True beginnings

This is the fourth and final installment in a series on beginnings. It’s best to read these in order, starting with the first post. Today’s is all about non-fiction.

In general, the guidelines of fiction apply to non-fiction as well. Aim for context and curiosity. Write with clarity and sharp specifics. Take care with grammar, diction, and syntax. Don’t bore or confuse the reader. Ofcourse, it’s much, much easier to write plodding non-fiction so you have to work harder to find a compelling opening.

Begin with an anecdote, rather than a list of factual statements. Ideally something with high stakes drama as in Patricia B. McConnell’s The Other End of the Leash (more on that below) or biting humour as in Cat Bohannon’s Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, which is a popular science book based on her dissertation.

An anecdotal opening, especially one that paints a clear scene, is especially important in non-fiction that is heavily informational and research-based. But sometimes memoirists need this reminder too. Show the reader that you can tell an engaging story and they will remain invested during the long passages of exposition.

A singular voice comes in handy. Non-fiction is so heavy on the telling that what a storyteller sounds like can make a big difference. See for example, Michael Harris’ dry wit in the opening paragraphs of Rare Ambition: The Crosbies of Newfoundland.

Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, an insightful and meticulously researched tome about racism and caste hierarchy in America, begins with an old pathogen and a medical mystery in Siberia. Beginning with the unexpected is a brilliant move. While the reader is fully invested in the mysterious illness, they are also wondering what it has to do with racism. Curiouser and curiouser….

Another device, often used in non-fiction, is subversion. See, for example, Clarisse Loughrey’s very funny review of Bullet Train which likens the movie to a try-hard child cartwheeling into a wall.

When authors begin strong, with a story, scene, or anecdote, it’s instructive to look at the passage that follows. The Other End of the Leash, a book about dog psychology, opens with a true story. Driving home one night, the author sees two dogs blithely trotting down the highway, oblivious to traffic. Human peril is elementary. If you really want to make a reader anxious, put an animal in harm’s way. Having set the stakes, described the scene, and introduced the canine characters, McConnell describes pulling over and, with infinite care and excruciating patience, using body language to coax the dogs to safety. WHEW.

The passage that follows gets into the nitty gritty of dog cognition and the twinned history of canines and humans etc. etc. It’s fascinating but more so in the context of the scene we’ve just witnessed. In effect, McConnell has shown and then told. Through the book, she employs this strategy of using specific anecdotes and examples to illustrate the facts she describes.

Compare the opening sentences of the first and second passage:

“It was twilight so it was hard to tell exactly what the two dark lumps on the road were.”

vs.

“All dogs are brilliant at perceiving the slightest movement that we make and they assume that each tiny motion has meaning.”

Notice in the twilight opening how she provides some context (time: twilight and place: road) and leaves you with a question (what are those lumps?). And at the end of the brilliant opening scene — after we watch her save the dogs — the reader is left wondering how the hell she did that and how they can learn those skills too. That’s the curiosity that animates the entire book.

So here’s the last lesson about openings (in fiction and non-fiction): It’s not enough to have a catchy one. You must maintain that strength of prose and clarity and court the reader’s inquiry right to the end. But first, start as you mean to go on.

How to lose a reader

This is the third in a series on Openers. In the first post, I harped on about the importance of clarity. The opposite is confusion. If you confuse your reader at the jump, they are likely to close the book, turn off the e-reader, or reject the manuscript. So let’s look at what not to do.

But first, a caveat….

Rule Free Zone

There are no rules for good writing. Here are some old saws you’ve probably heard:

we must kill our darlings
show, don’t tell
don’t begin a story with a nightmare

These are useful guidelines but they will only serve you 75-95% of the time. Here are three more.

How to lose a reader in three moves or less

Open with dialogue

Beginning with dialogue is one of the most difficult ways to open a narrative. Remember: the reader arrives with a blank slate and if all they get is disembodied voices without context, they are liable to get confused and bored.

This is controversial, and I love much of Iris Murdoch’s work, but A Fairly Honourable Defeat has an irritating opening. Some voices (impossible to know who or how many) carry on a vague conversation about some other characters. Confusing. Boring. Next.

So that’s the guideline. But it’s not a rule. If you open with dialogue, make it compelling. Ideally, the speech hooks the reader (perhaps with a provocative question, a la EB White’s Charlotte’s Web) and then the author swiftly provides crucial context that roots the reader firmly in the scene.

Open with too many characters

Imagine going to a new partner’s family reunion and being quickly introduced to a room full of strangers, who all look alike, and then being expected to keep track of their names, peculiarities, convoluted relationships, jealousies, and alliances. Hideous. Don’t put your reader in that nightmare.

If you open with a cast party, be intentional about who you introduce and when. Leave the reader enough sharp specifics to fix one character firmly in mind before introducing the next. A good example comes from the opening pages of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, which takes place at a boarding school that’s busy with students and teachers.

Open with abstractions

This might be a mistake more common to non-fiction. Any passage that is heavy on vague generalities and light on specifics is likely to be poor. But in an opening, it’s almost certainly a bore.

On the other hand, there is Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities which begins with a page of contradictory general statements. It works because it’s funny as hell. The prose and voice alone are compelling. And eventually, he does get around to the point!

The last post in the series comes out on Wednesday and it is devoted to non-fiction.

And then they woke up…

This is the second in a series on opening lines. If you haven’t read it, here’s the first post.

One of the most common things I tell my clients and authors I mentor is this: your opening is a red herring. This guideline applies to fiction and non-fiction equally.

Prologues

It’s very likely your prologue, beautifully written though it might be, is unnecessary. Worse: it’s probably spoiling the story by telegraphing the climax or some other key drama that should be revealed gradually. Or it’s giving away the ending.

