Charlotte Holmes on the Importance of Bridging Even the Smallest of Gaps

In the 59th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Charlotte Holmes, author of The Grass Labyrinth (BkMkPress), contemplates misses, near misses, and non-misses.

Women’s shoes come in whole and half sizes from five to nine, but manufacturers often leap from nine directly to ten. The “heart size” for most shoe manufacturers—where they do most of their trade—falls between seven and nine, but ten is the afterthought, still a standard size. Nine and a half is not. For someone who wears a 9.5, nine is too short and ten is a boat. The slow pressure that deforms the hallux, the humiliation of losing a shoe while running for the train—size nine and a half women know these punishments because they’re three tenths of a centimeter from normal. Manufacturers must think this a negligible difference.

An editor at a literary magazine in New York, I’ve sent out galleys for the next issue, and now comes the tug-of-war over the copyeditor’s marks. A writer—my former teacher, winner of all the awards, hailed for his unstinting accuracy—telephones to go over his galleys. He’s chatty and comfortable, teasing. He’s asked me to sleep with him several times, and attributes my refusals to prudishness, not to lack of interest. When we get down to the serious business of the galleys, his voice hardens. “In the penultimate line, someone has changed the word to grandmother,” he says. “The cadence, the off-rhyme—grandfather is the word that should be there. Any fool can hear the difference. Grandfather was in the manuscript.” I have the manuscript on my desk. In the penultimate line, typed in the poet’s faded ribbon, grandmother winks back at me.

Over my desk in North Carolina, I tape an index card on which I have copied out a quotation from Caroline Gordon: "Find the exact word, not an approximate one." Caroline is one of my literary heroes. She keeps the magnolias at bay when she writes about the South, and for this, I love her and her books lined up on my shelf. Sometimes my poet husband and I fancy we’re like Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate—married writers under the same roof, toiling in academia. Because these are the early 1980s and no biographies of the two exist, we know few particulars of their lives. When we imagine ourselves like them, we don’t think of their violent quarrels over his infidelities, or their alcoholism, or the way they farmed out their daughter so they could write. We imagine them behind their typewriters all day, sipping a little wine and arguing books in the evening, doting on their only child, teaching classes brilliantly. We tell ourselves that if they did it, we can, too. All we must do is work very, very hard. Who knows how long it will take to make a life like theirs.

Only when I’ve lived in one place a long time do I understand the moon. After years of watching it rise in the same place above my backyard in Pennsylvania, I sense its constancy. The moon rises an hour later every night. When the moon is nearly full, it rises just after nine, and climbs to the tops of the blue spruce trees in the wooded lot behind our house. A little higher, and it silvers my next-door neighbor’s slate roof. This is particularly striking in winter, when the air is hard and still and the black bulk of the evergreens throws shadow onto the snow. The landscape’s rendered not in black and white, but in black and blue as moonlight burnishes the snow. Burnish doesn’t seem like the right word for snow, but this snow is full of light, and light burns. Burnish is the right word after all.

Lunacy: In search of the exact word

I listen to my mother on the phone, her garbled sentences urgent. She’s been dying for a long time, and though her words are unclear, I understand that she’s telling me I need to come to her now, right now. I imagine her bruised hands shaking as she clutches the phone, the oxygen tubes in her nose. My mother and I have always been close. She knows that, of all her children, I’m the one who won’t flake out. Every time she calls and says she needs me, I take a plane, rent a car, spend the time, spend money I don’t have to be with her. But a month ago, she accused me of unbelievable things, a conspiracy of almost comic proportions. If I hadn’t been so angry, so shocked, I might have laughed, might have figured out that her oxygen-starved mind was on the wane. I tell her that maybe someday she’ll realize I had no hand in her troubles. She answers, fluent in the language of aphasia. I tell her I love her and hang up, having a point to make. Three days after the last time we talk, she dies. Early the next morning—four o’clock—I sit in the dark in my freezing front room watching the Hunger Moon fall behind my neighbor’s house across the street. Snow covers the ground on my first day in the world without my mother in it.

