Blurbs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copy. Write.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The one about friends

This one isn’t about writing.

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

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

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

Aliens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yellow

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

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

Exhibits A&B:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cozy murder mystery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best

Speaking of highschool…

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

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

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

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

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

Highschool

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

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

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

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

In defence of cliches

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

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

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

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

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

Math lesson

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

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

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

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

Eulogy

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

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

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

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

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

Take the wheel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winner? Take all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This ain’t National Geographic

There is a moment in V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night when the first person protagonist declares: “Even now I do not wish to translate that word, kottiya. Must we explain each humiliation to be believed?” (pg. 113)

It’s a powerful moment in a powerful scene, but even out of context, the line is important for what it can teach us about craft. Writers who are not white sometimes struggle with this particular issue. How much of the culture/ language of the story should we translate? Can we assume the reader knows the definition of a salwar kameez? Must I explain that ammachi means maternal grandmother? That cousin brother is a male cousin and not, in any way, incestuous?

Authors, take heart. There’s a simple solution to all of this. Just assume no one will ever read your story. Write for an audience of one and let that one be you.

There are two good reasons for this approach. First, publication is ANGST-RIDDEN and something every author looks forward to with gritted teeth. The only part of the process you are sure to enjoy is the writing. So if you aren’t amusing yourself, what’s the point?

Second, it’s a fool’s errand to write with any particular audience in mind. Readers are special snowflakes, each with their own life experiences, culture, and ways of seeing the world. You are never going to be able to curate your work in such a way that each and every reader fully understands every word or undercurrent or moment of subtext or character motivation.

We’re writing fiction, not a National Geographic article. If you start defining every little thing, the pace will grind to a halt and that’ll be the end of the reader’s attention. Focus on the characters and the story. Include nothing that the characters would not themselves think. Forget the reader.

When editors italicize salwaar kameez or idiyappam, when publishing houses ask for glossaries, they are not only doing so for the benefit of an imagined reader, they are imagining a very specific reader. Guess what skin colour that reader has? Guess what language he speaks? Guess his gender (hahah. trick question). Guess his sexuality.

Readers are all kinds of people. And it is a truth universally acknowledged that good stories, told well, transcend cultures, borders, ethnicity, language, and time. Otherwise, how do you explain the enduring appeal of Shakespeare, Austen, Jesus’ parables, or Lord Buddha’s life story? Or the fact that I have been reading Tolstoy for decades and still only have the foggiest idea what a samovar is.

Lately, I’m noticing a sea change. Sugi Ganeshananthan’s novel, that I quoted above, came out this year and includes plenty of Tamil words, some translated, others not, none in unnecessary italics. Reema Patel’s Such Big Dreams - set in India and told from the perspective of a narrator for whom English is (at least) a third language - is full of words and slang that I assume are Hindi or possibly Marathi, none of it italicized, almost none of it explained. These authors know readers are intelligent.

Many of the words in Michael Crummey’s Galore are a mystery to me but it’s still one of my favourite books of all time. His writing is better for being true to the characters, for his commitment to their dialect. And listen, if Crummey’s not including a glossary for words like dunch and skerry and slut lamp, then neither am I, and neither should you.

Dissection

In grade eleven biology, my lab partner and I dissected a frog. We cut it open and stuck pins in all the organs, and in studying close up the frog’s anatomy, we gained a better understanding of our own.

In any story there’s the narrative readers passively imbibe. But underneath that narrative all the tools of craft are working together to bring the story to life. On Saturday I led a workshop where a room of writers dissected a story by O. Henry/ Giller-winner Souvankham Thammavongsa.

Have a read (or a listen) to Good-looking and then come back to read our results.

On the face of it, nothing much happens in the narrative. And yet, the story is compelling. Why?

TENSION

Dissection

A key tension in the story is the disconnect between the way characters want to be perceived and the way they are perceived. Dad talks a big game but his child sees through the charade. Meanwhile the son would have us believe he’s a fair-minded narrator even as he contradicts himself (Now, I love Dad, and I hate to say this but…). Neither man is entirely honest, leaving the reader to judge. Stories are more interesting if the reader must play an active role.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN?

