Want more Doerr wisdom? Of course you do. Get it 24hrs a day, for seven straight days during the 2013 Tin House Writer’s Workshop. Apply now!

 

Benjamin Percy is the author of two novels, Red Moon (May 2013) and The Wilding (Graywolf Press, 2010), as well as two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh. He will be teaching at this year’s Summer Writer’s Workshop.

“Something is funny, most of all, because it’s true, and because the velocity of insight into this truth exceeds our normal standards. Something is funny because it’s outside our accepted boundary of decorum. Something is funny because it defies our expectations. Something is funny because it offers a temporary reprieve from the hardship of seeing the world as it actually is. Something is funny because it is able to suggest gently that even the worst of our circumstances and sins is subject to eventual mercy.” – Steve Almond, “Funny Is the New Deep” (From The Writer’s Notebook II)

 

Steve Almond is the author of ten books of fiction and non-fiction, three of which he published himself. Get the full bio and CV. If you have a question, ask away.

 

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“In all storytelling, no matter how nonlinear or diffuse the narrative might be, no matter how whimsical the pacing is, some kind of time bomb should always be ticking toward zero.”

-Anthony Doerr, “The Sword of of Damocles” (Writer’s Notebook II)

“Let’s suppose a philosopher who after having published several works declares in a new book: ‘Up to now I was going in the wrong direction. I am going to begin all over. I think now that I was wrong.’ No one would take him seriously anymore. And yet he would then be giving proof that he is worthy of thought.”- Albert Camus, Notebooks 1945-1951

Camus died 53 years ago today in an automobile accident.

People can disagree, and have, over whether a novel or a story must itself have a “purpose” apart from being beautiful. But it seems to me inarguable that the parts of a novel or a story must have a purpose within the whole. These days, when I find that a sentence I’m writing isn’t working, I don’t think about what I want that sentence to look like or to be; I don’t pull it from the page to weigh it in my hand; I don’t worry over its internal balance. I simply ask myself, “What do I need this sentence to do?” I ask myself what role the sentence plays in its paragraph, what role the paragraph plays in its scene, the scene in its story. If I can’t answer these questions, even in some inarticulate and intuitive way, then I’ve got a problem, and that problem is bigger than this one sentence.

If this bit of hard-won knowledge sounds fairly obvious, I can only say in my defense that nothing about the academic creative writing complex as I experienced it encourages this attitude. The problem goes as deep as the very name of the discipline. I suspect that the perpetual debate about whether “creative writing” can be taught would cease if we just had a moratorium on that unfortunate moniker. No good teacher thinks that creativity can be taught; no good teacher doubts that writing—in the sense of a set of tools with which a writer can tackle literary problems—can be. Yet how often are beginning writing students who are not yet up to putting together an entire story placed in front of an object and asked to describe it in writing, in the way that students of painting and drawing are asked to render still lifes or the human form? Instead, they are simply told to write something that is in turn given to other students who are asked to judge it without any reference to what the piece of writing is supposed to be doing, what part it might play in a larger whole. The result, I suspect, is lots of students doing as I did, tirelessly perfecting sentences that serve no purpose, forever chasing the fair without ever considering the fit.

My own experience as a teacher has been that students are initially resistant to writing exercises, which they see as an infringement upon their self-expression. They are likely to be impatient if you suggest that these exercises will actually give them the tools necessary for self-expression, let alone that great writing might not even have that much to do with self-expression, in the end. But if you push them on it, if you set them to specific tasks, they will see improvement almost immediately and thus be encouraged to persist. I have had students admit to a great feeling of relief at being given an assignment at which they could succeed because even though they were certain that they wanted to write, they didn’t yet know what they wanted to write, and learning both the how and the what of writing at once is an overwhelming task.

There is another way that creative writing workshops at almost every level contradict the functional view I’m proposing. In most creative writing workshops, you will be encouraged to write short stories, even if your ambition is simply to write novels. (Once you’ve “graduated” from workshops, of course, you will be encouraged to write novels, even if your ambition is simply to write short stories, but this is another matter.) The idea is that stories are easier in some way, if not to write, then to discuss in class. But if it’s true that sentences and paragraphs need to be judged as parts of a whole, then it follows that the sentences and paragraphs of a short story—which is quite obviously a dramatically different form from the novel—need to be judged on different terms than the sentences and paragraphs of a novel. Treating short story writing as preparation for novel writing suggests that a good sentence is a good sentence, irrespective of its fitness to a particular task.

