The Writing Process: From Idea to Publication (Part Two)

Last time, we discussed the first part of the writing process. This week, I want to look at a much neglected part of the process, when our work becomes no longer private, when we put it out into the world. In other words, now that you have a finished product, what do you do with it? 

There is, of course, a number of options at your disposal, depending on the length, genre, and your goals for the piece. For our purposes, we’ll assume that you want to reach as many eyes as possible. (Or to put it bluntly, we aren’t considering self-publishing.) Furthermore, we’ll try to keep our approach rather broad, so whether you’ve written a poem, a short story, or a novel, you can begin to find the right home for your work.

Research 

The first thing you’re going to want to do is find somewhere to submit. Unfortunately, not all publishers are of equal value. Each one is uniquely useful. Some are widely known, with a readership and reach that extends into the thousands or even millions. Others, though small in readers, may be larger in influence. This all boils down to what you hope to achieve. 

First, consider its length. 

Some publishers won’t even look at a piece if it doesn’t fall within their word counts. If a magazine only publishes short short stories (typically under 1000 words) and you’ve written a 20,000 word novella, that’s probably not the best choice for you, since it will surely be rejected out of hand.    

Second, what genre or style is it? 

If you’ve written a formalist poem, you’re best off submitting it to publishers who prefer such things. Now there are some places who aren’t so specialized, but it’s all about knowing who puts out work like yours and who doesn’t.

Third, what kind of reputation does this publisher have?

There’s no point in sending your work to a magazine no one has ever heard of. At the same time, however, you have to recognize that the more access that publisher has, the less likely they will be to take you on. Remember: Publishers recieve more submissions than they can print. But that shouldn’t stop you, of course. You just have to be aware of reality. Having a story in The New Yorker is a serious achievement in anyone’s career: It will just be really, really hard. You don’t have any control over what happens once your work is in a reader’s hands. But you won’t get anywhere if you don’t submit in the first place.

(Note: You may be wondering how to find these publications and learn about their editiorial style and so on. Sadly, the most common answer is read them. While we should all strive to read more, especially in those magazines which we aspire to one day find ourselves, it is a bit unreasonable. There are literally thousands of journals in the world today. How, exactly, can one person get familiar with all these places? Better yet, how can he or she afford it? Things are a little more hopeful once you realize this. With websites like The Review Review and Duotrope, we have databases that catalog most of the information about such publishers, which makes this first step easier than any other time in history.)         

Submitting

This is probably the most frustrating, difficult, and lengthy part of the process. You have a polished piece. You know the places who want it. But how do you get them to say yes? You don’t, to put it bluntly. This is why you have as big a net as possible. You want to send out to as many magazines as you can. It’s a lot like playing the lottery. Even though your chances are absurdly high, it doesn’t hurt to buy a few more tickets. 

(A Note on Queries/Submissions: This shit is often made far too complicated. The basic cover letter should be short and straightforward. Let the work speak for itself. Start by addressing the editor by name. Then describe your work in very simple terms. For example, “Please find attached my 2,000 word short story ‘Story Title.'” Finally, give a brief overview of your accomplishments: “I hold an MFA from such-and-such university. My fiction has appeared in this and that magazine.” Thank them for their time, and then peace out.)

I suggest that you organize your submissions into tiers. Start with the places who have the most clout, the ones you’d be most proud to appear in, your S-tier publications. Choose ten or twenty of them who are on the same footing. (These magazines tend to be the ones who pay a lot too.) Then choose another ten or twenty in your A-tier, then ten or twenty in B-tier, then ten or twenty in your C-tier, then another ten or twenty in your D-tier. Don’t submit to them all at the same time however: Send them out in batches. Attack one tier at a time, and once that tier is exhausted, move on to the next. 

It should go with out saying, but make sure you query each magazine individually. Don’t send off some mass email. Make it as personalized as you can. Most magazines have a masthead section on their website. Address your query/submission to the person in charge or your genre (the fiction editor, the poetry editor, the non-fiction editor).

Lastly, expect to wait–a lot. Most editors won’t get back to you until three months have passed. Some, like The Threepenny Review, have an unbelievable turn around (three days), but most take their time. Why, exactly, it’s hard to say. Some just have a huge volume of submissions. Many are understaffed. Some are dicks. It’s like anything else, and there’s no one answer that fits all publications. How and why things take so long can only be examined if the magazine is unyieldingly transparent–so good luck ever finding that. 

(A Note on Submission Fees (Actually, A Rant): As you send in your work, you’ll find a number of magazines who charge you to submit your work. They often rationalize this as being the same as when people mailed in hard copies. This is a stupid fucking argument. The money you paid in the past to send in a story didn’t go to the magazine: It went to the USPS. Now, three dollars, which is what most magazines charge, isn’t too much money, but it does add up, especially when you’re submitting dozens and dozens of times. The truth about submission fees is that most editors and publishers have no idea how to make their magazines profitable. They don’t even pay themselves the majority of the time. Why, then, should the writer be punished for trying to make them more successful? (There’s no magazine if there are no stories, after all.) It really is bullshit. Furthermore, most magazines that charge submission fees tend to be some of the biggest names in the business. These are often the prestigious university-run journals with storied histories. Why can’t they figure out a better way to support themselves than to exploit the very peole who want in? Shouldn’t they, of all people, know how to do this? But like most things American, it’s something people have accepted rather than do anything about. You’ll probably bite that bullet too. How you resist, how you revolt, is up to you.)         

Rejection

This will be what you can expect to find in your inbox the majority of the time. It’s just the reality of the competition. There’s a whole slew of reasons why you got rejected. Often, however, the note you’ll recieve won’t say it: You’ll get a brief, form letter thanking you for your submission and a notice that your work has not been selected. 

You may have sent the wrong type of story to the wrong editor. You may need to rewrite your work. The editor may have not read your work very closely. The publication may have just published a story just like yours. The editor may have bad taste. You may have bad taste. 

The answers vary widely, but again, you really don’t have control over these people. You can’t make them say yes. 

Of course, there are, on occassion, times when you’ll recieve something that feels like it was written by a human being instead of a computer. It’s still a no, but it should boost your confidence. These rejections are typically written because the editor believes that you are not a complete fucking idiot. They actually liked something about your work. They might even encourage you to submit something else. Take heed of whatever you find therein. This is a publication you should consider in the future. You’ve managed to develop a relationship with someone. Take advantage of it. 

(A Note on Taking Rejection Gracefully: It sucks getting rejected. It sucks more when you read an issue of the magazine you submitted to and find nothing but junk in their pages. And while you should be free to discuss why it sucks, you shouldn’t make a point to call out that magazine to their face. Don’t write the editor and tell them to fuck off–unless you don’t mind burning that bridge. Recognize the difference between criticism and being a dick. For the most part, talk shit about them behind their back.) 

Acceptance

This is what you’ve worked towards. All those months have finally paid off. But your work isn’t done yet. Your publisher no doubt has some kind of plan in place to promote your work. (This is typically Facebook posts, tweets, and other forms of social media.) Don’t put that, admittedly small, burden on their shoulders alone. You have friends. You know people. Tell them about it. Support your publisher. They’ve supported you–why not return the favor? And by doing so, you also help out all the other writers who have been published alongside you. Support them too. Develop connections. Network. This is your chance to get noticed. 

Just try not to be annoying about it, of course.  

The Writing Process: From Idea to Publication (Part One)

For the next week or so, I intend to give an overview of the writing process. There is, however, a part of me that feels that such a series is slightly unnecessary, because process is individual. It is something that we learn very early on, and even though we may not give it a great deal of consideration, it’s something most of us do automatically. There are certain parts of the process we like; there other parts that we do not like. But we typically do the things that come naturally. Nonetheless, I still think there is some confusion over the process, and many young writers would benefit from at least recognizing the steps and thinking about their own a little more critically.

I also want to mention that, in academica, at least, rhetoricans have overblown the importance of the process. That’s not to say it isn’t important–it is–just that it’s not the most useful idea to systematize. Scholars tend to forget that writing is about choices and making the best choices is what makes some content more appealing than others. After all, the final step is putting the work out there–publishing. Most writing is meant to be public, to be product, and when that happens, nobody cares how many drafts you’ve written. There is no portfoilio of your progress. You are judged solely on the merit of your work. All that matters to editors and readers is that it is worth the read.

