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.

How to revise your novel (part 4)

Originally posted: September 7, 2020

This is the fourth post in a series about novel revision. Part 1 considered characters and pace. Part two covered conflict, flashbacks, and thought vs. action.  Part 3 tackled beginnings, endings, and dialogue. Today it’s that old saw: show don’t tell.

SHOW NOT TELL

Here it is, the single most common weakness of every work-in-progress: too much telling, not enough showing. Sometimes we tell instead of show. Other times we show and tell, illustrating a scene in perfect detail only to explain to the reader the very thing they’ve just witnessed. That’s how worried we are that the reader won’t get it. In the case of the latter, the solution is a quick backspace. In the case of the former, the work is more difficult.

Adjectives and adverbs are telling signs. Instead of saying Mary eyed Bob suspiciously, describe what’s suspicious in her manner. What does suspicion look and feel like? Instead of the adverb, show us the feeling or action.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but: you don’t need adjectives on dialogue tags. He said furiously. She asked anxiously. They cried dolefully. STOP. Stick to he said and she asked. If dialogue is accompanied by an emotion, find a way to embody the emotion.

BE SPECIFIC

Abstraction is another telling sign. First drafts, by their nature, tend to lean heavily on words like suddenly and something. I think of these as placeholders we drop in the ground as we write toward a first draft. In second and third and seventh drafts though it’s important to return to those placeholders and fully articulate the suddenness or what the something is. Don’t tell the reader the lights went out suddenly. Make the lights flame out in a way that feels sudden for character (and by extension reader). Hot tip: most of the time you can just delete the word suddenly without doing anything else.

Ditto vague descriptions. You could tell us there were eagles in the sky and rain on the way, sure. Or you could show the eagles “beating muscled wings, threading in and out of black thunderclouds” as Valeria Luiselli does in her Lost Children Archive. You could tell us Edgar feels vulnerable or show him grasping opposite wrists as Ian Williams does in Reproduction. Weeks after finishing the novel, this visual has stuck with me, more importantly the feeling of tenderness it inspired has lingered. That’s the power of specificity.

FILTERING AND MEDIATION

Stories are most immediate and immersive when they can get right in close. But too often writers filter the story through an unnecessary lens. Compare two versions of the same scene:

“Outside, Gillian noticed two neighbours squabbling. She saw them jab their fingers at each other across their property lines and heard their voices growing louder.”

“Outside, Gillian’s neighbours squabbled. They jabbed their fingers at each other across their property lines, voices rising.”

There’s no need to tell the reader that Gillian is seeing and hearing the action. Remove the filter words notice and saw and what happens? The pace quickens and the reader is drawn closer to the action.

Here’s another telling move: mediating flashbacks. Compare two version of the same flashback:

“Jim thought of Blake with a smile, remembering how they first met on a plane to Mexico City. They were stuck in the middle aisle, sandwiched between two frat boys.”

“Jim and Blake met on a plane to Mexico City, in the middle aisle, sandwiched between two frat boys.”

IN CONCLUSION

Narration and exposition have a place in fiction but if that’s all you are doing, the reader will skim. Stick to your bones fiction is writing that reveals, that leaves room for interpretation. Let’s say you have this line: “Marty served his guests tea.” That’s fine but consider this version instead: “Marty’s mugs were a motley collection, branded freebies from conferences and radio station give-aways, the white ones stained with years of tea and coffee, most of them chipped.” The mugs show Marty’s mugs and the reader may draw further conclusions about his personality and home life from those mugs.

Writers have a tendency to worry too much about the reader. Take my hand, dear Reader, we seem to say. Allow me to be your tour guide on this journey. NO. STOP. Create the world, animate the characters, then get out of the way. Let the reader wander unchaperoned. Trust them to read between the lines and connect the dots. Be open to the narrative being understood in a different way than you intended. Your story will be stronger for a multiplicity of interpretations.

The next post (the last in the series) is a laundry list of advice.

How to revise your novel (part 3)

Originally posted: August 31, 2020

This is the third post in a series about novel revision. Part 1 considered characters and pace. Part two covered conflict, flashbacks, and thought vs. action. This post tackles beginnings, endings, and dialogue.

