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 

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

“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.

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.

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.

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

Recently, I’ve wondered if this advice (and if I’m feeling really verbose today, maybe I’ll take a crack at other workshop truisms as well…) has been taken to an extreme. In a recent first draft I’m working on, I used the word “lemminged” to describe how two characters snaked around grocery store aisles. Just writing the made-up word “lemminged” made me shake my head with a “Really, Michael?” smile on my face, but I went with my first-draft philosophy of leaving it in and fixing it later. Also, I’ve lately been hyper-conscious of verbs that seem a little too … flashy? … in the submissions The Missouri Review receives. A specific example doesn’t spring to mind, but I can sometimes sense a writer working really hard to make the story’s verbs more and more thrilling. The idea seems correct to me, but the result feels like too much flash and not enough substance.

(Digression: my favorite of these verbs is “undestroyed.” It’s how William Maxwell ended his brilliant novel, a favorite of mine, So Long, See You Tomorrow. It’s Maxwell’s word. When I see it, I know the writer is familar with Maxwell. This is not a bad thing, at all, just a wink and a nod I feel like sharing).

A few semesters ago, I was teaching an advanced fiction writing class, and assigned “The Man Who Knew Belle Starr” by Richard Bausch. Our discussion was going just fine, and one of my sharpest students raised his hand, and pointed to this line:

He was a bad character.

“It’s so boring,” my student said. “Why did he write that?”

What my student saw, I think, was the verb. Not much there. Nor, he probably thought, is there much to the adjective “bad” either. All fair points, and I was happy that one of my students was taking the “to be” editorial advice to heart.

But sentences rarely stand alone. Let’s ignore the rest of Bausch’s sentence for a moment (Or not: “bad character” – who thinks of himself this way? Doesn’t this seem like a petulant, foolish, lost man? And doesn’t that simple phrasing reveal quite a bit about Mcrae to the reader, and isn’t it interesting that Mcrae lacks this awareness? And doesn’t this lack of awareness get him, momentarily, in quite a bit of trouble? And, yeah, I’m getting this all from one sentence and there is actually quite a bit more that could be discussed.) and think about sentences. They do not stand alone. This may seem like an obvious point, but sentences work together to make paragraphs, and paragraphs work together to make narratives, and narratives make stories. The toe bone is connected to the foot bone is connected to the knee bone, and so forth.

The idea that he is a “bad character” lingers in the reader’s mind as more of Mcrae’s history is revealed: his time in the Air Force, his dying father, his time in Leavenworth, and the realization that when he meets Belle Starr “he had started to feel like a happy man.” It’s difficult to not have developed a sense of hopefulness for this “bad character” by the time happiness has begun to creep into his life. One of the reasons this quality remains with the reader is because Bausch established Mcrae’s “bad character” with a sentence that was clear and direct.

The directness of a good “to be” sentence is partially one of style: Richard Bausch works this way, another terrific writer might not. If there is something to be told, something best given to the reader immediately, well then, a writer like Bausch will do that. And if one of those brilliant verbs helps to create the compound-complex, multiple clause sentence that takes a reader’s breath away, then that’s the word to use.

Every sentence doesn’t have to be DEFCON 1. Every sentence, though, does have a purpose. And sometimes, what tips us to a skilled writer’s language isn’t immediately obvious. It’s the way the reader has been setup for what’s coming next. It’s confidence in being forthright with prose. This confidence will catch our attention every time.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review

During a recent round of friendly drinks here in downtown Columbia, a friend of mine was lamenting the fact that he didn’t finish college. Or, more accurately, he was upset about the way he is labeled and stereotyped by some people. This is the way he is identified: he is seen as a person that didn’t graduate from college. A dropout, a restless soul, indecisive, or some other dismissive way of viewing his life.

I said, that goes away. Once you get a little bit older, no one really cares how much education you have. Many people I know work in fields that have nothing to do with their college degree. Instead, when I meet someone for the first time, I eventually ask “What do you do?”

What someone does for a living is not, of course, the end all and be all of a person’s character. You don’t get into all the good stuff that makes a person unique in the first five minutes of a conversation (unless you’re talking with one of those people who asks far too personal questions the moment they meet you, but those people freak me out so why talk to them?). Asking about a job is polite. And, a person’s work can be quite revealing.

When you think about it, most of us spend a large chunk of our day working. Five days a week – and more for many of us (or less days but longer hours) – we go somewhere and work. Characters in most novels have jobs, but literature actually about work is not commonplace, though some examples like Joshua Ferris and Ed Park spring to mind. And yet, a large number of stories I’ve recently read coming into TMR make more than just a passing reference to the protagonist’s job, often in a way that seems to be ill-considered. The number one job for protagonists in these not-quite-fully-imagined stories is teacher. Specifically, English teacher at a university.