If the story is about a young protagonist on a perilous adventure but the prologue reveals him in his 80s, you’re spoiling the plot. Ditto a will they/ won’t they that begins with the couple’s wedding. Any time your story begins in the future of the main narrative’s present, take care.

Which is not to say it can’t or shouldn’t be done. Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude begins with the iconic line: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Notice we are starting at a moment of extreme peril and then rewinding to (presumably learn) how this guy got here. The stakes in the future remain (along with the question: will he make it?) even as we return to the past.

Similarly, there are many prologues that serve a strong narrative purpose, offering crucial context about character or beginning on a crisis that grabs the reader’s attention.

Preludes and Prefaces

Are you writing a non-fiction book with a preface or prelude? Interrogate it. Sometimes this is the correct place to begin. More often, in a draft, it’s a list of musings that you as the author need to ponder. I call these “notes to self” and they can be incredibly illuminating, giving you information about the themes or ideas you want to explore in the work.

Sometimes it’s a summary of the journey you as the writer want to take the reader on. Rather than telling them in an information dump, gradually reveal the journey through the book. Nothing you write is a waste of time. Most of the work of drafting is getting things on paper and panning for gold. Sometimes those nuggets are things you keep and expand on in the narrative. Other times, it’s a document you keep close by as a checklist or outline, while you write.

Be wary of opening on too many questions. Remember: context and curiosity. The author provides the context that makes the reader ask questions. Often the questions in your draft preface are the ones you need to answer through research and narrative exploration.

Alarm Clock

It’s natural that so many of us default to a dream/ nightmare/ alarm clock wake up sequence when starting our stories. Afterall, that’s how our days begin. (Remember that old Degrassi theme song?)

Sometimes this morning routine is a narrative limbering up and the true beginning is further down the page. Ask yourself where a reader’s curiosity might be piqued. Or perhaps you can search for the moment where the character’s day becomes one like no other. In other words: the inciting incident, the thing that sets the hero on their journey. Once you find this, you can kill that darling wake up scene. Simple, right? (There comes a point in revisions when — hand-on-heart — deleting is joyful because it’s the only thing that is easy.)

But it might be that key things happen in the character’s morning or those early moments reveal information that provides necessary context for the reader. Perhaps they set stakes or are necessary for the inciting incident. This is when a flashback can come in handy.

Have a look at Janika Oza’s A History of Burning. It begins with a hook and then rewinds back to reveal the first minutes of the day, setting up the stakes for the protagonist, revealing crucial background about his family and home, and then moving to the inciting incident. The trick here is that her flashback is swift (without feeling rushed). In fact, the whole passage is a masterclass in openings. It’s well worth a dissection.

On the other hand, there are some stories that must begin with a dream or nightmare or the character waking up. Cliches have been unfairly maligned. They are a useful tool that, when used judiciously, can be powerful. Like direct dialogue and repetition though, they have been wielded too often without care and intention.

Months before I signed with an agent and sold the manuscript and began working with my brilliant, thoughtful editors, there was an editor at a different publishing house who told me not to open The Boat People with a nightmare. He didn’t explain why, just said don’t do it. In hindsight, I don’t think he’d read much of the manuscript, just had a knee-jerk anti-cliche reaction.

There was no other place for that novel to begin. Mahindan is trapped in one nightmare until he gets caught in the living nightmare that comes next. And by some good fortune I was stubborn about this opening, even before I had the words to articulate why. (Also good fortune: my agent and actual editors never mentioned the opening, though they sure did make plenty of other suggestions!)

It’s important to stay in the driver’s seat when it comes to your stories. Let editors and early readers ride shotgun. Consider their suggestions. But if something feels right to you, stick with it, even if it is a cliche.

Monday’s post is all about what not to do in the opening. Don’t touch that dial.

To begin with…

A few weeks before The Boat People hit shelves, I served as a reader for the CBC’s annual short fiction contest. This meant I was reading hundreds of anonymous submissions while hunch-backed on the couch.

“Every other story begins with a character waking up from a dream,” I grumbled to my husband. To which, he replied: “Your book starts like that too.”

It was not an Oprah ah-hah moment so much as an oh shit, stop the presses moment. Once you know the cliche, you will notice it everywhere. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about openings and how to craft ones that hook and hold.

Context & Curiosity

The strongest openings give readers context that makes them curious. Context means: who (character), what (plot), when (time), where (setting), and why (stakes). As an author, you must decide what, and how much, detail to offer while leaving the reader with questions so they keep turning pages.

Curiosity can be stoked by the usual suspects: drama (meaning high stakes and struggle), tragedy, mystery, romance, lust, and love. It might also be conjured by some intriguing world-building, as in sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction. Beautiful prose that conjures setting combined with a seductive narrative voice can also do the trick. See for example: the opening lines of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar; Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things; or just about anything by Michael Crummey.

The strange, the unusual or idiosyncratic also make good openers. George Saunders is particularly adept at this with his slightly off-kilter fictional worlds. But an idiosyncratic narrative voice can be so disruptive of the norm that it alone hooks. Thomas King’s One Good Story, That One is an excellent example as is Ian McCurdy’s short story Crossroads.

Types of Openers

Lights! Camera! Action!: this is an opening that combines an attention-grabbing first sentence that hooks the reader with a swift set up of character, setting, and stakes combined with an inciting incident that puts the plot in motion and sets the hero and the reader on their journey. The reader is immediately carried away, perhaps gulping the narrative in one sitting. Check out RF Kuang’s Yellowface as an example. Classic thrillers are very good at this too (see: The Retreat by Elisabeth de Mariaffi). So is the slower paced and lyrical, A History of Burning by Janika Oza.

Inciting Incident: A reliable place to begin is on the day when everything changes for the hero. Think about the inciting incident (ie. the thing that puts the plot in motion) and begin as close as possible to that point. Frodo Baggins is minding his own damn business in the Shire when his drunk uncle gives him the world’s most dangerous present. Cinderella is an indentured servant until an invitation arrives from the palace. Better still: Jessica Grant’s brilliant short story My Husband’s Jump.