BEGINNING

If you are new to fiction, if this is your first novel, odds are good the true beginning of your story is lurking somewhere past the first few paragraphs/ scenes/ chapter. It’s very likely your prologue, beautifully written though it might be, is unnecessary. Especially if it spoilers the ending. Go find the real start of the story and then delete all the stuff that comes before.

Does your novel begin with a character waking up? (Mine does!) It might be fine but be warned that characters getting out of bed is a very, very common and cliched beginning. And now that I’ve told you this, you’ll start to notice it everywhere.

ENDING

I’ve blogged about endings before but it bears repeating: Do you need that epilogue? Really? Are you sure? Because 99.9% of the time, epilogues, like prologues, are unnecessary. In fact, the last sentence/ paragraph/ scene/ chapter of an early draft is usually redundant. Resist the urge to tie up all the loose ends. Trust the reader to get the story.

An earlier draft of Butter Tea at Starbucks had this final sentence: everything feels miraculous. Someone in my writing group suggested that last line was too on the nose so I removed it and sure enough, the ending was stronger.

DIALOGUE

A common issue in early drafts is an over-reliance on dialogue. It’s the rare, exceptional author who can successfully use direct dialogue to carry a story. Remember that there are many, many other ways to convey information to a reader including: action, narration, and scenery. And when you’re writing dialogue, don’t neglect summary and indirect dialogue.

Coming up next: show don’t tell.

How to revise your novel (part 2)

Originally posted: August 24, 2020

This is the second post in a series about novel revision. In part 1 we considered characters and pace. This post will tackle conflict, flashbacks, and thought vs. action.

CONFLICT

Or rather, lack thereof. After flat characters, lack of conflict is the second most common problem in manuscript after manuscript. Including my own! Being a published author doesn’t make you immune to shitty first drafts.

Are your characters too virtuous? Are they too obliging? Does every conversation end with everyone getting exactly what they want? Are you letting your characters off the hook too easily or too quickly? Put your characters in peril. Make them morally complicated and imperfect. Make the people in their lives intractable and difficult. Let bad things happen to your beloved protagonist. A common pitfall: dumping all the problems on the side-kick. That’s how hard we work to spare the protagonist! But now your sidekick has the more compelling storyline so why should the reader care about the supposed main character?

There is a scene in The Boat People where Mahindan is in a detention camp in Sri Lanka. The war is over and he’s trapped in a literal hell. In a very early draft, my writing group pointed out that in the entire scene, Mahindan was the only character who didn’t seem hungry/ in pain/ in physical discomfort/ scared. This was a huge failure of imagination on my part. I went back to the drawing board. Added hunger pains, insect bites, the ick factor of being without a bath, the hum of anxiety, the high pitch of terror. It took time to really settle into that uncomfortable difficult place with Mahindan. But writing is work. Suffer for your art.

FLASHBACKS AND OFF-STAGE

A while back I read a manuscript by a promising and talented author. Most of the scenes were framed inside a flashback. Now this framing structure can work well. The novel A Little Life is narrated in this structure and the device adds to the sense that life is happening in a circular way for the characters, blurring the lines between past and present. For that book, with its particular themes, and its excess of conflict and tension, the flashbacks worked. But that’s rare.

More often flashbacks, like minor characters, can be vestigial organs. You started writing without really knowing what was going to happen and mid-way through a scene you realized “oh, this important thing has to come first” and rather than pause the flow of your work, wrote that thing as a flashback. That’s a reasonable first draft strategy. But later, in revisions, scrutinize those flashbacks. Would the action unfold better in real time?

One sneaky way we writers avoid conflict  is by making it happen off-stage and/or in flashbacks. Flashbacks can be useful but they lack the immediacy, the heart-stopping quality, of real time events. So be sparing when you are utilizing it to relay senes of conflict. Similarly, if Banquo’s going to get knocked off, bring the action centre stage. Don’t fade to black just as the tension is rising and then have some characters recounting the big fight in the following scene. (Booooo! complains the reader)

THOUGHT VS. ACTION

Perhaps because the stories take place inside our own heads, many of us have a penchant for letting characters live too long inside their own heads too. Even if your main character is in a coma and the entire story is taking place in their dreams, there will still be action, right? The character will think they are out in the world running and jumping and having fights about the fence with the belligerent neighbour. And you have to convey those memories or dreams in such a way that it feels like it’s really happening.