I have one child, now the age my mother was when she bore me, the Jesus age, thirty-three. My son is an artist with an MFA, trying to make a living in America’s most expensive city. My mother, who never finished high school, was a housewife with three kids, trying to make ends meet on a red dirt road in Georgia. I’m their point of intersection. When she wounded him with a thoughtless remark, my mother tried to make amends by promising him my father’s things. When he was five, she let him touch the heavy ceremonial sword engraved with my father’s name. When he was ten, she allowed him to hold it. The last time they saw one another, she told him he could take the sword home. Twenty, already an art student, he seemed embarrassed that he’d ever longed for a military sword. For my mother, at least in this case, time didn’t calibrate desire.

Centimeters divide the right from the almost to the never-possible. I want to be able to rely on precision, on accuracy, to incise life into words that find its patterns. If I’m lucky, a story travels the distance, whether step by step or by leaping.

Why Rachel Hall Writes Fiction

In the 58th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Rachel Hall, author of Heirlooms (BkMk Press), lays out the ways in which fiction can get at the truth.

Because the stories in Heirlooms are inspired by family stories of WWII, immigration, and assimilation, I’m often asked why I wrote the collection as fiction. I’ve come to expect this question, but at first I was surprised and flummoxed—and also, honestly, a little annoyed. I bit my tongue, didn’t say what came to mind: I wrote it as fiction because I wanted to, because I love and write stories, because fiction rules! None of these answers would satisfy the interviewers or audience members who ask about genre, though they are in truth, part of the reason. I studied fiction writing at an MFA program that didn’t even offer creative nonfiction workshops. The story form is the language in which I am most proficient. (I was going to say fluent, but even Alice Munro, a master of the short story, admits that each new story makes her feel as if she’s a novice.)

The more thoughtful—and adult—answer is this: I write fiction because it is immersive in a way that creative nonfiction, for all its other qualities, is not. In creative nonfiction, the reader is aware that they are hearing about someone else’s experience. We might sympathize or identify with the narrator, but we don’t forget that we are reading about events that already happened to someone else. Fiction allows us to experience the events ourselves. Hopefully, the reader of Heirlooms is terrified when Lise’s escape is thwarted in “Leaving the Occupied Zone.” Hopefully, the reader, too, feels the complicated, clotted mixture of fear and guilt and shame that prevent Lise from ever speaking of the rape. In fiction, the characters become real to us; we might think of them as friends. We care about them and worry for them, see ourselves in them. Reader and character meld together.

Also important: Fiction allows me to make things up. While many of the stories in Heirlooms sprang from anecdotes I’d heard, there were missing parts, crucial details that no one remembered, and conflicting memories and interpretations. (One could argue that all family stories are fictions.) I needed to invent and embroider to bring these stories to life. The truth is I do this embroidery without even realizing it. When I hear a story, I immediately begin adding and inventing. Soon, I’m not even sure what is factual and what I’ve made up. People like me should perhaps stay away from creative nonfiction with its implicit contract to adhere to what really happened.

William Trevor writes that the short story is “an explosion of truth,” reminding us there are many ways to get at the complicated thing we call reality. I didn’t live through the dark times at the heart of Heirlooms. I grew up hearing these stories, true, but they aren’t mine in the same way that they are my grandparents’ and my mother’s. In choosing fiction, I get to remain backstage as my characters spin under the spotlights. And ultimately this feels like a more honest approach to the material, more true.

Stephanie Han's Ten Points of Fiction Writing Advice

In the 57th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Stephanie Han, author of Swimming in Hong Kong (Willow Springs Books), shares some writing tips.

1. Write into the conflict and paradox. Move as close as you can to that point and begin.

2. The ending does not have to be neat and tidy. A moment should be complete, but that does not mean that all questions are answered. Think about it: very little is fully resolved in life.

3. Writing should be an act of discovery. 

4. Write more, you can always edit.

5. Write secretly. Write openly. Accept that writing is not a familiar type of behavior and roll with its complications. Think about it: you are putting down stories and ideas and thoughts in the form of little marks on a page all by yourself, instead of doing something that is viewed as more tangible or beneficial such as gardening, hanging out with friends, watching a sunset, or yes, making significant sums of money. Accept that and all that it implies.

6. Don’t worry about what your (mother/partner/friend/mentor, etc.) thinks about your subject matter. 

7. Fact and fiction. Fiction and fact. A slippery relationship. Be prepared to answer questions. If you are, don’t worry about it. If you aren’t, prepare yourself.

