ideas, titles, plot threads.
There’s a long history of writers keeping journals, many of them published posthumously. In Darkness Visible, a 1990 memoir about his long struggle with depression, William Styron confesses that he realized he was in life-threatening emotional distress when he destroyed the one journal that he didn’t wish anyone to read after he died. But not all writers have the presence of mind or physical ability to take these steps, most having no idea which day will be their last. Instead, they leave the fate of their journals in the hands of their heirs, which is what, for example, Susan Sontag did.
Several years ago, some of Sontag’s journals were edited and published posthumously by her son, and both critics and fans excoriated him for including early passages that they argued would have embarrassed his famous mother. It’s old news that writers live dual existences, to some degree: the public, authorial persona sometimes at war with the private man or woman who spends many solitary hours at his or her desk. Reading about Sontag’s diaries and the related controversy, I wondered if she really would have minded what her son chose to publish of these private papers – the controversy surrounding his choices was one way, after all, for her to remain present in her readers’ minds.
Nonetheless, I wondered if she would have made a few different choices than those her son made. Passages concerning her formative sexual relationships might have been left out, although Sontag was known for her candor.
I don’t expect people to be lining up to publish my journals after I die, but I can’t say that I’d like to have their contents made public, especially not the pages on which I bemoan various romantic and professional disappointments, or how infuriating it is when people don’t say thank you when you hold the door open for them.
Looking back on these journals now, something I rarely do, I feel a mix of sadness and nostalgia and often close the notebook after only a minute or two of skimming. All that energy expended on worries and doubts that mostly proved to be as ephemeral as an afternoon’s cloud formations. All the people whose names I have forgotten, along with the hours that we spent together. How could I have forgotten so much? But of course here they all are again, if I have the curiosity and courage to revisit them.
I think sometimes of the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin – many volumes of ruminations on their day-to-day experiences, their personal relationships, and the literary themes and mores that preoccupied them.
They were writing in part to make sense of their lives, to categorize and preserve its ephemeral hours. There seems no better reason to keep a journal. It is a gesture toward immortality, one of the few permitted us, though who will read these words, if anyone, after we’re gone, remains an open question.
April 12, 2017
Giving up the Ghost, or, When to Stop Submitting
The harsh truth is this: sometimes it’s time to give up. It can (and should, in many cases, I believe) take a while for writers to make the decision to stop sending out an essay, a poem, a short story, or a longer manuscript. For one, giving up is antithetical to what most of us have been taught about the writing and publishing business. We’re told repeatedly by our best teachers to be survivors, to turn the other cheek when we’re slapped with another rejection letter. We’ve been given examples of now-famous writers who repeatedly submitted their manuscripts to uninterested editors, and in some extreme cases, died before their genius was celebrated in college classrooms and book clubs everywhere. (I’m thinking of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and of Nabokov’s Lolita in particular, though fortunately, in the second instance, the author lived to see his masterpiece praised and canonized).
Especially when I was first publishing, I submitted quite a few of my short stories dozens of times before they were accepted for publication. One of the the previously unpublished stories in my first collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, was rejected more than forty times. I refused, foolhardy or not, to believe that it had few merits and decided to include it in the manuscript, and later was both relieved and vindicated when after Portraits was published, some readers told me they liked that story best of the ten in the book. (It’s “You’re So Different”).
As most everyone who has been sending out work for a few years or more knows, not all of our stories and poems will find sympathetic readers and editors. Not by a long shot. We keep a file of abandoned hopes, one that we glance at on occasion with mixed emotions – wasn’t that story about the guy who dangled himself blindfolded out of a helicopter to impress his estranged wife and daughter a friggin’ brilliant exploration of middle-aged loneliness and disaffection? Or, how could the editors at The New Yorker have failed to see how original and revelatory my poem about cotton candy and flamingos is?
Maybe we haven’t completely given up hope because we can’t make the final excision – discarding the hard copies or deleting these files from every jump drive or cloud they currently inhabit. Because if the story or poem exists at all in some tangible form, perhaps it deserves to exist?
In the last several years, more times than was probably healthy, I submitted a story only one or two times before giving up. I felt the chilling conviction that it should not be sent out at all, but because I had spent two months writing and revising it and only it, the damn story was going out! (In the case of “You’re So Different,” I didn’t stop sending it out because enough encouraging rejections had arrived for me to believe that someone would eventually publish it).
I’d also had the experience of guest-editing fiction for a journal that harvests an enormous number of submissions each year, many, many thousands, and some of the submissions I was assigned were so unready for an editor’s eye that I felt this weird mix of awe and bewilderment as I read through the pile. I kept thinking, If this is what I’m competing with, why does it take me 20 or 30 attempts to publish a story? I’ve been in Best American Short Stories for *&^# sake!
The pill I kept swallowing the year after that publication was bitter and frighteningly large: almost a year passed before I received another story acceptance, despite the BASS 2008 line in my cover letter. I had also already published close to 25 stories by the time the BASS call arrived on a day in late February of 2008. It seemed safe to believe I had some idea how to write a readable short story. But during those many months, I learned and relearned the lessons of humility I had begun my acquaintance with when I began sending out poems and stories in the mid-90s.
In fact, I had almost given up on the story that was selected for BASS 2008. It took me over four years to publish it, and at one point, it sat on my desk for a year and a half and did not go anywhere. I’m not sure why I finally sent it to the New England Review. Desperation? Hubris? A desire to play a practical joke on two editors I respected? No, the truth is that I worried I submitted to them too often; I'd sent them other stories to consider in the preceding couple of years.