Conversely, some manuscripts are all action and zero interior thought so that characters become puppets. The balance between inner and outer life will be different for every book but it is a balance. You can’t just have a character involved in a high speed car chase - say - without giving us some idea of what she’s thinking, how her heart is pounding, how her mind is racing, how her reflexes are taking over, why she’s doing this, what she hopes to gain, what she fears to lose etc.

The next post is about beginnings, endings, and dialogue.

How to revise your novel (part 1)

Originally posted: August 17, 2020

Manuscript evaluation is one of the things I do for a living. In a nutshell: I read someone’s manuscript and return detailed notes to get them started on re-writes. Every story is unique but there are several common issues that plague all our drafts (mine too). If you’re struggling to revise your manuscript, here are three things to watch for:

UNFORMED CHARACTERS

In early drafts most secondary characters are blanks and the antagonists are one-note. Protagonists might be morally complex and more fully formed but there’s often something still missing, usually motivation. What’s making them act destructive? Why are they so helpful? Why do they care so much about this issue/ person/ place/ thing? When it comes to characters, you need to interrogate them thoroughly until you know everything about them.

TOO MANY CHARACTERS

Squint at each character. Make sure they earn their place. Sometimes characters are vestigial organs. Though necessary at the start to help you understand the protagonist, you might find they’ve served their purpose by draft two or six. Thank them for their service and then let them go.

Two or more minor characters can often be merged into one. A couple of years ago I was reading my friend Jamie Fitzpatrick’s novel, The End of Music. There’s a character who appears on the first page, who sparks a nostalgic memory for the protagonist, Carter. Later, she re-appears unexpectedly as the manager at his mother’s nursing home. She’s a pretty minor character but plays a necessary role. In earlier drafts these had been two different characters but somewhere along the way Jamie’s editor advised him to merge them. The merger makes the story stronger. It gives the reader a little dopamine hit to meet the woman again and remember her from the first page. And her presence in both parts of his life strengthens the theme of nostalgia and memory (which his mother in her old age is losing).

PACE

When it comes to our own work, most of us are terrible judges of pace. But readers are very very good at sensing slow parts of the book. Does every scene advance plot and/or character (ideally both). If not, jettison the scene. Or strip it for parts to graft on elsewhere and trash the rest. Much of revising is also moving the puzzle pieces around. Swapping around scenes and chapters, shifting beats within a scene, passages of prose, action and so on. Think about arcs, not just character arcs, not just story arc, but the smaller arcs that happen within a scene or chapter or even a conversation. Are the stakes present early enough or do they arrive at the very end like a footnote. And if so, is this what you intend?

This is part one of a series on re-writing and revising. The next post covers conflict, flashback, and action.

Put the toast to work

Originally published: August 23, 2017

Dialogue is one thing but what about the stage business? Action in a scene - a character moving through a space, physically interacting with other characters - serves several functions. It enlivens the narrative while grounding it in a fictional reality. And it paints a picture, allowing the reader to visualize the story. I'm a fan of interweaving stage business with dialogue, sometimes even using it to replace dialogue tags (he said/ she said). For example, consider:

I don't know, John said. It was there this morning.
vs.
I don't know. John buttered his toast. It was there this morning.

This example came from fellow Port Authority writer, Jamie, who smartly pointed out that the toast only deserves to be in the scene if it serves a greater purpose. It's not enough for the toast to highlight the speakers.

Now consider this:

Where's the cheque book? Nora asked, searching the junk drawer.
Dunno. John buttered his toast. It was there this morning.

Better right?

I'd probably take it a little further, show John swiping a pat of butter off the block, describe the dry scrape of knife on toast. Nora, meanwhile, pulls out scissors and rubber bands and junk mail and pens. John dips his knife into the jam and spreads a thick glob of strawberry over the greasy toast. Nora slams the junk drawer shut, yanks another one open.

This is a lot of unnecessary detail and most of it would be cut back in revisions but do you smell what I'm cooking? The toast now tells us who is speaking, suggests something about motivation, and gives insight into character. It furthers the action. The toast provides subtext - something unsaid to read between the lines. The toast is multi-tasking.

