Rotten eggs

Originally published June 17, 2020

You know when you’re baking, cracking eggs into a bowl and one is rotten? This happened to me once: the green and grey ooze slipped between my fingers, the sulphur turned my stomach. A bad book is a rotten egg. That stink, it lingers. When I say bad book I don’t mean purple prose or dud dialogue. When I say bad, I mean dangerous. Recently I had the ill luck of what seemed like a carton, a rash of rotten eggs.

Crimes against fiction: an incomplete catalogue

There was the historical fiction wherein the only Indigenous characters were dead, their ghosts floating around. The book where every female character was either a virgin or a whore. (The writer is a misogynist, I texted a friend. That’s it. That’s the review.) And the YA I can only describe as a smorgasbord fit for a glutton for punishment. The cast included a predatory gay man, a gay kid whose sexual assault was a weak plot device in service to the straight protagonist’s betterment, and a one-note single mother with a neglected child (Black, natch). By contrast, the two-dimensional trans character was a relief. At least the kid didn’t get killed or beaten up. The whole mess, slap-dash and badly written, reeked of what it likely was: a cishet author trying to capitalize on #trends and a publisher asleep at the wheel. Or worse: rotten egging the author on.

Then came the novel about two urbanites - a Black transgender woman and a bi-racial man - who, on a whim, take a cycling holiday in rural Spain. Naturally, the author is an old white guy. And like Lionel Shriver delivering a keynote in a Sombrero, every beat of his book twanged false. From the conceit of the trip to the characters’ ease on the trail to the cringe-worthy rap lyrics to the way the man repeatedly thought of his best friend as if she was a man. Trans women are women. The end. If you’re going to write about characters who are nothing like you, do your homework. Google hiking + Black and traveling while trans for a start. I get it. The book was an elaborate troll, the literary equivalent of Black face. Hint: if you drip contempt for Black and Trans people in real life, it’s going to show in your fiction. What’s amazing to me is a publisher (in 2019!) gave this pathetic temper tantrum a platform.

The heart breaker was the book by an author whose work I’d previously enjoyed. For 200+ pages it had me. Excellent prose. A propulsive plot. An Indigenous point-of-view character with a redemption story arc. But if you know even one true thing about the way Indigenous people are treated, you’ll guess what came next. The Indigenous character, the only one in the book, was murdered by the white protagonists who drugged him first to make it look like he was drunk, then set the building on fire, so that after he burned inside everyone thought he’d caused the accident. It was played off to the reader as a mistaken case of “self defence.” This is why Indigenous authors get up in arms when settlers write about them. THIS IS WHY. Because it’s not enough they are being murdered by cops and civilians in real life, writers must kill them on the page too. Look, I’m sure the author’s intentions were good. But you can’t be ham-fisted about Indigenous justice. You can’t prioritize plot twists over politics, not when the real life stakes are so high.

What’s the harm? It’s only fiction, sure.

In this, the year of Our Lord twenty bloody twenty, I can’t believe I still need to spell this out:

1. The unrelenting imagery of dead Indigenous people in fiction desensitizes us to their deaths in real life so that we don’t hold killers or governments or oil and mining companies accountable, so we don’t demand justice.

2. Trans people are still fighting for basic equality because society refuses to recognize their genders. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Books that get this twisted, books featuring characters who confuse their best friend’s gender, are piling on to the problem, preventing trans people from having basic human rights.

3. Perpetuating the myth of the predatory gay man makes straights hysterical about their children’s real life teachers or the man next door.

Reading is a powerful education/ miseducation tool. Through a story, we step into someone else’s body and experience the world as them. And if we go gallivanting in Spain with two Black characters, one of whom is trans, who don’t at any point fear for their safety or get dirty looks or hassled at the airport then when the Black and trans people in our lives or on the news tell us about the bigotry they experienced, we are less likely to believe them.

Readers trust authors

But…but…I hear someone say. Yeah, you there in the front, Satan’s Advocate. I hear you arguing readers aren’t stupid. They know fiction is imaginary. Sure they do. That must be why readers assume every debut novel is autobiography, why people keep asking if I was an immigration lawyer. That must be why the husband of an author I know got dirty looks after she published a story about an affair.

A couple of years ago, I was at a literary festival watching an author read a passage from her novel. It was a sex scene between a woman and her Indigenous lover. He was described in animalistic terms. There may even have been references to bestiality. I was sitting with a group of Indigenous authors. I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me. I can’t begin to imagine what they felt, hearing this white lady read this passage and knowing that everyone else in the packed theatre (mostly other white people) was hearing it too. We were all made complicit then, in that display of settler arrogance, as we listened to yet another incarnation of the Noble Savage fever dream. Afterward, at the signing table, readers came up to the author and asked “So is this accurate? Is this what life is like in the North?” “Yes,” she said, and blithely scribbled her name in their books.

Tell the truth

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.”