Yet, before NER accepted it, I really was thinking of putting “Quality of Life” away for good. If Stephen Donadio and Carolyn Kuebler hadn’t taken it, it would have joined the circular file. I’d have lost interest in it, and this, more than anything else, is what happens with the stories that I stop submitting. I get sick of looking at them. Or maybe the subject matter now seems dull or else there have lately been too many stories published about stand-up comedians with OCD or marathon-running real estate agents who want to move from Newark to Sydney. The subject has been covered well enough, and my story looks like a sad imitation.
The uncertainty of the writing life is discussed again and again in posts like this one, but it’s a subject with so many variants, so many points of view. When I retire a story, it might only be because I prefer to put my resources into submitting newer material. The old, unpublished story is like the chambray shirt I once loved but eventually gave to the Goodwill. I grew sick of seeing it in the closet, remembering its better days, the thrill I felt to look upon it when it was in less-threadbare form.
The unpublished stories, however, did serve their purpose. For one, they eventually brought me to other stories.
--A previous version of this essay appeared on the Ploughshares blog.
Especially when I was first publishing, I submitted quite a few of my short stories dozens of times before they were accepted for publication. One of the the previously unpublished stories in my first collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, was rejected more than forty times. I refused, foolhardy or not, to believe that it had few merits and decided to include it in the manuscript, and later was both relieved and vindicated when after Portraits was published, some readers told me they liked that story best of the ten in the book. (It’s “You’re So Different”).
As most everyone who has been sending out work for a few years or more knows, not all of our stories and poems will find sympathetic readers and editors. Not by a long shot. We keep a file of abandoned hopes, one that we glance at on occasion with mixed emotions – wasn’t that story about the guy who dangled himself blindfolded out of a helicopter to impress his estranged wife and daughter a friggin’ brilliant exploration of middle-aged loneliness and disaffection? Or, how could the editors at The New Yorker have failed to see how original and revelatory my poem about cotton candy and flamingos is?
Maybe we haven’t completely given up hope because we can’t make the final excision – discarding the hard copies or deleting these files from every jump drive or cloud they currently inhabit. Because if the story or poem exists at all in some tangible form, perhaps it deserves to exist?
In the last several years, more times than was probably healthy, I submitted a story only one or two times before giving up. I felt the chilling conviction that it should not be sent out at all, but because I had spent two months writing and revising it and only it, the damn story was going out! (In the case of “You’re So Different,” I didn’t stop sending it out because enough encouraging rejections had arrived for me to believe that someone would eventually publish it).
I’d also had the experience of guest-editing fiction for a journal that harvests an enormous number of submissions each year, many, many thousands, and some of the submissions I was assigned were so unready for an editor’s eye that I felt this weird mix of awe and bewilderment as I read through the pile. I kept thinking, If this is what I’m competing with, why does it take me 20 or 30 attempts to publish a story? I’ve been in Best American Short Stories for *&^# sake!
The pill I kept swallowing the year after that publication was bitter and frighteningly large: almost a year passed before I received another story acceptance, despite the BASS 2008 line in my cover letter. I had also already published close to 25 stories by the time the BASS call arrived on a day in late February of 2008. It seemed safe to believe I had some idea how to write a readable short story. But during those many months, I learned and relearned the lessons of humility I had begun my acquaintance with when I began sending out poems and stories in the mid-90s.
In fact, I had almost given up on the story that was selected for BASS 2008. It took me over four years to publish it, and at one point, it sat on my desk for a year and a half and did not go anywhere. I’m not sure why I finally sent it to the New England Review. Desperation? Hubris? A desire to play a practical joke on two editors I respected? No, the truth is that I worried I submitted to them too often; I'd sent them other stories to consider in the preceding couple of years.
Yet, before NER accepted it, I really was thinking of putting “Quality of Life” away for good. If Stephen Donadio and Carolyn Kuebler hadn’t taken it, it would have joined the circular file. I’d have lost interest in it, and this, more than anything else, is what happens with the stories that I stop submitting. I get sick of looking at them. Or maybe the subject matter now seems dull or else there have lately been too many stories published about stand-up comedians with OCD or marathon-running real estate agents who want to move from Newark to Sydney. The subject has been covered well enough, and my story looks like a sad imitation.
The uncertainty of the writing life is discussed again and again in posts like this one, but it’s a subject with so many variants, so many points of view. When I retire a story, it might only be because I prefer to put my resources into submitting newer material. The old, unpublished story is like the chambray shirt I once loved but eventually gave to the Goodwill. I grew sick of seeing it in the closet, remembering its better days, the thrill I felt to look upon it when it was in less-threadbare form.
The unpublished stories, however, did serve their purpose. For one, they eventually brought me to other stories.
--A previous version of this essay appeared on the Ploughshares blog.
March 29, 2017
The Vampire in the Ivory Tower: Genre Fiction*
Several years ago, an English professor friend made a thought-provoking comment that continues to haunt me: “Why do college creative writing programs often disdain genre fiction,” he said, “when that’s what most people who still read books actually want to read?”
As much as I’d like to say this isn’t true, it is very difficult to argue with the numbers: mass market paperbacks--thrillers, detective novels and mysteries, for example--consistently outsell books by literary luminaries such as Alice Munro and JM Coetzee, even if the Nobel literature prize committee and book critics of the world generally agree that Munro and Coetzee are writers whose books glow with the sheen of immortality.
Challenges to the world of literary writers abound: Why, for a significant stretch of the 1990s was Robert James Waller, author of The Bridges of Madison County, a much more famous writer than Raymond Carver? Why does 50 Shades of Grey author E. L. James continue to acquire more new readers per week than a genius like W.G. Sebald likely acquires in a year? (He might have died in 2001, but his books are still talked about and read, though not by a massive readership).