A quick glance through our archives or work published in many other good literary journals will show that we’ve published plenty of stories and essays about being a teacher. Giving a character such a job doesn’t inherently make the story bad. On the other hand, seeing lines like “Carol’s morning survey class was full of sleepy freshman” makes me stop every single time.

A few years ago, when I was still working at River Styx, we received a ton of stories about the Lazarus. Not the department store or some sort of symbolic narrative (though, this too, would be odd), but stories about the actual Lazarus. Not tons, ultimately – eight or nine at the most – but it came up so frequently that I wondered if I had missed a contemporary literary trend in ironic response to the recycled popularity of vampires and zombies.

These trends come and go; Lazarus didn’t come back the next year (sorry – couldn’t help it). But I still read enough manuscripts that certain choices writers made began to seem very familiar. And the number of stories with a main character working (unhappily, always) as a university English teacher seems to be increasing.

So too does my resistance to these stories.

Usually the professor-protagonist is bitter about his/her indifference to the job, and these are moments that are, I suppose, intended to be something the reader can relate to. I tend to roll my eyes. Everything here becomes familiar, banal, dull. The protagonist becomes paper-thin. A teaching job never makes the protagonist any richer, deeper. It seems to be a default, as if there is no other job that the writer can think of. Rarely do these classroom scenes or lonely office hours of grading bad essays have any true relevance in the story: it simply reinforces the idea that the character is unhappy, which the reader knew from the moment the protagonist’s job was told.

So the protagonist remains flat, lacking depth or complexity, and becoming a type, a wholly expected and overdone cliché. The assumption, it seems, is that this job is universally known to be miserable and unpromising. It is, then, exactly what the reader expects. No surprise or tension here: personally, I stop actively reading and struggle to not skim. This is a terrible feeling, one that I try to resist. But I’ve yet to come across a recent submission with the professor-protagonist that doesn’t make me cringe.

Here’s a leap. Hemingway’s story “Hills Like White Elephants” is many things: perfection of his minimalist style; an example of excellent dialogue; a snapshot of two people that reveals their entire lifetime; imagery that resonates in its depth and emotion; and of course, being a “teachable” story that often requires an explanation that the young couple is talking about an abortion. But the story’s staying power is in its tragedy: it’s a story about not being able to see the world in metaphor, a story about the crushing of a woman’s imagination.

The failure of imagination should deeply trouble all of us. Looking around the world, seeing the news, it’s hard not to feel as if the dullness of celebrity culture and fame has permeated all aspects of our lives. Lazy mimicry is the default mode not just for political discourse, but in our art as well. In fiction, something feels missing to me in the story of a professor-protagonist: a lack of insight, maturity, feeling, inspiration, I don’t know, something. Usually, as in most things in these stories that don’t quite work, there are still characters, moments, sentences, perhaps even just a clause, that are so striking and so good that I can’t imagine why the author defaulted to such a one-dimensional character like the professor-protagonist. There is something optimistic about creating art, writing stories. So the apparent laziness puzzles me to no end.

I’m sure that not every story needs to get into the protagonist’s job; in fact, I’m positive that isn’t the case. So when employment comes up, I expect it to do quite a bit. In fiction, an architect and a zoologist aren’t the same character; neither are the names Kathryn, Katherine, Kathy, or Kate. Small choices matter tremendously. Simple statements of a job – white collar, blue collar, corporate attorney, truck driver, auto mechanic, house painter, and so on – have meaning. There are no simple statements. There can be no missteps. The professor-protagonist often gets “proven” in these stories with characters and scenes that are so familiar and unimaginative that they become wholly meaningless.

This is not to say that it can’t be done, that the professor-protagonist might have a compelling story. My good friend, the poet Richard Newman, was in a classroom, being told a series of Do’s and Don’ts about writing. He wrote his poem “The Briefcase of Sorrow” (later anthologized in the Best American Poetry series) after coming across this quote from Frances Mayes:

Some writers get into the habit of letting of name a metaphor without really showing the image to the reader: sea of life, mattress of the soul, river of death … or (perhaps worst of all) briefcase of sorrow.