Dialogue tips from the Port Authority

Originally posted: February 24, 2020

My writing group was exchanging emails about dialogue, why it flatlines and how it can be revived. Putting words in a character’s mouth - words that sound authentic and are compelling to read - is no easy feat. So the next few posts will be devoted to dialogue.

There are no hard and fast rules for good writing and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or ignorant. But there are guidelines that will serve you well 75-90% of the time. Note the spread: 75-90% of the time, you can safely defer to the playbook. The other 10-25% of the time, you’re better off improvising or breaking the rules. Caveat aside, let’s begin.

To start, here are The Port Authority’s collected thoughts on good dialogue:

1: Characters should talk to each other, not the reader. Don’t use dialogue simply to convey information that you think the reader needs.

The last part of that sentence is important. Often, what you think the reader needs is quite a bit more than the reader actually needs. Restraint is part of the discipline of writing. Leave room for the reader to use their intuition.

As a manuscript evaluator, I see this a lot: Character A says something that Character B surely already knows. Can the dialogue be prefaced with the phrase “as you know”? If so, delete. 

2. Pay attention to how you and people around you speak. Rarely do we formulate our thoughts in smooth, complete sentences. We speak in fragments, double back, pause, hesitate, um, ah, jump from subject to subject, use slang, drop inside jokes and so on. If two characters are speaking too fluidly they are going to sound like sociopaths or robots. Now maybe your story is about sociopathic robots looking for love in a post-apocalyptic world. If so, as you were. Otherwise, delete.

3. Less is more. Three lines of dialogue at a time is usually plenty. I like to write lots and lots of dialogue in a first draft and then cull it back later. As someone who reads my own and other people’s drafts for a living, one thing I’ve noticed is there is often a gem of a sentence lurking in a paragraph of dialogue. Liberate the gem. Delete the rest.

4. Delete the inessentials (“Hello. Nice weather we’re having. Those Leafs, eh?”). Go straight to the juice. (See #7)

5. The best dialogue has a thrum of tension. Perhaps it’s right at the surface - characters at each other’s throats, airing pent up grievances. But often it’s an undercurrent, a frisson that electrifies some mundane chit chat. Our best teachers are stories. Pay attention to how other writers pull off this trick. Short fiction is a good place to start. The excellent ones are chock-a-block with barbed dialogue.

6. If Character A wants something from Character B (let’s say it’s the answer to an important question), Character B should not oblige. Leave things unsaid. Leave someone wanting.

7. Related: If Character A isn’t quite sure what Character B knows BINGO! Now you’re getting into the realm of subtext. The best dialogue exists on two planes: there are the words that are being said and all the unsaid stuff lurking underneath, the unspoken elephant in the room, ill will or discomfort. All of this non-verbal material is subtext. And subtext is ripe. Subtext is the juice.

8. Imagine a tool box. You’ve got a hammer, a wrench, a tape measure, a couple of screwdrivers, pliers, a drill and so on and so on. In your writing tool box you’ve got narration (a voice in first, second, or third person conveying a story), exposition (background information conveyed by the narrator), time shifts (flashback and flashforward), action and so on. Dialogue is only ONE type of tool.

Where many writers - even published, established ones - go wrong is they forget there’s a whole box and grow too reliant on a single tool. That tool is usually direct dialogue. (Groan) Listen, a Robertson screwdriver is handy but you can’t build a whole house with one. Also, there are other types of screwdrivers! There are other kinds of dialogue too: summary and indirect. Direct dialogue is the easiest tool to use poorly. Summary and indirect dialogue to the rescue.

9. Ideally, dialogue is hard working. Great dialogue does more than one thing: reveals character, advances plot, dials up tension, adds to the mood etc etc. But writing dialogue that multi-tasks is not easy. The good news is, you don’t need dialogue - especially direct dialogue - as much as you think. Circling back to the first point (Don’t use dialogue simply to convey information), sometimes you don’t need dialogue at all. Use a different tool. The reader needs to know something? Give it to them via narration or exposition.

You might have noticed that most of this advice boils down to: delete. In the next four posts, we’re going to pick up our pencils, lick the lead (gross), and get into how to actually write it well, beginning with summary dialogue.