Michal Lemberger's Letter to a Young Writer Emphasizes Empathy

In the fourth in a series of posts on 2015 books entered for The Story Prize, Michal Lemberger, author of After Abel (Prospect Park Books) discusses how she came to write short fiction—and what she's learned.

Dear writer,

You asked what it takes to write? I’m no Rilke. In fact, it wasn’t long ago that I’d be the one asking that question. That’s because I never thought of myself as a fiction writer. I was, however, a devourer of fiction from a very early age, the kind of kid who hid books in the small space between my bed and the wall so I could read after bedtime and first thing upon waking. I appreciated fiction. I studied it for years. I admired those who could write it. I especially admired those who could write short stories. I just never imagined that all that reading would one day lead me to write short fiction, too.

I was a writer, though. Primarily a poet, but then I went to grad school and wrote academically. After that, there was a stint as a book reviewer, then a long fallow period, and then I sat back down—I’d like to say pen in hand, which is a lovely if outdated image—at my computer and began writing poetry, essays, and some reported pieces again. It never occurred to me to try my hand at fiction.

As it turns out, all that reading and writing—and teaching, which I didn’t mention above, but which was an important component, too—was leading to an outpouring of short stories. Which is to say: experience matters.

We sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that only certain things count as experience: travel, love affairs, poverty, addiction, kinky sex. For writers, reading counts as experience. We learn how to write by reading. And thinking counts as experience. I think about books a lot, about how authors construct their characters, how they keep the action moving, word choices, and paragraph breaks, plot points, images, and themes.

Nomads: Been there? Done that? Not exactly...

The phrase “write what you know” gets bandied about, but it needs to be banished, to be kicked in the ass so that it flies through a window with a cartoon whoosh. Lived experience will make its way into your writing. You may end up writing about travel, love affairs, poverty (or affluence), addiction (or recovery), kinky (or boring) sex, and so much more that you draw from your life. I began writing fiction after I had children. Being a parent informs every sentence I write. But the stories in my book are set in the ancient world, which was much more brutal, but also smaller, than the one we inhabit. I’ve never lived in a caravan of nomads, herded sheep, or even seen the Nile, except in photographs. It was reading, specifically a years-long, deep immersion in ancient texts and other people’s writing about the ancient world that allowed me to imagine myself into its landscapes and rhythms.

Which brings me to the next important aspect of writing fiction: empathy. Empathy so complete, so radical, it hurts. It is empathy that lies at the heart of the writer’s imagination, and it is, I think, the trait that writers share, because we have to enter into our characters’ minds. We have to become their brain stems, sending out the signals that will move them through the arc of the story. Those of us inclined to write are born with the capacity for that level of identification, but if it’s not nurtured it will disappear, like a predisposition to gymnastics or piano. There, too, reading is a crucial tool. All of human life can be found in literature, which means you can find in it every passing squall of temper, or that surge of love that seems to take over all your nerve-endings, or the moment confusion tips over into embarrassment. The empathy you naturally feel will grow stronger the more you read.

The people we encounter as we go about our day are closed to us. We can’t enter their minds. Even though I am writing this to you, I remain a mystery to you, as you are to me, because we give each other just slivers of ourselves, that 10% of the iceberg that juts out into the air. It’s in stories that we learn how to shimmy into another person’s consciousness, how to wrap ourselves in it. Only once we’ve learned to do that can we write something worth reading. Here, then, is the key lesson: what your characters do will advance your narrative. What they feel will be your story.

Yours,

M.L.

"Sincerely, Ray Carver"

In 1984, shortly after reading Raymond Carver's short story collection, Cathedral, I wrote a letter to him expressing my admiration for the story, "A Small, Good Thing." One moment in, particular, struck me as being incredibly vivid, real, "cinematic" (which I thought then was quite a compliment). It occurs in the emergency room of a hospital where a couple has taken their young son. The boy, after being struck by a car while walking home from school—on his birthday, no less—later goes into a coma. In the waiting room, the boy's mother encounters members of another family, who have brought another child to the emergency room. What amazed me was the feeling of intersecting narratives. And I could imagine a story about the second family, with this mother just passing through.

I was 25 at the time and had a different last name, Charny. (Long story short: My wife and I both changed our last names to Dark when we married). I sent the note I wrote to Carver care of Vintage and didn't expect an answer. It just felt important to send, no matter what. But a couple of months later, a handwritten letter with a Syracuse postmark arrived. I had just quit law school to pursue writing fiction, and getting a response from the great man himself thrilled me, almost seemed to validate my choice. I swore that when a fan wrote to me, I'd write back, just as Carver had.

The fiction writing career hasn't quite worked out for me—yet—some 25 years later. (I'm now double the age.) But the pursuit of it did, nonetheless, lead me in a direction I couldn't have foreseen. In 2000, I ended up choosing a posthumous Carver story, "Kindling," for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. It almost felt like I was returning a favor. In truth, the letter Raymond Carver wrote me, just as he was dashing off to the airport to catch a flight back home to Washington State, was a small act of generosity that I will never be able to reciprocate.