Aphorism: This is a fun old-timey hook. Altogether now… “All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Note that in both cases, we have coherent sentences that spark curiosity. You might wonder, for example: how? and does he truly? And both Tolstoy and Austen jump right from abstract aphorism into specific domestic scenes. Anna Karenina begins with the revelation of an affair that throws a family into chaos. And in Pride & Prejudice, an eligible bachelor moves in next door to a family with five unmarried daughters. So we swiftly move from generic truism to specific drama (the day everything changed).

The subtle route: There’s a risk to a flashy beginning: hurtling headlong into cliche or artificiality. Many of the best openings are quieter, subtler, and more artful. In Téa Mutonji’s short story The Photographer’s Wife, two people meet. One is an ardent pursuer and the other is ambivalent but finally agrees to a date. The apparent power imbalance (ie. tension) and the narrator’s reluctance makes the reader wonder why and what will happen next? Just enough information to elicit questions.

In Michael Christie’s The Extra two people are so hard up financially, they rent a space without running water and must urinate into the same jugs they later use to collect drinking water. Christie’s prose is pristine, the details visceral and specific. Right away, we have a picture of characters on the edge (stakes). Naturally the reader wonders will they be okay? Or perhaps the reader stays for the quality of the writing. When done exceptionally well, prose alone can carry the narrative a long way. See: Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.

A dream: I began this post with dreams. Yes, they are cliche. No, they are not verboten. There’s the cliff. Hang tight till Friday for Part II of this series when I tell you why.

Search Party

When I help emerging authors with their manuscripts — or revise my own wonky drafts — one of the main issues I notice is a lack of conflict. If the hero is too comfortable and has nothing to lose, the story is boring. This is true of non-fiction too. Send out a search party, I joke with clients (and myself). Find the conflict and strong-arm it back into the narrative.

Stakes

A pre-requisite of conflict is stakes. What does the character have to lose? There are three types:

Physical stakes: life and limb are the obvious ones but don’t forget about financial crises, professional embarrassment, minor kitchen fires, falling off a bicycle, and arachnophobia.

Emotional Stakes: romantic rejection, sibling rivalry, a tricky friendship, any risk, however major or minor, however real or imagined, to the character’s feelings.

Philosophical Stakes: these are the most difficult stakes to find because they are about core values, like morality and self-identity. They might interrogate society at large (who counts as an insider? can giving ever be truly altruistic? is individualism better than communalism? is democracy impossible?). Philosophical stakes force the reader to grapple with their own values, putting something in peril for them. These tend to be the narratives readers ponder long after reading. Again, this applies to fiction and non-fiction, short and long-form.

A story need not have all three stakes and you can divvy them up among characters. The best narratives, of course, include all three.

What does the character have to lose? Answer that and you’ve found the story’s stakes. How far will they go, what will they do, what will they sacrifice to hang onto those things? Answer that and you’ll discover the plot.

Tension/ Conflict

There are many ways to weave in tension. The obvious way is through a fight, argument, or battle. You can also make your character physically uncomfortable and introduce interpersonal conflict by putting characters at odds with each other.

Dialogue is an excellent vehicle for tension. You can introduce conflict through speech (what is said) and how it is revealed (ie. through summary, indirect, and direct). Summary is a quick summation, vibes only. Indirect gives you a hint of the words. Direct is word-for-word.

Each type of dialogue has a different level of reliability. Any time the character is uncertain or unsure or skeptical of what is being said, they become uncomfortable. That discomfort is tension.

Text is what is spoken. Subtext is everything that’s roiling under the surface, the unspoken words and sentiments that are far more freighted.

Here’s a writing prompt for adding tension: write a scene where one character wants something and the other one won’t give it. And the next time you’re reading something, pay attention to the stakes and conflict. Finding the stakes and conflict in the stories you read is the first step to discovering it in your own.

Need More Help?

Here’s a little extra advice on conflict and a multi-part series on dialogue.

If you’re in or near St. John’s, I’m the Writer-in-Residence at the AC Hunter Library until November 20th and am offering 1:1 consults, running workshops, and hosting write-togethers. There are only a few spots left for individual consults so email me at achunterwir@gmail.com to book yours now.

I moonlight as a writing mentor and manuscript evaluator which means I give constructive feedback on works-in-progress. I’m taking bookings for the spring so get in touch for more info or a quote.

In Residence

Exciting news: For a month this Fall, I’ll be the Writer-in-Residence at the AC Hunter Library. Between Tuesday, October 22 and Wednesday, November 20th, I’ll be running four workshops, hosting group writing sessions, and reading/ offering feedback on your prose during twice-weekly office hours. Everything on the program is free, in-person, and open to writers of all levels.

Better still, I’m only one of four writers who will be in residence at different libraries in the province. This special initiative is part of NL’s Year Of The Arts. Who knows if we will ever get this opportunity again so if you’re a local writer or writing-curious, take advantage!

Write Together Sessions

These low-key, zero-pressure writing sessions will be held on Tuesday evenings and Wednesday mornings, October 22 - November 20th, on the third floor of the AC Hunter Library (125 Allandale Road, St. John’s). They are open to aspiring and practicing writers of all levels. Bring yourself and your implements (paper, pencil, computer, whatever you prefer) and I’ll provide optional prompts and a timer to keep us on track. Tandem writing is a wonderful way to break writer’s block and get you in the zone. It also helps build the muscles of focus and attention. If you’ve been struggling to firm up a writing practice or have a story you desperately want to commit to paper, these sessions are for you. No advance registration is necessary.