Here is what I’m not saying: I’m not saying that writing ought to be transparent, that language that draws attention to itself is an extravagance. I’m certainly not saying that a novelist must have a “purely informative style.” Nor am I saying that style should be of only secondary concern. In fact, I still more or less think that style is everything. But style, as Proust said, is just a way of looking at the world. It emerges from the effort to express something other than itself. You don’t develop a style by writing sentences that have no purpose other than to be stylish, sentences that seek to be self-contained works of art.

Admittedly, some truly great novelists, like Joyce and Flaubert and Nabokov, went a long way with the belief that every sentence should be a work of art. To this observation I have two responses. First, if you have the talent of Joyce or Flaubert or Nabokov, you should immediately cease listening to anything I have to say about writing. But second, if we’re being honest, even Joyce and Flaubert and Nabokov were in their ways harmed by this belief, achieved what they did more in spite of than because of it, and did their worst work when they were most committed to that aim.

Finally, the advice to make your sentences do something doesn’t rest on a particular attitude about the function of literature. It applies equally to traditionalists and experimentalists, to realists and to metafictionists. In a way, it doesn’t matter what you ask your sentences to do, as long as you ask them to do something. But my own experience has taught me that sentences have the best chance to fit their purpose elegantly when the work they’re being asked to do is fairly modest.

CHRISTOPHER R. BEHA is an associate editor at Harper’s Magazine. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, The Believer, Bookforum, and elsewhere. He is the author of a memoir, The Whole Five Feet, and the co-editor, with Joyce Carol Oates, of the Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction. His first novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, was published in the 2012 by Tin House Books.

You can purchase The Writer’s Notebook II here.

III. FOLLOW YOUR YELLOW-BRICK ROAD TO A CONSISTENT, RULE-GOVERNED DREAM WORLD

One lesson that I have to relearn continually is that writing fiction set in an alternate reality doesn’t mean you get a free pass to do any crazy thing you want. If you’re going to try a Kansas: Oz shuffle, a radical “rearrangement of nature,” you have some additional responsibilities to the reader. Namely, that you don’t get tripped out on your godlike power (or more likely just exhausted and forgetful) and violate the parameters of the world that you’ve created.

Many of my early stories failed to create a consistent, rule-governed world, an Oz of sturdy emerald construction. They took place in frictionless worlds where I myself felt like a tourist with only a shallow sense of the laws and customs, places where anything was possible and there was no discernible center of gravity. I kept changing the rules as I was going, so the stakes were nonexistent—it was a world that wasn’t governed, that wasn’t consistent, so nothing was at stake. It wasn’t a world of consequences, so readers didn’t care what happened.

As difficult as it is to get a reader to suspend disbelief, it’s even harder to keep his or her disbelief lofted over the course of a story or novel as it progresses. In the same way that you can break a reader’s heart by playing fast and loose with the rules of your Oz, you can also fail a reader by getting sloppy on the Kansas details. Here’s my own embarrassing cautionary tale: I recently got proofs back for my first novel, Swamplandia! . In one chapter, Ava, the female protagonist, hatches out of a glowing red alligator in a reptile incubator in the Florida swamp. A few pages later, I had written that she falls out of “a forty-foot tree.” The copy editor gave me a pass on the red dragon, but that forty-foot-tall tree was circled three times. She’d attacked it with editorial lightning bolts. Her note read: “Is this a joke, or a mistake?”

So the red dragon was okay, but I had to do a panicked, humiliated revision to the forty-foot tree.

I think this is a good lesson about the danger of imprecise details. Somehow, a mutant, strawberry-red lizard was more plausible in the world I’d created than a child’s forty-foot fall. Why? My guess is that a reader’s belief in the red alligator is predicated on Ava’s own reaction to it—she finds the gator “miraculous,” just as we might, but she goes on to assure us that it is real; it needs food and water like any hatchling gator; in other words, it obeys certain natural laws we recognize. Its blinking eyes and scales are described by Ava in the same straightforward register she would use to describe an ice cream cone or her sister’s hair color. To Ava, and hopefully to the generous reader, the red alligator is a strange-yet-true entity. In contrast, when Ava falls out of that “forty-foot” tree, she doesn’t call her survival “miraculous,” doesn’t check for a broken femur or anything; she just dusts off her swamp culottes and continues rambling on about her sister. That concrete detail, “forty-foot,” was my own lazy mistake. So, because I had not earlier indicated that Ava had an adamantine skeleton, and because gravity still seems to operate in the Florida swamps of this novel exactly as it does for us tumblers out here in the “real” world, readers were guaranteed to be confused and distracted by my Kansas detail gone awry. The copy editor’s faith in Ava’s narration, and in the entire cosmos of the novel, was rattled.