— Oscar Wilde

There is a contract we enter into when we read a story. The author assumes authority; the reader suspends disbelief. Using the tools of craft we train the reader to trust us, to accept every word on the page. Fiction shapes the way readers understand the world, thereby influencing the world itself. We have a responsibility then to tell the truth.

The truth is not a tired trope or a dangerous stereotype. The truth is something you discover with humility, research, empathy, and the wise counsel of Subject Matter Experts (or as some people call them, Sensitivity Readers). When you don’t tell the truth—

Sorry. Let me rephrase that.

When you lie.

When you lie and claim that Black people are as safe as white people in all spaces. That queer people enjoy the same privileges as straight people. When you stubbornly insist a woman is a man. When you perpetuate the idea that the only good Indian is a dead one or a Noble Savage. When you tell these lies in black ink, with the authority of the printed page, you are either incredibly irresponsible or an asshole. Take your pick. And in telling these lies, you are making actual people’s real lives more difficult, more fraught, more dangerous.

How to do it then, how to write from outside your perspective? Glad you asked.

Bury your tropes

Originally published: July 1, 2019

Recently in a fiction workshop someone asked the question every sensible writer dreads: how do I write characters who are outside my own personal experience, who are not white/ straight/ cis? I say that every sensible writer dreads this question because in my experience the ones who steam roll right in with more bluster than caution are morons. And their lazy attitude is doing everyone - their readers, their characters, and other writers - a disservice.

HUMILITY

Begin with humility, I told the group in my workshop. Your ignorance is an uncovered manhole and if you’re not careful, you’ll topple in. For example, do you have just one gay character in your cast? Does the character die? Does the death happen soon after the character finds love? I’m not psychic. Your character is a trope (google: Bury Your Gays). This is why we must begin with humility. Because, to quote a certain blustering steamroller, of the known unknowns.

RESEARCH

What we are striving toward in our fiction is truth. Accuracy, veracity. And how can you paint a realistic portrait of, for example, a non-binary character, if you are cis? Without humility, without research, without knowledge, guess what you’ll do? You’ll make that character magical. Or die. Or both.

Friends are a great resource. I’ve been helped along the way by so many of mine. For example, In Indonesian there is one word for temperature hot and a different one for chilli hot and these words are pedas and panas and non-Indo speakers can never remember which one is which and this is such a fantastic nugget that I was like a child on Christmas when I used it in a story. And also the contraction “Indo” is wonderful. How was I ever going to know that on my own? (That story, by the way, is called Lord of the Manor and it was published in The Dalhousie Review.) So step two: have a diverse group of friends. But that’s really just life advice.

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition.”
- Daniel Kahneman

Devour books and articles and whatever you can get your hands on to help you understand the worldview and background of your character. Read other fiction featuring characters like the one you want to create. If your character is Muslim, please read books written by Muslim authors. Seek out interviews with the authors of these books. A while back I was listening to Jen Sookfong Lee on the podcast Can’t Lit. She was talking about naming her Chinese characters and the importance of choosing names that could be pronounced by Chinese parents. I immediately filed that nugget of knowledge away for later. (Thanks, Jen)

Sensitivity readers are professionals you can hire to steer you clear of those manholes. Remember the known unknowns!

A STORY

Months ago, while was casting my new novel, I created this fantastic character called Emmanuelle. She’s a 13th-generation Nova Scotian from an evangelical family with a minister father (hence her name). Em is a teacher and an extrovert. She’s got a rowdy group of friends who come to her apartment and sit around painting their nails and watching Survivor (this is circa 2001). I know her apartment, the bo-ho chic furniture and wall hangings, the sticky kitchen floor, the triangular rainbow sticker just beside the peep hole on her front door, the humid bathroom with its patch of black mould by the tub that always returns no matter how often it gets scrubbed away. I have an image of Emmanuelle too, tall with very dark skin and tight curls that spray out the top of her head like a fountain. She is wonderful. I know her so well I can hear her voice, deep, a little husky, a singer who might break out in jubilant song at any moment. She sang in her church choir for nearly two decades and though she threw over faith when she came out, she still loves all the old gospel hymns.

But then I was plotting out the book and because Em’s not the main character, because she’s a semi-minor actor who is there in service to the main character (as all the characters are of course), the plot dictated that she had to die. And at some hideous point I realized what I had been about to do. Kill my only lesbian character. Worse, kill her in order to trigger an emotional epiphany for the straight dude. (That’s two tropes, by the way) I was in Vancouver having dinner with Dina Del Bucchia. I told her my dilemma. I probably had my hands over my head, quite possibly tugging on my hair. Dina was kind but the verdict was unanimous. So now I’m back to the drawing board with the plot. Because, I want to be fair to my characters and one gay character getting killed in a book full of gay characters is fine but what I was doing was diving face first into a manhole.

