The Tricks of the Trade

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say. (Raymond Chandler)

Judging Your Work

From an interview with Flannery O'Connor

Q. By what standards do you judge your own work? Is objectivity difficult? Are you ever fully satisfied with a finished work?

A. I suppose the standards are largely instinctive. I have a sort of feeling for what I'm doing, else I wouldn't be doing it. I don't suppose objectivity is difficult. I wouldn't be attached to a sorry story just because I had written it. Sometimes you need time between you and the story before you can really see it whole; usually it's good to see how somebody else reads it. Distance is always a help. Sometimes I'm fully satisfied with something I've written but most of the time I'm just satisfied that this is the best I can do with my limitations.

from Conversations with Flannery O'Connor edited by Rosemary M. Magee. Excerpt from an Interview with C. Ross Mullins, Jr. published in Jubilee, June 1963

Giving Up the Ghost

"On any given week, up to half of any nonfiction best-seller list is written by someone other than the name on the book," declared a 1997 New York Times piece that examined the growing presence of ghostwritten books in the publishing world. "Add those authors who feel enough latent uneasiness to bury the writer's name in the acknowledgements and the percentage, according to one agent, reaches as high as 80."

Sadly, very few of them are worth reading, including many of those I'd had a hand in producing.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field, on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us--so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe."

Cocktail party material aside, somewhere along, the way, I lost my way. When I started I told myself that ghostwriting was as good a training ground for a novelist as most any other kind of writing, that someday I would resurrect my unpublished novel and be equipped, at long last, with the necessary skills to fix it. That by studying others' voices I would learn how to shape and refine my own. This was the crux of my John Hopkins voice class. Learning to modulate, even appropriate another's voice was useful, I instructed. Yet after a while, I warned my students, ghostwriting becomes an exercise in ventriloquism and nothing much else.

THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE (Volume 35, Number 1) from "Giving Up the Ghost" by Barbara Feinman Todd

Dealing with the Unspoken

[Thornton] "Wilder taught me that what a writer deals with is the unspoken, what people see or sense in silence."

Great Deeds & Great Thoughts

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. (Albert Camus)

Alice Walker on Flannery O'Connor

"It was for her description of Southern white women that I appreciated her work at first, because when she set her pen to them not a whiff of magnolia hovered in the air (and the tree itself might never have been planted), and yes, I could say, yes, these white folks without the magnolia . . . and these black folks without melons and superior racial patience, these are like Southerners that I know . . . . That she retained a certain distance (only, however, in her later, mature work) from the inner workings of her black characters seems to me all to her credit, since, by deliberately limiting her treatment of them to cover their observable demeanor and actions, she leaves them free, in the reader's imagination, to inhabit another land-scape, another life ....This is a kind of grace many writers do not have when dealing with representatives of an oppressed people within a story, and their insistence on knowing everything. . . has burdened us with more stereotypes than we can ever hope to shed."

from in "Beyond the Peacock" from:

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

We Are What We Read

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books - might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it." (Carl Sagan)

On Work Habits

“I tend to get really going later in the afternoon. But I can do a lot of puttering. I'm an expert putterer. Plus, I have three children, so I can interfere in their lives. I have aging parents. I have plenty to do if I don't want to write. I can keep myself busy for a couple of days without going anywhere near my computer. But basically, when I have work to do, I usually buckle down in the afternoon. Sometimes I'll get a whole day in, but it'll be towards the end of the day. I'll work an eight hour day, but never more than a couple hours at a time at the desk. I have to walk around, check the mail, make a cup of tea. So it's an eight hour day, that unfortunately starts around four in the afternoon.”

THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE, March 2002: from an interview with Amy Bloom by Sarah Ann Johnson

Critiquing Short Stories

When critiquing a piece of writing, consider the following elements: You may find it easier to put your critiques into the headings below, and give your views on each topic. Some prefer to break the story down into parts and refer to each element in the story that they feel needs further work.

What can be problematic is when a person writes about how the story has affected them personally and/or offers praise. Although praise and sentiment are very worthwhile they are not what a writer needs most when trying to "polish" their work to perfection. In the end, it is ultimately whatever you are most comfortable with, but at all times consider what would you most want for feedback on your writing.

CHARACTERISATION: Do the characters seem real with depth and emotion, or are they recognizable stereotypes? Are the motives of the characters understandable and logical to the story? Are the good guy(s) likeable and the bad guy(s) really bad?

The characters are very important to any story and they must be believable. There is room in any critique for characterization.

DIALOGUE: Does the dialogue seem realistic? Can the reader imagine real people talking as the characters do?