If you can write commercial fiction and make millions, my professor friend also asked, why bother going to graduate school to learn how to write an artful and memorable sentence or line of verse? Why bother making Art when you can make Money? Some people have managed to do both – Annie Proulx, Jennifer Egan, George Saunders, Colson Whitehead, and Anthony Doerr, for example, but the list of literary writers who have been able to live solely off of their advances and the royalties from their book sales is very short. Many literary writers teach or freelance for periodicals; some do both. Others copyedit or work in unrelated fields such as medicine and law. Poets Wallace Stevens and Ted Kooser were both insurance executives for many years, and Frank O’Hara worked in New York at the Museum of Modern Art until his premature and much-mourned death at 40 from a dune-buggy accident.
Writing, no matter how much you love and excel at it, often doesn’t pay. At least not money. The temptation, therefore, to sit down and try to write the million-dollar romance novel or vampire fantasy or wizard odyssey is great. Is there anything wrong with this impulse? I don’t think so, but the profit motive is, I suspect, sometimes much greater here than the desire-to-create-something-beautiful-and-meaningful-and-take-part-in-the-country’s-cultural-conversation motive. Yet, the urge to write what could sell (really, really sell), is understandable – most of us want to support our families without working ourselves into an early grave, and if we’re not making enough from our book sales of the most innovative novel since Ulysses, we might think that penning Sir Nigel, the Gentleman Vampire is a good way to make some serious cash for once in our lives.
Genre fiction is considered the fiction of the masses, if there still are any masses when it comes to book consumption. I suppose there still are, a fact to which J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyers can all attest, each of them having written novels that have been turned into hugely popular films as well as bestselling hardbound and paperback edition books. I don’t know if these three writers would say that they expect the books they’re writing to endure like The Great Gatsby or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn have, but I suspect many readers would agree that the entertainment value of their novels is higher than their literary value, something the authors might also be willing to acknowledge. (I realize this is a subjective assessment – a convincing rebuttal can be made by fans of Rowling, in particular, probably).
Literary fiction aspires to the rarefied stratosphere where art resides, and this is a noble aspiration. I don’t know if it’s always in a writer’s best interests though, considering the realities of today’s publishing world and the preferences of the reading public. Can we teach readers to choose Sebald’s Austerlitz over the Twilight triology? Maybe. A lot of readers view books as entertainment, and above all, genre fiction entertains. Literary fiction can entertain, of course, but it also often instructs, and its lessons are sometimes painful ones.
It is a rare month that passes without someone close to me saying, “Why don’t you write a romance novel and make millions and then write whatever you want to?”
“I wish it were that simple,” I usually answer. It isn’t easy to write anything well, whether it is genre fiction or a more literary form. Nor is it easy to sell your manuscript if you do succeed in writing a good vampire or werewolf romance novel. If you manage to sell it, there’s also no guarantee it will earn you and your publisher the paydays both of you are banking on. Foolhardy or no, for me, the choice isn’t very hard: I prefer to read literary fiction. And despite the relatively small financial returns on the fiction that I have published so far, I still prefer to write it.
*An earlier version of this essay appeared on the Ploughshares blog.
As much as I’d like to say this isn’t true, it is very difficult to argue with the numbers: mass market paperbacks--thrillers, detective novels and mysteries, for example--consistently outsell books by literary luminaries such as Alice Munro and JM Coetzee, even if the Nobel literature prize committee and book critics of the world generally agree that Munro and Coetzee are writers whose books glow with the sheen of immortality.
Challenges to the world of literary writers abound: Why, for a significant stretch of the 1990s was Robert James Waller, author of The Bridges of Madison County, a much more famous writer than Raymond Carver? Why does 50 Shades of Grey author E. L. James continue to acquire more new readers per week than a genius like W.G. Sebald likely acquires in a year? (He might have died in 2001, but his books are still talked about and read, though not by a massive readership).
If you can write commercial fiction and make millions, my professor friend also asked, why bother going to graduate school to learn how to write an artful and memorable sentence or line of verse? Why bother making Art when you can make Money? Some people have managed to do both – Annie Proulx, Jennifer Egan, George Saunders, Colson Whitehead, and Anthony Doerr, for example, but the list of literary writers who have been able to live solely off of their advances and the royalties from their book sales is very short. Many literary writers teach or freelance for periodicals; some do both. Others copyedit or work in unrelated fields such as medicine and law. Poets Wallace Stevens and Ted Kooser were both insurance executives for many years, and Frank O’Hara worked in New York at the Museum of Modern Art until his premature and much-mourned death at 40 from a dune-buggy accident.
Writing, no matter how much you love and excel at it, often doesn’t pay. At least not money. The temptation, therefore, to sit down and try to write the million-dollar romance novel or vampire fantasy or wizard odyssey is great. Is there anything wrong with this impulse? I don’t think so, but the profit motive is, I suspect, sometimes much greater here than the desire-to-create-something-beautiful-and-meaningful-and-take-part-in-the-country’s-cultural-conversation motive. Yet, the urge to write what could sell (really, really sell), is understandable – most of us want to support our families without working ourselves into an early grave, and if we’re not making enough from our book sales of the most innovative novel since Ulysses, we might think that penning Sir Nigel, the Gentleman Vampire is a good way to make some serious cash for once in our lives.
Genre fiction is considered the fiction of the masses, if there still are any masses when it comes to book consumption. I suppose there still are, a fact to which J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyers can all attest, each of them having written novels that have been turned into hugely popular films as well as bestselling hardbound and paperback edition books. I don’t know if these three writers would say that they expect the books they’re writing to endure like The Great Gatsby or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn have, but I suspect many readers would agree that the entertainment value of their novels is higher than their literary value, something the authors might also be willing to acknowledge. (I realize this is a subjective assessment – a convincing rebuttal can be made by fans of Rowling, in particular, probably).
