Victoria Patterson's Letter to Her Beginning Writer Self

In the 29th in a series of posts from authors of 2018 books entered for The Story Prize, Victoria Patterson, author of The Secret Habit of Sorrow (Counterpoint), shares some insights gained through experience.

You have no idea what you’ve undertaken. That’s OK. You’re going to love writing. No matter what happens, it’s yours. But here are some ideas and thoughts.

Don’t suppress who you are—your oddities, wackiness, your un-literary background. You’ll end up closing off the source of your most true impulses. If you alter who you are because of fear of not succeeding, or of not fitting into a capricious market, you’ll hate yourself, and then your work will suck anyways.

Stop asking others, “Do you think I have talent?” It’s like asking, “Should I buy it?” i.e., “Should I buy myself?” No matter how difficult, no matter the obstacles, no matter the years it takes, be willing to trust yourself.

Learn to honor yourself through your failures. Let them contribute to a stealthy self-respect, steadiness, and poise, which will be integral to your work.

Praise your adversity-bred toughness. Many writers have abandoned their craft due to the necessity of rejections.

It’s not that exciting. Learn to appreciate the drudgery. It’s a requirement. The grind becomes part of your ability to write well.

One of your best teachers will be yourself: by copying sentences, paragraphs, pages and pages in private notebooks, from authors you revere. Don’t worry. It’s not imitation. Go hog wild. Copy as much as you want. The magic of these sentences will cast a spell, impelling you toward your own expression.

Try not to worry too much about angering people. Chances are they’ll be angry at what you didn’t predict, and the things you fretted over won’t matter.

Your deficiencies and weaknesses will paradoxically become the best and worst qualities of your prose. Don’t despair. Whatever you don’t or can’t overcome, you can let it be purposeful and useful to your work. But to do this, you have to be aware and alert, otherwise, it’ll hide in your prose, diminishing it, and you won’t even notice.

Don’t use talent as exhibitionism, withholding behind language. Move deeper, risking vulnerability and foolishness. Don’t fall for the easier, flashier accomplishment.

A commitment to your work is not a pledge to achieve fame or success. Try not to dwell over the fate of your work. Instead brood over the writing.

Remember that your truest appreciation comes from silent, absorbed readers.

Learn to live for the next thing you write, and the certainty and thrill when your own work speaks back to you.

Don’t fall for the constant fatuous exhibitionism of social media, a need to be in public view as conspicuously as possible. Most of your time must be reserved for privacy.

Don’t be afraid to write badly, just do it in private, where mediocrity and badness can flourish, and where you don’t have to strain not to be trite, sentimental, or clichéd. You have to loosen up and write badly. Unless you’re willing, you can’t write well. You’ll need lots of privacy for your inevitable bad writing.

One of your greatest attributes is your urgency to write, that vital seed of determination, interest, need, and desire. It’s all yours. You might not know what the story means yet, but you are impelled to tell it, and this fundamental element propels a reader’s interest and can’t be faked.

Be glad that your stories are hungry. If the motivation is trivial to the writing, the story will lack the passion that generates interest, no matter how beautiful the prose.

Try not to worry about intellectual expression or academia. Your respect and delight in the incidental and prosaic details of life are more helpful, as well as your ability to perceive through emotions.

Victoria Patterson: What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the book or books they like best. This year's judges were author A.M. Homes, critic and blogger Carolyn Kellogg, and librarian Bill Kelly. Here's a citation for Victoria Patterson's Drift:

With a steady hand and a gimlet eye, Victoria Patterson proffers a surprising vision of a familiar world in her story collection, Drift. The very idea of a literary work of fiction set in notoriously materialistic Newport Beach, Calif., is perhaps one of the biggest surprises. But Patterson makes it work through skillful writing that shows us the gritty side of the glitz and deftly peels back the layers to reveal the inner core of characters struggling to fit in or to define themselves within a wealthy, vacuous, and sometimes toxic culture.

Part of the pleasure of reading this book is growing familiar and fond of the characters that appear throughout the connected stories, and I missed some of them the moment I finished the book. This is a deft, fully realized work of fiction made up of disparate parts that nonetheless cohere to reveal a complex world full of pain, regret, and no easy answers. It is an impressive accomplishment, a book of great depth and unquestionable authenticity.

photo © Eric Richards

At the Signing Table (and Other Photos from The Story Prize Event)

© Eric Richards

Before the The Story Prize event on March 3, 2010, at The New School University in New York, finalists Victoria Patterson, Wells Tower, and Daniyal Mueenuddin signed stacks of books for our bookseller McNally Jackson (which still has signed copies available). To see more photos, please visit our Web site.