SETTING: If the story is, for example, about the rich and famous, details of wealth must be included. If about poor people, the reader has to see that they are poor. Is there atmosphere in the story allowing the reader to experience what the characters experience? Can the reader imagine the location around the characters clearly?

POINT OF VIEW: Is the POV first or third person? If it is third person, is the narrator able to see into the heads of the characters? Is the POV consistent throughout the piece?

DEVELOPMENT: Does the story develop logically, so that the reader can follow the specific changes, which occur in the story, or does the story make sudden leaps, which cause the reader to lose the direction of the narration? Is the progression of characters and events logical, or is the whole story too confusing?

PACING: Pacing is a key to appeal; how well does the reader get involved in the story? Does the action progress slowly or quickly? How long does it take for the story to be set up? Is the reader drawn into the story from the beginning? Is it non-stop action or character development? Different readers prefer different paces in what they read.

MECHANICS: A beginning writer often has trouble with mechanics and needs help. Sentence structure, verb agreement, and aspects of basic style are considered here. If a reader feels that there are problems with mechanics, s/he will specify the problems seen, rather than simply stating that they are there.

Readers react to what they read. Sometimes the gut reaction to the story is more important than anything mentioned above--especially when the writer is more experienced. Gut reaction can negate nearly anything, with the exception of flaming another writer.

SHORT STORY CRITIQUES from shortstorygroup.com

Place

What is there, then, about place that is transferable to the pages of a novel? The best things - the explicit things: physical texture. [Stories]. need the warm hard earth underfoot, the light and lift of air, the stir and play of mood, the softening bath of atmosphere that give the likeness-to-life...

from "Place in Fiction" from On Writing by Eudora Welty

Problem Stories

As I said to my students at Yale the other day, there were four major problems with the stories they just turned in. One was "I'm Smart, You're Dumb." The other was "I'm Smart, My Characters are Dumb." Another one was "I Have a Secret," in which the author tries very hard not to tell the reader what's actually going on. The final one was that complex emotions can only be expressed through complex and convoluted sentences.”

THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE, March 2002: from an interview with Amy Bloom by Sarah Ann Johnson

Dialect is Annoying

Though dialect was used quite extensively in earlier periods, today it is seen as a liability for several reasons. Dialect is annoying to the reader. It takes extra effort to derive the meaning of words on the page; that effort deters full involvement in the experience of the story." (Sol Stein)

Tobias Wolff

Excerpts from an interview in Carolina Quarterly Summer 2002 vol. 54, no. 3

Tobias Wolff is the author of several books of short stories and memoirs and is currently Director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. He made a week-long visit to the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morgan Family Writer-in-Residence in March, 2002. During his stay, he met with students, faculty, and community members to discuss the art of writing and gave a reading from his novel-in-progress. On the morning of March 21, he sat down with Jonathan D’Amore (JD) and Farrell O’Gorman (FO) to talk about his work as a writer, editor, reader, and teacher.

O’Gorman: You're obviously a reader and editor of contemporary fiction as well as a writer—you've done a lot of work editing short story anthologies—and I was wondering if you think it's still useful to think of American fiction in regional terms? Has it, for example, occurred to you to try and achieve any sort of regional balance in the anthologies you've edited?

Wolff: No, actually, it's never occurred to me to try for regional balance in an anthology. And I haven't given a lot of thought to the larger question.

I've noticed since I came to California a certain prickliness among California writers, a feeling that they've been marginalized. I have to admit that I laughed at the notion. It's not as if this country has failed to appreciate or any number of other California writers: Wallace Stegner Maxine Hong Kingston, Raymond Carver, Ishmael Reed, Michael Chabon, any number of … I could go on. There are a lot of California writers who seem to be getting their due, and rightly so.

Certainly the South has been very proud of its writers, and again, rightly so. But I don't tend to see things in those terms. I notice that Colson Whitehead, in being praised by John Updike as a talented young African-American writer,replied that he thought that Updike was a talented Anglo-American writer. I thought that was a neat way of calling attention to the fact that, in the end, we're all trying to practice this art as best we can. And sure, we bring something of our place with us whenever we write—everything happens somewhere. But I'm sure that no one is sicker of hearing all this stuff about "the great Southern tradition of storytelling" than Southern writers.

The tendency to see our literature in balkanized terms is probably reflecting what's happened in our politics. We relish our differences, obviously; that's what makes things interesting. We wouldn't want to read the same story from everybody. But those differences aren't the point.

I was talking to a woman the other day and she said to me, "What is 'women's fiction'?" I said, "I haven't the slightest idea what that means." And she said, "Well, I read something from a publisher that said they encourage submission of 'women's fiction.'" Anyway, she wrote off—I forget what publisher it was—and got a description of what they thought it was: it emphasized 'relationships,' and 'family,' and all this sort of thing. She really resented it, and I understand why. Then, 'guy's fiction'—what's that? I tend not to parse things out too much in that way. Either I like a story or I don't.