Literary fiction aspires to the rarefied stratosphere where art resides, and this is a noble aspiration. I don’t know if it’s always in a writer’s best interests though, considering the realities of today’s publishing world and the preferences of the reading public. Can we teach readers to choose Sebald’s Austerlitz over the Twilight triology? Maybe. A lot of readers view books as entertainment, and above all, genre fiction entertains. Literary fiction can entertain, of course, but it also often instructs, and its lessons are sometimes painful ones.
It is a rare month that passes without someone close to me saying, “Why don’t you write a romance novel and make millions and then write whatever you want to?”
“I wish it were that simple,” I usually answer. It isn’t easy to write anything well, whether it is genre fiction or a more literary form. Nor is it easy to sell your manuscript if you do succeed in writing a good vampire or werewolf romance novel. If you manage to sell it, there’s also no guarantee it will earn you and your publisher the paydays both of you are banking on. Foolhardy or no, for me, the choice isn’t very hard: I prefer to read literary fiction. And despite the relatively small financial returns on the fiction that I have published so far, I still prefer to write it.
*An earlier version of this essay appeared on the Ploughshares blog.
March 13, 2017
What a Character! Incorporating a Living Person into a Work of Fiction
About four years ago when I started writing the first draft of what became my third book, the novel Paris, He Said, I knew that it would focus on a young woman named Jayne Marks who had talent as a painter but didn’t yet have the confidence and discipline required to pursue a career in the arts. Artists interest me as characters in part because for five years after graduate school, I worked at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the student affairs office. During those years, I met many painters, sculptors, digital artists, architects, and filmmakers.
When I was well into a complete rewrite of an early draft of Paris, He Said, that I happened to cross paths with Susan Kraut, a painting instructor I’d known from the Art Institute, at a mutual friend’s book release party (Peggy Shinner’s, for her excellent essay collection You Feel So Mortal: Essays on the Body). Susan told me that she was still teaching at the school and painting in her studio when she wasn’t on campus. Eventually I asked if I might include her in my novel as herself, and would she mind showing me her studio sometime and letting me assail her with questions about her process?
She was extremely gracious and said yes. Within two weeks, I was visiting her studio, which is on the top floor of her stately wooden house in central Evanston. She is modest about her work, despite its moody brilliance, and it wasn’t hard to introduce her into the narrative of Paris, He Said because I knew that Jayne needed a mentor, though I wasn’t yet sure who it would be. Susan was perfect for that role, and I was almost certain that it wouldn’t be difficult to cast her as a sympathetic character.
The biggest challenge was writing truthfully but not sycophantically about her paintings and her key support of my character Jayne (Susan was the only wholehearted, early supporter of Jayne’s work). In the novel, the two women meet at a summer studio class that Jayne begged her parents to help her pay for during the break between her junior and senior years at a college in Washington, D.C. I had to verify that the School of the Art Institute did offer such a class, and in fact, Susan had actually taught one of these summer courses many years ago.
Fact-checking was the easy part. What I spent more time thinking and worrying about was how I could make Susan the fictional character compelling in ways that kept the narrative moving forward. I also needed to ensure that her chemistry with the other characters seemed organic, or, maybe more aptly, non-toxic. I used her paintings as the point of entry – I described them from Jayne’s point of view (which in this case was also my own) and hoped to establish Susan as someone deserving of readers’ admiration too.
After this, when it was time to show Susan and Jayne together in scene, I thought about our own conversations and email exchanges of the past several months and attempted to imbue them with the gentle supportiveness that seems to come naturally to Susan as a teacher and a friend.
One detail that I ended up pulling out before the book went into galleys was what Susan (the character) tells Jayne before Susan joins her in Paris to take part in a group show: that her husband suspects her of using speed instead of coffee to give herself extra energy. I wasn’t sure if people would assume that Susan the real person sometimes took speed. She’s a college professor, a mother of three, etc. If she had been made up wholesale for the book, however, I probably would have retained that detail.
This was the first and only time I’ve included a friend as a character in one of my stories or novels. It was a pleasure because I only had nice things to say, but if you can’t portray someone you know personally in a positive fashion, you will probably lose this friend (and/or be sued for libel). There’s also the chance that what you might really want to write is narrative nonfiction instead of fiction.
The main criterion for including a real person in a story, I think, is whether there is a true dramatic need for this authorial decision. I didn’t have to shoe-horn Susan Kraut into Paris, He Said because Jayne needed a teacher-mentor; Susan’s presence provides context for Jayne’s early and continuing development as an artist. It’s a happy potential corollary to the story that Susan Kraut the artist and living person might also find new admirers.
This essay originally appeared on Glimmer Train's website.
When I was well into a complete rewrite of an early draft of Paris, He Said, that I happened to cross paths with Susan Kraut, a painting instructor I’d known from the Art Institute, at a mutual friend’s book release party (Peggy Shinner’s, for her excellent essay collection You Feel So Mortal: Essays on the Body). Susan told me that she was still teaching at the school and painting in her studio when she wasn’t on campus. Eventually I asked if I might include her in my novel as herself, and would she mind showing me her studio sometime and letting me assail her with questions about her process?
She was extremely gracious and said yes. Within two weeks, I was visiting her studio, which is on the top floor of her stately wooden house in central Evanston. She is modest about her work, despite its moody brilliance, and it wasn’t hard to introduce her into the narrative of Paris, He Said because I knew that Jayne needed a mentor, though I wasn’t yet sure who it would be. Susan was perfect for that role, and I was almost certain that it wouldn’t be difficult to cast her as a sympathetic character.
The biggest challenge was writing truthfully but not sycophantically about her paintings and her key support of my character Jayne (Susan was the only wholehearted, early supporter of Jayne’s work). In the novel, the two women meet at a summer studio class that Jayne begged her parents to help her pay for during the break between her junior and senior years at a college in Washington, D.C. I had to verify that the School of the Art Institute did offer such a class, and in fact, Susan had actually taught one of these summer courses many years ago.