Readers are constantly trying to figure out: what’s the story about? what will happen next? This is why writing instructors harp on about show don’t tell. Because if you tell the reader what the story is about, if you telegraph what’s about to happen, you rob the reader of the mystery-solving fun.

Although, note how much the story tells and how little it shows, in particular that the once scene takes place in the second act at the coffee shop. This is one of those instances when a guideline (show don’t tell) doesn’t apply. Telling is a tool as much as showing and some stories require its use.

Dad’s doing his push ups with a smirk on his face. Mom’s saddled with three children. We know where this is going, right? Man cheats. Woman discovers the infidelity. Bam: family in crisis. Surprise! This isn’t that kind of story. Good-looking is successful because it keeps the reader guessing. Just when you think you’ve figured out where it’s headed, the plot veers left.

STAKES

If you want the reader to care, you must raise stakes. At the first whiff of infidelity, the external and emotional stakes are present. Will an affair crack this family apart? Will the child be forced to collude with his father in hoodwinking his mother? But while our attention is focused on the obvious, Good-looking slyly reveals the real stakes are philosophical. The family unit was never in peril but Dad’s actions jeopardize his son’s love and respect. Ironic considering this is a man who spends the whole story obsessed with earning a stranger’s respect.

PLOT

Plot can take the form of action rising to a climax. Or it can be a gradual accumulation of knowledge. The narrator’s contempt for his father is present from the jump (Dad thought himself a good-looking man) and builds to a devastating blow: Now, I hate to say this, and bless his heart, but Dad had talked all night, looking like a dumb fool, a chunk of muscle.

During the anniversary party, I couldn’t help but hear a sinister tone in the clink, clink of those champagne flutes. They were as potent as gun shots.

DESIRE

Often when a story leaves you cold it’s because it hasn’t laid bare the characters’ desires. During the date/ non-date the Professor’s motivations are straight forward. But Dad is a mystery. He’s so eager he arrives early but he’s brought his son along. My theory: Dad’s confident in his appearance so sex isn’t what he needs. It’s this educated woman’s admiration that he wants above all. When the narrator senses this truth he experiences a rare moment of empathy: I felt sorry for him then. Perhaps this is why Dad puts his wedding ring back on. It’s anther surprise we don’t see coming but perhaps it makes sense in hindsight. Having failed to win the Professor’s respect, he decides Mom - a younger woman who dropped out of school and maybe sees him as he wishes to be seen - is enough.

TURN, TURN, TURN

Mom and Dad celebrate a 50th anniversary. Who saw that coming? This unexpected end made me question the narrator, remember all those times he contradicted himself and wonder what else he misunderstood. Was the rampant philandering (Dad gets older, but the women stay the same age) real? Mom calling during the date/ non-date, laughing about the women at the gym: was she the butt of the joke or in on it, secure in her husband’s fidelity? Reckonings that force the reader to re-consider the story, see it all differently, in light of new information, make for delightful endings.

CHANGE

Stories are about change. Usually it’s the characters who change their actions/ minds/ lives. But sometimes it’s the reader who changes. In this story, the characters don’t change. What alters is our understanding of the story. In the closing beats, the narrator muses on the Professor. This stranger he met once is the one who got away.

“The action of the character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown.”
- Elizabeth Bowen

An unexpected plot twist that makes complete sense. This is a child whose father drags him across town at bedtime to chaperone a date/ not date. Whether or not it happened, he pictures himself parked in front of television while a parent conducts an affair in the next room (that’s exactly what Mom would have done. She’s not off the hook either.). His vulnerability is laid bare when we realize this man spent his childhood feeling so neglected that decades later he yearns for a stranger who put his needs ahead of her desires.