KNOW YOUR TROPES

Here is what happens. Gay and trans characters die so often in fictional stories, we see this plot point repeat over and over, and then it becomes a cliche that’s lodged into our brains as fact. (The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman talks about this cognitive bias in chapter five of his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.)

Then when we straight/ cis writers sit down to write a gay or trans character we unconsciously reach for whatever information we have and up comes this tired refrain, which we don’t even realize is a trope, and we unthinkingly, unconsciously, repeat it on the page. It is a self perpetuating cycle. This is the danger of writing from outside of your own experience. Without caution and care, without humility, without research, you will perpetuate a lazy cycle that does everyone a disservice, most of all the community of real people who you are trying to recreate on the page. And then if your ego is fragile because you’re a special snowflake, and someone calls you on your bull shit, you’ll dig your heels in and yell: “Political correctness has gone too far! Don’t tell me what to do! This is fiction and I’m a writer!” And the rest of us will be over here, eyes rolling out of our damn heads.

And let’s pause to think about this trope for a moment. Why are all these gay and trans characters dying all the time? Is it because the rest of us have a deep buried hatred of them and are enacting mass murder on the page because we can’t do it in real life? Think on that and tell me if you still feel good about knocking off your only trans character.

I don’t know if Em will make an appearance in this book I’m writing because I’m reworking the plot. But she’s in my head now so she’s bound to turn up somewhere. I’m not killing this particular darling. I’m saving her for later.

MANHOLES TO SKIRT

It helps to know all the ways you can unintentionally fuck up. I brainstormed a few tropes to get us started. Please chime in, in the comments, if you know any others. I am still learning just like everyone else.

The magical/ wise old black man

Related: the magical Indigenous character

Indigenous characters who are described in animalistic terms. Please. NO.

The predatory lesbian (Who invented this nonsense - religion? hysterical men? all of the above?)

I love Apu Nahasapeemapetilon and in my opinion (not every brown person’s opinion) he works because The Simpsons is a show full of tropes. That’s the whole gag. But if there’s only one brown character in your book and they are driving a cab or working at a 7-11 and have an accent then you have FAILED. Fifty points to Slytherin if said 7-11 guy dies.

The white saviour

The token. You know how on TV shows the token black or gay or brown character has all white/ straight friends? Yeah. That’s not a thing in real life.

In fantasy stories: the good guys are white, the bad guys are black. (Chandler Bing voice: Could you be more racist?)

Adorable asians. RO Kwan writes about this stereotype playing out in real life so have a read and take care with your descriptions.

SEMINAL

Last Fall Tom was reading a book by John Updike. I don’t know which one because it’s not important. Tom said: It’s about a man who leaves his pregnant wife for a younger woman. Uh-huh, I said, bored already with this predictable bit of masturbatory fantasy certain male authors seem keen to replicate. Then a few days later, Tom reported that the book had taken a dark turn. Let me guess, I said. The wife goes nuts and kills the baby? Tom was amazed by my psychic abilities. How did you know? he asked. Have you already read this book?

LOL. I’ve read enough books by male authors, particularly of a certain vintage, to know that some (#notall but #toomany) men are lazy and incapable of writing realistic female characters. To them women = hysterical, doe-eyed, back-stabbing, dangerous, sex-pot, BOOBS. They get pregnant and either terminate the pregnancy in some back alley way that results in death or they throw their babies off a cliff because…I don’t know??… bitches be cray, I guess. Or more likely because on some fundamental level these men believe we aren’t responsible enough to care for children and therefore shouldn’t have the right to decide what happens inside our uteruses. Yeah. Suck on that nasty thought for an hour.

We have a running joke in our house about these seminal authors and their jerk off fiction. It’s also the subject of ridicule all over the internet. If you’re a man writing about a woman, DO BETTER. My pal Jamie Fitzpatrick is a great example of a straight man who writes convincing, complicated, wonderful female characters so I know it can be done. It probably helps if you respect ladies and believe we are equal members of society. Once again, just some basic life advice: don’t be a raging asshole.

BE SPECIFIC

Specificity is the soul of strong writing. Real life is specific and your fiction should be too. Every time a light-skinned brown actor plays a south Indian on screen, an angel in heaven dies. Skin colour isn’t something you just slap on a character like height or glasses. Skin colour is specific. People from north India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan have lighter skin than anyone from south India or Sri Lanka. Even in Sri Lanka, there are significant differences. Tamils are darker than Sinhalese. Burghers are even lighter. Some could pass for white. And why does it matter? Because shadeism is real and pernicious and you have to know the character’s skin tone if you’re going to know the most fundamental things about them. By the way, if you don’t know what shadeism is, you have no business writing from the point of view of a brown character. Go do some homework. Ask your loved ones who are brown (not strangers or acquaintances…please don’t force strangers to teach you things you could learn on the internet). Hire a sensitivity reader.

