Riddle Fence

This Fall, I joined Riddle Fence as the Creative Non-Fiction Editor. Since then, I’ve been sifting through hundreds of submissions, searching for gold. A few people have asked what exactly I hope to publish so here are some suggestions.

First off, please don’t send me:

• poetry (there are other editors helming that section)

• fiction (ditto!)

• reviews (they are published online; get in touch with the managing editor)

• opinion pieces

• academic essays

• journalism

Riddle Fence #53

And here’s what I want:

1. Creative non-fiction means true stories. Story is important. There should be a narrative drive and emotional resonance. As in fiction, if you’re skirting the emotions, you’re likely skirting the conflict too. Any story — true or false — without conflict is boring.

2. Strong writing. That might be poetry in motion — beautiful sentences that contain insight, interesting metaphor, or simply demand to be read aloud. But strong writing can also be spare, unfussy prose.

3. The important thing is clarity. If the work is full of vague abstractions, if the tense shifts are perplexing, if there are too many flashbacks and flashforwards that trip the reader up, it’s an automatic rejection. Ask your most critical frenemy to read your submission and circle the places where they got confused.

4. Clarity also applies to the subject as a whole. Too many questions in an essay is a red flag, suggesting the author is still feeling their way through a draft. You should be able to summarize your piece in a single sentence. (In the cover letter, not the essay!) For example, Andreae Callanan’s “All The Ghosts a Voice Can Summon” is about complicated grief and Sinéad O’Connor. Bushra Junaid’s “On Hosting” is about feeling like an outsider in one’s own home. Though I can’t take credit for finding either of these, they are excellent examples of the types of submissions I want to publish.

5. When I tell you an essay is about complicated grief or feeling like an outsider, you can already feel the tension. Find a subject that is difficult and personally hurts you and then wrestle it out on the page.

6. Brevity. I have 6,500 words per issue and a mandate to publish at least 50% NL-content. Anything that’s over 2,500 words and doesn’t fit into that mandate must hit all five marks above. If your piece is 750 words, you can get away with 4/5, maybe even 3/5. But if your essay is over 3,000 words and you are not from this province, writing in this province or about this province, then it absolutely must be a stellar 5/5 and even then, I might still have to reject on the grounds of word-count. What is this submission about? What makes you uncomfortable? Hone in on those two things and strip away the excess. Here are some tips on trimming.

Speaking of identity…

Riddle Fence is a Newfoundland and Labrador arts and letters magazine. This is a place of storytellers and vibrant culture and part of our mandate is to foster those things, which is why I’m aiming for 50% NL-content in the creative non-fiction section.

In practice that means I’m looking at addresses. Please self-identity if you were born here and are in the diaspora. I’m interested in writing about this place as well. If you lived here and are writing a reflection on that time, I’m game to read it. I’m less keen on tourism. I’m starved for writing from Labrador or by Labrador authors. Please, please, self-identify in the cover letter.

None of this equals automatic acceptance. The writing still has to hit at least 5 or 6 of the marks listed above but the odds of publication are better.

This is not a Riddle Fence mandate but a personal goal: I want more colour in our pages. Are you a BIPOC author? Self-identify. (I know, I know. I hate doing it too but we get hundreds and hundreds of submissions. Help an editor out!)

The ideal submission

I’d love to see something unconventional, say a collection of vignettes curated around a theme. See, for example, Gary Barwin’s “Meat and Bone” in this issue of Grain Magazine. Or a complex essay that combines a first person narrative with a didactic deep-dive into a related subject, toggling back and forth, each strand of the essay shining a light on its opposite. For the latter, I would break the 3,000 word limit, especially if it checked the NL-content box. Good examples of this kind of complex creative non-fiction can be found in Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out On The Ground, Jen Sookfong Lee’s Superfan, and Sarah Polley’s Run Towards The Danger.

And don’t forget!

My new year’s resolution is that I’m not reading any submission that doesn’t conform to the guidelines. So please attend to these basic civilities:

• Upload your work as a .doc or .docx file

• Double-space

• Make sure your name, title, and word count appear on every page of your submission

• Cover letters are appreciated, especially if they include the word count

Okay, done all that? You’re ready to submit. I can’t wait to read it!

