Douglas Trevor on Toni Morrison and Subjective Histories

In the 36th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Douglas Trevor, author of The Book of Wonders (SixOneSeven Books), discusses how Toni Morrison influenced his writing when he took an undergraduate writing class with her.

When I was a junior at Princeton in the spring of 1991, I had the opportunity to take a small craft class on fiction writing with Toni Morrison. There were six of us in the class—all students in the creative writing program. We met once a week in Professor Morrison's spacious office in a building known to us simply by its street address: 185 Nassau. In addition, Professor Morrison scheduled individual appointments with us. This was two years before she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In one of my private meetings with Professor Morrison, I remember her asking if I had first drafted the story we were discussing by hand or if I had typed it directly into my computer. At the time, I was using a Macintosh SE that had dual floppy drives. I recall writing my stories on this computer, saving them on a floppy disk, and then printing them out in the computer lab in Fine Library. I told her all this, adding that my own handwriting was so bad, sometimes I had difficulty deciphering my lecture notes.

She responded by shaking her head and laughing very softly. She said I had to be able to read my own handwriting if I wanted to be a serious writer; otherwise, I would never learn how to control and create the music of my sentences. She told me to rewrite the story by hand and then revise it and rewrite it again. Typing, she observed, is not the same as writing.

Perhaps none of Morrison's novels are more overtly attentive to the question of rhythm and variation than Jazz, which would come out in 1992—a year after my class with Professor Morrison ended. In Jazz, the distinct narrative perspective on each character is akin to a different solo. Taken together, these solos form a larger, composite piece, all knitted together—orchestrated, as it were—by the narrator.

I find the theory of character development embodied by Jazz to be an incredibly generative model for thinking about fiction writing, not just because it emphasizes how characters need to sound different from one another, and how this acoustic distance is part of what establishes character in the first place, but also because Morrison thinks about the historical dimensions that inform how and why characters express themselves in unique ways. By historical dimensions, I don't mean that older characters will use different forms of speech and diction than their younger counterparts, although of course that's true, but that each character should have a different relationship to history. This history can be personal or political or—as is really always the case in Morrison—both.

The title story of my recent collection, The Book of Wonders, is just one example of how Toni Morrison's lessons about character development, and her emphasis on subjective histories, continue to shape my writing more than twenty years later. In this story, a middle-aged woman named Simone is convinced that her mother, Annabel, has long scribbled secrets about her past in a leather ledger book she keeps under lock and key. For Simone, to access this book is to access a secret history that will help her explain the distance that has always existed between her and her mother. Annabel, on the other hand, regards the past in very different terms. Never really satisfied in marriage, she has instead dwelt upon the memories she has of those female friendships she cultivated while a student at Radcliffe in the sixties. Annabel has chosen to live in these memories—to clutter her home with pictures of these women, and to judge her daughter in relation to these figures.

While Simone assumes that excavating her mother's real past will prove something incontrovertible about it, and therefore explain their own relationship in some fundamental way, what she discovers instead is not so much what her mother thought about the past but how she thought about her own life. This discovery has a much different impact on Simone than she would have ever imagined.

"The Book of Wonders," both the story and the collection, is about this kind of impact—about what happens when one character is made to understand how another character sees the past. By virtue of her sustained meditation on how history works in the minds of different people, I group Toni Morrison with other writers whose work has meant the word to me—other writers for whom the flickering and repressing of the past constitutes one of their central concerns: Proust, Woolf, Marquez, Sebald, Bolaño, and—more recently—Egan. That I had the opportunity to engage directly with Professor Morrison's mind, to watch her pen mark my pages, is something—to this day—I still cannot quite believe.

Michelle Ross Asks: Is a Story Ever Finished?

In the 35th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Michelle Ross, author of There's So Much They Haven't Told You (Moon City Press), contemplates the array of choices writing a story presents.

By nature, I’m an indecisive person. If I don’t bring leftovers to work with me in the morning, then I will deliberate for so long about what to get for lunch, that in the time I wasted trying to decide where to go, I could have been out and back and eating already.

Writing, of course, is an exercise in making choices. Every word is a choice. Every detail. Every action. In the process of writing any story, I make thousands of choices along the way.