8. If you are bored writing, think how bored someone will be reading your writing.

9. Read.

10. Publishing has little to do with the act of writing. Publishing has everything to do with how others feel about you as a writer.

Dana Fitz Gale on Writing Into the Unknown

In the 56th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Dana Fitz Gale, author of Spells for Victory and Courage (Brighthorse Books), explores the difficulty of creating a story based on a tragic event.

When it comes to writing, I have never had much faith in rules. I doubt whether any lasting art was ever made by following a set of guidelines. In terms of fiction, I think the very worst, the dreariest and most destructive rule is also one of the most cited ones: “Write what you know.”

On the surface, it sounds practical enough. It's easy and convenient to write what you know, to stick to topics that feel cozily familiar. Writing fiction about what you know is safe; it requires no research, no forays into the domains of doubt and ambiguity, no death-defying trapeze acts of the imagination. And this, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with writing what you know.

Canoeing, not ca-knowing

One of the stories in my collection, Spells for Victory and Courage is a piece called "Canoe." It's fiction, but it was inspired by a real-life event. About fifteen years ago, there was a river accident in Montana involving a tourist family with two young boys, ages three and five. At the time, I had recently completed river rescue training and raft guide school. I was spending all my free hours on Montana rivers, so the accident felt disturbingly close to home. Long after it had vanished from the news, I was still contemplating it. In fact, I could not keep it from my thoughts.

Many years later, when I had two sons of my own, ages three and five, the incident came back to haunt me, once again. I decided that my odd obsession with this past event meant I should turn it into fiction, use it as material for a story. It would be easy, I believed, since I'd be writing what I knew. As the mother of young boys, a lover of rivers, and a Montana resident, I was more or less an expert on what happened.

Despite my knowledge, my attempts to write the story kept on failing. I wrote several drafts from the mother's point of view. I knew how torn she was between her wish to let her children have adventures and her instinct to protect them, at all costs. I knew exactly how she felt, and yet the story wouldn't work. I tried the father's point of view. I knew him too. His yearning for wild places, his desire to give his children the experiences he'd craved, as a child. I knew his good intentions, undermined by bad advice and a simple lack of information. It was not his fault that he had grown up where the waterways were slow and wide and relatively warm. I knew these things.

I knew my characters and subject matter inside out. Yet the story fell flat, every time. It failed because the true story was not about the things I knew. Like a trout haunting the depths of a cold river, the truth was lurking in the shadow of my ignorance.

What I didn't know was why certain Montanans had given these poor tourists bad advice, why they'd assured the father it was safe to canoe the glacial river at the height of spring runoff. Considering that there were two young children on the trip, this deed seemed unimaginably evil. I could not imagine what would make a person do such a malicious thing. I didn't want to know, and yet I had no choice. The only way to write the story, I finally realized, was to plunge into the fog, to write the thing I genuinely didn’t know.

The unknown, not the known, is what makes fiction worth the effort. Einstein said the unknown is what makes existence worth the effort. “The mysterious," he wrote, "is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead.”

So if I still believed in rules, perhaps I'd suggest a few new ones:

Instead of writing what you know, write curiosity. Write doubt. Write what your parents never told you, what you never learned in school. Write your own blind spots. Write what keeps you up at night. Write the flickering shapes that hover at the edges of your vision and then vanish when you turn your head to look. Write past the barbed wire fences of your understanding. Write towards chaos. Write what you don't know.

Sara Schaff on Art for Our Sake

In the 55th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Sara Schaff, author of Say Something Nice About Me (Augury Books), grapples with engagement.

Years ago in Ann Arbor, when I was in graduate school and the great Shaman Drum Bookshop was still open on State Street, a local guy seemed to appear at every reading and harass the writers: Didn't they think they had a responsibility as artists in the face of the current political climate? At least, this was the question as I remember it, and I also remember bristling at his scolding tone. The writers he scolded seemed to bristle, too. They tended to defend art for art's sake, not art in service of some larger idea.

The political climate then was the one under George W. Bush, a President I railed against over drinks with friends, but not in my writing. And if the man at Shaman Drum had asked me why not, I would have defended my right to write whatever the hell I wanted.