This is what I mean by “a consistent, rule-governed world.” In the kind of Kansas:Oz ratio I’d set up in Swamplandia!, no way should a kid fall a fatal distance, get up, and walk away like a cat on its ninth life. There should be a serious consequence (911, broken bones) or, at any rate, some kind of acknowledgement within the text of the story that a law has just been violated. When my characters weren’t jarred by a forty-foot fall, my readers were.

IV. THE INTERIOR WORLD OF OZ

I’ve spent a lot of time discussing “the concrete detail” and its ability to pin down the reality of both Kansas and Oz for a reader. I would add that a person writing a fantasy must also be strictly attentive to emotional detail. As I mentioned above, I missed the boat on a concrete detail, flubbing the realistic height of a tree; but just as crucially, I also failed to give Ava a credible human reaction to her fall. You need concrete detail to establish the bricks-and-mortar reality of your alternate world: its fauna and truck stops and weather. But equally vital, I think, is the convincing emotional detail. Characters must have convincingly human reactions to their world for it to feel real.

Sometimes the details that fully convince me of a twilight zone aren’t descriptions of the setting itself, per se; they are details that reveal the private, emotional worlds of the characters who occupy it. In Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead, millions have been killed by a lethal virus unleashed by the Coca-Cola Company. (And there’s a Kansas detail for you–Coca-Cola–to confirm the fictive, apocalyptic plague!) All of the newly dead are reincarnated in a purgatorial zone they call “The City,” which looks a little like Main Street U.S.A., where they continue to exist as long as someone alive on earth still remembers them. A brilliant, wild premise that becomes absolutely plausible as soon as you hear “eyewitness testimony” from credible sources like the character Jeremy Fallon: “Jeremy Fallon, sixteen, and from Park Falls, Wisconsin”—those are some pretty Kansas details, right?—“said that the fighting hadn’t spread in from the coasts yet, but that the germs had, and he was living proof. Or not living maybe, but still proof, he corrected himself.”

You can just see this kid’s shit-eating grin, his wry self-correction. Hear that teenager’s desire to charm, which, against the backdrop of his recent suffering, becomes all the more poignant:

The bad guys used to be Pakistan, and then they were Argentina and Turkey, and after that he had lost track. “What do you want me to tell you?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders. “Mostly I just miss my girlfriend.” Her name was Tracey Tipton, and she did this thing with his earlobes and the notched edge of her front teeth that made his entire body go taut and buzz like a guitar string.

In that tiny capsule, I think you can really see the Kansas:Oz ratio: you’ve got Park Falls, Wisconsin; you’ve got some sort of murky, apocalyptic plague that has driven these souls into the City; and you also have Jeremy’s shrug, his mock-casual affect and sincere confession of longing. These details strike me as exactly the way a sixteen-year-old boy from Park Falls, Wisconsin, would react to finding himself in an afterlife. Why should things make more sense in the afterlife, why should any of our questions get answered there? How can we even approach, in language, a loss so violent and extreme as the loss of everything? Against the scale of a global apocalypse, everything he misses, everything he’s lost, condenses to this tiniest of gestures of his girlfriend’s, a nibble on his earlobe. It’s a heartbreaking, human detail, and one that makes me immediately willing to believe in the plague and this city of the dead.

Another example in which concrete and figurative details combine to nail down a fictional world occurs in Kelly Link’s story “The Specialist’s Hat,” in which Link stages a tale about childhood grief in a possibly haunted mansion called Eight Chimneys:

Eight Chimneys has exactly one hundred windows, all still with the original wavery panes of handblown glass. With so many windows, Samantha thinks, Eight Chimneys should always be full of light, but instead the trees press close against the house, so that the rooms on the first and second story—even the third-story rooms—are green and dim, as if Samantha and Claire are living underneath the sea. This is the light that makes the tourists into ghosts.

These two sisters, Samantha and Claire, have recently lost their mother. In the description above, Link skillfully blends concrete details about the house itself, such as the number of windows and the “handblown” glass, with the girls’ subjective experience of these “green and dim” rooms. We get a powerful sense of their isolation and their grief. During the day, we learn, Eight Chimneys is a tourist attraction: “The house is open to the public, and . . . people—families—driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway will stop to tour the grounds.” But these cheerful visitors from the “real” world, far from making the rooms of Eight Chimneys any less mysterious, enhance our sense of the kids’ seclusion. They really are just tourists, mere interlopers through the ghostly fog of the twins’ grief. Our feeling for the girls’ bereavement and isolation and the claustrophobia of Eight Chimneys (and of the private world of childhood more generally) is enhanced, not diminished, by Link’s deft mention of the Blue Ridge Parkway. While family sedans go whizzing past on the highway, here is a stagnant pocket, a twilight zone. “The light that makes the tourists into ghosts” makes the sisters’ grief palpable—it’s a literal detail about the actual light in Eight Chimneys, as well as a powerful evocation of these two characters’ haunted interiors.