I’m also a perfectionist, and I suspect this largely explains the indecisiveness. Maybe perfection exists on a small scale. There are perfect sentences, I think. But on a larger scale, perfection either doesn’t exist or, at the very least, I don’t think it’s a reasonable goal. That’s in part because while some writing choices feel easy and natural, as though I couldn’t have chosen any other way, many other choices involve more chance than that. I could have chosen differently and still ended up with a great story. Maybe it would have been a slightly different version of the story I wrote. Maybe it would have been a drastically different version of the story I wrote. Maybe so different, anyone else wouldn’t know the two stories had started with the same seed.

Decision tree: Chose your own story

So I remind myself that there isn’t one correct path I must stumble my way onto or else the story is doomed. There are many fine paths I could take, so I just need to relax, make a choice and another and another and keep going.

And then there’s the revision, of course, and so reconsidering choices, and choosing differently, which creates more and more choices to make.

Until, finally, the story is finished.

On one hand, I want to say that knowing when a story is finished is rather simple. It’s a gut feeling. I’ve put in the work, given myself time and distance from the story, reread the story again and again and found that nothing nags at me anymore. That’s when I know a story is finished.

But many times an editor who has accepted one of my stories for publication has requested edits. Was the story not finished when I sent it out?

When I put stories together to make this collection, I revisited work I’d published in journals a decade earlier in some cases. I found more edits to make—most of them copyedits, but also more significant edits. I cut whole paragraphs. I rearranged scenes. Were the stories not finished when they were published in journals?

My book has been a finished thing since February of this year. If ever my stories are truly finished, surely it is when they appear collected in a book that has my name on the spine, right?

Recently, an editor expressed interest in republishing a story from my book, only she wanted to know if I’d be willing to consider making some edits. In addition to being in my book, this story won a contest years earlier. A prize of $1,000, the most I’ve ever been paid for a story. I’ll admit I felt a little uncomfortable at first about editing this story now. Because to make changes seemed to be an admission that the version of the story in the book is less than perfect. But didn’t I know that already?

There’s that famous sentiment I’m not sure whom to credit: Art is never finished, only abandoned. The word “abandoned” feels a little harsh, but if by “finished,” we mean “perfect,” I’m inclined to agree that no story—or few stories anyway—are ever truly finished.

There’s something liberating and beautiful about that.

And so, yeah, I listened to this editor’s insightful suggestions, and I edited the story. And it’s a better story.

But it’s still not perfect.

Michael Knight on a Literary Touchstone

In the 34th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Michael Knight, author of Eveningland (Atlantic Monthly Press), discusses his sentence-level admiration for The Great Gatsby.

Name Something by Another Author that You Wish You’d Written / Talk about a Literary Touchstone / What Influenced You to Become a Writer?
Given the nature of this prize and this blog, I should probably select a short story to answer this question, and if I’m not going to select a short story, I should probably take advantage of this opportunity to shine a light on some under-read masterpiece rather than on what is surely one of the most read novels of all time, and if I really do intend to select an already well-known novel, it would make perfect sense for me to pick the one referenced by the title of my new collection (Walker’s Percy’s The Moviegoer is now and ever shall be one of my favorite works of fiction), but the book that keeps insisting on itself in my mind is The Great Gatsby. I know, I know. I already feel like a heel and I’m barely a hundred words into this post.

But, still, there are those sentences:

An oldie but a goodie

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

And there is the point of view, Fitzgerald’s observer narrator, Nick Carraway, his first person voice inviting us in, courting our sympathy—he’s a charming storyteller, after all, and he’s just as amazed as we are by the near surreality of the wealth and decadence on display—allowing for bias in Gatsby’s favor while also keeping us at a slight but vital remove. This is a narrative stance I have employed (imitated? stolen?) on several occasions in my own fiction, including in the story “Water and Oil” in Eveningland. Even when I’m writing in third person, I often imagine my narrators this way, as actual humans with flaws and opinions and recognizable uncertainties bearing witness just on the fringes of the action and moved by what they see, as I hope the reader will be moved. There is a scene in my story “Jubilee” that makes direct reference to (rips off?) The Great Gatsby, a party scene featuring a guest list that bears an undeniable resemblance to Nick Carraway’s list, famously scribbled in the margins of railroad timetable.

