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October 5 - October 25, 2023
If you were my student, I’d tell you to forget about being liked. Tastes change over time, public taste as well as personal taste. Your work might not be immediately celebrated, but if it remains lodged in someone’s memory you have a good chance of being embraced over time.
Instead of writing about a character, write from within the character. This means that every way the character describes the world must describe the character’s experience. You and I never walk into the same room as each other. We each see the room through the lens of our own life. A plumber enters a very different room than a painter enters. This means you can’t use abstract measurements. No more six-foot-tall men. Instead you must describe a man’s size based on how your character or narrator perceives a man whose height is seventy-two inches. A character might say “a man too tall to kiss” or
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No two people speak the same. Each has her own little wardrobe of phrases and slang. Each misuses words differently. For instance, I’ve noticed that people from larger families always use a clause to seize attention before they say anything. They’ll say, “Get this. It’s going to freeze tonight.”
The pros: Books are cheap to write. They cost little more than time. And they’re cheap to produce and distribute, especially compared with films, which require huge consensus to come together. Books require a certain level of intelligence to consume so they’re less likely to fall into the wrong hands: a child’s, for example. Thus books can tackle topics not suited for children, whereas films can be so easily consumed that they must always self-censor.
Books are also consumed in private. In most cases this means one person making the continued effort to read and thereby giving her ongoing consent. Contrast this with films, which might be shown on airplanes to both consenting and nonconsenting viewers. Films cost a relative fortune to create and therefore must be presentable on television to make a profit. Comics...comics and graphic novels can offer almost the spectacle of film, without the music. But their ease of consumption means they must self-censor.
The cons: Books take an enormous amount of time and energy to consume, compared with films. Prose can’t convey the spectacle that film can. Most books fail to viscerally engage the audience. They might act upon your mind and emotions, but they seldom generate a sympathetic physical reaction. Compared with video games, books offer no way for the audience to actively control events. But video g...
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So when choosing an idea for a book, make sure it’s an idea that only a book can best present. If it’s an idea that film, comics, or gaming can depict, why bother writing the book?
If you were my student I’d tell you to write the most outlandish, challenging, provocative stories. Take full advantage of the complete freedom books provide. To not take advantage of that freedom is to waste the one chief strength of the medium.
How do you convince a reader of something beyond his own experience? You start with what he does know, and you move in baby steps toward what he doesn’t.
If you were my student I’d tell you to create a clear scene. Render the setting and physical actions without judgment or summary. Use simple Recording Angel as if you were a camera. Allow your reader to determine the meaning of the events. Let your reader anticipate the outcome, then—boom—spring the actual intention, the surprise.
Always, always, if you were my student, I’d tell you to allow the epiphany to occur in the reader’s mind before it’s stated on the page.
So never dictate meaning to your reader. If need be, misdirect him. But always allow him to realize the truth before you state it outright. Trust your readers’ intelligence and intuition, and they will return the favor.
The theory goes that stories told in the first person carry the greatest authority because
someone assumes responsibility for them. The storytelling source is present, not just some omniscient writerly voice. The trouble is that readers recoil from the pronoun “I” because it constantly reminds them that they, themselves, are not experiencing the plot events. We hate that, when we’re stuck listening to someone whose stories are all about himself. The fix is to use first person, Peter taught me, but to submerge the I. Always keep your camera pointed elsewhere, describing other characters. Strictly limit a narrator’s reference to self. This is why “apostolic” fiction works so well.
In addition, don’t screen the world through your narrator’s senses. Instead of writing, “I heard the bells ring,” write just, “The bells rang,” or, “The bells began to ring.” Avoid, “I saw Ellen,” in favor of, “Ellen stepped from the crowd. She squared her shoulders and began to walk, each step bringing her closer.” So were I your teacher, I’d tell you to write in the first person, but to weed out almost all of your pesky “I”s.