AGENCY

Recently, I was sharing the stage with another brown author and the moderator asked her the following question, AND I QUOTE: “I was surprised by your book because your characters are from Iran but they didn’t seem oppressed.” This is the kind of bullshit non-white writers have to deal with but that’s a post for another day. Please don’t be like that ignorant moderator. Remember that everyone has agency and all your characters should have some degree of it too. This is really important, especially when you are writing about characters who come from communities that have been sidelined in the western canon. Making characters passive to their fate is lazy writing. Find where their agency lies and explore it on the page.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Diversity on the page begins with diversity off the page. Are all the radio programs and podcasts you listen to narrated by straight, cis, white people? Ditto the books and essays and magazine and online articles you read? What about television and movies? What about the people in your life? Diversify your life and you’ll find it easier to bring that richness to the page.

I’ve barely scratched the surface here. I teach a single session online workshop on writing from outside your perspective (it’s called Writing Who You Don’t Know. Get in touch for more details or a quote if you are interested.) Meantime, here’s some further reading:

In Appropriate: Interviews with Canadian authors on the writing of difference edited by Kim Davids Mandar

Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples by Gregory Younging

At Book Riot: 7 Manholes to skirt

At The Belladonna: a run down of some familiar tropes

At Midnight Breakfast: an illustrated guide

At Lit Hub: a wonderful essay by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda

Write who you don’t know

Originally posted: December 4, 2020

The Canadian Press interviewed me about every blowhard’s favourite topic: authors writing outside their perspectives. How do we create characters whose identities (skin colour, class, sexuality, gender, disability) are different from our own? Is it possible to ace the job and should we even try?

When the request came in, I almost turned it down. Despite what certain dinosaurs might like to believe, this isn’t a straight forward subject. It’s complicated and nuanced and too often dismissed as censorship. (As if there’s a giant mute button Brown people can press to silence writers we despise. HA HA HA. WE WISH.) I wasn’t about to let some unknown reporter twist my words to serve the Old White Man Agenda.

But my publicist assured me the journalist was sensible so I gave her quite a bit of my time and I’m not sorry. You can read the piece here. I was glad to see the article included interviews with other authors including Kim Davids Mandar who edited In | Appropriate, an excellent collection of interviews all about this subject. If I was the head of an MFA program, I would make the book required reading.

This Fall I’ve run two online workshops on “Writing Who You Don’t Know.” The first was for a small group in Alberta and the second for about 70 writers from all over the place including the US and the UK. The turnout at the second workshop was shocking, especially given it was Saturday morning and a number of west coast heroes rose before dawn to Zoom in. But then again, maybe it’s not so surprising. This is difficult work, tricky to pull off. Traditional how-to manuals offer no guidance, too little attention is paid to the subject in classes, and the homogeneity of the industry ensures there’s no sober second thought. Then some poorly written, trope-infested book comes out, the Internet pounces, and all the fragile snowflakes whine about how they will never again win a Booker just because they are straight white men (oh, for a mute button).

All to say, I’m here to help. I’ve got a one-hour workshop and a two-hour workshop, both test-driven and well received. And listen, if you’ve been following me here for any length of time, you know I’m not a charlatan. I’m a thorough and meticulous researcher. I put together thoughtful workshops that give attendees food for thought as well as practical craft advice. If you belong to an organization that would like to host an online workshop, get in touch for more details, references, and the price.

What you know

Originally posted: June 30, 2016

I once adjudicated a junior short fiction contest. Young writers ages 12 -20 submitted their stories and essays and I was given the monumental task of picking winners. When I told a couple of teacher friends that I was doing this they told me to expect cutting. Cutting is important, my teacher friends said. Teenagers always write about characters who cut themselves.

I didn't read any self harm stories but there were some common themes: New York City, spies, zombies, violent crime, and the tragic deaths of healthy young people. The body count was high. Everything about these pieces felt familiar. Maybe a little too familiar. I was a teenage writer once, pouring all my imagination and purple prose into page after page on WordPerfect. My stories were invariably about teenagers on an island, being picked off by a serial killer (spoiler: the killer was one of the teenagers). I knew nothing about deserted islands or serial killers just as I suspect most of these young writers know little of spies and violent crime. What I wanted to say to all of them was: never mind all this; write what you know!

Because here's the thing: there was a lot of talent in these pieces. Evocative scene setting, beautiful turns of phrase, and endings that surprised and thrilled me. But a lot of it was overshadowed by the emphasis on high-stakes plot. Occasionally, a glimmer of some real truth, some messy uncomfortable human emotion, shone through and that's when I got interested.

The problem - I think - is when we are told to write what we know, we think: what I know is boring; no one is going to read that. My advice is more specific: focus on the real feelings and emotions of which you have intimate knowledge. Interrogate those areas of your life which are most painful, most awkward, most cringe-inducing. And then write about those things.