With those assumptions in mind, so begins my two part series on the writing process, from the germ to publication.

Prewriting

This is the first step, and depending who you are, you’ll either spend a ton of time here or as little as possible. Typically, such people are defined as either outliners or pantsers respectively. I doubt any one person falls firmly on one side of the schema or the other, but this is something very individual. I think it is dictated not only by the writer’s personality but the length and substance of the work. 

When you post a tweet, you probably don’t spend too much time thinking about what you’re going to write; however, when you’re working on a novel, you’re probably going to give a little more time to percolate.

You see, prewriting is merely the act of thinking about what you’re going to write, developing your ideas, and coming up with a plan. Short things require less active thought because, most of the time, your brain reaches conclusions so quickly you don’t need to acknowledge them, and long works are frustrating to get through and require more critical thinking along with perservance. 

But, of course, this all depends on how you like to do things.

Personally, I’ve always avoided writing outlines. I remember how, in grammar school, I would turn in papers without the required rough drafts or outlines. (I was not a good student.) My teachers would tell me I was missing out on being a better writer. In some respects, they were right; in others, they were wrong. But that’s because they couldn’t see what was going on inside my head. For me, I liked to take a lot of time to think. I think about what I’m going to write while I’m in the shower, when I’m lifting weights, or as I lay my head down for sleep. That’s my process. I come up with my plans in my head and then put them down on paper and figure everything out as I write. That’s just what works for me.

This is the point about process overall, and why I don’t think it’s as important to stress such an overview. You have to find what works for you. If like writing a formal outline, do it. If you enjoy putting together a list of ideas, do it. If you prefer to sit down at the computer and throw up on the screen, do it. There’s a whole host of prewriting activities available to you: freewriting, journaling, talking, thinking, clustering, listing, outlining. So if you haven’t figured this out by now, here’s your chance. 

This step leads logically to the next.

Drafting

This is when you actually put words on paper. The tool you use doesn’t matter all that much. Some people like to use a pen, others a keyboard. But the way you do it is important. This is also probably the most difficult to explain. How can you talk about something you just do? 

When we draft, we’re enacting some kind of plan. We’re always not consciously aware of that plan, of course. It’s part instinct, part intellect. We’re making choices based on our purpose, our audience, our context. Most of all, this is when we listen to our own minds and express those thoughts as truly as we can, when we transcribe the chaos of our consciousness. This chaos is unfortunately somewhat unpalatable, which is why we take the next step.   

Revision

The writer who understands the act of revision, of re-seeing their text, is typically the writer of superior prose. It is not simply fixing the commas and crossing your Ts however. (Those are lower order concerns.) Revision requires rethinking, which is what makes it distinct from editing. We look at the whole of our text, the thrust of it, the tone of it, the organization of it–the higher order concerns–and we ask is this what we mean? Is this the best way to express it? In our drafting stage, we more or less went with instinct, letting the words flow out of us naturally: In revision, we should be ruled by intellect. We tinker, change, rewrite. We temper and rearrange. We take those questions about purpose, our audience, and our context into much greater consideration. We look at the text dispassionately, without emotion. This is the last time anyone will care what we meant vesus what we say. Afterward, it becomes product, written in stone, something to analyzed and scruntinized, something over which we have no control. That’s why this step is so vital. We should recognize that people will take away something different. They will misread your work. Putting a text out into the world is the greatest example of a writer’s impotence. Hence, we should cherish this brief moment, look outside ourselves, and ask if what we have done is the best way to articulate it. If it isn’t, expect to be a prisoner of your own regret. 

Editing

This is the final step in the process. This is where we check for comma splices or mispellings. It doesn’t really make a message any clearer for the most part, but it does, however, show our seriousness. By making sure that we’ve corrected our typos, we demonstrate something to our reader. We show them that we are no fool, that we are worth listening to. Unfortunately, this is the step we approach most carelessly, myself included. But this act should be treated with a little more reverence, I think. That concern we have, that dedication, hopefully, rubs off onto our reader.

And so concludes this week’s talk on the process. I know that I don’t offer a lot of specifics here on it, because it is so difficult to pin down. This is much more about trial and error than anything else. It’s about what works for you. Of course, work has to go out at some point too, so we shouldn’t get trapped in the anxiety of our choices either. It should also go without saying that these steps aren’t independent of one another, that they happen at predetermined intervals. Some writers revise while they draft; others write to the end and then fix it. But that’s because there is no one way to do it. Process, after all, is individual.

Crafting a Talisman

It’s always been a part of our nature to notice patterns and assign them meaning. Take the constellations, for example. People looked up at the night’s sky and saw shapes and figures in the random order of the stars, and with one stroke, they connected the dots to reflect their own understanding of the world. It was one of humanity’s first attempts at art. 

We had created symbols, an object meant to represent something else. It’s been a western tradition ever since. Just look at the book of Genesis and the story of man’s fall from grace. When Eve commits the world’s first sin–disobeying the word of God–it is not just through action but by taking something physical. Gods orders could have been simpler: “Don’t ignore me.” Or: “Don’t go over there.” But it is the eating of the apple that gets her and Adam in trouble. The apple is a manifestation of that sin. And thanks to the Bible’s enormous influence, apples tend to represent sin throughout the western world. But every text, every work of art, has its own internal logic, symbols bound to them, things that stand in for something else.

One of the best places to turn for this is The Great Gatsby. Throughout the novel, at different lulls in the story, Nick Carraway observes Gatsby standing out on the dock, gazing across the bay at the green light that radiates from Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s home. The green light is a symbol among symbols. First, notice the choice of color. Green is the color of money for one but, also, jealousy–as in he is “green with envy.” That’s no accident on Fitzgerald’s part either. The light itself represents Gatsby’s great longing for the life he could have had with Daisy, a life Tom has and he wants. Part of what prevents that from happening is that Gatsby isn’t old money: He’s a bootlegger. That’s not the kind of man, according to society’s standards, can marry a woman like Daisy. And all of that is communicated with a simple green light. 

Symbols are great because they prevent us from ever veering into the melodramatic, from being too “on the nose.” They say what characters cannot say or express. Some are more highlighted than others, of course.

In “Hills Like White Elephants,” Hemingway sets the story in a train station to show the differing paths the couples may take, whether they choose to keep the baby or abort it, as well as whether the couple will stay together or fall apart. However, it’s far more subtle than Fitzgerald’s use of symbolism in The Great Gatsby. It’s almost a throw away line. But it’s there, under the surface. 

T. S. Eliot, in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” presents the idea of the objective correlative. 

“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

This, I believe, broadens our definition of symbolism, and though not quite exactly the same, is helpful in understanding the possibilities of literature. Eliot’s point is that all the elements of story can represent the emotion of the narrative. An object can stand in for jealousy or longing, love or loss, choice or consequence, but so too can it be applied to setting, scenes, structure, plot, dialogue, so on and so forth. We tend to think of symbols as only one part of the narrative, that they exist as symbols themselves, but everything in a story is symbolic. It stands in for something else. Even words themselves are symbols. What does anger look like? Depends on who you ask. What does madness look like? Each case is individual. Even something as simple as a table has different shapes and sizes. 

This is what we call signifiers and signifieds. The signifer is what represents the object; the signified is the object itself. As Kenneth Burke once wrote, “Man is the symbol-wielding animal.” It’s a part of our nature. We were born to do it. So keep an eye out for how the elements of a story reflect the heart of it–its theme. It may enhance your understanding of the text, or when done thoughtlessly, it may give you a reason to close it.  

Reading, Because If There Was Another Way to Get Better, Someone Would Have Figured It By Now

My first semester as a grad student, everyone thought I was a douche, and to be fair, they still do but one with whom they don’t mind having a drink and sharing their lives. Back then, however, I was the odd man out. For one, I was the youngest of my cohort. Furthermore, I was probably the most prentenious of the bunch by far. But the thing that bothered my peers the most was that I seemingly had read everything. That’s no mere boast, mind you. My knowledge of the classics was so extensive that when my instructors quizzed us on the openings of great stories and novels, I easily had the high score that day. Kaylie Jones even made a joke of it, when I confessed that I hadn’t read a story by de Maupassant: She said, “Wait, there’s something you haven’t read.” After class, my peers asked me where I had gone for undergrad–did I go to some special prep school? To their surprise, their was nothing fancy about my upbringing or my education. My parents weren’t wealthy. I worked throughout college at UPS. I had graduated from a public high school with little distinction and a public university with even less. So how did I, at twenty-two, read more of the canon than writers who were my age in triplicate? 