Office Hours & Feedback

If you’re a writer with a short piece of fiction or non-fiction, I am offering feedback (on up to 2,000 words) through one-on-one meetings during my twice-weekly office hours. Due to time constraints, there are only 25 spots so email achunterwir@gmail.com to submit your writing and book your 30 minute time slot.

Workshops

I’ll be running four in-person workshops. Three will be geared toward adults and one is specifically for teens. These are free events but space is limited. More details for each workshop are on my Events Page. To register phone the library at (709)737-3950.

Here’s the schedule for my time at the AC Hunter:

Tuesday, Oct 22
5pm-6:30pm: write together session
6:30-8pm: office hours

Wednesday, October 23
9:30 - 11am: write together session
11am - 12:30pm: office hours

Tuesday, October 29
5pm-6:30pm: write together session
6:30-8pm: office hours

Wednesday, October 30
9:30 - 11am: write together session
11am - 12:30pm: office hours

Saturday, November 2nd
Story Dissection Workshop: 10:30am-noon

Tuesday, November 5
5pm-6:30pm: write together session
6:30-8pm: office hours

Wednesday, November 6th
NO WRITE TOGETHER OR OFFICE HOURS
Great Openers Workshop: 6:30-8pm

Thursday, November 7th
Creative Writing Workshop for Teens: 3:30-5pm

Tuesday, November 12th
5pm-6:30pm: write together session
6:30-8pm: office hours

Wednesday, November 13th
9:30 - 11am: write together session
11am - 12:30pm: office hours

Saturday, November 16th
Revision Workshop: 10:30am-noon

Tuesday, November 19th
5pm-6:30pm: write together session
6:30-8pm: office hours

Wednesday, November 20th
9:30 - 11am: write together session
11am - 11:30am: office hours (NOTE: shorter office hours on this day)

Blurbs

Recently, on CBC’s Commotion podcast. there was a dishy chat about blurbs. It’s worth a listen if you’re an aspiring author or have a first book deal or are curious about what it means to get a more established author or Barack Obama to say one nice word* that can be printed on your cover.

Most of us need blurbs but the relationship is fraught. It’s amazing to receive any sort of advance praise, especially when you’re deep in your feelings in that final stretch right before a new book comes out. But blurbs require hours of free labour. And the galling part is it’s impossible to do the (unpaid) job without toppling into cliche hell. To wit…

“A confident and lyrical debut penned by an author of uncommon talent.” (for Heather Nolan’s This is Agatha Falling)

“A vivacious debut from an author to watch” (for Jamaluddin Aram’s Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on a Wednesday)

“Clever and insightful, this book is a sheer delight.” (for Kerry Clare’s Waiting for a Star to Fall)

“A masterful collection, written with so much veracity, you’ll swear every word is true.” (for Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife)

I once wrote “laugh-out-loud funny” in a blurb and was asked to please find a synonym because all the book’s endorsements included the same banality. In our collective defense: Shashi Bhat’s The Most Precious Substance On Earth is very funny and did make me guffaw.

Okay, so here’s a secret: I’m 95% more likely to consider a blurb request if it comes from a third party - agent, editor, publisher, publicist etc - instead of the author. I say no a lot more often than I say yes and the whole proposition is less fraught if it goes through a middleman.

But here’s the other thing: there’s more than one way to champion a book. I talk about books, write about books, recommend books to friends and family and clients and students. Whenever I lead a workshop, I pull passages from at least three or four authors. Just because I say no to a blurb, doesn’t mean I won’t find another way to be a cheerleader for the book.

*My favourite blurb always and forever is the one Obama gave Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad: “terrific!”

Copy. Write.

Ten years ago a guy broke into our house and stole my laptop which contained all my short stories plus research and early scenes from a project that would eventually become The Boat People. I wasn’t backing anything up at the time (I know) so it was a blow.

But that was nothing compared to the dread and rage I feel in the dystopian present where a cylon is hoovering up our literary souls in order to teach itself how to shit formulaic turds.

Maybe I’m naive or in denial but I’m not worried about AI taking my job. I’m not prolific enough, for a start. And my work is too nerdy. The Boat People was a fanfic of the Refugee Law text book. Who wants an AI version of that? The new novel-in-progress is even nerdier. Even nerdier.

What I mourn is the theft. Stories come from a deep well of experience, memory, and freighted emotion. It’s a collage of personal insecurity and insight. I remember the moment when the character of Grace finally clicked and I realized her primary motivation was fear. It happened when I was in the middle of a fraught conversation about Syrian refugees that made me feel sick for days afterward. There’s a scene early in The Boat People where Priya is in an elevator and her name is being butchered. My first year in Canada was grade three. The teacher asked me to repeat my last name (it was longer then - Balasubramaniam) so many times out loud in front of a class where I was the new kid that I came to hate it. I had never known my name to be a burden before that. I had never hated my name.

The character of Savitri is an homage to my Appama who, like Savitri, was fair-skinned. She fled Burma as a child on foot to Sri Lanka. Her brother died along the way. In Point Pedro, she was so fair compared to other girls that the family was afraid she’d be abducted and her step father slept by the front door with a gun. I can’t remember if that detail made it into the final cut of the book but that’s part of Savitri’s biography.

These are my characters. They come from me. They come from my people. They are part of an older, wider community that is historic and contemporary because of course I am also taking from experiences I have or things people tell me or things I overhear or intuit by watching and listening. I write human stories and AI cannot do that. But AI is really fucking good at stealing. It robs our work, our words, our ideas, our stories, our syntax, our phrases. But it’s also pillaging something more personal and that’s the worst, most perverse, most inhumane part.

On the morning of the break in, we woke up to the sound of a stranger rummaging through our cupboards. The imagination defaults to the worst case. Mine went to heavy boots. Big man. Weapons. The thief turned out to be a scrawny eighteen-year old with glasses. The things he stole were found nearby, all unharmed, including my laptop. His sentence was nine months in prison. What do you think Zuckerberg et. al deserve for their grand larceny?

