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.

The sanity thief

Originally posted: February 18, 2020

2019 got off to a rocky start. For reasons I still can’t fully articulate, I fell into an anxiety spiral in the first half of the year. It felt like one of those Escher paintings where you’re climbing stairs to nowhere that never end.

It began during a quiet period, when I was home and not travelling, not even really doing much book promotion, supposedly stress-free. That’s when the anxiety crept up. All stealthy like. Like a bank robber. To steal my sanity. And for a long time I didn’t realize it was even anxiety. Or rather, I knew I was anxious but also, I thought I was dying. Because these are the wholly rational thoughts anxiety produces. You. Are. Dying. Now.

Helpfully, my best friend pointed out that mortality is the human condition. We’re all dying, Shar, she said, then grinned at her own cleverness because she’s perverse like that. We were having cocktails at Sassafraz after one of my events and I told her I was putting those words into my next book as revenge.

Sometime in the spring, I realized I wasn’t actually dying. Or at least, not right this second and not any faster than any other mostly healthy person my age who occasionally eats kale and zones out in spin class. There was nothing much wrong with my body except a screw had come loose in my head. So then I cast about for the cause. Objectively and subjectively, life was grand. What can be wrong when all your professional pipe dreams have come true? What can be wrong when you have a nice life with people you love in a safe country with free healthcare? What is there to be anxious about?

I’m having a mid-life crisis, I group texted my friends. It’s fucking tedious. Six months and I’m getting it out of my system.

Turns out, I’m the person who gives her midlife crisis a deadline. I’m also the person who does her homework. I took up meditation (Calm is a really excellent app by the way). I began each morning by thinking of three nice things from the day before. I read a bunch of research articles about anxiety and had a long, long chat with a friend who is a cognitive psychologist. I went to one deeply unhelpful and condescending therapy session. I took all my bad feelings and channelled it into my work. I wasn’t totally sure any of these things were getting me closer to a solution. I still felt like an anxious thrumming ball of awful.

And then, one day in September, when I was coming to grips with things and feeling genuinely better, I was listening to Rebecca Traister talking about her book “Good and Mad,” how its unexpected success had lengthened her book tour and how stressful that was and how the fall out was intense, irrational, anxiety. Hello. What’s that? Anxiety caused by book publication? DING DING DING. And yes, let me just acknowledge this is peak first world/ fortunate author problems.

Tom, my doctor, some other people probably, had suggested that perhaps it was publication and publicity and the whole whirlwind of the previous year that was to blame but until I heard another author mirror back my experiences, it was impossible to believe a good thing could cause bad feelings. As Daniel Lavery likes to say, life is a rich tapestry.

This week I was listening to John Green, whose fourth novel, The Fault in Our Stars, went super nova in 2012, talk about his own success and its resulting fall out. His issues, like his success, are so much more intense than mine ever were, but much of what he said, about the bad that comes married to the good, was familiar.

All this to say, if you are an author on year two of an even mildly successful book, feeling crappy for no good reason, it’s not a mid-life crisis. It’s not a catastrophic illness. It’s success. This is what it feels like.

And also! Importantly! It will pass.

There be dragons

Originally posted: July 8, 2019

One Saturday a few months after The Boat People came out, I was at my local nursery, pleasantly hung-over, and feeling optimistic about the fact that this time I would for sure keep the new basil alive (spoiler: I did not). It was one of those sunny, hopeful mornings. And then, while in line, I made the mistake of checking email.

There was a message from a reader. The subject was in all caps, angry and accusing. The message itself was a dissertation, in length, if not quite in cogency. How do I hate your novel? Let me count the ways.

