Have you ever read the Paris Review interviews? My friend Sasha Troyan (award-winning author of Angels in the Morning and The Forgotten Island) got me into those years ago. Wonderful stuff—interviews with all the great authors of the twentieth century you’ve ever heard of and all the ones you haven’t yet. I discovered Isak Denisen, Edna O’Brien, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and dozens of others through them.
Now Poets & Writers is doing the same thing, only with the agents and acquisitions editors of the contemporary publishing world.
Read these interviews. Then read them again. Then read them again. Enjoy them for the great conversations they are. Take notes. Follow advice. Look up the books and authors mentioned.
No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place.
—Isaac Babel, “Guy de Maupassant”
A convincing lie is, in its own way, a tiny, perfect narrative.
—William Boyd, “A Short History of the Short Story”
This week we’re linking to the Willesden Herald of Willesden, London. Why? Because they run an annual short story competition, and Stephen Moran took the time about a year and a half ago to explain in great detail exactly what you can do to lose a short story competition.
This is priceless information. Read it and take notes.
Even more than that, though, at the bottom of the page Moran included “A few interesting links” to three works every fiction writer should throw themself into headfirst and wallow in until they become part of their body chemistry: by William Boyd, Raymond Carver, and Jack Kerouac.
Boyd tracks a history of the short story from Walter Scott and defines a handful of short story types being written today: event-plot, Chekhovian, cryptic/lucid, poetic/mythic, mini-novel. Be aware that, although he’s dismissive of Virginia Woolf’s stories, she did in fact do much to loosen the bonds of the short story from formal prescription. Also be aware that, although he claims Chekhov completely re-imagined the short story without plot, this is a clever bit of subterfuge—Chekov’s stories have plots. Even Woolf’s stories, weird as they are, have obscure little plots. They’re just not arranged the way previous short story plots had been up to that point.
Understand that when Raymond Carver says he and Flannery O’Connor didn’t plan their stories—and Boyd says Chekhov “abandoned manipulated plot”—they’re talking about highly-accomplished authors who had already studied structure intently. They didn’t mean: “Don’t learn structure. You’re too special.” They just meant the short story form can take a certain amount of spinning madly across the sun—so long as the writer knows how to keep the reader with them in their spins. Notice Edgar Allan Poe’s restriction in the acknowledged first definition of a short story: “In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.” Even in 1837 Poe already knew there must be—in the writer’s mind, at least—a story there to tell.
“No tricks,” Carver says, and I would like all aspiring writers to carve this into something directly in front of their keyboards, like their monitor screens. Don’t save up information for your climax. Don’t pretend you don’t know something about your characters that you actually know. Don’t think you’re fooling anybody. Every time a writer imagines they’re cleverly planting a mystery in the beginning of the novel that’s not a mystery, to be revealed like a magician whipping a handkerchief off a top hat at the end, the reader figures it out long before that and then the novel has no more tension. Never rely on your reader’s stupidity for tension. You don’t want that stupid of readers.
(Okay, don’t wallow in the Kerouac, either. He didn’t write short stories, anyway, and his hyper-intense focus on himself and his own internal experience of life, while a fascinating take on conventional fiction, has been from the beginning hideously misunderstood by faux “writers” just looking for an excuse to focus on themselves without the benefit of fiction, spawning generations of narcissists who don’t write fiction and never have, but continue to insist on putting words on paper, drinking themselves blind, and smoking themselves stoopid because that’s what their hero Jack did. If the neighbor kid jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too? Apparently—YES.)
The short story is. . .well, short. Which makes it good practice grounds for serious writers. Use Boyd’s definitions of different story forms to practice—write stories in each form, write the same story in every form, write with plans and without. I don’t mean do one of these. I mean do all of them.
This week we’re linking to literary agent Donald Maass, but even more than that, we’re linking to the free download of his book The Career Novelist.
Why?
Because Maass has done us all a huge service with this book, and I’d like to direct excellent aspiring writers his way.
Read Chapter One, The Dream, on why people write novels. Are you doing it for approval, or are you doing it for the sheer joy of writing? Writing is all about exploring the truth, and if you can’t nail this truth about yourself, you’re not going to make it as a writer.
Then read Chapter Two, The Reality, and pay close attention to the bad news about the publishing industry. Keep in mind that this book was written thirteen years ago, so even though Maass gives us a bird’s-eye view of the publishing industry from the seventies to the nineties, things have altered massively in just the past two years. What he does here is give you a clue: it’s a business. It’s always been a business. And under Storm Warnings in Chapter 20, The Economy and Publishing, he points out one of the most vulnerable high-risk groups is full-time writers who live off advances only.
Then read all his advice about finding the right agent, pitching the right pitch, and managing your writing career realistically in the context of the publishing industry. Because this is where you will be doing it, and you’d just better get used to that idea.
But, more than anything, read Chapter 13, The Bottom Line: Storytelling. Because that, folks, is what the whole thing is about.
Today I’m bringing you one of my all-time favorite writers of comedy: the inimitable P.G. Wodehouse. It’s Friday, and I say, what the hell.
I’m taking the weekend off from the publishing world, this madcap adventure in publicity, loquacity, and marketing perspicacity run amock. There is only so much eagle-eyed analysis one person can do before they keel over backward on their heels and find, behind them, their husband sitting calmly with a laptop waiting to share an evening of Jeeves and Wooster.
For those of you unfamiliar with this fabulous British TV series, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry spent the early 1990s bringing to the third dimension P.G. Wodehouse’s classic valet (in England that must be pronounced “valett”) and the congenitally lunatic young dandy he serves.