So, I’m playing the curmudgeon role here: no more professor-protagonist stories! Or maybe I’m asking aloud (sorta) for something else: a new, imaginative look at the professor-protagonist. Either way, readers and writers will resist any sort of Do and Don’t list from me. Which, in one way or the other, is exactly what we’re looking for in great fiction.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review

In honor of National Novel Writing Month, we are actually reading novels!  Okay, snarkiness aside, novels are on the brain right now.  I recently finished reading Jonathan Franzen’s new novel – maybe you heard of it somewhere – and started reading an older book called The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley.  Hartley’s novel is okay; it’s one of those reissued doohickeys from the New York Review of Books Classics and I want to like it more than I do because it is touching on some thematic elements that I’m working on with my own writing.  But for whatever reason, I haven’t really been able to stay with the book, and I’ve been “reading” it for five weeks.

Which isn’t really true: I don’t think I’ve cracked the pages open in close to ten days.  When I pick it up, I’m pretty clear on where I am and what’s going on and all that, but whatever momentum I feel for the book is lost.  Is the book failing, or am I failing as a reader?

Two thoughts jump starting this one.  Here goes.  The first is from Alexander Chee, paraphrased by TMR pal Karen Gentry:

If you read in a fragmented way–3 or 4 books at any one time–then you’ll likely write that way too–fragmented. He wasn’t knocking fragmented writing, just pointing it out. That got me thinking.

It got me thinking too and I’ve been trying ever since to read less fragmented.  As Karen pointed out, fragmented reading isn’t good or bad inherently.  But if I even stick with one novel at home, what about all the reading I do throughout the day?

Thought number two is courtesy of Philip Roth.  You might have heard of him.  He’s kind of a big deal.  From his video interview with The Daily Beast:

To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by — it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities.

Roth’s point on concentrating is an interesting one.  The best readers I know (whatever that means) read prolifically and attentively, and I’ve always thought that was difficult to do: how can a person rush thorough a book like that?  But I wonder if it isn’t being rushed so much as it’s being completely immersed.  That’s happened to me recently: while Franzen’s book was one I picked up and put down over the course of a month, I recently read Inman Major’s novel “The Millionaires” in about four days.  Couldn’t put it down, as the kids say.

Is this the responsibility of the author?  Or of me as the reader?

As with most things, of course, it isn’t as clean cut, as black and white, good or bad, as the either/or choice makes it seem.  Some books pull me in and others don’t.

This weekend, I posted up at Coffee Zone, a spot in downtown CoMo that has a Turkish café vibe, with the sad exception of the massive flat screen TV in the back.  I took a table underneath the screen so I couldn’t look up and be bombarded with Headline News, and started reading The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist, a Swedish writer that I had truthfully never heard of.  The book had been on my shelf for a long time – I’m actually not quite sure where I got the book from; I have no memory of buying it – and for whatever reason, I was in the mood for something dystopian.  In the novel, women over the age of 50 and men over the age of 60—single, childless, and not working in progressive industries—are transferred to so-called reserve bank units where they live in complete physical comfort, while giving up their bodies and minds to drug experimentation and organ donation, until they are no long needed.  They are “disposable.”  It’s a chilling novel, and the prose has this subtle elegance of controlled terror all throughout the narrative, a constant sense of unease with the world Dorrit, our narrator, perceives.

I read about 100 pages on Saturday.  I didn’t blow through it.  I didn’t rush.  I had my bottomless cup of coffee, and time, and when I looked up, I could see out the windows of the café and watch the world darken from a bright gray afternoon to night.  This wasn’t effortless.  Ignoring the television, the café noise (strangely, it’s often harder for me to concentrate in the quiet of home), not bringing a computer or listening to music, shutting down my brain’s efforts to think about all the other things that take up my mental energy: this is taxing, something that has gotten harder and harder to do, as previously noted here and here.

Reading can be a pleasure; getting into reading is, actually, quite hard, and seems to get harder every year.  Despite the ease with which we can follow a link and bounce in and out of a webpage, I actually find it very difficult to give up on a book, even ones I don’t like.  I can do it; there are books I’ve been so disgusted with that I’ve literally thrown them across the room (you should do this at least once: it’s actually quite fun!) but for the most part, I plod through a book I’m lukewarm on, refusing to quite, sympathizing with the author, that poor soul, and knuckle down to figure out what I’m missing from the book, what’s going on here that I should absolute pay more attention to, should understand.

I accept that there is a heavy responsibility on my part to be an attentive reader.  On the flipside, as a writer, I know that there is also a responsibility to engage that reader, whoever he or she is, and hold their attention.  This is might be more important than ever.  A common complaint about contemporary literature is that the first chapter, sometimes the first 100 pages, are so incredibly good, but the rest of the book is remarkably mediocre, if not outright bad.  And the reasons why are probably pretty easy to tag: workshops that address twenty pages at a time; mailing the first pages to agents; viewing the book as part of a platform for a brand; and probably others that I’m not particularly interested in exhausting here.