The short answer is simple: the internet.

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When I was in high school, I hated reading. It’s a miracle that I passed at all, since I did everything I could to avoid completing  an assigned text. I can honestly say that I finished a handful of books over the course of my secondary education. What was the point? TV was twice as fast and a hell of a lot less boring. Besides, what use would it serve me? I was going to be a nuclear physicist.

The only thing I could choke down was poetry. It was short, which was nice, but the other thing about it was its play with language. I’ve always had a ear for music, for the beauty of sounds, naturally-attuned for euphony. I just liked the way some words sounded next to others. I liked it so much I began to write poetry myself. My friends would remark how any time they saw me I had a pen and paper in hand, furiously scribbling. And that love of poetry followed me to college, and so did my love of movies and philosophy. My love of physics, however, did not.

If there was one thing I didn’t like, it was studying, and in order to succeed in my science courses, I was expected to memorize all manners of formulas. But where was the critical thinking, the application of ideas, the innovation? Physics and calculus didn’t offer any of that, so I guess that’s why I failed both. But it didn’t phase me all that much. It was a chance for me to discover what I really wanted. I didn’t want to have a career where I plugged numbers into a calculator and charted a graph: I wanted something meaningful. I wanted a job that didn’t feel like work, that came naturally, because if I did have to study, I’d never graduate. 

I thought about the things I was good at, the things I did well, the ones people had said I did better than most. In tenth grade, I remembered, my English teacher said I should major in creative writing. At the time, I thought he was full of shit. But then I realized, he wasn’t the only one. In fact, as early as fifth grade, people were saying I had a way with words. It was theme that kept reoccuring, and I kept ignoring. But if I was going to be a writer, how would I learn to get better?

The answer was obvious: I had to read.

At first, I picked up books others had recommended, like Fight Club, or ones by poets I had enjoyed, like Sylvia Plath. It was during this time that I realized that reading wasn’t such a chore; in fact, it was a lot like watching a movie. It had all the things I liked about Star Wars or Back to the Future, the only difference was that I had to imagine it. I also learned that writing sentences was pretty damn similar to writing poetry. It didn’t take long for me to exhaust the few books my friends had loaned me. Worse still, I had no where to start. How would I know where to start on my own?

My talk with the librarian proved fruitless. Most of my classes were general education courses, and none of the teachers seemed particularly helpful. Then the idea occurred to me. I was pretty good on the computer. I had used it to enhance my knowledge of music and film. I had torrented hundreds of classic albums and films–from a list I complied by spending hours every night on Wikipedia. (My instructors over the years are probably having a mild heart attack at this moment.) The site had been invaluable to me. They had articles on the history of film, notes on significant achievements in the artform, even little footnotes that led me further down the rabbithole. Why couldn’t–or bet yet, shouldn’t–I use this tool to help with my new goal? 

So I did. I sorted through page after page, clicking on links and footnotes, following the thread as far as it would go. I checked out books from the library, and when I couldn’t get them for free, I gave up buying lunch to buy a book instead. I didn’t read books based on their description, only reputation alone. Many were very good books, like Notes from Underground or Blood Meridian; others were not so good, like The Bluest Eye or Home to Harlem. Regardless, every novel presented some new skill for me to learn or avoid. The good books showed me how to write with care, how to search for that one perfect word (le mot juste), to give as much attention to my prose as my characters, to set a scene. The bad books showed me what dreck looked like on the page and spurred me to try, because, I reasoned, if shit like that can get published, why can’t I? 

Every few weeks, I would go through my supply and search the web for a new fix. I used the Time list, the Modern Library list. I read anything I got my hands on, and when I switched from physics to English, I had even more books to enjoy. My best semester introduced me to Crime and Punishment, Song of Solomon, Midnight’s Children, and The Death of Artemio Cruz from just one class. I got to the point where I was reading three or four books a week at least. Sometimes even, I’d put down one novel to pick another immediately. 

I had become an addict.     

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I’ve been teaching college for three years now, and in that time, I’ve managed to have quite a few students who have made me proud. More rare, however, have been those who chose to write, who have that yearning, that boundless ambition to press pen to page. They often come to me for advice, and I think, they’re often disappointed with what I have to say. They say, I have an idea for a story. It’s about this guy who…. They give me every piece of it, scene by scene, and ask me what I think. Typically, I like it. Then I give them the bad news: Where are the pages? Usually, they shrug and say they keep throwing them out. I’m quick to remind them that they’ve produced fine writing in the past, and they will contnue to do so. All they have to do is write it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s good or bad, because it’s a draft. There’s plenty of time to fix it. The words aren’t static, fixed there forever: They can be changed. Then they say, What about Hemingway–how can I ever compare to him? 

Try, I say, just try.

The writing you never do is writing that you can never assess, that you can never know the true worth of. My former students who want to write take it for granted that their heroes struggled themselves. Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-four times before he was happy with it. And I doubt that Hemingway learned his craft in a vacuum. He studied the masters; he emulated them–as did everyone else.

Ben Franklin famously taught himself to read and write. For him, those two things went hand-in-hand. The man himself, more or less, invented the American style. But he didn’t do so in a day. It took years of practice. His method was simple: He found a piece of writing he thought was particularly impressive (for him this was The Spectator), tried to memorize it as best he could, and then wrote out those sentences and paragraphs. After he finished, he would look at his work and then the original and compare. Sometimes, he discovered he had improved the style; other times, he discovered he hadn’t. But that learning process was enormously important in his growth as a writer. He learned what good writers did and then did them himself. His case is not unique as I’ve said already. Hunter S. Thompson copied pages of The Great Gatsby just to know what it felt like to type out Fitzgerald’s prose.

As children, we do this instinctually. We mimic the sounds and phrases of our parents and those around us. We learn the language by copying the way others use it. The same goes for writing. A lot of it comes through osmosis. By seeing the same things over and over again, we adopt those choices as our own. But there’s more a young writer can do, and it requires something we so rarely give: careful and considerate thought.

If we passively read, there’s only so much we can learn; however, if we look at a sentence and ask why, we begin to strive towards something greater. Every word, every mark of punctuation, every paragraph break, the order of the sentences, their length, their construction–all of these things are a choice, whether we recognize it or not. 

Emerson demonstrates it best: “First we eat, then we beget; first we read, then we write.”

This sentence alone is a testament to his genius. Look at the sentence above. We’ll skip the diction choices and focus solely on punctuation. Emerson could have written it like this: “First we eat, then we beget. First we read, then we write.” Or he could have done this: “First we eat. Then we beget. First we read. Then we write.” 

Notice anything?

The two latter examples don’t have the same, and I hate to use the word because it’s so ill-defined, flow. They just don’t sound right. Why?

Emerson’s sentence is perfection because the construction draws a parallel. It serves as an analogy: Eating is to reading as begetting (procreating, making babies) is to writing. Had he choosen one of the alternatives, that connection would have been lessened or even lost. The order of the words are the same in both clauses, separated by a semi-colon. Can that be copied or imitated? Of course, it can. Emerson doesn’t own the copyright to that structure. It’s free to use as you like–and so is the rest of the canon. 

Everything is a technique. It’s just a matter of trying it out for yourself, or as T. S. Eliot once wrote, “Immature poets borrow; mature poets steal.”         

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People tend to forget the age we live in and the resources available to us. As far as access to knowledge goes, this is the best time to be alive. There’s a whole world of information on the internet just begging us to look at it. Project Gutenberg hosts just about every novel in existence that is out of copyright. Wikipedia is a pretty damn good encyclopedia. Sparknotes and Shmoop are there to help us understand those difficult texts. And the best part is that they’re all available for free. If you wanted to read through the works of Homer in the past, like say in 1300s, you had better be rich or have access to a serious library, since books had to be produced by hand. Or If you wanted to read every one of Shakespeare’s plays, in say 1900, you better get your butt to the bookstore and have some cash on hand, because even though his work had been out of copyright and could be printed for free by anyone, the only way you could get it was in hard copy. Furthermore, good luck getting anyone to explain it to you back in the day. Unless you knew some slick literature professor, you were on your own. Now, you don’t even have to leave the bathroom for all that and more.