FO: I've seen Stanford somewhere—a magazine or web page—claim you as a "Westerner." And you've commented elsewhere that, on the one hand, your nomadic background has been helpful in exposing you to many different aspects of American life….

TW: Yes.

FO: …but you've also sometimes regretted not having your Yoknapatawpha County. Do you think it's helpful to think of any of your fiction as 'Western'? Back in the World, in particular, seems more strongly unified than your other story collections in this regard.

TW: Yes, that has a Western locale—New West, not cowboy West. I suppose that's true. Again, everything happens somewhere. And at a certain point as a collection is forming, you do look for certain things the stories have in common. With that particular book of stories, I guess I wanted you to have the feeling you have in reading Dubliners, the sense of these people inhabiting a common world. But place there isn't as specific as it is in, say, Tolstoy's Moscow, where restaurants and clubs are named. But yes, there's the atmosphere of a particular place in that collection of stories, an element of coherence, as I hoped.

D’Amore: Your memoirs are certainly very personal stories, even regarding an event like the Vietnam War. In Pharaoh’s Army is about your individual experience more so I think than the experiences of just a soldier—they’re undoubtedly Tobias Wolff’s memories...

TW: Yes. My argument would be that we have generic notions of the experience of soldiers in Vietnam. The mass media obviously feeds those notions. There was no generic experience—everybody over there had a different experience. Certainly my experience was dramatically different from the experience of friends of mine, even those who were in the same kind of unit I was in but were stationed up north. It was the luck of the draw. The closer I get to anybody’s experience the more particular and distinct it becomes. So finally the only kind of honest rendering I could give would be extremely particular—how one person got into this and lived through it, and what it was like to come out the other end. But I was very careful not to generalize from my own experience and I would take that same approach now.

FO: For me as a reader, one of the most unexpected but also compelling things about your two memoirs is the way in which each ends with a meditation upon 'worldliness.' This suggests a kind of religious impulse that is obviously present in at least some of your writing, has shaped at least some of your stories.

TW: Yes.

FO: You've expressed admiration for—though perhaps also some distance from—Flannery O'Connor as a Catholic writer, and you've written of your friend Andre Dubus's "unapologetically sacramental vision of life." Could you say a little about how Catholicism might—or might not—shape your literary imagination, maybe by reference to some other writers?

TW: Well, I didn't really grow up in the Church the way Andre and Flannery O'Connor did. I was baptized when young and confirmed at the age of eleven, but had very little to do with the Church again until I was in my twenties. I have a very difficult relationship with the Church, though I suppose I would still describe myself as a Catholic. In all the versions of reality that are available to us, there is a certain generosity and recognition of human frailty in what I would call the Catholic vision that seems recognizable to me.

But I don't think of myself as a Catholic writer in the way that Andre Dubus is or Flannery O'Connor is; there's a certain allegiance even to Catholic doctrine in their work. In O'Connor's "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" she pits Catholic theology against fundamentalist Protestant theology and has a little argument going on in the songs that they sing back and forth. I would never feel comfortable with or be particularly interested in doing that sort of thing.

Sean O'Faolain said in one of his essays that all the best writing is the writer's argument with God. That's interesting to me, because that locates the sense of the religious in a story out of the realm of doctrine and into the realm of a spiritual discontent, which, when sincere and passionate, is for me the highest kind of literature. I see it in Chekhov, who was an atheist. I think that there's more true 'religious'—if you want to use that word—power in one of his stories than in any number of more pious works that have an argumentative purpose, a persuasive purpose. Keats has that wonderful line: we resist poetry that has a palpable design on us. The key word there is 'palpable': when you can see the salesman coming toward you, you brace.

Flannery O'Connor was for me a very powerful and influential writer at a certain point in my life. Some of the stories I still admire tremendously. But the more I read her, the more apparent her design is to me. I'm much more interested in Katherine Anne Porter, who has more real mystery in her work than Flannery O'Connor does, despite all her talk of mystery. I love Flannery O'Connor, don't get me wrong. Stories like "Revelation," "Parker's Back," "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," any number of stories. But I can see it coming, I can see her hand on the scales a lot of the time, and I don't ever with Porter. Stories like "Noon Wine" and "Flowering Judas" are the highest achievement of a really deeply questioning spirit, a sincerely questioning spirit. Maybe that's what I miss in O'Connor: there's not really a question there. She's already made her mind up, and she's just trying to get you to make yours up the same way.