What I am interested in is the books that do hold me, and why that is the case.  Here are some of the books that engaged me this year: The Privileges by Jonathan Dee, The Millionaires by Inman Majors, The Report by Jessica Kane, Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett, A Separate Peace by John Knowles (as I discussed here), and, of course, The Unit.  Is there something these books have in common?

The best that I can come up with – and this isn’t going to be very good – is that in their first chapters, good novels posit a question, or a series of questions, and then spend the rest of the book trying to figure that question out.  This isn’t anything about plot or character or prose; then again, who’s to say this isn’t entirely about an interesting character or an intricate plot?  Whatever it is, the author is generally interested in exploring something, whatever that something is, and, weirdly, isn’t really interested in answering the question so much as exploring the question.  What is evil?  What is memory?  Why, and how, is our culture bankrupt?  Why, despite all the reasons we have not to, do we love and trust others?

Just maybe that last question is closer to the answer than I realize: a relationship that is based on choice.  One might argue we don’t choose who we love; I disagree.  I’ll go ahead and just leap over all the implications of that last sentence, skipping the tangents, and make a quick comparison between a book’s author and the book’s reader.  Why does it work?  I have absolutely no idea.  If you really think about it, it’s absurd, isn’t it?  A writer hunches over a keyboard and works for five years, and lo and behold, there you are, months or years later, holding it in your hands, slumped on your couch, reading this person’s novel and, somehow, it works.

I mean, really stop and think about it for a moment.  Isn’t that sort of amazing?

If you read fast, fragmented, deep, slow, it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is that what you are experiencing is engaging and memorable.  We don’t read the same books, don’t like the same books, and never will.  I will not ever read every single “important” book.  That’s okay. What’s not okay is spending my time on the books that don’t work for me.  And when that happens, there’s nothing wrong with letting go.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.

I discovered Andre Dubus as an undergraduate at Ohio State.  We had a mass market paperback of 50 “masterpieces” selected by Tom Jenks and included in this anthology was “The Fat Girl.”  I actually don’t remember reading the story in class, or any of the stories from the anthology; it was one of those classes where the teacher makes you order five books and then you use none of them.  Early in the semester, we had this in-class writing assignment: take the first sentence from one of the anthology selections and use it as the first sentence of our own story.  After we wrote for about ten minutes or so, we were asked why we made the choice we did.  I went with Dubus, and the first sentence was this:

Her name was Louise.

I know: not very exciting, is it?  I’m sure that I had a contrarian thought there—no one else will pick this one, I’ll show them!—and that somehow this would make a fine story.  I don’t remember what I wrote, or what my explanation was, but I’m sure that whatever it was is still buried somewhere in a stack of notebooks along with assorted other things that I can’t throw away, one of those boxes of Stuff that goes with you every time you move and inexplicably doesn’t get opened, sorted, and pitched.

The stories of Andre Dubus have stayed with me ever since, traveled with me to my post-college years in Boston and its surrounding areas, where many of Dubus’s stories were set; followed me to St. Louis when I went to graduate school, and discovered that much of what we were told not to do in our own stories during writing workshops was precisely what Dubus did in his own work; and here in Columbia, where I think about stories and writing all day, whether my own or for the work in the magazine.  Dubus is one of my guides; he is also one of my foils.  He’s a writer that I once tried to emulate; now I recognize he and I are different writers in ways too numerous to list here.  Now, he feels like an old friend, the kind of person you’re always delighted to see enter a room and even if you haven’t seen him in two or three years, your conversation is still effortless and delightful.  More often than not, when I’m not sure what new book I want to tackle and I’m ill at ease at home and the dreck on television just won’t do it, I go back to my shelves and take down a Dubus collection.

On those nights, I often turn to one of Dubus’s novellas.  He has several excellent ones: “Adultery” and “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” are probably the best known ones, but I’ve always been fond of “The Pretty Girl” and its slightly thriller-esque style.  All these novellas take a few hours to read, perfect for one good night of reading.  The characters in these stories are all richly observed; there is no rush in his stories, no hurry to get the narrative going until you know your characters the way you know your own face in the mirror each morning.  Dubus dives down into his people, layer upon layer of a person, all of his or her eccentricities and secrets revealed with humanity and grace.  These are stories about grieving parents, adolescent boys, young wives, the whole gamut of our lives, and yet, there is something distinct about his treatment that lets me know, instantly, that I’m reading an Andre Dubus story.

And the distinction is this: compassion.