Early next week we'll post the judges' citations for the three books we honored that night: Patterson's Drift, Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, and the top prize winner, Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.

Scenes from The Story Prize: Wells Tower, Victoria Patterson, and Daniel Mueenuddin

© Eric Richards

The finalists for The Story Prize (L to R) Wells Tower, Victoria Patterson, and Daniyal Mueenuddin (the winner), had lots of interesting things to say, both on-stage and off.

Mueenuddin for instance, told me in a private conversation that he built and oversees a school for some 200 children from around the village where his farm in the southern Punjab region is located, partly as an alternative to the fundamentalist madrasas that are popping up all over his native Pakistan.

On-stage, Patterson confessed that in her struggles to find time to write she would sometimes leave her children in the church school on Sundays and sneak out to go home to work (earning an undeserved reputation for piety).

Tower discussed seeking a magazine assignment to write about carnival people, in the hope of proving the stereotype wrong. Instead, however, he found carnies to be every bit as unsavory as they are reputed to be—maybe more so (as in his story "On the Show").

Thank you Daniyal, Tory, and Wells for being a part of The Story Prize's sixth award night.

Here are some links to coverage of the event:

• The New York Times Arts Beat and Paper Cuts blogs
• Reuters
• The L.A. Times Jacket Copy Blog (in a post by Story Prize judge Carolyn Kellogg)
• GalleyCat
• CBC
• AP

Adendum: More press...

• The New Yorker's Book Bench blog
• Poets & Writers (including a video interview with Daniyal Mueenuddin)
• Teeth Maestro (a Pakistani dentist's blog)
  

Four Questions For Story Prize Finalist Victoria Patterson

Note: Story Prize finalists Victoria Patterson, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and Wells Towers will read from their work and discuss it onstage on March 3 at The New School. At the end of evening we will announce the winner of the $20,000 top prize. Tickets are available from SmartTix.

How long was Drift in the making, and what were some of the obstacles you encountered along the way?
The stories had been germinating since high school, and I’ve been keeping journals since the 2nd grade, I have stacks of them. It took me years and years to learn to capture details—to be almost predatory in my observations. So I was learning how to write, mostly through journal writing, learning about the subtleties of plot, setting, tone, and dialogue, and developing my voice, with Drift in mind. And grad school was helpful and productive for me. Also, I read and read. I studied writers, studied their sentences. I longingly stared at their author photographs, willed them to help me, tried to channel their talents. I underlined and pored over their books, copied passages, all in my efforts at transmutation. I listened to books on CD, for rhythm. (I still do all of these things.) Drift finally started taking form on paper, and from there, it took seven to eight years. Two of those years were spent working with my editor, Anjali Singh. She taught me a lot about writing, and about my work—gracefully pointing out flaws, pushing me to write deeper, challenging me. She somehow made me want to please her without being overtly praising. She’s an amazing editor.

As far as obstacles, I had this sense of persecution, and it comes back sometimes. (Joyce Carol Oates gives the advice to writers: “Don’t expect to be treated justly by the world. Don’t even expect to be treated mercifully.”) I have to remind myself that I’m not special because I’m a writer, that a lot of people work as hard as I do, even more so, with fewer rewards and more obstacles. But during those many years, it sometimes seemed that everyone and everything was conspiring against me, to keep me from writing: Finances, Time, Rejections, Family, and Peers (capitalized because they were so big in my head, and in that order of magnitude). These seeming obstacles (imagined or real) furthered my resolve. I was dogged and stubborn and dedicated and I had a lot of support—but it was more like I didn’t have a choice. At some point, I knew I would write no matter how many rejections and whether I tasted publication, and this helped. Writing is a great risk for me, so it’s frightening, and the most debilitating obstacles are internal; and the true rewards are internal. One of the most satisfying parts is my need to write—the having something that needs to be written, not from anyone else but from me—and then writing it, getting the story to the page, no matter how long it takes. When I finished Drift, it was like a death. I might not have felt so persecuted all those years had I known that having those narratives inside me essentially overshadow all those obstacles was/is quite a thing—that burning desire to work, that driving purpose. And now, when a story wants to be written—when I feel its need for me to form it into life—for me, that’s one of the most rewarding and exciting and addictive parts of writing. But I have to be willing to drudge as well.