Does that make any sense? It's a hard question. I don't want to disavow the power of the persuasive impulse. It was the dominant impulse in literature for a long time. It's in the very marrow and sinews of our culture.

Bad Books

Good books may instruct, but bad ones are more likely to inspire. (Northrop Frye)

Translating Literature to the Screen

The axiom in movie criticism--if not in the movie business itself--is that first-rate literature almost never translates to the screen. The problem is that the novel can do one great thing that movies, despite their immense influence and universal appeal, cannot. It can go inside the heads of its characters to tell us what they are thinking. The movies can only attempt to show us the characters, though they have sometimes tried to do both by the device know as "voice over." But from Cervantes through Tolstoy through Henry James through Proust, interiority has been the great glory of the novel, and the movies cannot really compete with it.

(from "Reel Literature" by Joseph Epstein).

Origins of a Story

From an interview with Flannery O'Connor

Q How does a story come into being? Do you create it or does it create you? Do you think there's a danger of a writer's exhausting his material?

A. I don't know that I could really say how a story comes into being. I suppose it's about fifty-fifty as to whether you create it or it creates you. If it's a good story, it's as much a revelation to you as it is to the reader. I'm afraid it is possible to exhaust your material. What you exhaust are those things that you are capable of bringing alive. I mean if you've done it once, you don't want to do the same thing over. The longer you write the more conscious you are of what you can and cannot make live. What you have to do is try to deepen your penetration of these things.

from Conversations with Flannery O'Connor edited by Rosemary M. Magee. Excerpt from an Interview with C. Ross Mullins, Jr. published in Jubilee, June 1963

Writing with Zest

If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market; or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-excited. He should be a thing of fevers and-enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it'd be better for his health.

How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when arc you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?

Wouldn't it be wonderful, for instance, to throw down a copy of Harper's Bazaar you happened to be leafing through at the dentist's, and leap to your typewriter and ride off with hilarious anger, attacking their silly and sometimes shocking snobbishness? Years ago I did just that. I came across an issue where the Bazaar photographers, with their perverted sense of equality, once again utilized natives in a Puerto Rican back street as props in front of which their starved-looking manikins postured for the benefit of yet more emaciated half-women in the best salons in the country. The photographs so enraged me I ran, did not walk, to my machine and wrote "Sun and Shadow," the story of an old Puerto Rican who ruins the Bazaar photographer's afternoon by sneaking into each picture and dropping his pants.

When was the last time you did a story like that, out of pure indignation?

Here's my formula. What do you want more than anything else in the world? What do you love, or what do you hate?

Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with all his heart. Give him running orders. Shoot him off. Then follow as fast as you can go. The character, in his great love, or hate, will rush you through to the end of the story. The zest and gusto of his need, and there is zest in hate as well as in love, will fire the landscape and raise the temperature of your typewriter thirty degrees.

From Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

The Right Word

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. (Mark Twain)

Choosing Your Main Characters

British novelist and literary critic David Lodge has said, "Character is arguably the most important single component of the novel. ... Nothing can equal the great tradition of the European novel in the richness, variety and psychological depth of its portrayal of human nature. Yet character is probably the most difficult aspect of the art of fiction to discuss intechnical terms."

Probably one of the easiest jobs you will have as you write your novel is that of choosing your main character. In fact, it is likely that the main character is an inseparable part of your original idea: "A young man becomes dissatisfied with his working class life and leaps at the chance to receive a gentleman's education." Your main character is the young man. "A woman fights for custody of her daughter after her ex-husband accuses her of neglect." Your main character is the mother.

Your main character may even have been in your mind BEFORE your story idea: You want to write about someone who's like your feisty Aunt Sally, or base a character on a famous person--or on yourself.

Besides the main character (also called the PROTAGONIST), a novel must have a minimum of two more characters: the ANTAGONIST (the person in conflict with the protagonist) and a SUPPORTING CHARACTER with whom the main character can interact and reveal his thoughts and plans. (Note that in some novels the antagonist is not an actual character. It may be a force ofnature, an oppressive culture or society, or a conflict WITHIN the protagonist, but there must always be someONE or someTHING set in opposition to the main character.)

There is no upper limit to the number of characters you may include in your novel. How many you need will be a function primarily of the plot, as well as of the length and scope of your novel. Use as many as you need--but don't clutter up your novel like Penn Station. Since each character must be distinct and memorable, if you use only as many as you need, you make your job much easier, and in the long run, your novel more powerful.

--from the "Focus On The Novel" Workshop

A Good Modern Sentence

"A good modern sentence proceeds evenly, loosely joined by commas, and its feel is hypothetical, approximate, unstructured and always aiming at an impossible exactness which it knows it will not achieve." (from A.S. Byatt's ON HISTORIES AND STORIES)