Fact-checking was the easy part. What I spent more time thinking and worrying about was how I could make Susan the fictional character compelling in ways that kept the narrative moving forward. I also needed to ensure that her chemistry with the other characters seemed organic, or, maybe more aptly, non-toxic. I used her paintings as the point of entry – I described them from Jayne’s point of view (which in this case was also my own) and hoped to establish Susan as someone deserving of readers’ admiration too.
After this, when it was time to show Susan and Jayne together in scene, I thought about our own conversations and email exchanges of the past several months and attempted to imbue them with the gentle supportiveness that seems to come naturally to Susan as a teacher and a friend.
One detail that I ended up pulling out before the book went into galleys was what Susan (the character) tells Jayne before Susan joins her in Paris to take part in a group show: that her husband suspects her of using speed instead of coffee to give herself extra energy. I wasn’t sure if people would assume that Susan the real person sometimes took speed. She’s a college professor, a mother of three, etc. If she had been made up wholesale for the book, however, I probably would have retained that detail.
This was the first and only time I’ve included a friend as a character in one of my stories or novels. It was a pleasure because I only had nice things to say, but if you can’t portray someone you know personally in a positive fashion, you will probably lose this friend (and/or be sued for libel). There’s also the chance that what you might really want to write is narrative nonfiction instead of fiction.
The main criterion for including a real person in a story, I think, is whether there is a true dramatic need for this authorial decision. I didn’t have to shoe-horn Susan Kraut into Paris, He Said because Jayne needed a teacher-mentor; Susan’s presence provides context for Jayne’s early and continuing development as an artist. It’s a happy potential corollary to the story that Susan Kraut the artist and living person might also find new admirers.
This essay originally appeared on Glimmer Train's website.
March 4, 2017
Judgment Day: The Literary Competition
A number of years ago, I was invited to judge two short story contests, one for the writing program from which I'd received my graduate degree and the other for a local chapter of a national arts organization. Not surprisingly, I was flattered and a little excited to have been asked. What a novelty to be on that side of the desk. I immediately understood, however, the almost sinister power a judge wields over the contest participants. Having entered quite a few literary competitions myself over the past decade, I knew that the results seriously mattered to most of the participants, and not being named a winner or a finalist could set the contest entrants back for days, possibly weeks. (As I wrote that last sentence, I hesitated over using the word ‘loser.’ Loser’s connotations are often so unpleasant that even in an essay where it’s logical to use that word, I am reluctant to do so.)
If I remember correctly, the writing program’s contest was four distinct competitions – two for the undergraduate writers, two for the graduates. All told, there were about forty entries, twenty-five or so from the undergraduates, the rest from the MFA students. As I began reading, it became clear that many of the undergraduate stories needed a lot of work, and only about four were real contenders for first prize.
Nonetheless, in several cases, I was impressed by the scope of these writers’ imaginations. One student wrote a very detailed story about a beekeeper, another about a driver hitting a boy with his car that was, to my surprise, suspenseful at times. Certainly the majority of the stories were in need of extensive revision, but I could see that these writers were getting the hang of it, that they understood the importance of pacing and characterization, of the right word versus the obvious word.
Judging the graduate student stories was a process that revealed more about me than about the writers, I think. Most of the stories were good if not yet good enough to be published in a respectable literary journal, and as I read through them, I knew that the story that won first place would win because of my stylistic interests and loyalties. I liked funny stories where the mild perversities of a writer’s mind are given time and space to flourish. Like John Updike once said about his own writerly tendencies, I’d say that my default mode is the comic. I like satire, silly jokes, the sly, winking eye. I want to laugh or at least smile a lot.
The story that won was fresh, subversive and witty. After an hour or two of spying on the cute girls who live in an adjacent apartment, two college boys drive to a liquor store where they fail to buy any alcohol because they don’t have valid IDs. As a booby prize, however, they’re taken by the store security guard on a guided tour of a room in the back of the store, one filled with high-tech AV equipment. I wasn’t sure what to make of this story, but it struck me as the most original submission. Two or three others might easily have won first prize if the judge hadn’t been me. I suspect that in more than a few cases, the winners’ writing resembles the judge’s own in some way. Or perhaps the winning entry reminds the judge of a writer he or she admires – George Saunders might write brilliant, postmodern satire but it’s probable that he also admires the short stories of a writer very different from himself, someone like the eminently sober William Trevor, for example.
In a society that in recent years, if I’m not hallucinating, has established a practice of creating more and more contests, ostensibly to offer almost everyone some kind of award or prize before they are old enough to vote, I am skeptical of this proliferation, but I have greatly benefited from contests too—my first book was published after it received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction in 2009, but as I judged those college fiction competitions a few years ago, I felt bad for the writers whose work would not be singled out as the best of the group. It’s not hard to understand why there are now more contests than ever – we like to win things, and the more contests in existence, the more chance we have of doing so.
Even so, a significant portion of the American populace’s self-esteem seems to rely on the ribbons and medals we can tack to our walls. Exhibits A - D: American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and annual awards programs like the Grammys and the Oscars. Millions of people watch these shows, investing so much of their emotional energy in the fortunes of strangers they are unlikely ever to meet. We are sometimes personally affronted if our pick for the Best Picture of the Year, Best Album, or Best Screenplay doesn’t win, as if we had something important to do with their creation. Few things are more emotionally fraught than these creative horseraces on which we have staked our hopes (and sometimes, our money).