And there’s the way Fitzgerald uses imagery to mirror Nick’s interior life, a craft lesson for any writer. 

Two o’clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and ran in thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires . . . But there wasn’t a sound. Only wind in the trees, which blew the wires and made lights go off and on again as if the house had winked into the darkness.

Those lines span two beautiful paragraphs and appear in the novel immediately after Nick has learned the truth about Gatsby’s history with Daisy. For me, as a reader and a writer, no sentences in literature better reflect the way the world might look to just that human and just that moment in his life. 

Like most everybody else, I first came across The Great Gatsby in a high school, Nancy Strachan’s American lit class my junior year. I was the perfect age and exactly the right sort of kid to romanticize vague notions about the glamorous 1920s and a boozy literary life, false notions, to be sure, but no doubt the beginning of my dream to become a writer. And I can still remember the way my pulse thumped as Fitzgerald lead me inexorably toward what I surely must have known was coming, that image of Gatsby floating dead on a raft in his own pool, the water littered with fallen leaves, and from there to those last lines, which I most likely didn’t understand completely but which I somehow felt completely and have kept on feeling across all these years and dozens of re-readings and which, even now, I can feel creeping up on me as I type these words. Honestly, writing this post has made me want to go read The Great Gatsby all over again.

Timothy O'Leary Weaves Fact Into Fiction

In the 33rd in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Timothy O'Leary, author of Dick Cheney Shot Me in the Face (Unsolicited Press), discusses his ideas for stories and how he gets himself back on track.

How does a story begin for you?
Voyeuristically. I’ve always been fascinated by the often overlooked occurring around me. It might be the tension of a couple arguing three tables away in a restaurant, or the particular arrangement of bumper stickers on a car. It makes me wonder “why,” and “what if.” Right now I’m working on a story inspired by a particularly engaging sommelier I encountered—whose life I intend to make much more interesting than the one he probably lives. I feel compelled to take a little piece of fact and weave it into fiction I find entertaining.

All my stories begin with a real event. I began to formulate the title story of my collection, Dick Cheney Shot Me in the Face, when I ran into Dick Cheney at a fly fishing tournament in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He was in his home state, comfortable with the crowd, and it was interesting to watch him interact. I knew I wanted to write about that aspect of Cheney. I did a lot of research on the man, talked to a lot of people that had interfaced with him, and formed the story around the following premise: We all know Dick Cheney shot one man in the face, but what if there were more?

My story "One Star" began after I gave a restaurant in Aspen a poor review. The owner of the establishment literally tracked me down at my hotel, came to see me, and begged me to take down the entry. It got me thinking about the enormous online power each of us now has, and the much bigger “what if.”

My story "First Kill" began with a gun. When I was a kid I went hunting with relatives, who insisted I shoot my first deer with an old buffalo gun. It was a frightening and exhilarating experience for a twelve-year-old that I never forgot, and I knew I had to write a story based on that rifle, which eventually took me to a much darker place.

Sometimes it’s an old emotion I can’t get out of my head. The opening scene of my story "Impala" takes place in a bowling alley where I grew up. I always found the establishment delightfully sinister and frightening. It borders a graveyard and was a scary place to leave after dark.

The more I write, the more I search for snippets of real stories that I can make my own. I type cryptic notes into my phone when I notice something unusual in public, or hear an interesting story from a friend. Often someone begins to tell me a story, and I find myself rudely allowing my mind to wander, envisioning a much more dramatic end to the tale they are relating.

The physical practices that help me write.

Going Gaga: Set the mood

I begin every day with a long walk and a soundtrack for the day. With dog on leash, I walk for at least an hour as I try to work out an idea. Sometimes I am concentrating on language—trying to work out a passage. Sometimes I am contemplating a story arc. In any case, I find the perfect playlist to facilitate the work, that could range from 1970’s rock to Lady Gaga, to Willie Nelson. If the walk has gone well, I will have undergone some kind of emotional transition. Music often becomes the mood board for a story; a way to insert me back into the mindset I was in when I first decided an idea was worth writing about.