My point is that people measure stuff—money, strength, time, weight—in very personal ways. A city isn’t so many miles from another city, it’s so many songs on the radio. Two hundred pounds isn’t two hundred pounds, it’s that dumbbell at the gym that no one touched and that seemed like a sword-in-the-stone joke until the day a stranger took it off the rack and started doing single-arm rows with it. As Katherine Dunn put it, “No two people ever walk into the same room.”
Was it Kierkegaard? Was it Heidegger? Some egghead pointed out how people decide the nature of their world at a very young age. And they craft a way of behaving that will lead to success. You’re praised for being a strong little kid so you invest in your strength. Or you become the smart girl. Or the funny boy. Or the pretty girl. And this works until you’re about thirty years old.
So many successful books are about a character leveraging youth and beauty for a good marriage, then leveraging that union for education, and leveraging that for wealth. A book like Vanity Fair or Gone with the Wind or The Great Gatsby depicts a social climber who navigates upward in the world by trading each asset for a greater asset. The other choice the funny boy or the pretty girl can make is to deny the choice. To continue living according to the pattern for success he or she has established. But now that the trap is recognized, the funny boy becomes the bitter, snarky guy. He’s the
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So choosing a character’s body of knowledge isn’t merely about how their past and their priorities color their view of everything. It’s also about the pattern for success that they’ve chosen as children. The funny boy walks into a room looking for details to poke fun at, and listening for good setup lines he can riff off for laughs. The pretty girl walks in looking for potential competitors with clearer skin, better figures, brighter teeth.
I’d read the castigating piece David Foster Wallace had written in response to Frank Conroy writing the copy for a glossy cruise ship brochure. Conroy had gotten his large family a fancy ocean cruise as payment, but later regretted writing the love letter used to sell similar vacations to his readers. But...but I’d also cracked my share of old National Geographic magazines and found full-page advertisements wherein Ernest Hemingway endorsed some brand of Scotch, William Faulkner flogged a certain cigar, and Tennessee Williams raved about—what else?—an ocean cruise.
These are all ways to exaggerate a character’s physical awareness, and to prompt the reader to have a sympathetic physical reaction. Whether it’s drugs or sex or illness, it also allows you to distort the normal world so that regular settings and events appear warped and menacing.
If you were my student, I’d push you to create an epiphany. You’d have to dredge up or dream up the moment I realized why the tailor at Brooks Brothers had provided me with more comfort than a fortune spent on Jungian analysis. Me, I can’t recall just one revelation so I’ve redirected you to other examples of physical memory. The toothbrush. The paper page that wouldn’t scroll. Did I tell you that my mother sewed our family’s clothes? I’d forgotten that. But if my mind had forgotten it, my body had remembered.
So my clothes, even after my success, came from thrift stores. So did my language. Store-bought clothes and ten-dollar words felt pretentious and show-offy so we bought what we could find secondhand, my siblings and I, and we talked about the weather. And realizing that autopilot tendency set me free. My mother was dead. I could dress up a little. My ideas could grow because my vocabulary could.
So if you were my student, I’d tell you to listen to your body as you write. Take note how your hand knows how much coffee is left by the weight of the cup. Tell your stories not simply through your readers’ eyes and minds, but through their skin, their noses, their guts, the bottoms of their feet.
This prompted a story idea. In so many families a parent is compelled to make long work-related trips...so, what about a story where the family cat climbed into the suitcase? The departing traveler boarded an overnight flight to Europe, and when he landed he found a text or voicemail from his spouse saying the cat was missing. Dread mounts. He gets to his hotel and can’t bring himself to open the suitcase. Most likely, the beloved cat is inside. He doesn’t want to find out if it’s alive or dead. The story resonated with me because it demonstrates the philosophical paradox of Schrödinger’s cat.
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In the story “Phoenix,” I create the circumstance where a mother demands a father hurt their child to prove his love for her. She’s away on a business trip and their daughter refuses to speak to her over the phone. Fearing the child is actually dead, she demands her husband hurt the girl because a cry of pain would prove the girl is still alive. Ludicrous and horrible as it sounds, the story works because it’s a retelling of the story of Isaac and Abraham from the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament. But instead of God demanding Abraham prove his love by stabbing Isaac with a knife, it’s a
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If you can identify the core legend that your story is telling, you can best fulfill the expectation of the legend’s ending.