Writers enter contests at their own risk, but so many of us are hopeful and idealistic and believe very deeply in the work that we’re doing, as we should. But there are few things more likely to make us question our talent and life’s mission than when we receive a note stating that someone else has won. To make matters more, uh, complex, sometimes we know the winner. First we say, Okay, well, good for him. Then the truth comes out, Hey, he always wins! How selfish of him! Can’t he leave a few crumbs for the rest of us? He’s not even that good. Loser!
Despite the odds against us, the promise of prestige and a cash reward is too great for many of us to resist. If you can approach contests with a spirit of fun, and/or use them to spur you to get more writing done, then enter them and try to enjoy the suspense. But if you look upon them as vital fuel for your self-esteem, you’re likely to be depressed or outraged when you don’t win as often as you’d like to.
Remember that contests rely primarily on whim: of the writers who pay the entry fee, and of the judges who make the final decisions. Judges are not perfect creatures working in a perfect creative vacuum. Like umpires, they sometimes make questionable calls. In most things that are important to us, there is a degree of the subjective and certainly of the unknown. As with blind dates, you have to take the occasional rejection, and then, when you’re ready, try again.
(This post was originally published on the Ploughshares blog).
If I remember correctly, the writing program’s contest was four distinct competitions – two for the undergraduate writers, two for the graduates. All told, there were about forty entries, twenty-five or so from the undergraduates, the rest from the MFA students. As I began reading, it became clear that many of the undergraduate stories needed a lot of work, and only about four were real contenders for first prize.
Nonetheless, in several cases, I was impressed by the scope of these writers’ imaginations. One student wrote a very detailed story about a beekeeper, another about a driver hitting a boy with his car that was, to my surprise, suspenseful at times. Certainly the majority of the stories were in need of extensive revision, but I could see that these writers were getting the hang of it, that they understood the importance of pacing and characterization, of the right word versus the obvious word.
Judging the graduate student stories was a process that revealed more about me than about the writers, I think. Most of the stories were good if not yet good enough to be published in a respectable literary journal, and as I read through them, I knew that the story that won first place would win because of my stylistic interests and loyalties. I liked funny stories where the mild perversities of a writer’s mind are given time and space to flourish. Like John Updike once said about his own writerly tendencies, I’d say that my default mode is the comic. I like satire, silly jokes, the sly, winking eye. I want to laugh or at least smile a lot.
The story that won was fresh, subversive and witty. After an hour or two of spying on the cute girls who live in an adjacent apartment, two college boys drive to a liquor store where they fail to buy any alcohol because they don’t have valid IDs. As a booby prize, however, they’re taken by the store security guard on a guided tour of a room in the back of the store, one filled with high-tech AV equipment. I wasn’t sure what to make of this story, but it struck me as the most original submission. Two or three others might easily have won first prize if the judge hadn’t been me. I suspect that in more than a few cases, the winners’ writing resembles the judge’s own in some way. Or perhaps the winning entry reminds the judge of a writer he or she admires – George Saunders might write brilliant, postmodern satire but it’s probable that he also admires the short stories of a writer very different from himself, someone like the eminently sober William Trevor, for example.
In a society that in recent years, if I’m not hallucinating, has established a practice of creating more and more contests, ostensibly to offer almost everyone some kind of award or prize before they are old enough to vote, I am skeptical of this proliferation, but I have greatly benefited from contests too—my first book was published after it received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction in 2009, but as I judged those college fiction competitions a few years ago, I felt bad for the writers whose work would not be singled out as the best of the group. It’s not hard to understand why there are now more contests than ever – we like to win things, and the more contests in existence, the more chance we have of doing so.
Even so, a significant portion of the American populace’s self-esteem seems to rely on the ribbons and medals we can tack to our walls. Exhibits A - D: American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and annual awards programs like the Grammys and the Oscars. Millions of people watch these shows, investing so much of their emotional energy in the fortunes of strangers they are unlikely ever to meet. We are sometimes personally affronted if our pick for the Best Picture of the Year, Best Album, or Best Screenplay doesn’t win, as if we had something important to do with their creation. Few things are more emotionally fraught than these creative horseraces on which we have staked our hopes (and sometimes, our money).
Writers enter contests at their own risk, but so many of us are hopeful and idealistic and believe very deeply in the work that we’re doing, as we should. But there are few things more likely to make us question our talent and life’s mission than when we receive a note stating that someone else has won. To make matters more, uh, complex, sometimes we know the winner. First we say, Okay, well, good for him. Then the truth comes out, Hey, he always wins! How selfish of him! Can’t he leave a few crumbs for the rest of us? He’s not even that good. Loser!
Despite the odds against us, the promise of prestige and a cash reward is too great for many of us to resist. If you can approach contests with a spirit of fun, and/or use them to spur you to get more writing done, then enter them and try to enjoy the suspense. But if you look upon them as vital fuel for your self-esteem, you’re likely to be depressed or outraged when you don’t win as often as you’d like to.
Remember that contests rely primarily on whim: of the writers who pay the entry fee, and of the judges who make the final decisions. Judges are not perfect creatures working in a perfect creative vacuum. Like umpires, they sometimes make questionable calls. In most things that are important to us, there is a degree of the subjective and certainly of the unknown. As with blind dates, you have to take the occasional rejection, and then, when you’re ready, try again.
(This post was originally published on the Ploughshares blog).
February 16, 2017
A Few Tough and a Few Tender Things
Happiness is ____________
Hope is _____________
Disappointment is ____________
The writing life is _____________
I’ve learned a few things about the literary world and my own character since my first book came out in 2010 that have been, to put it politely, thought-provoking, and the source of countless conversations with my partner Adam (a longtime Zen Buddhist who is better able to accept most of my moods than I am).
Writers can train themselves, however, to view all the information that arrives—both good and bad—as experience. It is also, in a sense, raw material, and part of the mystery and sometimes, the enchantment, of everyday life.