Shaman Drum Bookshop: Marching to a different beat

The truth is I didn't know what the hell I wanted to write. I had to find my content by trial and error, not any measure of control. Many of the stories I wrote at the University of Michigan were useful practice but poor examples of art (for any sake). I threw most of them away. Which didn't make me feel any better. After graduating, I taught for two semesters, then received the same layoff notice as a few of my colleagues. The blow felt personal. I was struggling as a writer, but I had seen myself as a teacher for years.

I went on unemployment. I looked for work that was different than the work I had always expected to do. Suddenly I had a lot to write about. Financial insecurity, creative failure, old parental issues I had not yet faced.

I was lucky though: after several months I got a part time job at an art museum, then a full-time one at an advertising agency. Obama was President now, and I never railed against Obama. I didn't write about him either. I loved Obama. I loved my copywriting job. I could write in my cubicle, and as long as I got my copywriting work done, nobody bothered me.

I finished my first book that way, while unemployed and then while employed at a job I loved a little less as time went on. I was no Peggy Olson, but I met a couple of guys who thought they were Don Draper. My daughter was born, I quit my job, I found an agent, and my book didn't sell. I felt artistic despair, I went back to teaching, and I became the breadwinner of my family—another thing I'd not expected would happen, and which caused all other kinds of anxieties.

Still, I did not think I was writing about "the current political climate." Even during the 2016 campaign when I often went to bed with my heart racing. I wrote about other things and waited for the election to be over.

And then it was. That week in my beginning fiction class, we were "bending the rules of the universe," the name I give to our unit on speculative fiction, a week that is usually fun but which gave one of my students complete writers' block: "I was trying to write about a world in which it was impossible for Donald Trump to win. And then he won." She couldn't finish the story.

I knew where she was coming from. Everything I had been writing before the election now seemed inadequate. I stared at the novel-in-progress and a story, and new scenes didn't come. It's possible to bend the rules too far. What do you write when there are no rules?

Toni Morrison says this is exactly when we get to work, and since I shared her wisdom with my students, I couldn't let myself off the hook; I got to work: Letters to my representatives. A new story, essays. Notes for organizing the way the damn Tea Party organized in the years when I wasn't writing about politics.

This writing has kept me from sinking into despair, which Morrison also says there is no room for in crisis.

When I think of the Shaman Drum scolder now, I imagine what he was asking was whether we fiction writers took our work lightly. Even as a grad student I would have said no! Of course I took my work seriously—a fact I could prove because of how much I cried from the stress of it all. That wasn't commitment though. That was ego.

While I suspect that guy wasn't, in truth, trying to start a conversation so much as an argument, I'll still look for him in the audience when I do a reading from my first book. Go ahead, ask me, I'll be thinking. I'm ready to hear it.

Vanessa Hua's Ten Writing Pointers

In the 54th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Vanessa Hua, author of Deceit and Other Possibilities (Willow Publishing), offers some authorial tips.

1. Hours of power. Figure out when you are at your most inspired and productive—early or late morning? After 10 pm?—and spend that time working on the projects that matter to you most. When I’m feeling less than inspired—say, late on a Friday afternoon—I deal with administrative tasks, such as sending and following up on pitches and submissions, or taking care of paperwork.

2. Reverse engineer. Read stories and study their dialogue, their structure, and everything you can mine that resonates with your work. How did the author manage two timelines, or portray a character only dimly aware of the consequences of her actions? Type out the sentences you love and ad lib style, play around with the details until it becomes your own.

3. Writing about what you don’t know. To describe a time, place, or event that you didn’t witness, search through Flickr, YouTube, Google Street View for photos and videos of other worlds. Soundcities is a database of street sounds. Read fiction and non-fiction from that country and time period, as well as travel guides. If you discover gaps in the official record, rejoice! Your imagination can fill in the rest.

4. Writing outside your experience. Start humbly, not with assumption and arrogance. Ask questions and do research to avoid trite, stereotypical descriptions. Run a draft past readers from that background to get their opinion. Ask yourself, is your character fully-realized, or is he a symbol, a mechanism?

Hagiography? Not on your life!