It’s amazing that we have all these devices in arm’s reach at any given moment, and we don’t even bother to log off Facebook or Instagram for a minute to see what else is out there. It’s no wonder people call us entitled. We don’t seem to realize the power we hold in the palms of our hands.

I did, but I’m the exception, not the rule–not that I’m anything special. And don’t think I’m discounting the legion of educators I’ve had in my life. Without them, I am nothing. But I didn’t expect to be spoon-fed the rest of my life either. I knew there would be a time when I would have to step out on my own, and I committed myself to it. The question, then, is obvious: Will you?  

Where It’s At: Why Setting Matters

Depending who you talk to, you’ll either here one of two things when it comes to setting: “It’s not important” or “OMG! It’s TEH most important thing EVER!!!!111! It’s like a character!” I like to think it’s somewhere in the middle. More like, “It’s alright.” Alone, it doesn’t really matter all that much. Just think about some sci-fi or fantasy stories that begin with a whole bunch of world-building. Do you read it and enjoy it? Or do you toss that book away and find another that doesn’t waste your time? Most likely, you choose the latter. A wonderful sci-fi novel like Starship Troopers starts with the character and his/her problems and slowly introduces that vast universe. We need someone whose eyes we can see the world from, regardless of how similar or how different that setting is. 

You see, setting is merely an extension of character and vice versa. It’s all human psychology. There are those wealthy people in the world who know little of the struggles of everyday people, who may suffer the stress of running a business, of raising their kids, of hosting a great dinner party, of having the nicest home on the block, of being able to afford the latest toy, but they don’t know hunger or homelessness, what it’s like to go to school and feel unsafe or wondering if this month’s check will clear in time to starve off eviction. We are all products of our environment, but we also help to shape them too. The world we are born into represents who we are as much we represent it. The wealthy man might not know what happens in other spheres, but he knows firmly what the people are like in his own. However, if you take him out of his bubble and subject him to another’s, suddenly, there’s the germ of change–for good or for bad. That experience causes him to look at his life and home differently. The clashing of cultures, people from different places interacting, is what helps us move forward as human beings. We recognize the threat of the other, the unknown, and either adapt or resist. The wealthy man, after his encounter with the working poor, might come back to his life with a renewed appreciation. He might return and wonder how such inequality exists. He might come back and decide that he’s entitled to what he has. He might walk in through the doors of his mansion and realize that those people he just saw are nothing more than scum who need to be eradicated. It’s all a matter of perspective and experience.

As I’ve said before, there are really only two kinds of stories that exist: Someone goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. When we look at plot this way, it demonstrates the value of setting. It is a harbinger of change. All it depends on is how small your bubble is. In the novel Norwegian Wood, the protagonist’s sphere of influence is his small town of Kobe–or maybe even smaller. It may be his close group of friends: him (Toru), Naoko, and Kizuki (Naoko’s boyfriend). But the novel takes place in bustling Toyko during the 1960s, when Toru finds himself a student in college and must struggle to fit into this new world. Toyko is vastly different, and with it come all kinds of strange characters, like Storm Trooper, Toru’s roommate who keeps their dorm spotless and wakes up at six AM to exercise. Toru finds this new place strange along with it’s inhabitants, but he also learns to adapt. Naoko, who also moved to Toyko, can’t and finds herself in a mental institution outside Kyoto in the mountains. This, coincidentally, is what drives the plot of the novel. 

The beginning of Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is an excellent example. Just look at the first paragraph.

Her doctor had told Julian’s mother that she must lose twenty pounds on account of her blood pressure, so on Wednesday nights Julian had to take her downtown on the bus for a reducing class at the Y. The reducing class was designed for working girls over fifty, who weighed from 165 to 200 pounds. His mother was one of the slimmer ones, but she said ladies did not tell their age or weight. She would not ride the buses by herself at night since they had been integrated, and because the reducing class was one of her few pleasures, necessary for her health, and free, she said Julian could at least put himself out to take her, considering all she did for him. Julian did not like to consider all she did for him, but every Wednesday night he braced himself and took her.

Julian and his mother come from a more suburban region in the south, but in order to get to the Y, they have to go into the city, where black people and white people have to interact. Travelling itself is a problem and is an extension of the greater conflict of the story: Julian’s mother’s racism. She is a product of the Old South, who sees the world in simpler terms. Julian is much more experienced and has seen other parts of life besides the plantation, but he’s no saint either. He uses his progressiveness as a dagger, something to twist in his mother’s side. He doesn’t want to make friends with black people because he values them as individuals, but because he hates his mother and what she stands for. The question, of course, is whether this story could take place anywhere else? The short answer is yes and no. 

Yes, because racism and integration are not unique to America or the 1960s. This story could have easily taken place in South Africa at the end of apartheid. It could be reimagined with aliens–like a District 9. Those points of view would be the same regardless: They are not special in the realm of human experience. However, I also say no, because the American south of the 1960s has a different flavor than any other place in history. It is unique, and it shows in those characters. The things they say, the places they go, the things they think, the conflicts they encounter, are unique to that setting and that setting alone. 

Themes are universal. How you demonstrate them is specific.

                

What They See is What You Get (Part 2)

  This is part two of my series on point of view. If you’d like to read the first post right here. So without further adieu, let’s get into to it. 

First Person

First person is probably the most natural of all points of view and often establishes the most immediate sense of empathy. We instantly connect with the I on the page because we recognize this as a symbol for selfdom. It is an idea that we identify with because we are all the I of our own consciousness. Just look at the following passage from The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow:

“I am an American, Chicago-born–Chicago, that somber city–and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.
“Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.”

Bellow choose first person in order to make friends with his reader. It’s a tactic that, if not prescribed to an interesting character, can often backfire. But luckily for Bellow, Augie March is one of the greatest characters in all of American Literature. 

Of course, this should not be our sole consideration for choosing first person. Obviously, when you choose to transcribe a character’s dictation, you are limited in a number of ways:

  1. Your narrator can only know the things he or she knows through either experience or report. 
  2. Your narrator always has to be a part of the action.  
  3. Your narrator has a bias.

These three tenets are our essential guides when writing in first person. The first one is important because human beings cannot be outside themselves: They cannot know the thoughts and feelings of others truly. We can only give clues and details that suggest but not define the others around them. (Narrators who are mindreaders are often lazy and dishonest, because they can, at will, eliminate all subtext and uncertainty–and tension.) The second one is important because, if they are not involved, they can go fuck about elsewhere draining the story of its momentum; however, that does not mean the narrator has to be the protagonist. Just look at The Great Gatsby for an example of a first-person narrator who is peripheral to the action but still in observance of it. And lastly, your narrator must have a bias because we all have a bias. Some people use the term unreliable, but I’ve always avoided it because it sounds like the narrator should purposely mislead the reader. (Obviously, when you’re being willfully dishonest, you’re being a bad writer and an asshole.) But it’s more like your narrator has a blind-spot. We all have these. There are things about ourselves we don’t like to admit, things that we don’t even know are true. We are always, and at once, the person we think we are, the person others think we are, and the person we really are. Yet we can only show the one the narrator thinks he or she is. As I’ve mentioned in the past, Nick Carraway is one of the best examples of this. 

He tells us his father told him to reserve his judgement about others, and it’s advice that Nick intends to follow. But as we read the book, we discover that Nick has a blind-spot: He judges everyone constantly. Keep in mind: He isn’t (and nor is Fitzgerald) lying or being purposely dishonest or hiding the truth. He’s a person with flaws, and it takes someone from the outside to expose them.

One last note about first person. Too often do we leave out that first-person does not solely mean I: It can also be we. One of the best examples of first-person plural can be found in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”

“So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.
“That was two years after her father’s death and a short time after her sweetheart–the one we believed would marry her–had deserted her.” 

Here the same rules apply, but you as the writer now have access to the collective consciousness of multitudes. My only advice would be to give it a natural limit: a couple, a town, a city, a state, a country, a world, a universe. And even though it may seem all encompassing, there are still those outside of that group, those untouched minds who are intimately unknowable.  