True beginnings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compare the opening sentences of the first and second passage:

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

vs.

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

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

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

How to lose a reader

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

But first, a caveat….

Rule Free Zone

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

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

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

How to lose a reader in three moves or less

Open with dialogue

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

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

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

Open with too many characters

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

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

Open with abstractions

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

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

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

And then they woke up…

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

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

Prologues

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

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

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

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

Preludes and Prefaces

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

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

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

Alarm Clock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To begin with…

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

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

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

Context & Curiosity

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

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

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

Types of Openers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Search Party

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

Stakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tension/ Conflict

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

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

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

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

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

Need More Help?

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

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

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

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?

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tell me without telling me

The other day I put on a coat I hadn’t worn in several months, put my hand in the pocket, and pulled out a scrunched up poop bag.

You know that “tell me, without telling me” meme that went viral a couple of years ago? Here’s a funny example from TikTok. And a zinger from Twitter:

It occurred to me, when I found that poop bag in my coat pocket, that it was one of those revealing details I’m always harping on about in my writing workshops or with the authors I work with and mentor. Show don’t tell. Cut the tell; leave the show.

Showing is a muscle you strengthen with time and practice. You practice on the page as you write. You practice on the page as you read and notice how other authors reveal rather than explain. You practice off the page, as you live your life, as you put your hand in your pocket and find crushed up dog treats or a soother or a lighter or a piece of chalk or a crumpled medical mask. Tell me it’s the 2020s without telling me.

How to revise your novel (part 5)

Originally posted: September 14, 2020

The last several posts have tackled the most common issues that plague manuscripts - beginnings, endings, dialogue, characters, pacing, conflict, flashback, interiority and action, and that old cliche: show vs. tell. To conclude, I’m going to offer some more general advice.

1. Read your manuscript out loud. Each and every word. Pay attention to your annoyance and your boredom, the passages where your eyes glaze over. Pay attention to the cadence of your sentences, the unintended tongue twisters, prose that trips you up.

2. Set the manuscript aside for a few weeks or a couple of months. Come back to it afresh.

3. Every scene should reveal character or advance plot. Better still: do both.

4. At every stage along the way think about specific details. Julia cuts class and lounges in bed with a book. Julia skips calculus and lounges in bed with the new N.K. Jemisin. See?

5. Most manuscripts would be improved if 70-90% of the direct dialogue was removed. You can quote me on that.

6. A common blunder is to repeat the same word on the page, often in the same paragraph. A keen eye and a thesaurus are your friends here.

7. Watch for other forms of repetitions: characters repeating themselves in dialogue, the narrator giving the reader the same information two or three or seventeen times, scenes that are re-enacted. These repetitions are a sign you aren’t trusting the reader.

8. On that note: resist the urge to over explain. The delete button is your friend.

9. As the author you must know all, far more than what is on the page. Hemingway’s iceberg theory is a useful metaphor: the reader sees only the tip of the story; the rest they intuit. Or, said another way: "A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless.” (ps. most of what Hemingway writes in that piece is absolute tosh but there are a couple of gems if you’re willing to have a scavenge)

10. Every author has their own cache of ticks - words and phrases we tend to overuse. (Look and relief are two of mine.) At some point at a late stage in revision, cull the ticks. I keep a running tally of tick words in my notebook so that right before an important draft (say the one that goes to submission), I’ll do a quick search and replace.

11. Speaking of ticks, here’s my hands down, numero uno pet peeve: smiles, nods, and eye rolls. Give yourself a cap, say no more than seven smiles, three nods, and one eye roll allowed per manuscript.

12. Exclamation marks should be used sparingly.

13. For God sakes, make sure you haven’t written a rotten egg.
    

If at this point you’re feeling overwhelmed by the work ahead, take heart. The trough of disillusionment is a normal and necessary part of the process. And if you still feel uncertain or would like a fresh set of eyes and specific editorial advice, drop me a line. This series has only skimmed the surface of my expertise.