IN CONCLUSION

A man makes a shocking declaration of love that upends everything. Good-looking could have so easily been a straight forward tale of a family torn asunder by a father’s infidelity. Instead, it’s the son’s confession that rocks our understanding of the story. When you’re writing a story and the plot seems obvious, try an alternate route. It could lead to a more interesting end.

ps. Here are more thoughts on how to end a short story.

Toast is not exotic

As a rule, in my writing, I never italicize non-English words. At first, this wasn’t a conscious decision. It was just common sense. Italics indicate emphasis. And if a story is from the point of view of a Spanish-speaking character, say, then words like hijo and lo siento and hola would have no particular emphasis in the character’s mind.

When my short stories were published, editors sometimes italicized the non-English words. To be honest, I didn’t notice. Probably no one asked my permission. Or maybe they did and I was too green around the gills to know better or refuse.

But after The Boat People came out, a reader asked how I’d convinced the editors not to italicize the Tamil words. And that stopped me short. Because the fact is - bless my editors - it never came up. Speaking with other writers, hearing them tell their stories about fighting their editors on this very thing I’d taken for granted, I became more aware of the italics. And now, as a reader, seeing italics used inappropriately sets my teeth on edge. Imagine a dishevelled preacher ranting in the dessert. That’s me. AUTHORS! EDITORS! DO NOT ITALICIZE NON-ENGLISH WORDS. CEASE AND DESIST.

Let’s say a story is written from the perspective of a character called John. If John is having toast for breakfast, would you italicize toast? No, you would not. Because it looks idiotic. Italics around non-English words seem to telegraph the message: “hey! look! here is something exotic!” Which…come on now, since when is warmed up Wonder bread exotic? We’re agreed here, right? So please let us extend the same courtesy to a character called Mahindan who is eating appam. Let him finish his meal in un-italicized peace.

The mistake editors and publishers and yes, sometimes writers, make when they italicize non-English words is to temporarily lose sight of their craft (and also, I’d argue, their own common sense). They lose sight of the character and the story’s point-of-view and pander to the reader.

Why is the reader at the centre of the story instead of the character? And also, who is this imagined reader exactly? More on them next week. Meantime, here are some other, entirely different, thoughts on toast.

Hired pen

It’s a new year and I’ve got a slate of new client offerings. If you’re working on a creative writing project and need professional feedback, mentorship, or one-on-one support to kick start revisions, I’m your pro. Full details and pricing are here, along with client endorsements. I’m currently booking for Winter and Spring 2024.

Experience

For the past several years, I’ve been helping clients with their fiction - and occasionally non-fiction - through a manuscript evaluation service. The author sends me their draft. I read, consider, then return detailed feedback. We have a couple of meetings and off they go to tackle a big revision. It’s great work, especially when writers report back on how much their books have evolved.

“Sharon Bala’s thoughtful reading, clear-eyed questions, and deep dedication to her role as a mentor transformed my novel into a truer, stronger version of itself.”

— Janika Oza, author of A History of Burning

In 2020 I began mentoring through the Diaspora Dialogues Long Form Mentorship Program. Working with authors one-on-one, over the course of several months, watching their expertise grow, and their manuscripts improve in real time, has been an absolute privilege and one of the great joys of the past three years.

I’ve worked on literary fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, historical fiction, family sagas, short fiction, and memoir. Some writers I’ve worked with have been traditionally published (that’s industry jargon for not self-published). Some have signed with agents. An author I mentored in 2020 recently published her debut.

Expertise

I figured out how to do this work by practicing with my author friends. You get adept at diagnosing the problems in a story when you’re routinely parsing the works-in-progress of experienced talents. And you quickly learn the art of gentleness when someone else takes a scalpel to your manuscript. Mainly I’ve absorbed these skills by studying the master - my editor Anita Chong, whose preferred punctuation is the question mark. Recently, a writer I was mentoring congratulated my Socratic Method. Who do you think taught me that?

“[Sharon’s] feedback about arc, character and voice was invaluable to my manuscript and helped me work through sticky spots that weren’t working at a crucial point in my revision process, between an early draft and the draft I ended up submitting to land a publisher.”