Second Person     

The second person has always been tricky. With the pronoun you, the writer is imposing on the reader, regardless of whether the character is the reader (like in If on a winter’s night a traveler…) or a character (like Artemio Cruz in the writing of Carlos Fuentes). We relate to the character because the you is us and probably makes it easier to identify with. We both the you and not the you.

Just take a look at this example from Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City:

You met her in Kansas City, where you had gone to work as a reporter after college. You had lived on both coasts and abroad; the heartland was until then a large blank. You felt that some kind of truth and American virtue lurked thereabouts, and as a writer you wanted to tap into it.

Notice that the you here relates to experiences you are unlikely to have had, and yet, you empathize regardless. The second person is the great unknown of fiction: Too many writers fear it–probably because they don’t understand it. Nonetheless, it is a powerful tool when used properly. It manifests itself best when used as a remnant of the cultural zeitgeist. There may be things that are unique to Bright Lights, Big City, things that only our protagonist has experienced, but overall, the novel is about the excess and excrement of the 1980s. If you were alive during that time (or read about it), you can empathize. You understand those feelings, that alienation. Note too that McInerney is responding to the same fears as Bret Easton Ellis but using a much different vehicle. Ellis wants to subject us to the completeness of selfdom, that sense that we (himself included) are what is wrong in the world–all through the use of I–but McInerney remains a distant judge. He puts us in that excess and sees himself (or his narrator) removed from it. The use of second person serves as a societal mirror. It exposes our flaws, and we can only cringe. 

Third Person

Third person is the most used of all our points of view and probably the least appreciated. Too often do people constrain it to one of three hard and fast modes: dramatic, limited, or omniscent. While these are helpful, I do not think we should limit ourselves in such a way. All fiction requires some combination of the three. One may be more stressed than the other, but it does not mean, as my composition II professor once said, that the writer “messed up.” 

Maybe it is best that we start with definitions.   

Dramatic: In this mode, the writer aims to show only what is happening. Think of it as a camera’s lense. We are never invited to explore the minds of any of the characters. We are to watch as if it is a movie.

Limited: Here, readers can access only the mind of the protagonist–(or a peripheral observer). To put it plainly, we can know but one character’s thoughts and feelings. 

Omniscient: In this case, we explore the thoughts of all he characters–or at least, it is a possibility. We are granted entry to most characters minds.

While these distinctions are convenient, they are not necessarily true. David Jausse looks at it as a matter of long shots and x-rays. When writing third person, you have options when describing a scene. You can write it from the camera’s point of view and only show what is happening. This is especially true in a story like “Hills Like White Elephants.” But you may also go deeper. If a writer writes a scene in the limited form, it does not mean every line will be from the viewpoint character’s point of view, not every sentence will start “So-and-so watched other-character sit down.” It would just be “Other character sat down.” In other words, there will always be the “camera’s eye.” 

Typically, and probably most logically, a scene should belong to one character. There should be someone with whom we empathize. We need a viewpoint we understand or can learn to understand. However, it does not mean that the next scene must be told from that point of view. It can be told from another. Just look at Tolstoy: He tells a scene from the point of view of a dog–a fucking dog! But there is no better example of the malleability of the third person point of view than Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” It is as close to perfect as it gets. Most of the story is told from an objective or dramatic point of view. Not once do we gain access to the characters’s thoughts and feelings, but towards the end, when Hemingway has exhausted his brillant dialogue, do we look into the mind of the American:

The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the damp felt pads. “The train comes in five minutes,” she said.
“What did she say?” asked the girl. 
“That the train is coming in five minutes.”
The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her.
“I’d better take the bags over to the other side of the station,” the man
said. She smiled at him. 
“All right. Then come back and we’ll finish the beer.” 
He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to
the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him. 
“Do you feel better?” he asked. 
“I feel fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.” 


This entire scene, with the exception of one moment, is told in dramatic point of view. Everything that happens is what is said and done, but as Jausse points out, there is one moment when this story becomes the man’s. “They were all waiting reasonably for the train.” It is the adverb that tips us off. Look at the rest of the text. How many adverbs do you see above? Two. The idea that they are waiting reasonably is the protagonist’s, the American’s–not the narrator’s. (The other is that “the girl smiled brightly,” which may be the woman’s impression.)

Third person narration is about access. It’s about choosing where to go at the right time. Hemingway looks into the mind of the American because he wants us to see his frustration, his desire to make his girlfriend understand. The people are waiting “reasonably” in contrast to his girlfriend who is not “reasonable” about getting an abortion. Admittedly, if we didn’t see inside the American’s mind, we would still know what a fool he was, what a dick he was, but with this additional information, we get a slightly better understanding of him as a character and his bias. We’re meant to emphasize with him. However, we as readers have a bigger perspective than his. Therefore, we know what a fool he is. We can see his idiocy. That’s what makes it such a brilliant story. 

Third person is all about choice. It is a matter of when to reveal what and how. It’s not about being dishonest or deceitful though: It’s about giving the reader the information he or she needs as soon as possible. 


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That concludes part two of this very long (time-wise) series of readings. I hope this all makes sense. I will see you next time.    

Theme as Thesis

When I was young and stupid and frivolous, I thought following a form was the most limiting thing you could do as a writer. I liked pushing boundaries, discovering new horizons, creating something truly new and unique. And even though I had a way with words, I had difficulty turning in a well-composed essay. Don’t get me wrong now. My papers were never awful, but invariably, I would get it back with comments critiquing the organization and the buried argument. Of course, it wasn’t until I started teaching that I really learned how to fix those problems. I did, of course, get better over time, but teaching really put things in perspective for me and I was able to find a common thread between the academic essay and storytelling.

The academic essay is probably one of the easiest forms to understand but one of the hardest to master. It’s simplicity is its greatest strength, and the part that trips up most budding writers. It’s essentially three parts: an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. The introduction presents the topic and what others have said about the subject, which leads logically to your thesis, the heart of your paper, the main argument which you intend to prove. The body offers evidence and interpretation of that evidence which supports the paper’s thesis. The conclusion provides an interpretation of the argument you’ve presented and explains its significance to your field/subject/audience. And the short story or novel or poem can follow those same rules.

A story’s theme is its thesis, the answer to question that drives the writer to keep writing to the end, to discover what possibilities exist. A great story aims to prove something the same way an academic essay does. And typically, if the writer is any good, he or she plants those seeds in the very first paragraph–if not lines.

Let’s look at Joyce’s “Araby” as an example. The story itself is a simple one: Boy meets girl, falls in love, learns she wants to go to the festival but can’t, decides to buy her a present, but ends up leaving empty handed. This is not what I would call exciting. I’ve done that on a weekend (and for most of my adolesent life). So what? But that’s the thing: It’s not just the events that are important, but how they are told and experienced by the narrator which determines the genius of the story. The work dwells heavily on the theme of love vs. lust and learning the difference in the soul-crushing wasteland of Irish-Catholic Dublin. 

The story begins:

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.

The first paragraph alone sets up the narrator’s problem. His street in Dublin is “blind.” And even though he’s saying that it’s a dead end, that diction choice parallels the final image of the story as the boy stumbles in the darkness and his eyes burn with anguish. Joyce is implictly showing us the problem of the story, using his theme and symbol to do so. The street is a stand in for our narrator. He too finds a dead end in his “love” for Madgen’s sister, but also, the choice of blind alludes to his own blindness, his inability to differentiate between love and lust. And notice the end of the first sentence, the reversal that occurs. The only time the street is happy is when the school “sets the boys free.” Again, this is no mistake on the part of the author. Joyce is saying that casting off the fetters of religion is the only way to achieve happiness and enlightenment. Lust is OK–as long as you’re OK with it too. It’s a human emotion that we all feel. Why should we surpress it? Why should we be embarassed by it? Why should we bow down to the mores of the Church?

Of course, the next paragraph elaborates on that idea further, with a description of the narrator’s house, and it is this theme the story keeps coming back to. 

Later on, Joyce writes:

One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house…. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring:
–O love! O love! many times.

This is the thesis of the story, the theme, the part where the author most obviously addresses the question. Here we have the conflict of religion and instinct, of love and lust. The boy is praying, but the diction choices betray his innocence. It doesn’t sound like a typical prayer but, instead, more like masturbation or Onanism, which is forbidden. But the boy cries out in “love” because he doesn’t know what to do with those feelings. He doesn’t know what that twitching in his pants means, and he mistakes them for love. And his dialogue with Madgen’s sister only furthers that point:

She asked me was I going to Araby. I forgot whether I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar, she said; she would love to go.
–And why can’t you? I asked.
While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. She could not go, she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her convent. Her brother and two other boys were fighting for their caps and I was alone at the railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.
–It’s well for you, she said.
–If I go, I said, I will bring you something.