5. Beware of hagiography. When writing about your family, don’t turn them into saints. As hard-working as your grandfather might have been, as self-sacrificing as your mother is, portray them (or the characters based upon them) in all their flawed complexity.

6. Step back. You’ve just received comments from your writing group or workshop. Put your work aside for a day or more, however long it takes for your emotions to settle so you can see what advice you want to keep, and what you’ll disregard.

7. Exercise. It’s been said that “sitting is the new smoking”—our sedentary lifestyle is killing us (in addition to all the usual agonies of attempting to write). I try to go for a swim, walk, or a run each day. Feeling off kilter physically can diminish your motivation. That time away from my computer, with my body in motion, is important to my creative process. Often, a narrative dilemma resolves itself when I’m not actively thinking about it, that ah-ha moment when I'm gliding underwater.

8. Double up. If I’m commuting or going for a run, I use a pdf-to-voice app to immerse myself in my work-in-progress and to listen for clunky or confusing sentences. Do whatever you can to make the most of the time you have.

9. Foster literary community. Attend or organize readings, subscribe to literary magazines, and form writing groups. Share opportunities with colleagues and friends, and celebrate and spread their victories—even if they won what you wanted! It will help you cast your net farther in search of opportunities, and they will share with you in return.

10. No one will care as much as you do. Not your partner, not your mother, not your professor, not your editor, not your agent, not your dog. Sounds depressing, but for me, it’s empowering. Your work ultimately rests upon you, and you must do whatever it takes to put forth your best.

Peter Ho Davies on Writing Goals (Literal and Metaphorical)

In the 53rd in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), compares novelists and story writers to different types of soccer players.

I’ve been playing soccer with my MFA students for a dozen years off and on—more off than on this fall since I broke an ankle in a game earlier this semester, and maybe more off than on going forward since I’ve just turned fifty (and they collectively are forever 25). Injuries not withstanding—and we’ve had our share of sprains, and concussions over the years—it’s a very friendly game: co-ed, mixed genre, students and faculty. My colleagues Michael Byers, Derek Palacio and V.V. Ganeshananthan have all been regulars; David Mitchell has a special place of honor as our only visiting writer to have ever played (for the record he has what the commentators would deem a “good touch for a big man”). The injuries, mine included, mostly stem from the collision of enthusiasm and clumsiness, but the game is mostly good for our mental health—a space where the natural competitiveness of writers can find a healthy and low stakes outlet. Basically we get to compete together at something unimportant and that we’re mostly not much good at (we have had a few skilled players over the years, among them Uwem Akpan, and Chigozie Obiama, an Oprah pick and a Booker finalist respectively, though the coincidence of soccer skills and literary success is probably just that).

Sports metaphors: Sometimes Messi

Soccer has long been a useful, playful metaphor for me. I once compared getting into Best American Short Stories to some British non-writer friends as the equivalent of a soccer player getting picked for England. I’ve even thought of the table of contents of a story collection as a kind of “team sheet”—solid stories in defense (to block the critics), brief, speedy ones to race down the wings, a title story as mid-field general, an anthologized star striker. I also claim—mostly in jest—to be able to recognize writerly traits in the way my students play soccer (tenacious defenders do always seem likeliest to see their epic novels through).

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the nice distinction made in soccer circles between great goal scorers, and the scorers of great goals. The former are the prolific, poacher-types who tap in from six yards, scramble the ball over the line from a corner, amass great stats. The latter are the inspired artists of soccer, the scorers who chip the keeper from outside the box, connect with balletic volleys, beat two defenders with a sinuous shimmy. In a writing context, I suspect sometimes that our great goal scorers are our novelists; the scorers of great goals, on the other hand, are story writers or a least writers whose stories define them. Flannery O’Connor is a scorer of great goals, say. What a highlight reel! Aleksander Hemon, Peter Orner, and Daniel Alarcon—all actual soccer players, themselves - are surely also all scorers of great goals. Of course, there are exceptions. John Updike, say - undoubtedly a great goal scorer, but a scorer of great goals? Lydia Davis, a personal favorite, is an undeniable genius, but I’m not sure there’s a signature story or two I think of when she comes to mind.

This is merely a conceit, of course, but maybe just one more way of explaining the vexing difficulty story writers sometimes face moving to the long form…they’ve been transferred to a bigger club in a new league.