What do you like about the short story form? Is it the form that comes most naturally to you?
I love the short story form, probably because I love reading short stories: William Trevor, Anton Chekhov, John Cheever, Alice Munro, Andre Dubus, Richard Yates, Edwidge Danticat, Rohinton Mistry, Antonya Nelson, V.S. Naipaul, Lorrie Moore, Sherwood Anderson—all of these writers and more. I’m drawn to the short story, to its unique ability to contain a distinct, tenacious mood and vision, and then, with its conclusion, to open it up—larger and deeper. I love that each sentence builds on the other, builds momentum and draws toward the conclusion; that there’s nothing superfluous; that a ten-page short story can dig into me and unsettle me as much or more than a thousand-page novel.

I’ve written both short stories and novels, and for me neither one comes naturally. I’ve heard it expressed that like lovers in the night, all literary forms are essentially the same, and I do believe that good writing draws on the same skills. But I prefer writing short stories because, at this point, I’m more confident writing stories. And purely from practicality, I can put stories away and let them gestate and begin other stories and then later, take the old ones out, fiddle with them again. I don’t have to be locked down to the same characters, the same novel, for years.

Is there someone you show your work to first? At what stage do you do this, and what kind of feedback are you looking for?
I feel for my husband because he listens to me read my work over and over, and God help him if he falls asleep. He’s a tough critic, and I usually wait until I have something good before I read to him because I don’t want to be criticized. But I read to him because I need to be criticized. Also, hearing the work out loud (not just in a room by myself) helps.

I’m fortunate to have a writers’ group with writers that I trust, respect, and admire: Danzy Senna, Veronica Gonzalez, and Dana Johnson. We’re supportive of each other—but honest. I can bring my work to them at any stage, and I know that I won’t get eviscerated. If anything, they’ll make my head ring with more ideas and possibilities.

What’s next for you?
I have a novel coming out with Counterpoint Press in February 2011, with Jack Shoemaker as my editor. Already, I’m learning from him. I’m thrilled at the opportunity.

I’ve been writing short stories, and I want to write more short stories.

Story Prize Finalists Mueenuddin, Patterson, and Tower Are All Over the Place

Here are some links to essays by, interviews with, and other miscellanea from the three finalists for The Story Prize—Daniyal Mueenuddin, Victoria Patterson, and Wells Tower. Remember, all three finalists will read from their work and discuss it onstage at The New School, in New York City, on Wed., March 3 at 7:30 pm. And at the end of the evening, we will announce the winner.

Daniyal Mueenuddin

• Ron Hogan's prescient introduction* to Daniyal Mueeduddin writing about a story by Turgenev in January 2009 on Beatrice.com.
• An interview on NPR's Morning Edition in November 2009.
  
• Tour dates for the paperback edition, Jan. 19-25.

Victoria Patterson

• "On Selling Out" on The Nervous Breakdown.
• "The Perils of Fiction" on The Millions.
• "Homage to John Updike's Rabbit, Run" on Three Guys One Book.

Wells Tower

• His story "Executors of Important Energies" on Five Chapters (which you can read as one installment).
• "House Dutiful" on the radio show This American Life (at the 36:44 mark), in which he reads from an essay, "The Restoration," he wrote for The Washington Post in 2005.
• Contributions to The Believer.

Of course, the best way to experience these collections is to read Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Patterson's Drift, and Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

* I erroneously characterized this as an interview when this was first posted.

Three Debut Writers Are Finalists For The Story Prize

After reading 78 short story collections in 2009 and seriously considering a dozen or so strong candidates, Julie Lindsey (the founder of The Story Prize) and I selected the finalists for The Story Prize in early January. It's always difficult for us to narrow down our choices to just three collections and it seems to get harder every year. But, as always, we're excited about our choices. This year's finalists for The Story Prize are:

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (W. W. Norton)
Drift by Victoria Patterson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

What's particularly exciting is that all three are debuts--a first for The Story Prize. In fact, in the previous five years of the award, only 2 of 15 finalists were the authors' first books: 2004/05 finalist The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day and 2005/06 winner The Hill Road by Patrick O'Keeffe.

All three of these collections are exceptional and rewarding reads. Look for more about each of them here. In the days ahead, I'll also be releasing a list of other notable short story collections from 2009. In the weeks leading up to our event, I hope to spotlight some of these books in addition to the finalists.



This year's event, by the way, is at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 3, at The New School in New York City (66 West 12th Street). That night, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Victoria Patterson, and Wells Tower will read from their short story collections and discuss their work onstage. At the end of the evening, Julie Lindsey will announce the winner. 



For information on buying general admission tickets, which cost $14, go to SmartTix.com and search for "Story Prize" or contact The New School box office at boxoffice@newschool.edu or 212- 229-5488.

For those of you in New York, our official bookseller, McNally Jackson, will be giving away a limited number of tickets in the weeks leading up to the event. And for those who can’t make it, a Web cast will appear on FORA.tv several weeks later.