 This exchange highlights her absolute lack of interest in the narrator, and his failure to recognize it. Here is a girl who’s just being nice, talking to this slightly younger, immature boy, and when he says he will go, she says, “It’s well for you.” That might be one of the most backhanded things she could have said. She really doesn’t care if he goes. She’s only humoring him with the conversation. But the narrator is too blinded by “love” to notice. 
It’s only in the darkness of the bazaar, when the narrator witnesses the bawdy talk of a young English woman and some boys (not at all Arabian or exotic as he was led to believe) that he has his ephipany:

At the door of the stall a young lady was talking and laughing with two young gentlemen. I remarked their English accents and listened vaguely to their conversation.
–O, I never said such a thing!
–O, but you did!
–O, but I didn’t!
–Didn’t she say that?
–Yes. I heard her.
–O, there’s a… fib!
Observing me the young lady came over and asked me did I wish to buy anything. The tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty. I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at either side of the dark entrance to the stall and murmured:
–No, thank you.
The young lady changed the position of one of the vases and went back to the two young men. They began to talk of the same subject. Once or twice the young lady glanced at me over her shoulder.

This is the moment when things become clear for him. We aren’t privvy to the entire conversation, but we can assume by her denial that it’s something “bad,” something which she feels the need to deny three times (and look over her shoulder at the boy). (It was improper to write about sex in the early 1900s, after all.) The narrator is coming to grips with his own blindness, learning that the emotion he feels is not love: He wants Madgen’s sister sexually, not romantically. He now sees himself “as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and [his] eyes burned with anguish and anger,” which completes the cycle. 

We begin with an introduction of the subject (religion and instinct/love and lust), then we get our thesis (confusing one for the other), then our body (the boy’s story goal, his journey to the bazaar, and not buying a present), and finally our conclusion (recognizing the difference, the “so what?” moment of the story). 

Every great story should aim to let its theme inform it the same way. It must the infect the work entirely. It may not lead to an ephiphany like Joyce’s work, but regardless of its techinque, it still follows the story form and addresses its story question. It must be there from the start and seen through to the end. Bad or unsuccessful stories make the mistake of ignoring theme or misusing it or undermining what they are trying to say, but great stories dwell on it, return it time and time again. Without it, all you have is a series of events that aren’t worth reading in the first place.   

 

Plot, Structure, Form

When it comes to plot, structure, and form, people too often confuse one for the other and discussing all three doesn’t exactly help. However, all three are an extension of the same source and must be viewed as blocks which build one on top of the other, originating from the story’s theme. 

I like to think of it this way:

Theme determines form: form determines structure: structure determines plot.  

With that said, we’ll start at the macro level and work our way down.

Plot 

Plot, in its most basic description, is nothing more than a series of events which happen over the course of a story. E. M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, gives the following definition: “A plot is…a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story.  ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” Unlike Forster, I don’t see much of a distinction between plot and story; however, his emphasis on causality is of great importance. 

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Rob DiCristino, of the Ugly Club Podcast, introduced me to a wonderful exercise for plot, which he learned from Matt Stone and Trey Parker of South Park. Apparently, the writers gave a lecture on narrative at some film school or another. (I am ignorant to most of the details.) And they said when they first started working on the show, they would write out the events of the story and link them together with the phrase “and then.” In other words, they plot it like so: “Cartman ate chicken wings, and then he went to the bathroom.” It wasn’t long before the writers recognized the flaw in this model. It didn’t emphasize causation–what good stories are all about. And they modified the template accordingly. Instead of writing “and then,” they wrote “therefore.” So “Cartman ate chicken wings, and then he went to the bathroom” became “Cartman ate chicken wings, and therefore he went to the bathroom.” Of course, what if the first event was undermined in some way? This too did they plan for. In those instances, they wrote “but.” So now we have “Cartman ate chicken wings and needed to go to the bathroom, but he was stopped by Mr. Garrison.” 

This, I think, is one of the finest and simplest ways to look at a narrative. 

Each event is not seperate or disparate, unrelated and cut off, but a larger part in a causal chain. 

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My writing mentor, Bob Mooney, was a student of the late, great John Gardner and his advice to me was often verbatim from one of Gardner’s books. While he oversaw my thesis, Bob would write out little aphorisms on the manuscript. When I had too much summary, he would write, like Henry James used to, “Dramatize! Dramatize!” But there was one that really stuck with me: “There are only two kinds of plots: Someone goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” This is one of those old apochraphals that Gardner supposedly said, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Bob had heard from the man himself. But when I thought about it, I realized, as much as I didn’t want to admit that such a binary could exist in art, it’s pretty damn true. Just think about all the great works in literature. The Odyssey: Someone goes on a journey. Beowulf: A stranger comes to town. Hamlet: Someone goes on a journey. The Tempest: A stranger comes to town. 

And if you think about it, it’s really the expression of the same thing: It’s all a matter of perspective. The Dark Knight is a story of a stranger (The Joker) coming to town–a threat to the status quo–but if you flip it on it’s head and look at it not from Batman’s perspective but The Joker’s, it’s his journey. 

Plot is a disruption of the ordinary and the effort to restore it but slightly improved. Of course, a good plot is not so simple. The master’s show us that these events don’t just exist to further the plot but to demonstrate something larger. 

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In Paul Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, The Wife, and Her Lover, the titular wife is trapped in a marriage to a loud-mouth gangster who spends his time in an opulent restaurant, pontificating about shit and sex, and she finds love in a bookish professor who eats alone (a stranger comes to town). Every action of the film relates to its themes of high vs. low pleasures–shitting, eating, and fucking vs. culture and love. Our heros consummate their relationship in the restaurant’s bathroom, then move to the kitchen, and finally his study. It is a literal movement towards those higher pleasures. Of course, the thief of the title tries to drag them back, using those lower pleasures: He mashes peas in the the professor’s book, insults his wife about her regularity, and force feeds the professor the pages of his own books. These events are not arbitrary. They are ripe for analysis. They communicate the grandness of this work of art. Plot, ultimately, is a reflection of theme.

Structure

Structure isn’t as complicated as most people make it out to be. It’s just like a good academic essay. There’s an introduction which explains the subject and sets out a point that it will prove, a body which proves the thesis, and a conclusion that wraps it up and answers that question of “So What?” It can vary here and there. It can be linear or non-linear. It can be logical or illogical. But at the end of the day, it’s all, more or less, the same thing: a beginning, a middle, and an end. 

Of course, we can break that down a little further. 

(The following breakdown is a bastardization of a variety of sources, most notably, Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.)

Beginning/Act One

  • Status Quo/Something’s Missing: This is world before the disruption. Things are mostly copacetic. It’s Luke living on the farm with his aunt and uncle in Star Wars. Of course, even though people are happy and there are no threats, there’s still something missing from our main character’s life. In Star Wars, Luke is looking for a life of adventure, but on the farm, he’s not getting it.
  • Inciting Incident: This is the moment that changes everything. This is when the bad guy shows up or the telegram in the mail. To return to the Star Wars example, it is finding the message from Princess Leia. 
  • Debate/Theme Stated: Of course, change is scary, and no one will do so willingly. Luke wants to join Obi-Wan on his adventure, but he must attend to his duties on the farm…
  • Can’t Go Home Again/Choose Act Two: This is when the choice becomes clear for the protagonist. He or she is no longer questioning themselves. Whatever was holding them back is gone. Luke returns home to find his aunt and uncle have been murdered, tying together his quest for adventure and revenge: He can leave with Obi-Wan and take on the Empire.