Write about being bullied. Write about feeling inadequate. Write about being abandoned by your friends in the cafeteria. Write about failure. Write about loneliness. And then if you want to set the story in New York City, by all means. Or make your characters werewolves. Have them join MI5. Send them to Saturn.  If your writing is driven by real emotions and feelings, if writing makes me you feel unsettled and deeply uncomfortable, then the setting and characters and plot will matter very little. Because the things you invent will be secondary to the emotions that you know. 

I'd like to go back in time and give this advice to myself: You'll never be this age again. And when you're older you won't have access to the intense, complex emotions you have now. Write this stuff down.

It's low stakes (emotionally) to construct a high-stakes plot that is removed from the reality of one's own life. But when you make yourself vulnerable, when the act of writing feels high-stakes to the writer... that's when the story gets real, gets interesting.

ps. Was this post helpful? If you’d like more feedback, specific to your project, you can hire my services. Get in touch for more info or a quote.

Required reading

In my study, a corner of shelf space is devoted to how-to manuals, books I read with a red pen and highlighter in hand. These are my life savers, the guides I return to whenever I'm floundering.

Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway - the closest thing to a creative writing text book you can get and fully worth the price tag.

In Appropriate edited by Kim Davids Mander - This collection of interviews with Canadian authors tackles the question: how do you write from outside your perspective and should you even try? This is absolutely essential reading for anyone who is trying to conjure characters whose ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and/ or disability are not their own.

Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing by and About Indigenous Peoples by Gregory Younging - And this one is essential for everyone in the publishing industry especially crucial for settler/ immigrant authors who have Indigenous characters in their work.

From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler - immensely helpful when I was first starting to work on The Boat People. Butler advocates a system of imagining individual scenes, jotting them down on cue cards, then once you have sufficient cards, organizing them into an outline. And then putting pen to paper to write a first draft. I fell down on the outline part but being able to take each scene as they came, one at a time, really made the prospect of writing a first draft less overwhelming.

Aspects of the Novel by EM Forster - short and sweet, illuminating for readers as well as writers.

How Fiction Works by James Wood - teaches you how to take apart literature as you would a clock so you can understand what works, what doesn't, and most importantly why. Wood taught me how to read like a writer, critically and carefully.

Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff Vandermeer. This book is a delight.

Confession: I’m not a fan of Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It’s amusing but was maybe too rudimentary for the stage I was at when I first read it.

Pay attention to your boredom

Originally posted: February 19, 2016

Podcasts are like opinions these days; everyone seems to have one. One of my favourites is Startup (the podcast about what it's like to start your own business). It's hosted by former NPR/ Planet Money guy Alex Blumberg and it's fantastic. If you haven't already listened, go have a binge.

“The first draft always sucks. Things want to be bad... the only way to get that stuff to be good is with editing.”
                                                           — Alex Blumberg

I was listening to this episode one evening and it stopped me short. Blumberg talks about how he and his team create their podcasts, how every second of tape is obsessively edited to catch and hold the listener's attention, to educate as well as entertain, and just how much effort goes into making that happen. Skip ahead to about 21 minutes in and listen to what he says about editing. If you're a writer, it will 100 per cent resonate.

"The first draft always sucks," Blumberg says. "Things want to be bad. Talented people with great ideas still produce horrible stuff and the only way to get that stuff to be good is with editing."

Let's savour that for a moment. Things want to be bad. The only solution is editing.

A few beats later, he says: "pay attention to where you are confused, annoyed, bored. A big part of editing is paying attention to your boredom."

If you listen to the episode, you'll see that much of what Blumberg and co. do in their edits is straight forward deletion, skipping past the verbal diarrhea, straight to the good stuff. And this is much of what I do in my edits too. Delete. Delete. Delete. Sentences, words, scenes, whole characters and subplots. Delete. Delete. Delete.

Originally, there were 50 extra (boring) words and the start of this post. Delete!

ps. Was this post helpful? If you’d like more feedback, specific to your project, you can hire my services. Get in touch for more info or a quote.

Underwater writing

Originally posted: December 7, 2016

Years ago, I took a master class with Sarah Selecky. The class was tiny. Five of us students plus Sarah around her kitchen table every Monday night for five weeks. I learned a lot in that month - how to critique other people's work, for example, and by extension how to think critically about my own. But the most important skill Sarah taught me was underwater writing.

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Submerge yourself fully in the scene. Smell, taste, hear, see, and feel every detail. Are you there? Are you squirming? Is it hard work? Good. Now write from that place; write from within the scene. Don't write about the scene. Don't write in circles around the scene. Don't hover above. Write from inside.

“Don’t be deceived by well crafted sentences that write around an experience. Write the experience. Don’t write about it. Write from within it.” — Sarah Selecky

How do you know if you're doing it properly? Watch for the red flags. Abstractions are red flags. Don't say Romeo and Juliet are in love. What does love mean? How does it manifest for these characters? Show us the specific emotions and actions.

Efficient language is another red flag (ditto: cliches). Words like happy, angry, and impatient have become a kind of short hand, so shopworn as to be skimmable. Don't tell us a character is sad. Show us the rapid blinking of the watery eyes. Let us feel the slump of the shoulders. Conjure melancholy without using that word.

