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The Dangerous Idea of Your Story
This semester, I’m teaching an introduction to fiction writing class, the first time I’ve taught an intro class in four years. Thanks to the popularity of creative writing classes, several sections of intro to writing fiction (or poetry or nonfiction) are made available, and this keeps the classes small: my enrollment is limited to fifteen, which I’m very lucky to have – I’ve heard of creative writing classes with an enrollment as high as thirty-two students. Yikes.
After several weeks of discussion about craft and close readings of short stories and a series of increasingly bizarre short writing assignments, we’ve started workshopping stories. Before workshops began, I gave my students a handout, guidelines for both the writers and the readers. These guidelines explain how to approach giving and receiving criticism, manuscript handling and formatting, how long their written critiques should be (one page, single-spaced), and so forth.
As we closed in on the first day of workshop, several students would linger after class and ask to speak to me. They wanted to talk about their story. The story they haven’t written yet and the story I have not seen.
Usually, the question is about the plot, and whether or not this particular plot – which I’m only hearing about right then and there – will work. Now, at this point, there isn’t really much I can say. In the past, I have given restrictions. Once, I said simply “No guns.” Another time I suggested they avoid dramatic albeit often cliched situations, such as abortion. But over a couple of years of teaching fiction writing, I’ve found that this is unnecessary. Ultimately, the problems with stories that end in guns a-blazin’ are discussed in workshop by the students, not me, which does a better job of reinforcing the idea that violence needs careful and deliberate consideration than any finger-wagging that I can do. And, now, I can just give them the article that Ben Percy and Aaron Gwyn wrote in Poets and Writers this summer (sadly, this link doesn’t give you the article but if you haven’t read it, you should know it exists and find it).
How, though, to discuss an idea? Could it be a good idea? Sure. Could it be a bad idea? Sure. Asking me “Does that sound like a good idea?” is always going to get “Well, it could be a good story …” followed by several caveats, and that doesn’t seem like a very useful answer. Telling a student “Write the story and see what happens” is probably the best of bad advice I could give, but doesn’t leave me feeling like I’ve done a very good job.
Where does this anxiety about an idea come from? Thinking back to when I was an undergraduate, I don’t remember worrying so much about an idea. Mostly, I worried that my stories were boring. I worried that the emotions didn’t come out, that people wouldn’t get how much my characters (read: the author) are suffering. But I don’t remember fretting about whether the story ideas were good or bad.
My best guess is that new writers don’t trust their own experiences, and feel that if there is An Idea that holds it altogether, everything falls into place. From somewhere deep in my memories of Things Writers Told Me, there is this: to write fiction, we have all the experiences we need by the end of our childhood. It’s one of those phrases that if you think about it to hard, it seems false or incomplete (sex, marriage, divorce?), and if you don’t think about it too much, it seems true (all the emotions that come out in sex, marriage, and divorce). Of course, like any pithy one-liner, it’s a bit cute and simplistic. Easy to remember, though.
Perhaps, then, the worry my students have isn’t about the actual writing. It’s about themselves. It’s the fear that they aren’t good enough, that they don’t have anything to say through the story, that there isn’t anything unique or interesting about their own lives. And, this too, gets answered with a simple answer: When first starting out, every writer – under all that enthusiasm and late-night writing and wordplay and happiness at writing the climactic scene just perfectly – feels that he or she is not good enough to write. It doesn’t stop us from writing our stories.
Here’s the rub. The fear never goes away.
Really. Even the author with ten books has that gnawing anxiety that the next project can’t be tackled, that the scene doesn’t work, that the characters aren’t right. And, just like the beginning writer, that’s a fear of self, a fear that we aren’t smart enough or sensitive enough. Being a little bit afraid, always, is good. Being a little bit afraid creates risk. Literature that doesn’t take risks, whether they are emotional ones within the characters or experimentation in the form of the writing (or the thousands of other risks writing can take), isn’t literature. Writing that doesn’t take any risks is the kind of writing we very quickly forget about.