Middle/Act Two 

  • The First Obstacle/Shit Just Got Real: This is the first roadblock in our hero’s path. They have a clear goal now, but there’s a hurdle they have to clear first. Even though Luke knows he has to rescue the princess, he doesn’t know how he will get there; therefore, he must find himself a pilot, which he does in the form of Han Solo.   
  • B Story: This is the nugget of the story, the subplot that emphasizes the theme. It is a nice little distraction to the events. Typically, this comes in the form of a love story, but of course, there are other possibilities as well. Luke and company have to board the Death Star (and evade Jabba), but they won’t be get there for a while, so, in that time, Obi-Wan can give him a little sage advice and training: Use the force; trust your instincts. 
  • Midpoint: Depending on whether the story is a tragedy or success, this is the point where everything is great or terrible. It is, at this point, our hero’s greatest success or failure. The hero has finally reached his goal. Luke boards the Death Star and saves the princess. However, things quickly go downhill from here. 
  • Bad Guys Close In/You’re Surrounded: The hero is surrounded and his success is short lived. He has to find a way out, which he does–only to find himself in an even worse situation. Luke has saved Leia, but they end up in the trash disposal with some kind of killer trash snake. And the walls are closing in. They’re all going to die! 
  • All is Lost/Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire: The hero has escaped one certain and found himself in another. The mentor dies. The odds are stacked against them. They’ve been going the wrong way. Obi-Wan sacrifies himself for Luke, and our heroes must battle their way out of the Death Star.

End/Act Three

  • Third Act Twist: This is the ultimate change in direction. Our hero is done licking his wounds and being a bitch. He realizes what he must do to save the day. He puts on his big boy boots and flies straight towards the enemy. The Rebels decide to launch an assault on the Death Star, and they know just where to shoot.
  • The Showdown: The villain and hero come face-to-face in a climatic battle. Things here will either go one way or the other: The hero wins or the villain does. Luke leads the Rebels to the Death Star, trusts his instincts (which calls back to our B Story), and takes it down with his torpedoes with Han’s help.
  • Resolution: Everything returns back to normal. Our hero has accomplished his story goal and his character goal. He has changed for the better. This is the result of his happy (or unhappy) ending. Luke and company are given their commendations and everyone smiles for the camera.

Form

This is the most interesting and overlooked piece of the puzzle. Of course, it’s also the most difficult. But done right, this is a sign of absolute genius. It is an atom bomb that change an either genre in one drop. Form is the greatest expression of theme an author has. It is a question of how best to reflect the considerations at the heart of a work and often leads to innovation. It is a reconsideration of what that modality has to offer.

Works like As I Lay Dying, The Sound and The Fury, Naked LunchWatchmen, Pulp Fiction, Annie Hall, and Ulysses demonstrate this better than most. In Watchmen, Moore creates a post-modern masterpiece which deconstructs the limitations of both comic books and their heroes. Each chapter borrows from a multitude of styles and genres. Chapter one concludes with a memoir excerpt. Chapter four has bits of a textbook. Chapter seven includes part of the psychological file on Rorschach. Moore, like Joyce, imagined new possibilities for his form. And both authors did so in order to emphasize their particular theme. Joyce wanted to expose the intricacies of the mind, the modes of consciousness, and the typical realist novel failed to prove capable: He combined elements of Greek myth and plundered every work of literature, creating a polyphonic cacophony of styles. Moore, on the other hand, wanted to expose the flaws of the super hero, but the typical comic book wouldn’t do. He needed to put them in the “real world” and rewrote the rules of the form in the process.  

Form is as much a matter of technique as it is appearance. And no writer should ignore it.

So concludes our discussion of plot, structure, and form. Stay tuned as next time we will move into the heart of all stories, the very reason we write: theme.    

What They See is What You Get: Notes on POV (Part 1)

A Note on The Text: Due to the nature of the discussion at hand, I felt it was necessary to give a little more care and organization to this post. This is a little less philosophy and a little more nuts and bolts. Also, this, as the title implies, is a large subject that needed two posts to capture its true complexity. Stay tuned, and expect the second half next Sunday.

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This week’s craft talk is about point of view, which is probably one of the most abused and misunderstood elements of the craft. Some people define it rigidly; others are so careless with it that it seems like it abides by the laws of quantum physics–if it follows any laws at all. While I lean to towards a more rigid definition, those favored by the editors and college literature professors, I think that binaries, in most cases, leave out the necessary naunce that is reality.

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First and foremost, point of view, for the most part, is, like most elements of storytelling, determined by character. It is part of what helps writers create empathy and an essential part of our reading experience: It is the person whose eyes we looking out of. Typically, there are three major categories of point of view:

  1. First Person
  2. Second Person 
  3. Third Person        

However, I would also argue we often forget that tense too informs the point of view. And there, of course, three major categories of tense as well:

  1. Past Tense
  2. Present Tense
  3. Future Tense

Let’s start with past tense.

Past Tense

Strangely, this tends to be the neutral default for most writers, and I’m not sure why. Now don’t get me wrong here: I’m not saying that past tense is no good. But it, like every story, every character, every paragraph, every sentence, and every word, should be a conscious choice. Too often are writers afraid to challenge the orthodoxy of fiction, the rules and conventions that we arbitraily follow. 

Consider Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric: “It is the ability to observe the available means of persuasion.” It is a very fine definition, but there is one change I recommend: “It is the ability to observe the [best] available means of persuasion.” The choice of past tense should inform the text and theme. The writer should decide on it because there are no better options, not because that’s what everyone else is doing.

So why use past tense? 

Let’s take a look at the opening from Carver’s “Neighbors” to find out.

“Bill and Arlene Miller were a happy couple. But now and then they felt they alone among their circle had been passsed by somehow, leaving Bill to attend to his bookkeeping duties and Arlene occupied with secreterial chores. They talked about it sometimes, mostly in comparison with the lives of their neighbors, Harriet and Jim Stone. It seemed to the Millers that the Stones lived a fuller and brighter life.”   

Here, Carver uses past tense because it immediately creates doubt in the reader’s mind. When we read that Bill and Arlene “were a happy couple,” it has an entirely different meaning than if Bill and Arlene are a happy couple. Were suggests that they used to be happy, that there now is a problem. In someways, we don’t even need to look at the following sentence to understand that the couple is in crisis. By choosing past tense over all others, Carver can articulate a longing for the past, that great intangible happiness of memory. 

Past tense should be decided on because it arouses our sense of nostalgia, of what has been. Readers may not be able to articulate this effect explictly, but they feel it. It is invisibly implicit.

Present Tense  

Present tense often gets a bad wrap. People lay down edicts like “Novels should never be written in present tense.” Frankly, I’m not fond of hard and fast rules–especially those proposed without a shred of evidence as to why. I will say present tense can be more difficult to pull off, but just like past tense, if the writer is aware of his or her choice, its rhetorical effect can be alarmingly haunting.

In Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, he writes almost exclusively in first person, present tense. And though many are quick to label the novel mysogyist and empty, Julian Murphet, the author of the novel’s reader’s guide, gives a compelling analysis of the Ellis’s style that I would be remiss not to mention.

“…American Psycho is a perversely unified text, and the rest of the book…is a carefully considered foil to the violence. Some of the emptiest dialogue ever committed to print; ghastly, endless descriptions of home electronics and men’s grooming products…characters so undefined and interchangable that even they habitually confuse each others’ identities; and a central narrating voice which seems unable and unwilling to raise itself above the literary distinction of an in-flight magazine…. If Ellis wants to bore us, he must have a reason.”     

And I am inclined to agree. One of the most obvious effects of the present tense is an otherworldly sense of boredom that it instills in the reader. Just look at these lines from the novel:

“Back at my place I stand over Bethany’s body, sipping a drink contemplatively, studying its condition. Both eyelids are open halfway and her lower teeth look as if they’re jutting out since her lips have been torn–actually bitten–off. Earlier in the day I had sawed off her left arm, which is what finally killed her, and right now I pick it up, holding it by the bone that protudes from where her hand used to be (I have no idea where it is now: the freezer? the closet?), clenching it in my fist like a pipe….”  

That might be the coldest description of a murdered woman I have ever read. Add in the lack of figurative language and no voice of reason, and it’s easy to see how people can confuse the novel for one that celebrates the very violence it is actually trying to condemn. Bateman, the narrator and protagonist, does not seem the least bit bothered by this horror. At most, he is thoughtfully voyeuristic; at worst, he is heartlessly removed. The latter seems especially appropriate as his mind drifts to where Bethany’s hand may be. But this wouldn’t be so easily achieved had Ellis used another tense. 