It wasn’t the first or last time a molotov cocktail has landed in my in box. But this one got to me. Something about the timing and the all caps subject line calling me a lazy writer was shocking. It felt so personal and mean, an attack on not just my writing but my whole weekend. I began to shake, right there in the nursery, surrounded by ferns and succulents and other people buying ficus plants. Instinctively, I put the phone away. I blamed myself for being the dumb ass who checks email in line. Good writers don’t distract themselves from the moment. They pay attention. Watch. Store the real world up for later. I vowed to stay off email until Monday. I thought about my new plants, how I was going to spend the day outside, potting and writing. I stopped shaking. I paid, made chit-chat with the cashier, carried my purchases to the car, congratulated myself on being so well adjusted. And then a woman came running out of the nursery waving my wallet.

Now, a year later, I can laugh about it but in the moment that reader’s anger was de-stabalizing to my work, to my ability to focus. I remembered this email the other day while reading Scaachi Koul’s excellent piece about a YA author who stalked a Goodreads reviewer. Yes, you read that right. This author got a bad review, lost all common sense, hunted down the reviewer, and showed up at her door. Let this be a lesson to all of us published authors: Goodreads is not for us.

Before my book came out, I used to be a regular lurker on Goodreads. Whenever I finished  reading a book I really liked, I would go online to see what other readers were saying. My first Goodreads review was a one-star. It popped up while I was still working on the manuscript. Disturbance in the matrix? Break in the time-space continuum? Either way, my days on the site were over. 

Goodreads is for readers. It’s for honest critique and dialogue and yes, sometimes, vitriol, about books. It’s for people who hate the synopsis and rate it one star. It’s for readers who want recommendations. For readers who want to keep and share to be read lists. It’s a democratizing force that bypasses the traditional gatekeepers and allows a wider range of books to gain traction. It’s for book lovers and bloggers. It’s for marketing departments. It’s for trolls (because the whole internet is for trolls). It’s a lot of things for a lot of people. BUT GOODREADS IS NOT FOR WRITERS. It’s a free internet so go on there if you like but I’m telling you right now it’s a mistake.

Because what are we on this earth to do? Write. And there is a limit to how many beatings one’s own ego can take before it begins to impact your work. And trust me, there are enough beatings to go around. There are hideous reviews that can’t be ignored. There are readers who itemize your failures via email or at a book club or event. There are rejections. Prizes you lose, lists that snub you, shops that don’t carry your book, loved ones who won’t read it. Trust me. Enough beatings. You need not go looking for more. And while I’m on the subject, for the love of god, stop googling your name. Get rid of that google alert. Leave it to your mom/ lover/ agent/ editor. GO BACK TO WORK.

Gripes

Originally posted: December 7, 2018

Rebecca wrote this dark comedy of a blog post recently and I was all “SING IT, SISTER.” It’s about the indignities she has endured in her years as a writer. Rebecca has been writing and publishing longer than I have so she’s had to grin and bear more, but I share indignity #4 on her list.

Anyway, like Rebecca, I had mostly wonderful experiences in my debut year as an author and I know I’m incredibly lucky to even be a writer and have work published but there are also moments that make me want to shake my fist. Please enjoy some dark humour…

In March I adjudicated a short story competition. Reading stories and choosing the winner was a pleasure but then the organization tried to scam me out of my payment with the old “the cheque is in the mail” routine. It was not in the mail. Not even after I sent several emails. And then there was radio silence and I started to get seriously concerned. Fortunately, the organization was the PEI Writers’ Guild and I have an acquaintance from PEI. She intervened and then the cheque really was in the mail.

In April I took part in the book club at my local museum (The Rooms in St. John’s). People paid $15 each to attend. The evening was a delight. We had a really big and wonderful audience and the interviewer was fantastic. But the payment took months and several emails on my part. If I don’t pay the plumber within 30 days he charges interest. But some organizations seem to think writers don’t deserve to get paid on time. Anyway, good thing our province has a toothless Status of the Artist legislation, huh?

An organization asked me to give a key note speech at their event. Key note speeches take time, effort, and stress. I wrote back a very polite email (which I put a lot of thought into) where I laid out why I couldn’t work for free, how to get in touch with my agent and negotiate a rate, and then listed a couple of other much cheaper options for how I could help them out. Think I got the courtesy of a reply? Nope.