My class has several goals that are factored into their grade because, hey, it’s a class and grading needs a criteria. There are stories to read and stories to write, writing exercises, participation, criticism, and so forth. But I also remember that despite everything stated on the syllabus, my goal for my students is simple. Keep writing. That’s it. I say more than that on my syllabus, but in the end, that’s all I really want them to do. And that will always be a scary thing, no matter how far down the literary road my students travel. Don’t worry about ideas. Be scared. Be afraid. Because that fear is what gets every writer to take the risk of writing the story that will be read, admired, and remembered.
Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye
The Truth About Shopping For Groceries
I’ll say this for him: whatever we may think of Philip Roth, the dude can still make headlines. First there was the noise about the Man Booker International Prize when one of the three judges walked in disgust when Roth was awarded the prize. Then this: in an interview with Jan Dalley, the literary editor of The Financial Times, Roth, who writes books (mainly novels) for a living, said that he no longer reads fiction. In more detail, here are Roth’s comments on why:
“I’ve stopped reading fiction (Roth said). I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did.”
How so?
“I don’t know. I wised up …”
And with those three words he gave me a long look from those fierce eyes and then a significant glance at my notebook, as if to say: that’s what I want you to write down.
Not a very enlightening response from Roth, is it? You can, and should, read the whole interview with The Financial Times here. It’s a solid if unspectacular piece that is a polite interview with a subtext of admiration (it’s not quite as crazy as this GQ interview of Chris Evans, which is one of the more bizarre things I’ve read in a magazine recently, even for the celebrity profile genre, but hey, I digress). Roth’s claim to not read fiction anymore seems a bit calculated to me, and it might be worth remembering that this is an author who is smart, thoughtful, and has humor and wit in abundance. Still. The refutation of fiction has also been made by Cormac McCarthy, Will Self, Lev Raphael, and Karl Weber, to name just a few, and given how commonplace this type of response has become – “I don’t read fiction!” – it should give us pause.
In her article on this subject at Salon.com Laura Miller noted that some of this might come from, well, men of a certain age, that when people get older, they have less interest in introspection and that the vast majority of fiction isn’t about people in their eighties or nineties. Lev Raphael wrote that as he and his friends have grown older, they have developed a stronger interest in history and biography and stories that deal with broader sweeps of time. Essentially, both Raphael and Miller are saying that the anti-fiction reading comes from older adults who have simply moved beyond fiction, as if fiction is the sort of juvenile thing we will all eventually leave behind, like toys or security blankets or imaginary friends.
The common response to this has been, essentially, that real life is more interesting than fiction. And this response is foolish.
I assume that this comes from some idea that because the book is “real” or “nonfiction” or whatever it may be called, this somehow makes it better than fiction. This train of thought is misguided. All books are, in some sense, a construct. There are things (people, events, moments, dialog, etc.) that are left in, and there are things that taken out. Do any of these “I don’t read fiction” critics actually believe that everything in a biography is wholly true? The complete story? Books have beginnings, middles, and ends: something must always – always – be left out. It is more accurate to say that it is the best and most complete narrative that the author can construct (“blazingly honest subjective truth“?) in order to tell the story the best story the author can write.
Real life is filled with the mundane. Lots of not interesting things happen in real life. That’s why we make up stories. Or write other people’s “true” stories. There are plenty of day-to-day events that happen to us that are not worthy of a story; just being “real” or “true” isn’t good enough. Everyone goes to the grocery store, right?
What artists do is bend. We make our own realities and put them together in some kind of framework that makes it approachable, engaging, provocative, interesting, whatever word you want to use here. There is always a frame. How “real” is reality television? Not very, right? Sure, they are “real” people on screen, but does any viewer believe that what she or he is watching is genuine or authentic? And can’t the channel be flipped, your television turned off? How real is that? Once we start thinking about the layers of constraint and filtering and framing that must be done to any piece of entertainment – whether it is a reality television show, or a massive biography, or a painting, or a sculpture, or whatever other medium we could cite – the question of “is it real or not?” seems too reductive and simplistic.
This is not to get into a deep philosophical argument on what is real and what isn’t: my understanding of philosophy isn’t much more sophisticated than The Matrix. My concern is that too many of us are spitting out fiction (or whatever else we might reject: I’ve heard this claim about poetry, too) without really thinking through why we believe fiction isn’t worth our time. We demand what is “real” without actually giving any thought to what that means, and such bombastic statements are lazily destructive.