The word "something" is another flag. Like efficient language and abstractions it is a first draft placeholder. But in the revisions, you must articulate what the something is.

Don't trust the word suddenly. Cross it out. Make the action feel sudden.

Once you get the hang of it, cliched and lazy writing is easy to spot. A more pernicious problem is beautiful language. "Don't be deceived by well crafted sentences that write AROUND an experience," Sarah told us. "Write the experience. Don't write ABOUT it. Write from WITHIN it."

This is the toughest part of writing. Articulating every emotion and action, that's slow going, gruelling work. It's the real reason writers are tortured and turn to hard liquor. Writing is drowning.

ps. Was this post helpful? If you’d like more feedback, specific to your project, you can hire my services. Get in touch for more info or a quote.

Hype cycle (aka the process)

Originally posted: January 23, 2019

Recently I was listening to an episode of the podcast Zig Zag. It’s about The Hype Cycle which is a graph created by tech analyst Jackie Fenn a quarter century ago. This graph was meant to describe new technology (ie. bitcoin, Twitter, push notifications) but it’s been borrowed by other fields and its basics are a helpful way to think of the writing process.

The Hype Cycle has five phases:

Image via Gartner

1. initial spark of innovation
2. peak of expectation
3. trough of disillusionment
4. slope of enlightenment
5. plateau of productivity

Every story begins with the first idea. It might not even be a very big idea but that match gets lit and it sets off a bonfire and you get so jazzed about writing this amazing thing.

That sets off phase two which is when you’re deep in the writing zone, churning out pages and pages and completely engaged with your project. It’s such a happy time, possibly the happiest time! At some point though you tumble into phase three, the pit of hell and despair. I have been thinking about the trough of disillusionment a lot because I know it is looming on my horizon but also because I’ve been evaluating manuscripts for other writers this month and I am always conscious of the need to balance critique and praise. My job is to question areas where I feel the draft is weak and offer suggestions for possible improvements. The risk is - especially with writers who I don’t know well or at all - that my comments will throw them into the trough and they won’t try to climb out.

Here’s the thing: the trough is a necessary part of the process. It’s like driving through the isthmus between St. John’s and Terra Nova National Park. Sometimes that damn isthmus is a death trap and the fog is low and there’s a horrible blizzard and you’re driving with zero visibility. But there’s literally no other way to get to the Park. You just have to white knuckle through it. The trough is the same. There’s no way to get to a better draft without seeing the flaws and feeling bad about them.

The trick is to keep calm and carry on. Don’t give up. And don’t deceive yourself into thinking the flaws aren’t there. Accept the flaws. Start trying to fix them. That’s phase four, the gradual work of revision and correction. And onward to the plateau of productivity. That initial hopeful burst doesn’t really come back. For one thing, after some time, the idea is no longer novel. But what you get instead in these last two stages is gradual improvement. Little by little. Until the end.

Sometimes you have to cycle through phases two and three several times while working on a single project. Dr. Math and I have this running joke in our house. He comes home from a day of research and I ask: “How was it?” If it’s been a good day he says: “I solved this lemma. I’m a genius!” But inevitably, the following day he’ll come home with a hang dog, downtrodden expression and tell me the breakthrough he made yesterday ended up only being a partial solution. Or he’s now discovered some other loose thread. Scientific research and fiction writing, if plotted on graphs would look much like the same rollercoaster. See the ride through to the end. That’s what I’m saying.

Sense of an ending

In my writing group we have a running joke that no matter what or whose piece I'm critiquing, my advice will always be to chop the last paragraph/ scene/ chapter/ sentence.

There is a tendency, often, to wax on for too long. Or, worse, to be anxious that the reader will not get it, will fail to properly understand the story. And then the writer, in a moment of weakness, crams a horrible summary at the end to explain the whole thing. No. Just erase all that stuff. The real ending is three sentences up. British author Tessa Hadley agrees: "If ever you can take off the last paragraph and it still works then you didn't need that last paragraph.”

It’s instructive to hear authors speak about endings which, in my experience, are either instinctive and automatic or impossible roadblocks that stall everything.

A while back, Hadley was interviewed by BBC Radio 4's James Naughtie about three stories in her collection Married Love. What interested me most - but wasn't discussed much - were her thoughts on endings. To summarize, she says: stories must take a turn and that you should leave something left over, a note of yearning at the end.

To me this means you begin with the characters at a certain point, then in the course of the story their circumstances change, and there is a turn so that they are left somewhere else. Or the reader begins at a point - perhaps with an assumption - and by the end the turn takes place in the reader's mind. The reader comes to a realization or their assumptions are proven wrong.

“...the ending of a short story spins and looks back over the short story and so it’s more retrospective in a way.”
— Lorrie Moore

As for the yearning….there is always that unfinished note at the end of Hadley's stories. The characters feel like they are left longing or the reader is. This is one of those characteristics that I love about her stories, that I want to emulate but can't because I can't even really articulate what it is that she does or how she does it.