The one about friends

This one isn’t about writing.

Last week everyone was talking about that article in The Cut. The one about friendship and children. You know the one. For some reason the discourse remains fixated on children, as if their arrival is the only thing that can transform relationships. But we all lose touch with work friends after leaving a job, school friends after graduation, neighbourhood friends after a move, parent friends after the kids grow up or apart. We shed relationships like skin and if we’re lucky, and put in the effort, make new ones. It’s curious that the level of bitterness heaped on kids doesn’t rear its head when a friend moves or gets in a new relationship and goes MIA.

It’s like this. You’re rowing your boat and along the way you come alongside someone else in their boat. They’re going your speed, seem to be on your wavelength, and for a time it is smooth sailing. Then something happens - a big move, a career change, a new relationship, a break up, illness, whatever - and the other person can’t row as hard. You can wish your pal well and move on. Some friendships aren’t meant for the long haul and that’s okay. You can resentfully flip them the bird as they drift away. Or you can hitch their boat to yours and give them a tow.

The true love, long haul, till-death-do-us-part, Big Friendships are the ones where two people take turns giving each other tows without keeping score, without expectation, on faith, trusting that when it’s your turn, you can put those oars down, someone’s got you.

Aliens

Earlier this year, I read a historical fiction about a young brown girl in a British boarding school. The perspective was close third person. The inner life of the protagonist was central to the story. In the opening chapter, the character wakes up, looks at herself in the mirror, and dwells on disparaging thoughts about how “swarthy” and “dusky” and “dingy” her skin is, how different she is from the other girls at school. And then she continues to have these othering thoughts about herself, obsessing over whether or not she is a “true Briton.” I have been a brown person in all-white spaces (hi, rural Newfoundland!) and I’m a sucker for stories set in Victorian England. I should be the ideal reader for this book. Instead, I felt alienated. Whose gaze is that in the mirror? It’s not the gaze of a brown character. It’s the gaze of the white author. A white author who perhaps - let’s be generous - tried their level best to get into the skin of brown character and failed.

I’ve been trying to forget this infuriating book exists but I was reminded of it again when I read Yellowface. In a scene mid-way through the book, the main character June is asked - by a Chinese-American reader - why she thinks she (a white woman) is the right person to write and profit from a novel about indentured Chinese labourers.

Sometimes this issue of identity and imagination is framed as: who has the right to tell a story? It’s the wrong question. Instead, the more crucial questions are why and how? Why am I drawn to this particular point-of-view? And how am I going to ensure the characters and their tales are authentic?

In tandem with Yellowface, I was reading Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades, a first person plural novella that follows a group of girls from the time they are about 10 well into adulthood. It’s Julie Otsuka’s Buddha in the Attic meets Queen’s, New York. The book’s titular girls are Black, Muslim, East and South Asian. They are straight and queer and some of them, it turns out, are not girls. Unlike many of the characters, the author is Filipino. Yet her characters rang true and their experiences and quandaries and thoughts all felt comfortingly, disconcertingly familiar. Palasi Andreades has spoken of setting the novel in her hometown where she was surrounded by girls like the ones in her story. Her expertise shines through in her characters.

White authors can and do write authentic brown characters, characters whose interiority is easy to sink into and whose stories I deeply enjoy. Jacinta Greenwood in Michael Christie’s Greenwood is an excellent example and so is Adam Foole in Steven Price’s By Gaslight.

I’ve gotten quite used to not finding myself in a lot of fiction. So when I see a character who looks a little like me - or my cousin/ father/ grandmother - I sometimes feel apprehensive. Like the only brown girl in an all-white school. How’s this going to go?

The best fiction envelops the reader, makes them feel at one with the characters. But when the author does a shoddy job the result is a poor ventriloquist act, a puppet with a brown face parroting a white writer’s (let’s be generous, again) unconscious bias. And the reader who should identify with the protagonist is, instead, expelled.

Yellow

No more novels about writers writing books, I swore. And then I read Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. Yellowface is the story of two authors. Athena is Asian and hugely successful. (I kept thinking of Zadie Smith, getting that mega publishing deal while she was still at OxBridge. ) June is white and midling. When Athena dies, June takes her unpublished manuscript - about the Chinese Labour Corps in WWI - and passes it off as her own. Spoilers ahead.

This book should be on the curriculum in every publishing house and MFA program because even though it’s a novel, and supposedly fiction, most of what’s on the page are facts.

Exhibits A&B:

“Publishing picks a winner - someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, “diverse” enough - and lavishes all its money and resources on them” (p. 5/6.)

“… the books that become big do so because at some point everyone decided, for no good reason at all, that this would be the title of the moment.” (p. 79)

Some of the most damning parts of the book are the passages where June and her editors hack away at Athena’s draft, making the whole thing more palatable to white readers, squeezing it into the corset of the western narrative tradition, which prizes a straight forward tale of a hero’s journey.

Athena’s manuscript is described as “an echo from the battlefield” (p. 27) layering “disparate narratives and perspectives together to form a moving mosaic… a multiplicity of voices unburying the past” (p. 28). She’s the kind of writer who makes the reader do a little work. One assumes there are no glossaries or italics around the Chinese words. I thought of Madeline Thien’s brilliant Do Not Say We Have Nothing. I thought of so many books by Asian and Indigenous authors that are capacious, allowing a plethora of characters and narrators inviting all their stories into the frame. Someone, I’m sure, has written a dissertation about this… how our stories are communal because our societies are too. Ironic then that exactly what drew June to the book are the very things she excises.