Good readers and good writers read widely. They don’t discount books because of what category they fall into. There are wonderful things to experience, regardless of genre, and we’d be foolish to dismiss entire categories of books wholesale. Let’s read (and think and feel) and embrace the possibilities. Openness is what allows artists and audiences to break barriers we didn’t even know existed in the first place. And why wouldn’t we want to be there when that happens?
Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.
Magic, and other innovations.
This past week I (finally) completed edits on the additional materials for two pieces that, although they were part of textBOX’s launch this past January, have very patiently been waiting for their extra pieces to join them online. To Cynthia Miller Coffel’s Editors’ Prize winning essay “Letters to David,” we have added an introduction, questions, writing prompts and a brief note from the author. As with all of the additional materials provided on the site, the goal is to enhance readers’ experiences, to illuminate a particular aspect of the text, or encourage consideration of some of the piece’s subtler elements.
Rural mailbox photograph by Mark McGee
In the note that accompanied the essay when it was first published in TMR, Coffel describes her motivation, saying, “I wanted, in my essay, to honor the generous impulse of my twenties—working to help all those poor people, trying to make our country better—and I also wanted to treat that impulse lightly, to admit that it was mixed up with arrogance and exuberance and naiveté. I also wanted to honor my friendship with the man I’ve called David. I think that kind of friendship is one you can only have at a certain point in your life.” Understanding the author’s intent can have a profound impact on a reader’s approach and while intent may not be everything, in this case Coffel’s explanation simply clarifies the tender, yet honest evaluation of her own past that is evident throughout “Letters to David.”
L. E. Miller’s short story “Kind,” is also about a woman reflecting on the life she led in her early twenties, although of course this story is fiction and its protagonist, Ann, a fictional character. In addition to adding our usual introduction, questions and writing prompts, I am pleased to announce that “Kind” is the first textBOX piece to be presented with a full audio version. Recorded along with the first-ever audiobook edition of TMR in early 2007, “Kind” is read by Mark Kelty and you can listen via the toolbox in the right sidebar of all the pages on which “Kind” and its additional materials appear.
There is a special kind of magic in listening to stories read aloud. More than once over the past decade I’ve found myself sitting in a parking lot, transfixed by PRI’s Selected Shorts, unable to complete whatever errand I intended to run until I’ve heard how the story ends. At AWP a few years back, I attended a Selected Shorts performance of B. D. Wong reading Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” and remember feeling as though the other thousand or so audience members simply weren’t there. It’s as if being read to can hold me perfectly in the present by reminding some part of my subconscious of the pleasure of being read to as a child.
(I admit this resembles my childhood not at all, but I like the photograph.)
Adding full audio versions of the stories, essays (and eventually poems – more on that soon, I promise) on textBOX has been something we’ve been thinking about for a while. This summer we are going to make it happen. “Kind” is just the first of many. William Harrison’s short story “Eleven Beds” has been recorded and will be edited soon, and our new team of anthology interns are already hard at work selecting which essays and stories will be next.
In the meantime, if reading “Letters to David” along with Cynthia Miller Coffel’s commentary, and listening to “Kind,” leave you wanting more, you can always listen to all of the pieces from The Missouri Review’s first audiobook issue (30.4, Winter 2007) here. Of course if you like that, you can always subscribe to our digital issue, which comes complete with a full audio version four times a year. And if that’s just not enough storytelling for you, maybe my favorite fiction podcasts (here, here, and here) can tide you over until we can get back down to the studio and start making more magic.
Nell McCabe is The Missouri Review’s Anthology Editor.