A group of writers asked me to teach them a private workshop for free. LOL.

FOR REAL THOUGH…WHY THE HELL DO PEOPLE THINK I WANT TO WORK FOR FREE? FOR THE RECORD: I DO NOT.

Once I was on a panel where all the authors were asked to prepare a 10 minute reading. One of the authors yammered on for about 25 minutes while the other author and I stared dolefully at each other. Finally the moderator cut him off (he hadn’t even gotten to his reading yet!). Then we did a Q&A and he kept trying to hog all the air time. Who am I kidding? Of course this happened more than once. And to paraphrase Rebecca, it’s not all male authors of a certain age but it is ALWAYS male authors of a certain age.

Writers are forever being picked up at airports and driven places by strangers. Sometimes it’s innocuous and you make pleasant small talk. Just as often it’s a bloody nightmare. Once, I got into a fight with a driver about “Hilary’s emails.” I hope he wasn’t expecting a tip. In New York, a driver with a Spanish accent complained about “Muslim foreigners.” He didn’t get a tip either. Once, soon after the miscarriage of justice that was the Coulton Bushie trial, a driver talked about why “Indian boys” deserve to get shot.

Hello older man I’ve just met. Please remove your hand from my upper back. Please stop taking every opportunity to randomly touch me as we stand at this registration table making awkward small talk while we wait for our name tags. I’m going to stand waaaaaay over here now and go out of my way to avoid you for the rest of this literary festival.

At a big event, in a room of 500 people where everyone had a copy of my book but most of them hadn’t read it yet, a woman stood to ask a question and shamelessly gave away the ending while the rest of the audience shouted her down. (Not the first time it’s happened either.)

Nasty emails from readers. Yes, really.

I agreed to take part in an event with another author. After the arrangements were made and plane tickets were bought, I found out it was an unmoderated conversation. For an hour. With an author I had previously met once for five minutes in an elevator. I happen to like this author very much and I think the feeling is mutual but it’s really unfair to make authors act as their own moderators. Promoting your own work and moderating a conversation are two very different skills and it’s impossible to move back and forth seamlessly. Fortunately, there were only 7 people in the audience.

Once after I’d given a 45 minute speech that I’d spent a very long time researching and preparing, a man in the audience said: “I haven’t read your book but let me tell you why everything you’ve just said is problematic.” LOL. When it was my turn to reply, I very politely eviscerated him to audience applause. Come at me, bro. But you best not miss.

In praise of agents

Originally posted: December 27, 2017.

Soon after I'd signed with my agent Stephanie, an acquaintance said (appalled): "but why would you want to work with an agent? they take 25%!" Well, first off, my agent is not taking a quarter of my royalties. Secondly, there would be no royalties without her.

Look, I think it's like real estate agents. Sure you could buy direct from the owner and negotiate a three per cent price reduction or whatever the realtor going rate is these days. But a good agent will save you from a lemon, point out the water damage, the cracks in the foundation, have advance knowledge of a gem before it hits the market. Of course a useless agent will do squat all and give the entire profession a bad name. So in all things the advice is: find a good professional.

Agents have knowledge of, and relationships with, editors. They don't just send your manuscript to a house, they target specific editors who would be a good fit for you and your book. Second, they know how to play the game. I only have the murkiest sense of what this game is to be honest but it involves a clever balance of hype and reticence, careful timing, and the intervention of benevolent deities called scouts. Stephanie has tried to explain it all to me but it's like when my husband Tom starts talking about string theory (or whatever it is that he does). My eyes gloss over and all I hear are cats. 

International sales are a completely different beast. Agents go to the big book fairs where they champion your book. They have contacts with overseas editors and subagents. They know how to time submissions. In short, agents get you the best deal possible and as many deals as possible.