Past tense would make it slightly wistful, a serial murderer longing for his glory days (and a form of empathy that I would argue is much more disturbing), but with present tense, it makes the reader question the narrator’s detachment as well as their own. Why should we be so unaffected by such gruesome details? As Murphet puts it, “Bateman’s monologue can…be seen as a ‘corrective’ to literary escapism.” We are given a reality that exists, a reality where brands and pop culture and money are more important and more interesting than the victims that the powerful prey on.    

Some people say present tense gives immediacy to the writing, but as we can see above, that isn’t always the case. Often times, people think that the present has a greater sense of now. Yet the truth is it only does the opposite. Just think of how many bad novels begin with prologues told in present tense, while the rest of the book is written in past tense. We mistake in the moment with in media res, but all we end up doing is putting the reader to sleep. 

Future Tense

Future tense is the most ignored and undervalued of all our options. It is the conditional, the possible, the imagined, and wished for. It creates an effect that can only be achieved through itself. However, its examples in literature are few and far between, because, most likely, writers are either ignorant of its power or afraid of it. One of the tense’s rare masters was Carlos Fuetnes. 

In his novel, The Death of Artemio Cruz, Fuentes uses all the tenses and persons to capture the entirety of the human condition. In the following passage, notice how Fuentes uses future tense to soothe reader and convey an atmosphere of endless possibilities:

“You will close your eyes aware that the lids are not opaque, that though they are folded down, light still reaches your retinas, light of the sun that will remain framed in the open window at the height of your closed eyes that, being closed, blur all details of vision, altering shadow and color without eliminating vision itself; the same light of the brass penny that will spend itself toward the west. You will close your eyes and you will see again, but you will see only what your brain wants you to see: more than the world, yet less: you will close your eyes and the real world will no longer compete with the world of your imagination.”  

Notice that Fuentes uses repetition and winding, lengthy sentences to enhance that effect. We delight, as the protagonist delights, in the what may be: a discovery outside ourselves and inside ourselves. 

Future tense may not be sustainable at great lengths, but when dealing with the possible, it should be a choice closely considered. 

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And so concludes the first half of our discussion on point of view. Even though the tense we use may not seem important at first glance, it is nonetheless an important choice which decides the tenor of our fiction, something so invisible its power goes unnoticed. Next week, we will look at the potential points of view available to us and how and why we should use them. Until next time…. 

Character as a Vehicle for Empathy

In order to talk about character, we have to talk about why we read in the first place. It’s a good question. Why after some 2000 years are we still reading Homer? Who cares about Vergil and Ovid? Why go to the library to check out La Divina Comedia? Why study Shakespeare? They’re all long dead, but surely reputation and the bidding of schoolmarms and ancient professors has something to do with it. But what about more recent shit, like Tolstoy or Turgenev, Woolf or Wilder, Burroghs or Beckett, Morrison or McCarthy, Egan or Eggers? Most books, nowadays, have a Wikipedia page or an in-depth chapter-by-chapter synopsis on Sparknotes. If you want to know what happens, you’re only one google search away. And better yet, why do I keep re-reading Dubliners when I have shelves of unread novels in my bedroom? 

I can tell you it’s not because we need to know what happens next.

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A few years ago, I was having coffee with Bob Mooney, my thesis advisor and writing mentor. Bob is the kind of guy, who, even when you’re with him, seems somewhere else, and his heavy grey face and disheveled hair made that distractedness obvious from across the street. But Bob had learned from masters like John Gardner and had Sunday dinners with the people I had studied in college. (Once he told me he had to hang up because Jack Barth was coming over. Only after did I realize he was referring to John–fucking Sot-Weed Factor–Barth.) 

We bullshited for a while, little things about who had read my manuscript and what my writing process was like. It didn’t take long for him to get to what he had probably been thinking about since we agreed to meet. He wanted to know why my narrator had felt so bad for such a scumbag character.

I told him, “I always write about people I hate.”

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Until my sophomore year of college, I had never heard of Alex Jones. My boss at UPS thought he was the Second Coming. She said that he revealed the truth behind 9/11; I thought the truth had already been exposed in over 1000 pages by the 9/11 Commission. (I’m sorry, but I have to take a moment to comment on the stupidity of 9/11 Truthers. Really, what kind of cover-up could be that fucking massive? Who says, yeah, a bunch of people wrote a detailed report that’s pretty Goddamn authorative just to keep the sheep in the dark?) Needless to say, I went home and watched some of his documentaries out of curiosity, and after an hour of rambling, I knew he was crazy. But even though I thought he was manipulative and dangerous, I strangely felt bad for him too. I knew he believed every word he spoke, even if his evidence was filmsy and his points were illogical. He was passionate, whole-heartedly invested in his cause, and that was something I understood. 

I knew I wanted to be a writer back in high school when I was skipping pep rallies to write poetry and staying up late to watch movies and play video games but convinced I was going to be a physicist. It was only after I failed physics freshman year that I had the courage to admit it. So I felt bad for Alex Jones because I imagined what it would be like if everything I stood for turned out to be wrong. And the worst part: he’d never have a chance to see outside himself to know how deluded he is.

That’s what fiction is for: It’s an opportunity to doubt, to dream, to love, to feel through the eyes of another. The scholars might say it gives us insight into the human condition. I call it empathy. But how do you establish empathy through character?

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Joyce is a figure both revered and reviled in the literary world, and if you’ve had a chance to read him, it’s impossible not to form an opinion one way or the other. I fall into the former camp. 

His character and alter-ego, Stephen Dedalus, is probably his most well-known creation and serves as a model we should all aspire to. Stephen’s essence, his soul, is his ambition, his desire to become an artist–something he takes very seriously. He wants to be a great Irish poet, and it informs every aspect of his life. But just like Luke Skywalker or Odysessus, there are roadblocks that make his journey difficult. Stephen is torn between his ambition and his family, his country, and Catholicism. Of course, by the novel’s end (SPOILER!), he does what he needs to, but even if we didn’t take the time to read A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man, we would could see it in his name alone.

He is Stephen after St. Stephen, the first martyr who was stoned to death for blasphemy. This is, by no means, a mistake or happy accident. It suggests Stephen Dedalus’s own “martyrdom” and “blasphemy”: his sacrifice of his family, his suffering at the hands of the Church and Irish and English society, the “death” of his religious life, and his radical views on art and sexuality. His last name, Dedalus, is an obvious reference to the Greek mythological figure Daedalus, an innovator, a mature, skilled craftsman, an artist of the highest ambition. Stephen’s very name reflects who he is and tells his story. His growth as a character is established in two words.    

Of course, this is shown through his choices as well. Even though Stephen is a pussy who “wouldn’t bust a grape in a fruit fight” (that might be Jay-Z and not Joyce), when it comes to art, he does not back down. In chapter two, Heron asks Stephen who is the greatest poet, and Stephen replies, “Tennyson a poet! Why he’s only a rhymester…. Byron [is the greatest].” Stephen is so committed to his cause, he can’t even keep his mouth shut. He doesn’t care that everyone else thinks that Byron is “only a poet for uneducated people,” that he was “a heretic and immoral too.” He’s an artist, and he knows it. It’s only by the novel’s end that he gathers the courage to admit it to himself: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” His focus is singular and every moment in the novel demonstrates his movement towards the truth of who he is and his acceptance.

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A lot of people advise young writers to start with a list of attributes: name, age, height, occupation, what they ate for breakfast. If that kind of stuff can tell you who and what a person is, then the Census Bureau should be writing better stories than all of us. These things can’t be forced on a character: They are chosen by them. 

Philosophers like Aristotle believed that essence precedes existence, that the soul exists long before the physical body. Even though I agree with Sartre, that, I think, is where you need to start when writing characters: What kind of man or woman are they? Most people think of themselves as the hero of their own story. They are always trying to do the right thing. Sure, there are limits and compromises, but how far they’ll go and by what means is determined by the character’s soul, the heart of who they are. The writer’s job is to put them into situations which test it. 

A character’s essence must infect every part of their being, from head to toe. It may evolve and change and refine itself through struggle, but the core remains and determines their every choice, every success and every mistake. That’s what allows us to empathize with Nathan Zuckerman or Dr. Manhattan, not backstory and exposition and interior dialogue. Nobody cares where you’re from or what happened to you when you twelve years old. That’s all window dressing. It’s when those little details tell a story of your choices, when they serve as evidence of who you are: That’s what makes the reader turn the page.