And then here’s American short story queen Lorrie Moore talking about the difference between short stories and novels. The former ends with a backward glance while the latter looks forward.

Finally, some wisdom from author Ethan Canin who believes our job, as writers, through the course of the story, is to engage the reader so fully and deeply that emotion overwhelms intellect and the reader is carried along: "At the end of a story or novel, you do not want the reader thinking. Endings are about emotion, and logic is emotion's enemy."

Short story endings

The other day, I ran into Eva Crocker and Susie Taylor and we got to talking about short story endings. They’re so tricky to write, I complained. To which Susie said: Yeah, there are only so many times you can end a story with someone dying or getting on a plane.

Ending a novel is infinitely easier than ending a short story. Actually, almost everything about the craft of writing is easier in long vs. short form. Regardless, here are four ways to end a short story:

“There are only so many times you can end a story with someone dying or getting on a plane.” — Susie Taylor, author and astute person

First off, BACKSPACE. If you’ve already written all the way to the end you might want to reconsider the last sentence, the last word, or the last paragraph. Is it really needed? Many writers, myself included, make the mistake of summarizing things for the reader, just in case they didn’t get the point. Originally, the final sentence of “Butter Tea at Starbucks” was something like: Everything feels miraculous. And my writing group said: you’ve nailed the final scene but knock it off with this dumb line, already. They were right so I did.

Sometimes the ending is lurking somewhere else in the story and the trick is to go back and find it, then cut and paste so that the ending is a flashback. I struggled with “Happy Adventure” for years before finally moving the second last scene to the very end.

Other times, the ending is a flash forward. Check out Tessa Hadley’s story “An Abduction” which ends with a big leap into the future. It’s disorienting in the best possible way.

One way to conclude a story is to take some previously innocuous image from earlier in the story and reproduce in the form of an epiphany at the end. I learned this trick after binge reading a bunch of stories by Souvankham Thammavongsa. Have a look at Souvankham’s O. Henry-prize winning story “Slingshot.” In the third last scene a character talks about a tornado. It’s a bit obscure, what he says, and for a moment the reader is left thinking: “what’s this guy on about?” but it’s also so fleeting that it’s almost forgettable. Except then at the very end, the tornado returns in an unexpected way, gloriously described so this time we are left with a crisp image. (Read the story and you’ll understand what I’m saying)

Why does this particular sleight of hand work so well? Because a reliable way to end a story well is to surprise the reader WHILE making them feel that in hindsight the ending makes sense. And readers also like foreshadowing. Good murder mysteries do both these things well - surprise ending that also feels authentic because in hindsight you realize the gut punch was lying in wait all along.

I don’t mean to give the impression that a neat little trick is going to be satisfying to a reader without substance in place. Fundamentally, stories are about transformation. Something has to change by the end: either the character or the reader’s perception of the situation/ character or both.

Talent is over-rated

Sometimes we talk about stories like this: the story is an entity with its own consciousness. The story arrives, via a muse. The story reveals itself as it is being written. Writers are mere scribes.

In my experience, this airy-fairy, woo-woo, magical thinking is a whole lot of nonsense. Writing isn't magic. It's good old-fashioned hard work. It is sitting your butt in the chair every single day and forcing yourself to do the work. Because trust me about this, if you don’t keep the pump primed, it will not yield a drop.

Sure, there are moments that feel sublime but the movie montage of how a book is made would look really mundane. Writing is a nose stuck in a refugee law text book. It is hours trawling the internet for photos of jail cells and then more hours trying to find the correct combination of words to evoke said jail cells. It is reading over something you thought was insightful and poetic the day before only to discover it has morphed into toxic waste. It is revising a chapter for the tenth time. It is writing the same sentence five different ways and then reading each option out loud. It is chucking months of work and going back to square one. It is persistence and effort with a healthy dose of self-hatred. And most of the time it is also working despite deep uncertainty. Not knowing if the story is any good. Or else, knowing it is not good but hoping it might eventually get better.

Sometimes, because we are often asked and it is difficult to properly describe how stories are invented, we writers revert to supernatural explanations. Harry Potter famously appeared to JK Rowling in a train car. I believe this anecdote because that is how many of my characters have rocked up too. I’ll be tossing and turning with insomnia when a little girl appears out of thin air.

This is called inspiration (1%). Then comes the perspiration (99%). Now I have to make decisions. What’s this little girl’s name, age, and future vocation? Is she introverted or extroverted, a pessimist or optimist? Decisions mean constraints and constraints are important because good writing is precise. You can’t be specific when you are writing about a character if you haven’t nailed down the details. But then the real questions are: What does this character want more than anything? Who far will she go to get it? And for that, I free write pages and pages and pages, most of which will never leave my notebook. From all this random riffing emerges a picture of who the character is and from there the plot evolves.