I started my career writing advertising and for television, and that certainly influences my work. I tend to “cast” my stories—choosing one or two actors that I am writing for—and I find that sometimes helps—especially when writing dialogue.

What to do when the writing isn’t going well.
First, I try to wean myself away from the distractions. Fast access to the Internet is incredible when I am researching or exploring, but it is deadly when I need to concentrate. When I am really writing I don’t open my email account or anything else that could pull me from the page.

When the inevitable writer’s block visits, I go to the movies or read less challenging books that I can move through quickly. I want to experience a velocity of ideas for a kick-start.

When my writing is in a difficult place it is often a function of boredom or laziness. Perhaps I have written myself into a bit of a corner that I need to escape, and there is no replacement for enduring the pain of that place until you have written yourself into a more pleasant setting. It is easy to put that off. Perhaps I am writing necessary scenes that are much less interesting to me than the core of the story, but I need to move through them.

Becky Mandelbaum's Four Simple Pieces of Advice

In the 32nd in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Becky Mandelbaum, author of Bad Kansas (University of Georgia Press), talks about reading and writing.

Like many writers, I’ve received a great deal of advice over the course of my writing education, and yet these are the four pieces that have stuck with me. Like most good advice, each is more maddeningly simple than the last.

1.  Read more books, watch less TV 
Be prepared to lose a few friends with this one. While I, too, appreciate the appeal of burning through a season of Stranger Things in one sitting, I always remember what my first college writing professor told our workshop. “If you want to write good fiction, especially good dialogue,” she said, “stop watching television altogether. What you must do is read books. You must devour books.”

Stranger Things: Don't look now

She was not wrong. Over the years, the act of reading—such an obvious answer to the predicament of writing—has come to my aid over and over again. Whenever I’m at an impasse with my work, reading is always the solution. If it’s good writing, I think, “I’d like to write something that good.” If it’s bad writing, I think, “I can do better than that.” Either way, it leads me back to the page.

2.  Write
As an undergrad at The University of Kansas, I had the privilege of taking a workshop with Laura Moriarty, a killer novelist and teacher. When I asked her for writing advice, she told me simply, annoyingly, to write. “There are people out there who will call themselves writers,” she said, “but they don’t actually write. At the end of the day, the work is all that matters.”

So my advice is: Get your pages in. It doesn’t matter where or when or how. It also doesn’t matter if these pages are any good. I repeat: It does not matter if they’re any good. For every viable sentence I write, I probably write ten that end up in the trash. Those are frustrating numbers, but what is writing if not gratifying frustration?

3.  Revise, revise, revise
I once heard the writer Pam Houston tell a group of her students, “The very minimum number of times you should read through a manuscript is twenty-five.” Not surprisingly, a series of gasps and groans circled the room. Who wants to read her own book twenty-five times? Later, when I asked Pam about the advice, she told me, “The truth is, I usually read through a book fifty, sixty times before I’m done with it. But nobody wants to hear that. Twenty-five sounds more reasonable.”

4.  If you can do anything else and be happy, do it
In college, I had the opportunity to interview National Book Award winning poet Nikky Finney. Like most great poets, Finney emits a force field of wisdom you can feel on a cellular level when she enters the room. “If you can do anything else besides writing and be happy,” she told me, “then do that instead. This is not an easy life.”

These words have followed me ever since, appearing most often in times of self-doubt. Over the past few years, as my friends have begun to settle down in their careers, writing has sometimes felt like a dubious and even reckless life path, one that not everyone understands. Sometimes, when I’m home for the holidays, my brother will encourage me apply to law school. “I’ll pay for you to take the LSAT,” he’ll offer. “I’ll pay your application fees.” His concern is not unfounded. If there is money at all in writing, it comes in random, fitful bursts, like a row of cherries on a slot machine. I try to remember that the life of a writer is not a normal one and, as Finney promised, will by no means be easy. If I could clean teeth or crunch numbers or organize fundraisers and feel even a fraction of the satisfaction I feel after falling into the heart-swallowing extraterrestrial wormhole of a short story, I would certainly do that instead. But I can’t, and so I don’t. In exchange for all the fear and doubt and neurosis, I get to be in love with what I do.