And then once a deal is made, they negotiate the finer points of the contract. Even after you're working with a publishing house, the agent stays close, to make sure you're getting good editorial support, the right sales and marketing treatment. If things go pear shaped, they intervene. It's not just the business side of things either. Agents can help with interview prep and presentation skills. They check in to make sure you're not hiding under the bed hyperventilating into a paper bag. Sometimes Stephanie really feels like my personal cheerleader, therapist, and coach, all rolled into one. But most importantly, she takes care of a whole ton of stuff behind the scenes (and there is A LOT going on back there) leaving me free to WRITE.

The spreadsheet

Originally posted: July 26, 2016

It's rejection season! Seven rejections so far this month. My friend Sonam asked me how I handle it - so many "no"s. I've written about rejection before but not about my spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is key to the whole "brush it off" process. (It's also key to staying sane and organized.)

The format doesn't matter too much. Submitted. Rejected. Accepted. That's all you need. Create the spreadsheet as soon as you start sending your work out. That way, when the replies come in, you'll have a place to tally them up and something concrete to do.

The act of filling in the boxes can be analgesic. You read the rejection. You fill in the spreadsheet. Decide if you need to revise the story. If not, because you can see at a glance which publications haven't seen the story yet, you can re-submit right away. The goal is to have as few stories in the rejected section as possible.

Recently, I began jotting down alternative publications beside each submitted story. I highly recommend this approach. It makes re-submitting even more automatic and leaves zero time for brooding.

Writers, if I can give you one piece of advice: stop feeling sorry for yourself. That is precious time when you could be writing, editing, submitting, reading or binge watching Orange is the New Black.

Eventually something will stick. A story will be accepted and then you can move it to the "published" section of the spreadsheet (keep it visible, close to the rejected list). This is important because you can see over time how stories graduate from rejected to accepted. And keeping track of which publications rejected the stories will also help you see the truth: that taste is subjective. Just because a story is rejected doesn't mean it's worthless. Sometimes, yes, the story needs work. And if a rejection comes with feedback, consider it a gift. But often a rejection from one publication is only that: a rejection from one publication.

The spreadsheet speaks the truth. Look at all those acceptances! Look at all those rejections! Being a writer means being rejected. So go send your work out, go court rejection.

This post was written in 2016 but this spreadsheet is from 2020.

On rejection

Originally posted: December 22, 2015

In the late summer of 2011, I did something that, in retrospect, was a gamble. I left a full time job to write. Yes, there would be freelance work (read: paid gigs) but it was a conscious decision to check out of one career and make a running leap at another.

And almost immediately, I began sending my work into the world. I had taken a class with Jessica Grant a few months earlier and had a few stories stock piled away. I sent them to contests and journals. Anyone who has been through this maze knows it is a tedious, time consuming, soul destroying process that usually ends with a self addressed stamped envelope bearing a form letter rejection. If you’re lucky, someone will have scrawled the name of your story in pencil so you’ll know which one got the thumbs down.

Fast forward three and a half years. 2014 came and went and yes, I’d had a bit of success. A couple of short stories won awards. One made a long list. I’d done a couple of public readings and won a grant. But mostly what I had was a whole lot of rejection. Rejection and lost competitions.

Everyone has their own way of dealing with the words "no, thanks." My strategy has been to keep my work in circulation (five stories go out in a batch, rejections roll in more or less together, I re-shuffle the deck and send them all out again). The rule is: don’t wallow; write.

The thing about publications and prizes is that they don’t tell the whole story. The whole story, at the end of 2014, was that I had a disciplined (more or less, let’s be honest...no one is perfect!) writing practice. I was in the habit of submitting my work. I had the first draft of a novel and a collection of short stories I was proud to send out. Hundreds of thousands of beautiful words. It ain’t nothing!

Writing is a leap of faith. Submission is a gamble. And rejection is a knife in the heart. But what is to be gained by indulging the knife? Pull it out, throw it away. Get. Back. To. Work.

Cheryl Strayed tackled rejection and professional jealousy in an old Dear Sugar column. And her words, as always, ring with truth and wisdom. She’s speaking here about jealousy but it could just as easily be applied to rejection:

“You do not let yourself think about it. There isn’t a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.”

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.