It does everyone a disservice to suggest there’s a fairy who selectively whispers sweet nothings into the ears of a chosen few. Talent is real and it sure is helpful but it’s highly overrated and not the key ingredient. If you want to be a writer, write. Do the work. I repeat: talent is not necessary. Work is necessary. That’s the 99%.

All the work while crying

Originally published October 22, 2019

If procrastination was a sport, writers would medal. Going to the gym, cleaning the toilet, de-frosting the freezer, in-box zero, baking, scrolling instagram …these are novice moves. A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon search engine optimizing this website. A new low or levelling up?

But there’s another, more insidious, way we procrastinate. We avoid the difficult scenes.

Write the difficult scenes

You know the ones I’m talking about. You’ve brought characters together to have a knock-em-down-drag-em-out fight but just as the tension rises, you panic and fade to black. Or: something horrible happens off stage and the reader is informed of it after the fact.

As a reader, nothing is more disappointing than being cheated of the juice. But as a writer, I’ve been guilty of wimping out.

There were several scenes in The Boat People that were not written until late in the game (read: until my editors forced my hand). The scene where Sellian is born, the one where the UN leaves Mahindan’s hometown, the one where Priya and Charlie take Sellian somewhere he doesn’t want to go (I won’t spoiler the book and say where). Consistently, readers tell me these were the most gutting scenes, the ones that made them cry, the ones they won’t forget. I’m proudest of those scenes. They were hard work but that’s not why I love them. I love them because they are the scenes where stakes were high and characters were in peril and therefore, they contained the most emotion. Emotion is a story’s heart beat. If the emotions are dialled down, if you let the characters off easy and nothing they do is fraught, your story will flatline.

Unconscious procrastination

The odd thing about those scenes was that I always knew they took place in the timeline of the story, I just didn’t think they were necessary to show. Unconscious procrastination is insidious: we don’t even realize we are avoiding the hard work.

We create characters we love and then we can’t stomach making their lives hard. So we don’t write those difficult scenes. Instead, we write a whole bunch of unnecessary material. We add side stories and secondary plots, create minor characters and let the big, bad stuff happen to them. Deep down we know the story is flatlining and we try to breathe life into it by padding it with all this extra stuff. We procrastinate by writing.

How to write faster

Here’s the foolproof way to write your story faster: identify the scenes you are avoiding and get them over with. No excuses. March that character down the gangplank and push her into the shark-circled waters. Now, the climactic scenes need not be ones of injury and death. The big scene could be a character telling his parents something they don’t want to hear. Or a character having tea with the Queen of England and dropping the cup. Or kicking the corgi under the table by accident.

Figuring out the scenes you’re avoiding isn’t always easy. It helps to have another writer or a blunt friend read your work. Even better: hire a professional to help you with your manuscript. If neither of these are options, here are some signs to watch for on your own:

1. Is a minor character getting more action than the protagonist?

2. By the end of the story, who has experienced the most change and transformation? If it’s not the protagonist that’s a problem.

3. Are confrontations/ fights avoided or resolved too quickly?

4. Is life a little too easy for the protagonist? Do they bounce back too quickly and/or un-harmed from every set back?

5. In a tense scene, where were the characters physically in relation to each other? Long distance fights don’t have the same punch as two characters having it out face to face.

6. What action happens off stage?

7. What scenes made you squirm/ want to walk away? Did you wimp out? Did you end them too soon? Be honest.

Remember: stakes + peril = emotion. What is at stake for the protagonist? Have you put them in peril? Are the stakes and the peril present on the page? Count the words. Make sure you’ve devoted sufficient time to your protagonist’s discomfort. Don’t procrastinate on your own discomfort. Sweating, the shakes - these are solid signs you’re doing the hard work. Bonus points for tears.

ps. Was this post helpful? If you’d like more feedback, specific to your project, you can hire my services. Get in touch for more info or a quote.

via Toothpaste for Dinner

Red herring

Originally posted: February 24, 2016

The novelist Anne Simpson once gave me some good editing advice. Often the beginning (the first sentence, paragraph, chapter) is not really the beginning.

When we sit down to tell a story, it takes a while to warm up, to ease in. So then, in the edits, we must wade through and find the true beginning, the place where the story really starts, and lop off the rest.

I remember having this experience with an early draft of A Drawer Full of Guggums. Originally the story had an extra 500 words at the top. My main character got on a plane, flew half way around the world. Jet-lagged, she listened to her uncle snore in the next room. Bumbling around London, she struggled to find housing. And that was all great fun to write. It was quality time she and I spent together. But all along, I knew the story was about the main character and her quirky landlady. Which meant everything before their first meeting - all those hundreds of words - had to go.

Preludes and prologues, sometimes they are a red herring. Be brave.

ps. Was this post helpful? If you’d like more feedback, specific to your project, you can hire my services. Get in touch for more info or a quote.