Jeffrey N. Johnson Builds on His Training

In the 31st in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Jeffrey N. Johnson, author of Other Fine Gifts (Meddler Press), discusses how studying architecture provided a good foundation for his writing.

How did your architectural training prepare you to be a writer?
In September 1981, on the first day of design studio, our freshman class was herded into an auditorium to be introduced to our professors. The volume rose as the class assembled, everyone chatty and laughing and making a general ruckus. The room felt more like a high school lunchroom than a gathering of aspiring professionals. Amid the commotion, a potbellied man with unkept curly hair stepped to center stage and surveyed the crowd. He was clearly annoyed. Most of us hadn’t heard an accent beyond a rural Virginia drawl, so his stern Swiss voice carried great gravitas. He wagged a finger in the air and said, “There is no giggling in architecture.” The room fell dead silent. At that moment I was suffused with the seriousness and importance of the journey I was embarking on—this strange pursuit of the arts.

The late Professor Olivio Ferrari is legend at Virginia Tech. He had studied under Max Bill at the founding of the Ulm School of Design and later worked for him in Zurich, then went on to help mold one of the finest architecture programs in the United States. Under his guidance, the school was a place of inquiry. Ideas were paramount and ideas were to be questioned. Design was more than just drawing up plans. We were sent to the wood shop to get our hands on the materials. You might walk out of a lecture and realize you needed to take up photography, then you ended up spending the next semester in the darkroom. Some were encouraged to go to a mountaintop and practice their watercolors. It was a holistic approach that I quickly realized applied to all the arts. Everything was interconnected. Writing included.

Author's sketch: meditation on Venice

The strongest memories of my architectural days are of time spent sketching. On the study abroad program in 1984 and later backpacking Europe in 1988, sketching became a form of meditation. I would stand in one place for several hours and work on one drawing, one space. Gradually what I was looking at became more than just bricks, stone, and mortar. I wanted to understand everything about it. What was planned and what had grown organically? Who built the space and why? How did people interact with the environment; how did they change the space, and how did the space change them? Sometimes after dissecting a building’s architectural order, I swear I felt a direct connection to the mind of its long-dead builder. It didn’t happen often, but when it did it was a revelation, to perhaps feel for just a few seconds exactly how Palladio might have felt. I imagine classical musicians have the same sensation once they have dissected their favorite composer.

Writing shares so much of all this. The constant inquiry, approaching a problem from multiple angles, the desire to get inside another person’s mind and to sense the passage of time. It’s a serious endeavor. But I don’t shy away from injecting some humor in my work – to avoid humor is to avoid reality. So I retain Professor Ferrari’s proclamation, but slightly modified. There is some giggling in writing, but not much.

Describe your writing habits.
How I write today has changed drastically from where I started. The first draft of my novel, after a few false starts, was written in a six-month fury, or at least it was a fury for me. The rule was 500 words per night, five nights a week . . . any five, so if the juice wasn’t there I could take an evening off. This discipline was tossed when my twins were born. Given the three-hour feedings x2 and a full-time job, there was little energy left for my night owl tendencies, so I began writing longhand in a notebook during any break in the day I could steal. I’ve since become intimate with every coffee shop in the DC area. Longhand has proven more difficult—the short bursts of time don’t allow for the immersion I crave, plus I end up writing multiple versions of the same sentence or scene, leaving me with too much raw material to decipher. I intend on reverting back to my evening sessions, but it’s comforting to know that either way works. As in architecture, there are many processes to explore. Whatever it takes to get the work done.

Jennifer Caloyeras Reluctantly Joins the Family Business

In the 30th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Jennifer Caloyeras, author of Unruly Creatures (Vandalia Press), discusses her writing and reading habits.

What influenced you to become a writer?
I come from a family of writers and I really tried hard NOT to be a writer because I resisted going into the family business. My father is a screenwriter and television writer and playwright and my sister is a novelist. I moved away from writing to become a teacher and then a songwriter, which I did for many years, but eventually, I couldn’t ignore my desire to write and I came back to it, but not until my late twenties. I have achieved a good balance now between writing and teaching writing at UCLA.

Describe your writing habits.
I try to write on a schedule. My schedule doesn’t necessarily include specific times. I have two kids and I feel like our schedule is always in flux. Instead, I focus on completing goals. I’ll make a set of writing goals for the year, for the month, for the week, and for each day. Whatever the goal is, I try to meet it.