You would think there would be an abundance of this generosity of spirit in fiction, but there really isn’t.  Too often we read stories that fall into narratives of the uncompassionate.  These stories have a sense of puppetry.  The reader feels that the author has a Point, and that the characters are simply devices to make that Point.  It’s hard to give a contextual example, but perhaps you know what I mean: stories where the sense of manipulation is hard to point to but strongly felt; the characters, like Pinocchio, tell you that they have no strings, and this somehow makes those strings all the more visible.  This particularly stings with stories that are ironic, and irony seems to be a default for so much of our culture nowadays.  Sincerity isn’t just discouraged; it is distrusted to the point of almost being nonexistent.  Sometimes, to avoid irony, stories become far too sentimental.  These stories that are so earnest that they sink into melodrama, and remove the sense of what is real and true about the lives of their characters has to be overblown and enhanced, like a 3D movie of a soap opera.  Dubus manages to achieve compassion and sincerity in all of his stories in a way that is both terrifying and amazing.  I love this description towards the end of his story “Miranda Over The Valley”:

She spoke to him and kissed and dried his tears, though she felt nothing for them; she gave him her lips as she might have given coins to a beggar. She could feel nothing except that it was strange for him to cry

In the collection of essays, Broken Vessels, one of Dubus’ essays—I’m blanking on the name, and I’m writing from Lakota Coffee in downtown Columbia, the grinder working the beans and humming pleasantly, and can’t turn and pluck the book off the shelf—discusses watching snow fall with his family when he had four young children.  He wrote about how he felt in awe of the snow as a child, much as his children probably did at that moment.  But now, as an adult and a father, he knows that under different circumstances, like as a homeless person, the snow that he finds beautiful can also be a horrible thing, something that can freeze and kill another person in the wrong circumstances.  How so much of what we view and love and cherish can, to someone else, be life threatening.  His Catholicism effects and deepens all of his work—this might be why some people don’t know his stories—but it isn’t a Catholicism of conformity, but a belief that has been shaped and broken and rebuilt and wrangled through decades of family and work, a Catholicism that for Dubus alone is both personal and necessary.  Yet, reading his stories, I never feel that Dubus’s narrative or characters require me to feel anything, or that the emotions in his stories are preordained.  We are moved and engaged by what we feel but what that feeling is remains entirely up to the reader.

What a tremendous challenge and achievement this is.

In an interview with Powell’s, the writer David Means discussed the ending of short stories, and pointed out how the ending of one of Dubus’s great stories concludes.  It’s the story of Luke Ripley, a divorced father who lives a quiet life with his horses, opera music, and reading detective fiction:

All really good short stories are open-ended.  The bad short stories are the ones that resolve and wind up in a nice neat conclusion.  You don’t have room in a short story to close things down.  You just have room to give a narrative push and let the reader move forward with whatever happens.  I’m thinking of a story I read by Andre Dubus: ‘A Father’s Story.’  He sets up this really incredible scenario where the father protects the daughter who has hit somebody with her car.  He hides it. That’s the end of the story: he hid it. He did what he had to do.

Well, no: that’s not quite the end of the story.  At the end of the story, Luke is talking to God. Not in a “Footsteps” kind of way either—believe me, I wouldn’t recommend this story if it did—but in a way that is plausible and true and heart-wrenching.  It is an unbelievable ending, if you just tell a friend about it.  No one should get away with an ending like that. But Dubus not only gets away with it, but achieves something incredible, rendering one of the finest last scene that I’ve ever read in short fiction.

Naturally the best of his work will be found in Selected Stories, but in all his work, there is not only the compassion but a style that I love: long sentences often bound together with semi-colons, introspective narration, dialogue that feels almost like a play as you read between the lines to get the pauses and movements, prose rich in significant and moving details, and his descriptions of New England and the way setting deepens character and creates mood.  His style influenced me on many of my early stories, and I now admire Dubus’s work rather than try to emulate it.  I think that was a good thing: a period of thinly veiled mimicry all writers go through, sometimes for years, before discovering our own unique way of experiencing the world.

Asking me to pick my favorite writer is like giving a starving man a menu. Dubus died several years ago, so I’ll never have the opportunity to shake his hand and tell him how much his work has meant to me, just like I’ll never be able to say a proper thanks to Scott Fitzgerald or Grace Paley.  I didn’t know Andre Dubus, and pretending I do because I’ve read his work is ridiculous. Still. He wrote the kind of stories that all writers, regardless of your style or taste, should read and experience and appreciate, stories that feel intimate and true and make you feel you know the writer, you know the characters, and know them perhaps better than they know themselves. Dubus is one of our best writers, and the complexity and intimacy in his work can be experienced anew each time I reread him. If you have read Dubus before, I urge you to make time for his work again; if you haven’t, seek out his stories and read them for the first time. I promise, on a cold autumn night, there isn’t anything better to read.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review.