And none of this is fiction. It happens every single day. Editors and agents and well-meaning creative writing instructors, pushing writers-of-colour to whitewash their stories. Include a glossary. Westernize the names. Add explanatory commas. And, when that proves to be a pain, lavishing book deals and bigger advances on white writers whose books cover the same terrain and aren’t so “difficult.” At one point, June’s editor is amazed by how quickly she agrees to make changes, writing “You are so wonderfully easy to work with. Most authors are pickier about killing their darlings” (p. 45). But of course. Why should June be precious about axing what isn’t hers?

Still, though, it’s impossible not to feel bad for June. Because Yellowface is brutally honest about fragile writerly egos too. Even after June hits the NYT best seller list and quickly earns out her massive advance, she is unsatisfied, obsesses over online reviews and commentary, and drives herself up the wall with self-doubt. Her vulnerability is painfully relatable. The reader - who is also a writer - roots against her and identifies with her. Neat trick.

This novel is American Dirt meets Cat Person meets Bad Art Friend meets Lionel Shriver in a sombrero meets the Appropriation Prize. Yellowface is more than just a fun read. Yellowface is catharsis. Here finally is everything we have all experienced and been bitching about (mostly quietly, privately, amongst ourselves) for years. And not just in any novel but in a massively successful, Reese’s Book Club pick, book, one of those chosen few that the publisher (rightly) decided was going to be a hit. Can’t wait until they make it into a movie staring Constance Wu (who blurbed the book!) and ScarJo.

Cozy murder mystery

Shehan Karunatilaka’s 2022 Booker-winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is an absurd life-after-death romp about a young man who, against the better judgement of wiser ghosts, goes in search of his killers. It’s a whodunit set in Sri Lanka in the late 80s, during the civil war. It’s irreverent, unsentimental, and uproarious.

At one point I was reading on my deck, laughing uncontrollably. My neighbours were like WHAT is so funny? But here’s the thing… it’s impossible to explain. Part of my glee has to do with language. Karunatilaka sprinkles in Sinhala words here and there - without italics or explanation, hallelujah - and for once I, a famously unilingual person, actually understand. Here’s what I was laughing at: Boru Facts.

Boru means lies and just seeing this word, that I’ve never seen before in print, caused an immediate dopamine hit. It conjured up memories of my mother’s voice. Boru. As children we were forever telling, or being accused of telling, lies. Layered over my mother’s voice are uncles and aunts, shouting and laughing, cutting someone off mid-sentence to exclaim: Boru! Because when the adults got together to reminisce or gossip, the accusations of exaggeration and fabrication flew. Boru means lies but it also means bull shit, I guess. I don’t know. It’s difficult to translate, especially when my Sinhala is at the level of a slow witted six year old. Six is when we moved to Canada and stopped speaking Sinhala in the house. Sin, no men?* 

It’s not only that I understand the novel’s second language, it’s that the Sinhala is imbued with auditory memory, making the book feel familiar and homey. Did I just call a novel about a young man who spends his short life travelling around a war zone, taking photos of men, women, and infants being butchered, only to be killed himself, then chopped into pieces and thrown into a putrid lake, cozy? I did. Yes.

When a book is written for you, it feels like home. And even though the novel helps the reader along - for example, with humorous lists that break down the acronyms and political divisions - a lot is left untranslated and unexplained. It’s one of the great strengths of the book, the author’s confidence, that he trusts the reader to do some of the work.

In an interview, after winning what is arguably the most important literary prize in the western world, Karunatilaka said he had trouble finding an international publisher. “A lot of them passed on it, saying that Sri Lankan politics was quite esoteric and confusing. Some said that the mythology and worldbuilding was impenetrable, and difficult for Western readers.” Boru facts!

*Why do Sri Lankans add the word men to the end of random sentences? Who knows, men.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat

Grain Magazine is celebrating its 50th birthday and I was the prose guest editor for the upcoming anniversary issue. I sifted through a couple hundred fiction and non-fiction submissions and selected just over a dozen for publication. (Pro tip: sometimes these special issues are larger than usual and more pages = more acceptances.) One weakness I noticed, even in the strongest pieces, was repetition. Over and over and over again. (See what I did there?). If you’re fine tuning your own writing, here are four things to watch for:

1. Commonly, it’s individual words. For example, the word surprise or look or choose showing up three or four times in a paragraph.

2. It could be a specific description: the grandfather clock keeping the beat like a metronome. Finding the simile once is delightful but twice reads as a mistake.

3. Beware the synonym list. Do you really need four words when one will do?

4. Have you said the same thing five different ways? This form of repetition is the most difficult one to spot, often because it’s camouflaged by beautiful prose.

Repetition is a tool that can be used to great effect. Try to be intentional. And delete the rest.

The best

Speaking of highschool…

This winter, I juried the Youth Short Story Category, which is part of the Amazon First Novel Award. And at the end of May, The Walrus threw a celebratory bash at the top of the Globe & Mail building in Toronto. It’s gorgeous up there - wide open space, huge windows, a massive terrace with a view of downtown, long bar, the works. The six teen finalists were present but you know what? I was almost more thrilled for their gobsmacked, camera-happy parents.

Toward the end of the evening, one of the young writers asked me an impossible question: what made the winning story stand out from the rest? She’d read the entries by previous years’ finalists and couldn’t figure out what set the winners apart. (Teenagers are terrifying and wonderful, aren’t they?) I don’t know what I stammered out but I’m sure it was all wrong.

Every story on that shortlist was exceptional. One piece about a relationship between two young women was wise beyond the author’s years. Another had such perfect prose, I googled lines to make sure it wasn’t a theft. One had a confident, funny voice. One bared its complicated emotions without shame. Another put its anger right on the surface. And the winning story was inventive, like nothing else I had read in the hundreds and hundreds of submissions. And on that particular day, on that particular Zoom meeting, we decided to reward originality. On a different day a different jury would have made a different choice.