Where do you do your best work?
I can get a lot of writing done in a short period of time, but I’m also easily distracted. If I could go hole myself up somewhere, I could get a ton done. Unfortunately, that opportunity doesn’t happen all that often. I have a desk in a family office that I work from when no one is home. If I get stuck, I’ll go for a walk to clear my head and work through a problem I’m facing in my writing.

How do you know when a story is finished?
It’s never done! I have found myself, on more than one occasion, still editing my writing on my way to do a public reading of my published fiction.

Describe your reading habits.
I am an avid reader and get through anywhere from two to four books a week. I am constantly adding to my to be read pile. I don’t go anywhere without a book and find that I can get a lot of reading done throughout the day: in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, waiting for carpool, next to my kids doing their homework. I made it a priority to read because I love it so much. I try to vary the material I read, although I mostly stick to fiction. I’ll move from contemporary to classic, to short stories, to young adult, to historical fiction, to works in translation. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I am going to read next! And I think that everything I read has an influence on what I write.

Susan Tepper Keeps At It

In the 29th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Susan Tepper, author of Monte Carlo Days & Nights (Rain Mountain Press), discusses what propelled her into writing.

Writers usually have some inkling, I believe, that they will be doing this work. I never had an inkling. My dream from childhood was to become an actress, and so I left Long Island for the city when I was seventeen to attend drama school. Looking back on it all, I think it was the reading of so many plays that cemented language into my brain.

When acting with its limited rewards finally exhausted me, and I had moved out of the city, and was in my yard pulling weeds, with not the slightest clue of what I’d do next with my life, I began to get a message in my mind: Write that story. It pounded me all summer long.

Finally, sometime that August I sat down and cranked out a very long story. Mostly autobiographical with some juicy fake details. Then I took it to the New School where it was massacred in the workshop. Since I’d been banging around New York and other cities for years as an actor, rejection didn’t mean a whole lot to me. It sort of bounced off. They didn’t like my story. Oh, well. Except – except I happened to luck upon a great writing teacher in that first workshop, Alexander Neubauer. And when he returned his photocopy of my story, he’d written wonderful notes and at the bottom he put: Keep Writing. He underlined those two words a bunch of times. Wow! That’s what went through my mind: Wow, I can do this! It was revolutionary.

From that point forward I was seemingly jet-propelled by an unstoppable force. I went on to take workshops with Darcey Steinke, Jeanne McCulloch, Jamie Cat Callan, and another male instructor who will remain, due to his obnoxious verbal behavior, anonymous. But even he gave me something important to take away. I was a sponge. As playwright G.B. Shaw wrote in his play Overruled: “I soak up dirty water as well as clean.” Because that is the essential role of the creative writer. To construct worlds around what is soaked up during living.

My mother, who was a poet, humor writer, and essayist, had a lengthy non-fiction piece published in The New York Times opinion page when she was seventy. She had no journalism background, she was a sporadic writer, did it when she felt like it, with no career aspirations. It proved the point that good writing will rise to the top. She tossed great books my way. Somehow, she knew what I didn’t know about how my life was going to play out. Sadly, my mother died just a few weeks ago, and that shared path feels lonely now. She must have sensed she was near death, because she kept asking me when my new book would be coming out. Thankfully, she had seen the cover artwork in advance, so she saw something of this book. That gives me consolation.

Lobbying: At the Algonquin

Being a writer is so much fun, it’s the most fun I’ve ever had, and it’s what I most enjoy doing every day. I love talking with other writers about craft and life and love and disappointments. Recently I started an author/book Interview Series "Live From the Algonquin" to bring back some of that bygone writer glam. The Algonquin lobby is so elegant, and we order Prosecco, and for those few hours, it feels like we’ve stepped back in precious time. 

Louise Marburg Offers Ten Pieces of Writing Advice

In the 28th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Louise Marburg, author of The Truth About Me (WTAW Press), offers a tip or ten.

1. Read as much as you can, read every day, read all sorts of things, and especially read the genre in which you aspire to write.