Head authority is based on knowledge, used for evil or otherwise.
The second type of authority is “heart authority,” gained when a character tells an emotional truth or commits an act that shows great vulnerability.
The writer might not be smarter than us. But the writer is braver and more honest. That’s “heart authority.”
Emotional authority also comes through doing something horrible but necessary for a noble reason.
So if you were my student, I’d tell you to establish emotional authority by depicting an imperfect character making a mistake.
In real life writers are lousy at dealing with tension. We avoid conflict. We’re writers because we like to deal with things from a distance. But writing still gives us a way to dabble. We create the tension. We manage it, and we resolve it. As writers we get to be the bully. If someone gets cancer, we caused it. Our job is to challenge and confront the reader, but we can’t do any of that if we’re so tension-averse that we can’t create suspense and conflict.
As Ira Levin saw it, “Great problems, not clever solutions, make great fiction.” This means being able to tolerate the incomplete thing. Whether it’s the unfinished first draft or the events confronting the characters. In regard to the unfinished draft, Tom Spanbauer used to say, “The longer you can be with the unresolved thing, the more beautifully it will resolve itself.”
If you were my student I’d tell you I understand your unease with tension. But writing fiction allows you to experience escalating conflict, controlled by you. Writing fiction will help you deal with tension and conflict in your real life.
The horizontal refers to the sequence of plot points: The Woodhouse couple moves into a
new apartment, Rosemary meets a neighbor, the neighbor jumps from a window one night...etc. The vertical refers to the increase in emotional, physical, and psychological tension over the course of the story.
So if you were my student I’d tell you to limit your elements and make certain each represents one of the horses your story is about. Find a hundred ways to say the same thing.
By running the page numbers in reverse I made them into another clock, increasing tension by exaggerating the sense of time passing.
Billy Idol gave an interview wherein he commented on why so much punk music sounded the same. The typical punk song started at full throttle, ran for two and one-half minutes, and stopped abruptly. Only when I heard that did I realize how much the punk aesthetic had influenced my writing. This was the reason my best stories began with a jolt, seldom ran over ten pages, and ended by falling off a cliff.
It’s called a gun because of Chekhov’s directive that if a character puts a gun in a drawer in act 1 he or she must pull it out in the final act.
Whereas a clock is something obvious and constantly brought to mind, a gun is something you introduce and hide, early, and hope your audience will forget. When you finally reveal it, you want the gun to feel both surprising and inevitable. Like death, or the orgasm at the end of sex.
For now if you came to me and said your novel was approaching eight hundred pages with no sign of ending, I’d ask, “What’s your clock?” I’d ask, “Did you plant a gun?” I’d tell you to kill your Red Buttons or Big Bob and to bring your fictional world to a messy, noisy, chaotic climax.
If you were my student I’d tell you to listen to a child. Listen to someone who’s terrified of being interrupted and has developed tricks for hogging a listener’s attention nonstop. Granted, their stories might be boring, but you can learn some natural tricks for rolling your own fiction on and on and on.
If you were my student, I’d tell you to recycle your objects. This means introducing and concealing the same object throughout the story. Each time it reappears, the object carries a new, stronger meaning. Each reappearance marks an evolution in the characters.
If you were my student I’d tell you to be clever on someone else’s dime. You’re not Noel Coward. Cleverness is a brand of hiding. It will never make your reader cry. It seldom makes readers genuinely belly laugh and never breaks anyone’s heart.
So avoid tennis-match dialogue. That’s where one character says something, and another responds with the perfect quip. Think of situation comedy dialogue. Snappy comebacks. Perfect rejoinders. Setup and spike. Instant gratification.
Instead, if you were my student I’d tell you to never resolve an issue until you introduce a bigger one.
If a plot point is worth including, it’s worth depicting in a scene. Don’t deliver it in dialogue.
good writing is not about making the writer look good.