Having flown to Washington, D.C. last week to attend the godmother of all literary conferences, the annual Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference (AWP), I spent a little time in between on- and off-site events thinking about previous AWP conferences I’d attended, along with my changing perceptions of the writing life and the literary world in the U.S. since I attended AWP for the first time in 2009, a year it was held in Chicago, my home city.
A few observations, in no particular order – both tough and tender – sometimes both at once:
1. Many of our problems and frustrations can probably be traced to one crucial desire: the need to be acknowledged. In my case, specifically, whether it’s an email I’m waiting to receive or the hope for a book deal or a review in a specific periodical or an invitation to take part in a conference or to review someone else’s book, or to be asked to the prom (just kidding—thank God that one’s far behind me now).
Jokes aside, this desire is real, and sometimes corrosive, often implacable. We want to be seen, remembered, called on, liked, loved, longed for, offered a turn at the podium and a seat at the Captain’s table.
2. There are a hell of a lot of writers.
3. Writing books isn’t easy, but writing books that will sell many, many thousands of copies is, possibly, even harder.
4. You have to learn to manage your expectations, otherwise you will be driven mad by them.
5. For every person you think has it in for you, there are most likely a dozen who love and respect you, and these are the people who matter. Let’s face it, not everyone can love you. (If everyone did, just think about how hard that would be—you’d never get any work done. You’d always be returning phone calls and emails, going out for lunches and dinners and brunches).
6. Knowing how to enjoy, really enjoy and hold your successes close and to keep them close during times of disappointment and despair—this is an art you will probably have to spend most of your life trying to master. I’ve noticed in myself a tendency to overlook the joys that come my way and instead focus on the things I haven’t yet achieved.
I think it’s probably the human condition to be always in a state of mild to middling frustration, and to some extent, I’ve learned to make my peace with this fact & use it as motivation to keep working so that one day before I turn 50 I might be able to move out of my cramped, absurdly noisy one-bedroom condo. I don’t want to be eternally wishing for more or better, though, because it’s not a fun or peaceful way to live. It also makes it hard to relax and get enough uninterrupted sleep.
7. There are so many good books out there that I want to read. This bounty keeps me sane during times when it feels as if the wheels are coming off the bus we’re all riding in together.
8. There are so many books I still hope to write. Perhaps more than anything, this is the reason I wake up most mornings feeling motivated to sit at my desk up here in the treetops on Ridge Avenue, the sirens blaring north and south, the squirrels leaping from skeletal branch (it’s still winter) to rooftop to skeletal branch.
9. Spring is coming. It’s not too far away.
A coda:
I’ve been reading an extremely interesting (and often very entertaining) book, edited by Manjula Martin, Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. Many excellent interviews and essays; contributors include Julia Fierro, Leslie Jamison, Roxane Gay, Yiyun Li, Nick Hornby, Jonathan Franzen, Austin Kleon (and many others). Highly recommended.
Hope is _____________
Disappointment is ____________
The writing life is _____________
I’ve learned a few things about the literary world and my own character since my first book came out in 2010 that have been, to put it politely, thought-provoking, and the source of countless conversations with my partner Adam (a longtime Zen Buddhist who is better able to accept most of my moods than I am).
Writers can train themselves, however, to view all the information that arrives—both good and bad—as experience. It is also, in a sense, raw material, and part of the mystery and sometimes, the enchantment, of everyday life.
Having flown to Washington, D.C. last week to attend the godmother of all literary conferences, the annual Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference (AWP), I spent a little time in between on- and off-site events thinking about previous AWP conferences I’d attended, along with my changing perceptions of the writing life and the literary world in the U.S. since I attended AWP for the first time in 2009, a year it was held in Chicago, my home city.
A few observations, in no particular order – both tough and tender – sometimes both at once:
1. Many of our problems and frustrations can probably be traced to one crucial desire: the need to be acknowledged. In my case, specifically, whether it’s an email I’m waiting to receive or the hope for a book deal or a review in a specific periodical or an invitation to take part in a conference or to review someone else’s book, or to be asked to the prom (just kidding—thank God that one’s far behind me now).
Jokes aside, this desire is real, and sometimes corrosive, often implacable. We want to be seen, remembered, called on, liked, loved, longed for, offered a turn at the podium and a seat at the Captain’s table.
2. There are a hell of a lot of writers.
3. Writing books isn’t easy, but writing books that will sell many, many thousands of copies is, possibly, even harder.
4. You have to learn to manage your expectations, otherwise you will be driven mad by them.
5. For every person you think has it in for you, there are most likely a dozen who love and respect you, and these are the people who matter. Let’s face it, not everyone can love you. (If everyone did, just think about how hard that would be—you’d never get any work done. You’d always be returning phone calls and emails, going out for lunches and dinners and brunches).
6. Knowing how to enjoy, really enjoy and hold your successes close and to keep them close during times of disappointment and despair—this is an art you will probably have to spend most of your life trying to master. I’ve noticed in myself a tendency to overlook the joys that come my way and instead focus on the things I haven’t yet achieved.
I think it’s probably the human condition to be always in a state of mild to middling frustration, and to some extent, I’ve learned to make my peace with this fact & use it as motivation to keep working so that one day before I turn 50 I might be able to move out of my cramped, absurdly noisy one-bedroom condo. I don’t want to be eternally wishing for more or better, though, because it’s not a fun or peaceful way to live. It also makes it hard to relax and get enough uninterrupted sleep.
7. There are so many good books out there that I want to read. This bounty keeps me sane during times when it feels as if the wheels are coming off the bus we’re all riding in together.