Hugh Laurie wrote this wonderful piece on playing Bertie Wooster, surely one of the greatest comic performances of all time. Until you’ve seen Laurie go through his facial shenanigans upon first swallowing Jeeves’ magic hangover cure in Episode One you haven’t really lived.
Stephen Fry wrote this touching piece on Wodehouse’s extraordinary facility with language, particularly the comic metaphor, denying that his creation, the hapless Bertie, is as “mentally negligible” as Wodehouse made Jeeves claim.
But far and away the most amazing thing about it all is the books themselves, those marvelous plunges into the absurd where “Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastadons bellowing across the primeval swamp” and Wodehouse’s hilarious creations of the British upper classes stumble through life showing every evidence that in-breeding does, in fact, do exactly to the human IQ what doctors are always telling us it does. Although anyone not raised on the mythology that the British upper classes are a simple fact of life, like toenails, may find themself commenting repeatedly, “But these people don’t do anything for all that money,” there’s no avoiding the fact that Wodehouse had the ability to pack mixed metaphors into a single sentence in a mind-boggling display of comedic mania that would have simply destroyed any lesser writer.
And I’m not just saying this because I first read Wodehouse at the tender age of twelve on a creaky old tub of an Italian freighter crossing the Atlantic in 1973, in the abandoned 1930s library of what had once been a very small, very charming, very wood-paneled British passenger ship.
Now that I have completely polluted your minds with more business advice than you can possibly swallow, I’m bringing you a calming, refreshing mental yoga pose to get you through the weekend: The Essays of A.A. Milne.
Milne, as we all know, was a fiction author. In fact, a children’s fiction author. Dorothy Parker, reviewing books for the infant New Yorker in 1928, famously dissed him big when she quoted a passage from The House At Pooh Corner with the comment, “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.”
Why on earth anyone thought Dorothy Parker, of all people (author of light verse on different ways to commit suicide, known to subscribe to mortuary magazines for fun), would get a bang out of a children’s book I could not say. I guess The New Yorker was an extremely small enterprise in those days.
Regardless, she could hardly fault him for his essays. Milne was blogging long before blogging was possible, writing with charming casualness on the joys of cupboards (“It was a silly trap, because none of the mice knew how to work it”), goldfish (“Ants’ eggs are, I should say, the very last thing which one would take to without argument”), and, of course, the pleasure of writing (“The nib I write this with is called the “Canadian Quill”; made, I suppose, from some steel goose which flourishes across the seas, and which Canadian housewives have to explain to their husbands every Michaelmas”).
And when you have completely pacified your nearly-hysterical authorial senses back into a comfortable state from which to write, please note that this is only one site of an entire anthology of classic essays called Quotidana, and you can read essays by a whole slew of other great authors simply by visiting the handy-dandy set of links to the right under the heading Essayists.
I’m going to institute a new regular feature on this blog called: Linking to. Every week, I’ll find some blog of interest to fiction writers and talk a bit about it for your edification and entertainment.
I’m starting with pretty much my all-time favorite writing blog, which isn’t even for prose writers. It’s for screenplay writers. But I am telling you, this guy knows his onions:
Unfortunately, a month or so ago he stopped adding to this blog and moved to a new blog, which is fancier and has some heavy-duty (pretty attractive, actually) graphic shenanigans. It also has some fascinating stuff, but not as much yet:
But, fortunately, that means this first Linking to post gets to give you two links for the price of one!
Go to Mystery Man On Film and check out his Best Of posts. Holy shit. When I first stumbled on him, I blew a whole Sunday alone (my only writing time) reading these. I had to write to him and say, “Thank you for making me blow my entire writing day reading your stuff.” He wrote back a couple of weeks later, and he was heck of polite! Now I follow him on Twitter.
But why should novel and short story writers read up on how to write a movie? What does screenwriting have to do with fiction?
Only everything.
Read what he has to say about character development. He’s got one post on Mystery Man On Film about why character arc is a load of malarkey and another on Mystery Man about what he calls “reverse character arc.” Read what he has to say about “Sex in Screenwriting” on Mystery Man. I almost never agree to edit sex in my clients’ work, and he knows why.
Read what he has to say about storytelling structure. He takes apart three different movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark on Mystery Man On Film and both the new Farenheit 451 and the non-made Moneyball on Mystery Man, explaining exactly why scenes should be designed one way and not another.
Read what he has to say about exposition in context in his piece on Raiders on Mystery Man On Film. Read it again. Now read it AGAIN.
Short story author Scott Warrender is a Mentoring Program client. I have done full Copy, Line, & Developmental Editing on a number of short stories for him, the first of which was his poignant fictional memoir of Africa, ''The Boy With the Newsprint Kite,'' now published in the Foundling Review.
Clients’ Books
Bhaichand Patel is the author of two nonfiction books: Chasing the Good Life (Penguin Books India, October, 2006), and Happy Hours (Penguin Books India, October, 2009). I edited Patel's debut novel, When the Streets Were Cold and Dark.
I've edited a number of nonfictionessays for my friend Lucia Orth. (Many years ago, my contribution to Baby Jesus Pawn Shop was simply a peer critique and participation in a standing ovation.)
The poet Chris Ryan is the author of The Bible of Animal Feet (Farfalla Press, 2007). He has recent stories in Pank, Anemone Sidecar, and A Cappella Zoo. I edited Ryan's novel The Ishmael Blade and worked with him on his debut novel Heliophobia and WIP Pogue.