Strict attention must be paid to your characters’ inner lives. It’s the characters’ responses to their environment that will ultimately make their setting real for your readers. No matter how foreign or strange your imaginary world may initially appear, if your characters move through it in ways that feel “realistic”—if your characters’ speech and behavior and moods and terrors ring true to what we know about their personalities and basic human nature—then your readers are far more likely to accept the place on its own terms. Through each character’s reactions to his or her setting, important boundaries are erected—what’s normal and what’s abnormal in this alternate zone? Possible/impossible? Cheering or heartbreaking? Where does the danger reside? What is there to fear in a Narnia or a Macondo? This is how consequence gets established. “Raise the stakes,” young writers frequently hear in workshops; in the case of an altered universe, I think this advice is particularly important. What do readers want? A world with pleasures and dangers that mirror our own, “so real that it is fantastic.” Characters with something to gain or lose. Permission to care.

Karen Russell is the author of the short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, as well as the novel Swamplandia!. Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue and on The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. She is currently writer-in-residence at Bard College. Her latest short story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, will be published in February. 

An excerpt from “Don’t Write What You Know,” which appears in The Writer’s Notebook II, a forthcoming collection of craft essays from Tin House Books.

The facts are these: I was born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, the part of the country where most every word of fiction I’ve published takes place. I grew up around horses and hurricanes; my father worried about money, occasionally moonlighted to pay the bills, and died young; my mother smoked and paid mightily for it. If you read Corpus Christi: Stories, you’ll undoubtedly recognize elements from my life; however, very few of the experiences in the book are my own. In early versions of some stories, my impulse was to try to record how certain events in my life had played out, but by the third draft, I was prohibitively bored. I knew how, in real life, the stories ended, and I had a pretty firm idea of what they “meant,” so the story could not surprise me or provide an opportunity for wonder. I was writing to explain, not to discover. The writing process was as exciting as completing a crossword puzzle I’d already solved. So I changed my approach.

Instead of thinking of my experiences as structures I wanted to erect in fiction, I started conceiving of them as the scaffolding that would be torn down once the work was complete. I took small details from my life to evoke a place and the people who inhabit it, but those details served only to illuminate my imagination. Previously, I’d forced my fiction to conform to the contours of my life; now I sought out any and every point where a plot could be rerouted from what I’d known. The shift was seismic. My confidence waned, but my curiosity sprawled. I had been writing fiction, to paraphrase William Trevor, not to express myself, but to escape myself. When I recall those stories now, the flashes of autobiography remind me of stars staking a constellation. Individually, the stars are unimportant; only when they map shapes in the darkness, shapes born of imagination, do we understand their light.

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally acclaimed Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World: His work appears in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The Oxford American, and Tin House, and in anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories, The Puschart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, The Best American Sports Writing, and New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best.

Beginning with dialogue is one of the most difficult ways to open a story successfully. The dialogue must be compelling enough to draw the reader in before he or she knows anything about the character(s) speaking or the context in which the dialogue is taking place. There exists the danger that the dialogue will feel disembodied or separate from what follows.

Difficult, but not impossible, as Salman Rushdie demonstrates in The Satanic Verses, which opens with this line of dialogue: “’To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die.’” And Katherine Dunn in Geek Love: “’When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,’ Papa would say, ‘she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.”

Why do these openings work? First the speakers—Gibreel Farishta and Papa—are identified by name. In this way, the reader is introduced to the character who is speaking, which prevents that disembodied feeling. But perhaps even more importantly, what they are saying and how they say it draws the reader in immediately. With The Satanic Verses, we wonder if the speaker is dead. And we are given the wonderful added detail that Gibreel is tumbling from heaven. Papa’s dialogue is strange and charming at the same time. Mama was a geek? The nipping off of noggins? Hens yearned toward her? Both of these beginnings make the reader want to find out what will happen next.

Ann Hood is the author of the novels The Red Thread, and, The Knitting Circle, as well as the memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and chosen as one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, The Paris Review, Glimmer Train and many other publications.

“You can’t really succeed with a novel anyway; they’re too big. It’s like city planning. You can’t plan a perfect city because there’s too much going on that you can’t take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.” -Gore Vidal

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