— Carmella Gray-Cosgrove, author of Nowadays and Lonelier

Philosophy

I believe in guidelines, not rules, that asking questions is infinitely more useful than prescribing answers. This is art, not science, and there’s no single formula to describe all narratives. There are many traditions of storytelling and I’m the expert in precisely none of them.

However, I do know a few things about the tools of craft and how to wield them. And I’m adept at ferreting out that interesting, buried, storyline. Yeah. That one. The complicated, dishy thing you didn’t mean to write, perhaps don’t want to write, but maybe need to write? I don’t know. Just a suggestion.

Always, always, I aim to empower writers. It’s your book. You’re in the driver’s seat and know what’s best. My role is to guide, to help you find your way through the maze you’ve created to the story at the centre only you know how to tell.

If you’ve hit the wall on your manuscript, are struggling with revisions, or seeking a mentor, get in touch. It would be my pleasure to help.

“Sharon’s thoughts on character development, story arc, pace and plot were critical, nurturing and insightful. Her in-depth notes helped me craft a more complete and contained story world for my characters. If you need another set of eyes to guide your work in a positive direction, look no further than Sharon Bala.”

— Xaiver Michael Campbell

Thou shalt have no commandments

The stubborn ram in my nature bristles whenever I hear directives like must or can’t or don’t or need.

Don’t write a flashback in present tense.
Every story needs plot. (LOL.)
Every story must have a single protagonist.
Don’t write prologues or epilogues.
Non-english words must be in italics.
You can’t move between minds in a single scene. Who do you think you are, Virginia Woolf?

This sort of black and white advice might be well-meaning. Or is it sinister, an attempt to quash a writer’s ambition and keep them in their place, bound within the confines of the western tradition, an automaton pumping out the kinds of stories that some market-driven authority believes are most commercially viable?

Well, for the moment, let’s assume this counsel comes from a good place. Fact remains, it’s all nonsense. There are no rules for good writing. There are only guidelines which will serve you 75-95% of the time. Proof: for every “rule” there are a million exceptions. Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter includes flashbacks masterfully written in present tense. The forthcoming debut by Jamaluddin Aram - Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday - is brimming with point-of-view characters instead of a single protagonist. Importantly, I think, Aram’s storytelling style is distinctly non-western, which is to say the narrative is communal and indirect, without anything so dull as a clear moral lesson. When we throw out the rule book, we make room for other modes of storytelling, a wider breadth and diversity of literature, and frankly, more interesting tales. Even commercial fiction (for our purposes here, I mean fiction that sells well and makes a lot of money and is generally more concerned with telling a gripping yarn than, say, the poetry of a sentence) is full of broken “rules.” Louise Penney is a great one for mind weaving within a scene, within even a paragraph.

Writers, go forth. Write the story you want to write. Tell it the way you’d want to read it. And then, in revisions, yes, consider the guidelines. Is the prologue spoiling the ending? Is the epilogue trying too hard to leave your reader with a particular message? Is the rotating point-of-view confusing? Are the polyphonic voices fragmenting the story? If yes, is this what you intend? Approaching a draft with curiosity - asking yourself questions and holding yourself to account - is a better, more interesting, approach than burying a work-in-progress under arbitrary commandments.

Exclamation points

There’s an old Seinfeld episode where Elaine is dating one of her authors (ah, the 90s). She comes home to find he’s making dinner and asks if there are any phone messages (ah, the 90s), then takes umbrage when she sees he hasn’t added an exclamation point to the happy news about a friend’s new baby.

When it first came out, I only understood part of the joke: Elaine and the gang will latch onto any reason to break up with a paramour. But now I understand the rest of it. Of course Jake Jarmel isn’t tossing around exclamation marks willy nilly. He’s a good writer. He’s probably using his prose to emphasize the point instead of lazily relying on punctuation.

Elaine Benes though… not a great editor.