Australian for Books
I’m in Melbourne, Australia for a couple of weeks, and I’d intended to commemorate my trip with a blog post devoted to all the Australian books I’d been reading. Before coming here, I’d only knowingly read one contemporary Australian author—Tim Winton. So I went to the State Library of Victoria to get some ideas about who to read next. Right away I was struck by how many people were at the library; nearly every spot was taken in the reading rooms that I passed through, and even the stately central dome (equipped with fewer power outlets and an [observed!] ban on talking) was crowded. Signs prohibiting the saving of spots led me to understand that this is exam time at the universities. But something else may account for Australians’ love of the library: the outrageous price of books. Browsing through the library’s shelf of new releases, I’d decided to buy something by Chris Womersley
. Critics’ blurbs describe his work as Cormack McCarthy-meets-Amy Hempel; his second novel, Bereft (2010), is set in an Australian town called Flint (and it’s been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award). In every way, this sounded like the book for me. But then I looked at its price tag: $24.95 for a mass market paperback! With the conversion rate, that’s $26.14 American. I couldn’t strike a bargain by buying Womersley’s first book, either: The Low Road (2007), is available as a $32 trade paperback.
The issue of book prices apparently bedevils Australians as well as travelers; a search for “why are books so expensive in Australia?” turns up both conspiracy theories and more considered editorials. I decided seek answers to this question from booksellers themselves. I set out with some trepidation. Though I’ve had lovely conversations with Australians in casual situations—on the plane; in our seats at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies (that’s right: the sequel to Phantom of the Opera)—I have not felt nearly as comfortable in retail situations. I can’t for the life of me remember how to order a coffee (flat white? long black?). I have to examine nearly every coin in my wallet to determine whether any $1 or $2 pieces lurk among the lesser coinage. Even if the dollar were stronger, I couldn’t afford most of the things that draw me off the street and into Melbourne’s innumerable boutiques. And I suspect that shopkeepers know all of this as soon as they hear me speak. Even so: I needed answers.
Turns out everybody was happy to talk to me about this issue. The clerks at the used bookstore in my neighborhood said that Australian book prices are high because of import restrictions. Ostensibly meant to protect Australian writers, these restrictions instead create a closed market (explained more fully here). Thus the standard price for a new hardcover book is $49.99 Australian. But according to one of the clerks, Australian internet shopping has grown 100% in the last year; she predicted that this would force changes in the media market (CDs are also twice as expensive here as in the U.S.). The clerks sent me down the street to Readings, an independent bookshop with six locations in Melbourne, to ask about the high price of domestic books. There, the clerk who helped me find a copy of Womersley’s The Low Road reasoned that economy of scale accounts for book prices being so high: the market for books simply isn’t very big in Australia. He said often imported books often wind up being cheaper than domestic ones, even after factoring in the taxes involved.
Readings was busy on a Wednesday afternoon (much more so than the florescent-lit, echoing Borders across the street). There were also a lot of people working, and the young man who explained prices to me helped me navigate the Australian fiction section. He couldn’t offer any personal recommendations; it’s not what he reads. We didn’t get into the reasons why not. Unable to find Bereft on the internet at any cost, I bought both it and a collection of David Malouf stories. It’s probably for the best that I couldn’t afford to weigh down my suitcase with anything else. But if you’ve read other Australian writers, I’d love to hear about them in the comments section. A book costs only $15 or so at the used bookshop . . .
Stephanie Carpenter is a former TMR staff member and Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan-Flint.
Turn Out The Bright Lights
Originally, I planned on writing some sort of Monday morning essay about The Missouri Review’s 4th annual audio competition. Which is important and you should enter (really!). But all week, I’ve been chewing over ideas that are, I think, related to our auditory experiences, and wanted to write about something I experienced last week that actually has a link with our audio competition. Just maybe, this post will come together in some sort of cohesive way. Maybe.
Last week, Orr Street Studios, located here in downtown Columbia, hosted two readers for their (mostly) weekly art series, Seeing Visions/Hearing Voices. On the docket were my friends John Nieves and Amina Gautier. John is a doctoral student here at Mizzou, and his poems have appeared in a slew of places, including Redivider, Fugue, Adirondack Review, California Quarterly and Florida Review. Amina is the most recent winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award and her story collection, At-Risk, is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press in September. More than sixty of her stories have been published, appearing in Antioch Review, Best African American Fiction, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Pleiades and Southern Review. Amina’s work has been honored with scholarships and fellowships from places like the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference. Basically, it rocked.
(Which makes the fact that I was twenty minutes late even more embarrassing. I am always late to the Orr Street readings. I have no idea why. There was, however, plenty of time for Amina to flaunt the Lakers Game 7 win over the Celtics in my face. So I had that going for me).