8. There are so many books I still hope to write. Perhaps more than anything, this is the reason I wake up most mornings feeling motivated to sit at my desk up here in the treetops on Ridge Avenue, the sirens blaring north and south, the squirrels leaping from skeletal branch (it’s still winter) to rooftop to skeletal branch.
9. Spring is coming. It’s not too far away.
A coda:
I’ve been reading an extremely interesting (and often very entertaining) book, edited by Manjula Martin, Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. Many excellent interviews and essays; contributors include Julia Fierro, Leslie Jamison, Roxane Gay, Yiyun Li, Nick Hornby, Jonathan Franzen, Austin Kleon (and many others). Highly recommended.
February 1, 2017
“If You Want To Be Liked, Don’t Be a Writer”
When fiction writers use a first-person narrator, especially one that shares their gender, I routinely find myself wondering after only a page or two, in some cases, if the story is autobiographical, and if so, how much?
This is a topic I think about frequently, as both reader and writer, especially in an age where memoirs penned by writers from all walks of life—doctors, poets, recovering alcoholics, book editors, cancer survivors, children of abusive parents, film directors and film stars—to name a few, continue to appear on bestseller lists.
Two recent novels that I very much admired, UK author Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Transit, (the first two books in a planned trilogy), are based on events in Cusk’s life, although she has said in interviews that she did take liberties with many of the characters and scenes in which she dramatizes her narrator Faye’s interactions with them. Nonetheless, Cusk isn’t coy about these novels having been inspired by actual occurrences: a move back to London from a less populated part of England, along with various experiences related to her work as both writer and teacher, and the events chronicled in Outline and Transit take place after her divorce (which Cusk also wrote about more directly in her 2011 memoir Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation.)
A number of critics have written in reviews of these two books that Cusk has redefined the contemporary novel—the plotting, for one, is skeletal, and some resist labeling it a plot at all. As Monica Ali states in her January 23, 2017 review in the New York Times, “'Transit' is a novel that all but dispenses with plot.” Plot or no, I couldn’t put either of these books down, and perhaps this speaks as much to my habits as a writer as it does to my preferences as a reader: I often find plot the least compelling aspect of the stories and novels I read—it is the dialogue, the characterization, the precision of the writing that draw me in and keep me invested. Similarly, as a writer, I’d rather work on characterization than on plotting.
There are voyeuristic tendencies probably at play here too—I want to see what Cusk will reveal about people I imagine to be her intimates, and what she will reveal about herself in the process. I’m not sure why I’m interested, never having met Cusk, but I’m seduced by her voice and writing style—its litheness and lyricism, its subtle humor, its beauty and insights into the contradictions in human character.
Cusk also said something in a recent interview published in The Telegraph that I can’t get out of my head: “If you want people to like you, don’t be a writer.” This statement is in direct conflict with one a graduate school professor of mine once made, “We write because we want to be loved.”
I think truth must reside in both of these views. There’s a lot of pressure today for writers to frequently engage with each other and their readership on social media. This is a difficult thing for many writers to do, however, and it’s even harder to do well. “Our books should speak for themselves,” some writers say. This is definitely a valid point of view, though on the whole, publishers all but insist their authors interact with readers more than once every few years (or however often they publish a new book).
I’m not sure what the answer is, or if there is one. The only feasible one I can think of could likely be used in reply to many different questions—you learn your aptitude and appetite for things, and your tolerance for them, as you go.
This is a topic I think about frequently, as both reader and writer, especially in an age where memoirs penned by writers from all walks of life—doctors, poets, recovering alcoholics, book editors, cancer survivors, children of abusive parents, film directors and film stars—to name a few, continue to appear on bestseller lists.
Two recent novels that I very much admired, UK author Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Transit, (the first two books in a planned trilogy), are based on events in Cusk’s life, although she has said in interviews that she did take liberties with many of the characters and scenes in which she dramatizes her narrator Faye’s interactions with them. Nonetheless, Cusk isn’t coy about these novels having been inspired by actual occurrences: a move back to London from a less populated part of England, along with various experiences related to her work as both writer and teacher, and the events chronicled in Outline and Transit take place after her divorce (which Cusk also wrote about more directly in her 2011 memoir Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation.)
A number of critics have written in reviews of these two books that Cusk has redefined the contemporary novel—the plotting, for one, is skeletal, and some resist labeling it a plot at all. As Monica Ali states in her January 23, 2017 review in the New York Times, “'Transit' is a novel that all but dispenses with plot.” Plot or no, I couldn’t put either of these books down, and perhaps this speaks as much to my habits as a writer as it does to my preferences as a reader: I often find plot the least compelling aspect of the stories and novels I read—it is the dialogue, the characterization, the precision of the writing that draw me in and keep me invested. Similarly, as a writer, I’d rather work on characterization than on plotting.
There are voyeuristic tendencies probably at play here too—I want to see what Cusk will reveal about people I imagine to be her intimates, and what she will reveal about herself in the process. I’m not sure why I’m interested, never having met Cusk, but I’m seduced by her voice and writing style—its litheness and lyricism, its subtle humor, its beauty and insights into the contradictions in human character.
Cusk also said something in a recent interview published in The Telegraph that I can’t get out of my head: “If you want people to like you, don’t be a writer.” This statement is in direct conflict with one a graduate school professor of mine once made, “We write because we want to be loved.”
I think truth must reside in both of these views. There’s a lot of pressure today for writers to frequently engage with each other and their readership on social media. This is a difficult thing for many writers to do, however, and it’s even harder to do well. “Our books should speak for themselves,” some writers say. This is definitely a valid point of view, though on the whole, publishers all but insist their authors interact with readers more than once every few years (or however often they publish a new book).
I’m not sure what the answer is, or if there is one. The only feasible one I can think of could likely be used in reply to many different questions—you learn your aptitude and appetite for things, and your tolerance for them, as you go.