What are the criteria for “best”? These decisions are always made by taste and stupid luck. The thing I want to say to young writers is that creative writing is not calculus or a spelling test. There is no equation. There is no right answer. There is only your imagination and your authenticity. Tell the story only you can tell with all the honesty you can possibly muster. Don’t try to win. Try to write.

(Photo of the jury and finalists for the Amazon First Novel Award and the Youth Short Story Category, courtesy of the Amazon First Novel Award and The Walrus)

Highschool

In highschool I had a couple of friends on the improv team. For a couple of years they were on a hot streak - going so far as to compete and win at Nationals - and I was a groupie. Their main competition was the team from Cardinal Carter, a rival Catholic school in York Region. It was the heyday of The Simpsons and I’m sure we made the requisite Shelbyville jokes. Maybe they did too.

I hadn’t thought about improv or highschool in ages. But then a teacher from Cardinal Carter sent me photos. Students in their uniform kilts and sweatshirts (go Cougars!) sitting on the floor by a locker bank, desks forming a circle in a classroom, engaged in conversation, copies of The Boat People nearby.

First of all, I’m impressed. These are grade 11s - how old are they? 15? 16? - reading a 400 page, thinly veiled refugee law text book. At their age I was reading Salinger and snickering at Holden Caulfield’s potty mouth. The Shakespeare on the cirriculum that year was Romeo and Juliet. Which. Real talk. R&J is the most accessible of Will’s plays. We went to see Baz Luhrmann and called it a day.

At Cardinal Carter, the grade 11s are engaged in something called a Socratic Seminar. I don’t know what that is but I love the sound of it. The Socratic Method is how I like to engage with work-in-progress. I imagine them interrogating the book, each other, and their own morality, fumbling toward answers or possibly deeper questions. I hope they are thinking beyond the fictional characters and considering the real world and present day concerns, and how they will cast their first votes.

In defence of cliches

Hear me out. You’re drafting and deep in the zone, trying to get as much down as possible before the trap door opens to eject you, and in the rush to get to the end of the idea/ scene/ story/ passage/ novel, you write a can of worms, a sea full of fish, or a wicked stepmother. Cliches, yes. But neither trite nor lazy. Not yet. At the moment they are merely shortcuts.

I describe it like this to clients: You’re not just crossing unknown terrain, you’re creating the land as you go. And the first time across, the goal is to get to the end. Along the way you might drop flags in the ground, markers of places where you need to return and fine tune. Maybe add an oasis in this desert; get specific about the flora and fauna in this forest.

In an early draft, most cliches are markers. The trick is to return to them later and replace with more inventive prose.

And sometimes the cliches are hardworking and earn their place in the story. For example, when upended - the hooker with the heart of gold turns out to be an opportunist and also he’s not a hooker. Think of office jargon and how it can be used in a scene to convey the deadening nature of interminable meetings. Or dialogue! The plentitude of fish in the sea becomes a tragic-comic joke when used in a conversation between a meddling uncle and a newly single woman.

Cliches, like other maligned aspects of craft - telling, adjectives in dialogue tags, and so on - are a tool. Be judicious and intentional about how and when you use them.

Math lesson

I was telling Tom about a story that began with too many characters. “This needs to get pared back,” I said. “Yeah, yeah, there can be twenty people milling around the Loblaws when the axe-wielding clowns storm in, but only two or three get names. All the others have to fade into the background or it’s overload.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s like this paper I read the other day. It began with 18 cohomology classes, introduced one after the other. It was like….” Then he rolled his eyes and made a frustrated pffft noise, because who can keep eighteen cohomology classes straight?

Theoretical math is fiction writing with better funding. Sometimes Tom reads a proof and declares it “elegant” in the same way I might read a short story by Alexander MacLeod or a passage from Richard Wagamese and call it sublime. And other times he shoves a page of hieroglyphics at me and says “Look at this!” Then he makes a barfing noise and complains “Okay, maybe this guy understands what all this blah-blah means but that’s no way to write for a reader.”

What makes for strong writing in math? I asked. Everything serves a purpose. It ties together. There’s not a lot of extraneous stuff. Importantly: there is clarity.

Eulogy

The story was titled Wankus Interruptus, and when I first read those words, centred at the top of the page, I paused. (Do you know this feeling? A fleeting fuzz of nostalgia. A whiff of emotion. In this case, the top note was humour.) The phrase was familiar. Why? And in the next second I recalled.

The page with the enigmatic title, sat on top of a sheaf that was being used for tinder. It came from deep in a box of cast offs - flyers, print outs, egg cartons, effigies of our enemies - that we keep for this purpose. We’ve had issues with our chimney and even bigger issues getting someone to come and repair the damn thing, and for a couple of years now, the wood stove has sat unused. But this week, in an attempt to conserve heating oil (itself a tedious chapter in the long and boring story called Homeownership) we’ve had fires blazing every day.

Wankus Interruptus isn’t a story. It’s the title of a chapter. Was the title of a chapter. Is the title of a chapter? What tense should one use about a manuscript that lies cold in the necropolis of murdered darlings?

Anyway, this chapter was from the first person point of view of a fourteen- year-old boy. It was set in the 90s in St. John’s and I spent ages researching what the city looked and felt and sounded like in those years. And then I had to do a bunch of work to conjure up a teenage boy and find his voice. First person is exacting!

I wrote and revised a whole draft of this novel. A couple of drafts. I scored a Canada Council grant, an ArtsNL grant, and a municipal grant for this novel. Somehow my agent sold this novel. Yaddha. Yaddha. RIP to that novel (2018-2020). After a long spell in the recycling bin, it’s finally being cremated. Later, the ashes will be scattered under the deck where my silly dog will no doubt roll in them.

Take the wheel

In my 20s, I took up pottery. The classes were held in a shed, at the bottom of a blousy garden, where three of us students hunched over our wheels while our instructor walked around in an old pair of dungarees and chatted about the raccoons who were terrorizing her household.