Even stranger: Amina literally knocked the lights out. Twice.
Really! I think there was something goofy going on with the motion sensors or something, but yes, twice during her reading, Amina blew the lights out, something that she can proudly tell everyone for the rest of her life. Weirdly, if this had happened during the last scene of the story she read – “Been Meaning To Say”, which originally appeared in Southwest Review – it actually would have been appropriate (no, I won’t spoil it for you).
I would imagine that most of the readers of this blog have attended readings at least once, if not fairly frequently. One of the things that made the Orr Street reading wonderful was that I was listening to not just writers, but friends. Knowing how much effort Amina and John put into their work, how long it took them to get to this point with their poetry and stories, made the listening experience all the more delightful. A personal connection, a sense of intimacy with the writer’s process, the constant happiness creeping into your smile because you are witnessing the success of friends – their art out there in the world and expereinced live – made the reading all the more enjoyable.
Then there is the other thing: actually being a good reader. Amina and John delivered there, too.
What makes a good reading? Tough question. There’s actually much more to it than just the written word. I’m blown away by how frequently writers will stand up and not tell the audience “Hey, thanks for coming out tonight” or something simple like that. How often the reader will not notice the way the audience responds to the work. Haven’t you ever felt a reader lose his or her audience? The room gets too still; there’s an impatient politeness to the way we refuse to move or rustle; heads turn away, downward, minds on what to pick up from the grocery store on the way home. Even when I first started going to readings, I could sense when a reader lost the room. I figured this was rare: in fact, it’s far too common.
The poet Adrian Matejka was recently thinking about this, too: what about the etiquette of the public reading? Among other things kicked around was the poet beginning with reading a single poem by someone else; readers taking two minutes post-reading to be gracious and say hello to the strangers who come up and say thanks; and not hurrying off to the bar (and out the door) too quickly. What Adrian is curious about, I think, is the sense of the public reading not being such a one-way experience, but a collective experience of art and literature.
N+1 has famously blasted readings as incredibly boring. Sadly, I do partially agree: many readings are, in fact, quite mediocre. They certainly don’t have to be. Writers don’t know how else to promote ourselves, and the public reading seems to be a tradition that we just don’t think much about anymore: why do it, what is its purpose, and so forth. But I’m not ready to give up on them. A few years ago at Washington University, I heard Edward Jones read from his collection All Aunt Hagar’s Children. He seemed a shy man uncomfortable in public; his shoulders sloped and his eyes focused on the floor, saying very little when not behind a microphone. His reading? One of the fiercest and most visceral readings I have ever heard. He absolutely blew us away, metaphorically blew the lights out with this commanding, clear, beautiful voice that reverberated all the violence, tension, intrigue, and danger of the story he read. He took 45 minutes. He could have taken 45 days. No one in the audience would have minded at all.
Voices reveal. Voices reveal character, authority, confidence, charm, humor; voices give the story and the poems another element, an extra thing (joy? play?) that we go to public performances to experience. The best readers, the Aminas and Johns and Adrians of the literary world, know this. Even knowing it, when it works, when it really works, when the reading is that fantastic, we as readers – and listeners – are all the more grateful.
Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review
On The Recent Semester Teaching Creative Writing
I don’t know when I will teach fiction writing again. This is not by choice. I requested English 1510 this semester, was lucky enough to snag it, and was told even then to not expect to receive this course ever again. This is not about because of my ineptitude as a teacher (I hope) but because typically the managing editor teaches English 1000, a freshman composition class. I was told that I was given creative writing only because of how many people were on sabbatical and unavailable. Don’t expect to get again, they said. Well, then!
Since this might be it with teaching creative writing for a while, here are a few things I took away from my class this semester:
–I haven’t read Harry Potter and they haven’t read Moby Dick. Perhaps the one thing that can be guaranteed in a writing class is that the instructor has read more than the students (digression: some of you are thinking “Actually, I know that’s not true” and I’m nodding along glumly). When I was an undergraduate, I often felt embarrassed because my teachers all referred to novels and stories and poems that I had never heard of, and because of this, I not only missed crucial points of their lectures but also felt that I was unqualified to be in their class. Insecurity, and all that. This semester, I’ve usually found that talking about films is the best way of proving a point: there’s a better chance of my students having seen a particular film, and since films are generally narrative like novels and stories, an easy-to-understand analogy could often be drawn between movies and stories when I was trying to demonstrate a point about characterization, point of view, framing, dialogue, setting, and so forth.