2. Pay attention. Eavesdrop. Notice.

3. Do not wait for inspiration, for it will never come. Sit down and write a line, then write another, and so on. Eventually, a story will appear.

4. Train yourself to be able to write for as much or little time as you have. Don’t wait to write until you have the whole day free. If you have fifteen free minutes, then write for fifteen minutes.

5. Don’t set daily goals such as word counts and pages: Write what you can.

6. Don’t plan too much, because your plans will change.

7. Allow yourself the freedom to be surprised by what you write.

8. Make friends with other writers. Critique each other’s stories. Give and take advice. Find out what your writer friends are reading. Share tips on where to submit.

9. Don’t expect it to get easier as you become more experienced. It doesn’t.

10. Remember that every day you don’t write is a day you don’t become a better writer.

Josh Barkan Starts with Oddities

In the 27th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Josh Barkan, author of Mexico (Hogarth), discusses how instinct and curiosity lead him to write his stories.

Where does a story begin for you?
Starting a story is following an instinct, a curiosity, a small fact or small oddity that I want to know more about. A large unexploded bomb, weighing thousands of pounds, was found in the city of Niigata in 1992, one of the largest conventional bombs ever discovered, forty years after World War II. What was it doing there? Why did the Americans drop it? What if there were a Japanese intelligence officer during the war who discovered not only one bomb like this, but a series of bombs like this, dropped around Niigata, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Kyoto? What if he suspected these were signs of something bigger to come, yet not knowing what that bigger could be? What if he had a superior officer who would not let this young intelligence officer report that information to headquarters in Tokyo? Would the intelligence officer have the courage to act upon his convictions and suspicions? This was the path of the novella in my first collection of stories, Before Hiroshima, but I didn’t think about these larger themes of paralysis, and the authority of a superior officer, first. What I thought about was a two-inch news item I had found in the Yomiuri Shimbun, while visiting Niigata, about an unexploded bomb.

And what about the rumors I would hear, while living in Mexico City, that the narco El Chapo Guzmán once came into a fancy restaurant to have a meal?—even while there was a multi-million dollar bounty on his head. Why would he do that? Why were there rumors about him having done the same in his home state of Sinaloa? What if, based on these rumors, I imagined him coming into a fancy restaurant in Mexico City and my protagonist was an American chef who had to please the famous narco? What if El Chapo demanded the chef cook him a perfect meal? What if the chef realizes the only thing that will satisfy the narco is human blood? So he takes his own blood and the blood of a young girl in the restaurant and serves it to El Chapo, with the blood steeped into the fine shavings of Wagyu beef.

Sinagoga Maguén David, Polanco, Mexico City

I remember when I came to Mexico City, to the neighborhood of Polanco, the oddity of finding a large Jewish community with men dressed in black, Orthodox, Hasidic clothing walking to temple on Friday. I am Jewish and I had never known there was a large community of Jews in Mexico. What if a teacher coming from the United States is a secular Jew and he teaches in a high school, where the children of two narcos in his class must be separated because they are children from rival narco families, children who have fallen in love? What if the teacher has fallen in love with an Orthodox Jewish woman in Mexico City and her Orthodox father does not want her to marry a secular Jew and he tries to keep them apart at their wedding? What if the teacher—because his father-in-law will not accept his wedding to the Orthodox daughter—feels empathy for these two narco children in love and tries to protect them, at personal risk to his own life? How is this like Romeo and Juliet?

So I begin stories with oddities, with things that are unexpected, with a small detail that can then grow into questions and conflicts that I need to find out how the characters will resolve them. This is one of the things I admire about the short-story writers I like. There is a quirkiness to their writing. Raymond Carver’s protagonist in “Cathedral” ends the story on his knees, drawing with his hands in tandem with a man who is blind, to feel what it is like to “see.” Every single story by Carver is strange. John Cheever’s protagonist in “The Country Husband” is eating dinner in the suburbs of New York City, one night, and he sees a maid who was once a Nazi collaborator, who was stripped naked by the villagers of a town in Normandy, as she was forced to atone for her collaboration. The last image of the story is a cat dressed in doll’s clothing. Odd things, which feel real, and have moral significance. I look for the strangeness that will illuminate our normalcy, which will get to the center of our common pain and elate me.