Pottery is a physical act; you have to put your whole body into the effort if you’re going to keep the clay centered. More often than not, we novices found the clay controlled us, spinning itself in unexpected ways. A bowl stubbornly flattening into a plate. A vase becoming a mug. A mug shrinking to a pinch bowl.

Our instructor, a professional potter who’d been at this two or three decades, praised our creations, claimed there was a looseness to inexperience that experts could never replicate. I thought she was just being kind. Now, I know better.

Most of my clients have had little, if any, formal instruction in creative writing. They write instinctively, with the particular freedom that comes from not knowing the so-called rules. Unfettered by the shoulds and musts and can’ts, their stories are ambitious and experimental and interesting, uninhibited in the way mine used to be, with an unaffected playfulness I can’t recapture.

One thing about new writers: they are often surprised when I point out what they’ve written. In the same way my attempts at vases ended as miniature plant pots, there’s often a gap between the story the writer intended to tell - or thought they were telling - and the one they actually wrote. Without fail, the unintended story is the juicier one. Sometimes it winks out from the subtext. Sometimes it’s right there in black and white but the writer hasn’t noticed.*

The conscious brain is censorious. The subconscious though? Oh, she knows how to spin a yarn. This is true for experienced writers too. (A couple of months ago, after reading a draft of my new novel, my writing group pointed out that one of its central anxieties is money. Huh, I said. You’re right.) The only difference is experienced authors know the unconscious is also at work and, if we’re smart, we’ll lean into whatever gifts it might offer.

When I first start working with a writer I always give some version of this speech: You are in the driver’s seat. I’m only riding shot gun. I have a map. It might not be the correct one. I’m going to make suggestions but you make the calls. Lately, though I’ve been thinking I should amend this pep talk. Let the story take the wheel for a while. Find out where it takes you.

*You don’t need to spend a cent to find out what you’ve written. Ask someone you trust and who has never heard you talk about your work (that part is crucial. It must be a reader who is coming to it fresh and has no preconceived notions about the plot or characters or theme or what you are trying to do) to read what you’ve written and then tell you point for point what happens in the story and what it’s about.

But if you do want professional guidance, I’m here.

Winner? Take all.

The Journey Prize winners were announced yesterday. Winners plural. Ten to be exact. This edition of the Journey Prize breaks 33-years of tradition, which usually sees a long list of 10-12, a short list of 3 (and once, two), and one winner. That’s standard operating procedure for literary prizes - a broad spotlight that narrows until the winner stands alone, holding the pot. But for this special edition, which is a showcase of Black talent, the jury chose to do something different. The jury, by the way, was David Chariandy, Esi Edugyan, and Canisia Lubrin. Name a more iconic trio. I’ll wait.

I don’t know why they chose to go this route but I’ve been on my share of juries and have some ideas. Sometimes, the winner is unanimous, a book or story that stands so obviously head and shoulders above its peers that there’s almost no discussion. Just as often, the jury is divided and the winner is a compromise, the first choice of two jurors but not the third. Or the entry that everyone can agree they love equally though it isn’t anyone’s first choice. Which is no slight on the winner because by the time a jury gets down to choosing a short list, an entry has already run the mother fucking gauntlet.

Stories in the Journey Prize anthology must charm many, many gatekeepers. First, the editorial board of a literary magazine greenlights publication. These mags have vanishing resources, limited space, and strict word counts. I guest edited one issue of one magazine and it was excruciating to turn away stories, compelling, beautifully composed stories, on the grounds that I had twenty five pages and had to choose the combination of prose that fit exactly within those pages, no more, no less.

Second, the story must be chosen, out of all the stories published that year, as one of three that gets put forward for the prize, assuming the publication in question has the resources and wherewithal to submit.

Third, the jury must like the story enough to longlist it. Any time I do jury duty, I’m acutely aware of the idiosyncratic nature of taste. A different combination of judges reading the exact same stories or books could have and would have made different choices. The year I juried for the Journey there were stories that could have absolutely made the longlist if a different combination of authors were making the call. And by the time we got to the short list, it was agony. That’s often what happens. There are three spots and maybe five or six books that (in the jury’s idiosyncratic opinion, in that particular moment of that particular day) deserve a place.

What does it mean, then, to award one winner and what does it mean when a jury chooses ten? I haven’t got insider information and was not - sadly - a fly on the wall during deliberations but if I was on the jury, for this historic year when emerging Black authors are finally being offered a small portion of their due, I would also be inclined to say fuck it, all these stories and these authors deserve the spotlight.

You know what I think is revealing? Have a look at where the winning stories were published. Twelve stories total. Four(!) from Prism International. (Good eggs) Two from no where. Two stories that were turned away at every gate. Or two stories that were nurtured in private because those authors didn’t see themselves or their stories reflected in magazines. Or… well, I don’t know. Maybe two stories that were written specifically because the doors were thrown wide and the guards took a holiday.

Taste is a tiny bit nature and mostly nurture, formed by the stories we were raised on and the steady diet we were fed by teachers and book sellers. And if, for most of your life, all you see and read is one kind of story, told by one kind of person, guess what happens to your taste. When gatekeepers share the same narrow taste…. that’s how you end up with a paucity of Black representation. It’s nothing to do with writers or their stories and everything to do with flawed gatekeeping.

In a perfect, equitable world we wouldn’t even need special editions. Good on the jury for handing out ten crowns. Massive congratulations to Christina Cooke, A.Z. Farah, Zilla Jones, Sarah Kabamba, Téa Mutonji, Lue Palmer, Terese Mason Pierre, Jasmine Sealy, Dianah Smith, and Iryn Tushabe, whose twelve stories I cannot wait to read. You can pre-order your copy of the Journey Prize Stories now.