In class, I’ve lamented the fact that we need movies to teach us about writing fiction, but perhaps seeing these links isn’t a bad thing at all. We make do with what we got—what good, really, does it do to expound on A Separate Peace or Revolutionary Road or Underworld if my students haven’t read those books?—and it also might, I hope, make us all realize that writing doesn’t live in a vacuum. We’re shaped and formed by our greater culture, not just pop culture, but film, music, painting, sculpture, dance, and the like.
–Be honest about what they write and what they read. This might seem obvious, but too often I’ve had and heard about creative writing teachers cheerleading more than teaching. Hey, if the work isn’t good, how does it benefit the student to think otherwise?
–Style and ideas worry students more than substance. Style is, of course, significantly easier to mimic than substance. Mimicking a minimalist story is pretty easy. Having a surprise ending is pretty straightforward—withhold one crucial bit of information until the last page. This is how we all learn, though, isn’t it? I used to copy Fitzgerald stories in order to learn how he made his sentences dance; I wrote an entire book in response to a Charles Baxter novel. It’s a terrific way to discover that one doesn’t really sound like anyone else: I sound like me, my students sound like themselves.
More than once this semester, a student said “I have an idea for a story! *insert idea here* Do you think that would work?” To which I always answered, “It could. You should write it and find out.” In time, I think they’ll learn that all the bells and whistles on the page can’t cover a story that wholly lacks an emotional core. Perhaps they too already knew it. By now, I hope they definitely know it.
–Grading stories helps. I’ve gone back and forth on this over the years, but I think that I’m generally on the side of putting grades on student stories. I hear you: how can you tell this story is a B+ rather than a C-? My first response to that question is: really? In conversation with every colleague about writing workshops, we know which students are the best writers. This does indicate that there is some criteria, however difficult it might be to articulate, as to why something is “better.”
Students at a university receive these things called grades, and grades, more than anything, get their attention. I wrote a criteria for story grades on my syllabus, explaining why grades are given on their work, and, no, an A story is not perfect or necessarily complete. Grading gives the students an understanding that those elements of fiction I lectured about way back in September are not suggestions, but things that must be considered seriously when constructing a story.
–Stories may not change, but I do. I used a mixture of stories each semester, combining stories I’ve read before and stories I haven’t. Fresh eyes, and fresh stories, are often beneficial to everyone. One good example is Dan Chaon’s “Big Me.” To be honest, I’ve always assigned it because it’s in the textbook and students seem to like it. I’ve always thought the story was competent, just not for me. But this time, for whatever reason, the story really hit me: the duality of the characters, the non-linear construction, the haunting of memory, the way Andy forgets large chunks of his past. What once struck me as pretty straightforward now seemed remarkably complex, tenuously but perfectly held together, sad and funny and strange all at once. None of this would have struck me if I hadn’t assigned it again.
There are others I’ve always thought were good for teaching but I’m not crazy about, and there are others that I adore that never seem to win over my students. And there is always at least one surprise story each semester that resonates with my students when I had expected they would dislike it. Which is always sorta fun to discover.
–Be generous. Two weeks ago, one of my first writing teachers, Melanie Rae Thon, was visiting MU, and I was asked to give the introduction to her reading. I thought of her teaching first, even before her books, since that’s how I first knew her. And what she gave us, always, was her time, her spirit, her belief that our work was worth reading. She was generous. This quality is not easy: there are too many constraints on our time, too many people and tasks pulling at us from all sides. To really be patient with a student’s story, to remember that the writer is still learning, can be easy to forget. Having a visit from one of the teachers who gently nudged me in the direction of the writing life was a nice reminder that beginning writers need, perhaps more than anything, an attentive reader and a pat on the back.
I hope I provided a little bit of both this semester.
Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye