Month: July 2023

I had a dream the other night, in which I was attending a writers’ conference. It was at a “rustic” facility, at which we arrivals were not guided anywhere but all just sort of milled around. None of us knew any of the others, but occasionally, we would see a pod of two or three faculty gliding through the rooms like Greek gods, aloof from the masses around them. The attendees at one point were all in the same room, lying on the floor like a Red Cross pre-triage tent, and several were in the throes of insanity, occasionally shouting nonsense and being comforted by one of our peers.

The schedule was haphazard, and the esteemed authors had barely bothered to prepare. One gave us a thirty-second introduction before showing us an obscure film, with no discussion or Q&A afterward.

It was actually quite a lot like going to a writers’ conference.

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Hey, how about a mooc.

There are some people whose voices have become instantly identified with a particular medium.  You hear Tom Bodett and you think Motel 6. You hear Dennis Haysbert and you think Allstate insurance. You hear Sir David Attenborough, and you think nature documentary.

David Attenborough was a near-perfect choice to create fifty years of BBC nature documentaries. He was well educated, had a great amateur passion for nature and archaeology, and grew up into a family of actors, producers and directors. He was able to stand comfortably with one foot in the natural landscape and the other in the production studio. 

Let’s take this brief clip as an example. These beavers have no interest in being photographed or explained; they’re just doin’ their thing. They eat, they swim, they move mud and sticks. Whatever. Likewise, the photographers and transportation crew have fairly little interest in beavers. They’ve brought their motion-activated underwater cameras and their trailers full of lights and canoes and folding chairs to this site, and they’ll break it down and go off to Kenya in a couple of weeks. Whatever.

Attenborough’s job, as the narrator, is to know the beavers well enough to explain them to us, and simultaneously to know the world of film editing and sound editing, the explanatory tools that he has on hand. He’s working with the consulting naturalists and the wildlife management experts and the sound crew, culling endless hours of film and an immense amount of raw information into this nine-and-a-half minutes that’s informative, engaging, and aesthetically pleasing.

Watch any documentary, whether historical or biographical or natural, and there’s somebody doing that work of selecting and framing and helping the viewers come to understand a new world. Helping us see things we’d have missed. Helping us see why those things matter.

Writing relies on a narrator for that same function. The writer, standing off-stage, is the one doing all the research, the one with the lifetime of observation that has let her know her characters and her setting in rich and vast detail. The characters are the beavers: they have no interest in being explained, they’re just doin’ their thing. Whatever. The narrator is the one telling us the story, gradually introducing us to a landscape and a way of life and the people within it all. Helping us see things we’d have missed. Helping us see why those things matter.

Let’s take an example, nearly at random. Nora has a book on the table, the nonfiction story The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks. I stuck my thumb in it, and quickly came on page 224 to this: “Some shepherds are wizards at training dogs. I am an amateur, so I ring Paul and ask him questions and he patiently shares his knowledge.” There are a bunch of things going on in these twenty-five words.

• First off, the narrator is “I,” a first-person representation of a real person. Common enough; we see that in both fiction and memoir all the time. 
• But interestingly, the narrator is telling us this story in a present tense. “I am…” “I ring…” “he shares.” The narrator is recounting events that took place some moderate time ago—it takes a couple of years just between the delivery of the finished manuscript and the appearance of the book, and the book was published in 2015. We’re reading about things that occurred at least a decade ago, but the narrator wants us to feel invested, as though we’re involved and present ourselves. (As I’m doing in this paragraph. I’m using the first-person plural, “we” and “us,” to implicate you in the reading and thinking, and using the present tense to indicate that I’m thinking this all through on the fly, which I am. Narrators are everywhere, and we’re sneaky as hell.)
• This passage, like much of the book, is delivered in summary rather than scene. We don’t hear any of the characters’ questions or answers, we don’t really know what they’re talking about other than the general topic of training a sheepdog. We hear all the time that writers should “show and not tell,” but those aren’t a better or worse way of working. What we’re getting here is a picture of the “I” character thinking, trying to learn, trying to become something better than “an amateur.” It’s a portrait of a learner, far more than of what’s being learned.
• The use of the word “wizards” is an interesting choice, implying that some things can be learned and others lie in the world of magic, which one either has access to or does not. It’s similar to the way that Attenborough describes beavers as “engineers.” Well, they’re not really engineers. They didn’t go to Stanford or Virginia Tech, don’t run transfer-of-force simulations, don’t sign drawings. But Attenborough uses the metaphor of engineering to help us see the work beavers do, and to help us be appropriately impressed by it. So too, the sheepdog narrator uses the metaphor of magic to help us understand the sort of supernatural bond between the best dogs and the best owners. Narrators choose metaphors, and never tell you. Like I say, sneaky.

Narrators play the role of translator between the culture of the story and the culture of the reader. They periodically, or frequently, step into the story and say “Here’s some things you should know in order to understand what you’re seeing. 

I’ve long been fascinated by the concept of errors. Nolan Arenado of the St. Louis Cardinals has won the National League Gold Glove award for third basemen for ten consecutive years, with a fielding percentage of about .98. For a decade, he’s misplayed one ball out of every fifty hit toward him, and he’s the best there is.

Musicians, not so much. A guitarist or pianist with that error record would be sent back to the woodshed for a lot more practice. Of course, they have a lot more under their own control, burning in those sequences over and over with precise repetition, not like Arenado having to deal with a scorching, spinning ground ball skipping randomly across grass and gravel without warning.

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There’s a famous story told by John Updike about the experience of getting a box of his latest book from the publisher. Every time, it was a little miracle. The beauty of the cover. The precise alignment of the stacks. Even just the smell of clean paper. It just pleased him immensely to see the physical outcomes of all that work.

He’d pick one from the top, start thumbing through it, seeing the typeface they’d chosen, the spaciousness or compression of the pages, the header and footer signaling that it was A Real Book. And inevitably, within ten minutes or so, he’d find a typo, and the rest of his day would be completely lost.

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I’ve now had the chance to sit with Foreman the way a reader would. I’ve gone through it in four large sittings: “September” and “October” one night, “November” through “February” a second night, “March” and “April” last night, and finishing the working year with “May” through “August” this afternoon.

One thing I found is what I always experience. While I’m writing, the scenes feel slow, and a little disconnected. After I’m done, when I encounter the book as a reader, the scenes are sharp and interrelated. The book is both quick and coherent, which is good, because when I’m writing, I feel neither.

But there were four errors. In a novel of 94,332 words. A fielding percentage of .9999576.

Dammit!

It reminds me every time of how fragile the reading experience is, and why book designers and copy editors deserve double their current wages. Here we are, immersed in some family drama or a snowstorm, completely taken away from our current lives… and then some bit of text gets sideways and we realize that this whole damn time, we’ve been interpreting squiggly ink on a sheet of paper. It takes a while to trust the story again after you lose a tire like that and end up in the catch fence.

People think of writerly errors as misspellings, and sure, those happen. But the four errors I made were of four different types.

The first was common enough: the naming of an offstage character who wouldn’t play much of a role in the story, and then encountering that character again and giving him a different name. Angie’s brother was Eric the one time before we ever met him, and then Matt every one of the other nine times he said something or someone talked about him. Sorry, Eric.

The second was just a page layout glitch, a closing quotation mark at the end of a paragraph that somehow got loose from its family and ended up all by itself on a new line. How that happened, I don’t know. I’d blame the typesetter or the page designer or the copyeditor, but those are all me, and we all missed it.

The third was another name change, but a different kind. Two friends were going through a difficult experience that traumatized one of them. The other led her away and got her situated, and in the flurry of people and pronouns, I used the wrong name for one of the actions. It’s like walking into a glass door, you never see it coming and it just stops you hard.

And then the last one was an editing artifact, in which I’d recast a sentence four or five different ways, and when I got it the way I wanted, I moved on to the next one, leaving a crumb of incorrect verb tense behind me.

There are SO MANY ways to mess up a piece of text. I made one mistake for every 23,583 words I wrote. But those four… grrrrr.

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With all that said, though, I finished the book an hour ago and just sat. It feels good to have put 94,332 words into a box, and to have them become a family and a community and a landscape. To have them become people we care about. To walk away with hope for their lives after the book’s season has closed.

I have now written eleven shelf-inches of books. About one sixth of a Stephen King.

The photo above was taken at one o’clock in the afternoon of Friday, July 21. A shelf with one copy of all the stuff I’ve written in bookish format, including three short-story compilations. It’s a sort of good-luck charm, a gumption talisman. “I’ve done it before…”

The one near the left side, the gray one called Foreman, that’s the new one. Came in on Monday. I started reading it last night, always a fascinating feeling. It’s super familiar, of course, since I lived with it for seven months while I was writing it. But it feels really different as a solid, brickish object, and going through it from the beginning starts to read like it’s (finally) something external to me. I read that first chapter last night, and I thought, “If John McPhee wrote fiction, this is what it would be like.”

For Angie Torvala, the only woman road foreman in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, some things never change. Snow. Broken equipment. Road complaints.

But in the midst of that stability, some things do change.

Her daughter Esther, about to leave for college. A world that Angie never knew.

Her summer boyfriend Grant. Maybe around no longer, maybe becoming something more.

And the innumerable, quiet tragedies that an isolated winter can bring.

Want one? Let me know.

The mooc continues.

Zadie Smith, in a wonderful essay called “That Crafty Feeling,” talks about what she sees as two camps of writers, calling them “the Macro Planners” and “the Micro Managers.”

You will recognize a Macro Planner from his Post-its, from those Moleskins he insists on buying. A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot, and creates a structure—all before he writes the title page. Because of this structural security, he has a great deal of freedom of movement. It’s not uncommon for Macro Planners to start writing their novels in the middle. As they progress, forward or backward, their difficulties multiply with their choices. I know Macro Planners who obsessively exchange possible endings for each other, who take characters out and put them back in, reverse the order of chapters, and perform frequent—for me, unthinkable—radical surgery on their novels: moving the setting of a book from London to Berlin, for example, or changing the title. I can’t stand to hear them speak about all this, not because I disapprove, but because other people’s methods are always so incomprehensible and horrifying.

Personally, I’m a Micro Manager. I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to choose between three different endings because I haven’t the slightest idea what the ending is until I get to it, a fact that will surprise no one who has read my novels. Macro Planners have their houses basically built from day one and so their obsession is internal—they’re forever moving the furniture. They’ll put a chair in the bedroom, the lounge, the kitchen, and then back in the bedroom again. Micro Managers like me build a house floor by floor, discreetly and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.

In my writing group, two of us are Micro Managers, two Macro Planners. It would never occur to Nathan to write a book sequentially. He works opportunistically, whenever some new idea has opened a different perspective onto a room not yet built. I, like Ms. Smith, discover exactly what’s two inches in front of my nose.

I’ve read one of our members’ work so far this week, created at blinding pace. As I was reading it, I thought to myself, this writer is creating the melody, by way of significant plot points. The harmonies (subplots and secondary characters, the backstory) will come later. The rhythm section (precision in the sound of language) will come later. The instrumentation (voices and attitudes) will come later. The repeated themes will make themselves evident later.

The thing is, every composer starts from a different place, and operates from different constraints. Some composers start with a hook that they know will be repeated, and then build the opportunities to repeat it. Some composers start with instrumentation, knowing beforehand that they’re writing a piano quartet or jazz with a horn section, and figure out ways for that voice to be most vivid. James Brown basically invented the genre of funk through his regular admonition “Every instrument a drum.” You always recognize James Brown through his sharp syncopation, the “hit-it-and-quit-it” precision.

You, too, can start anywhere. You can start with a genre and a plot. You can start with a compelling character with a specific problem. You can start with a landscape, or an object, that seems crucial to a way of life. You can start like a poet, with the way words sound. You will eventually build out the others, but you start with what’s compelling to you. That’s the truth of your writing.

I know where I start. But unlike a true believer, I’m agnostic as to where YOU start. You start where you start.

I wrote a story on Monday. It came from something that Nora and I saw on Saturday, which linked to things I’ve seen around here for years. I thought about it Saturday night and Sunday, and wrote it Monday. It’s only five pages long, and pretty elegant, if I do say so myself.

But I was talking with Nora at dinner last night, and she said, “I just couldn’t get involved with any of the characters.” Then she looked across the table and said, “You’re the one who says you have to love all of your characters.”

There, as they say, was a blinding glimpse of the obvious.

I can write anything. I have a decent level of craft. But if it’s really going to be MY writing, it has to be generous, and help the readers feel generous as well. That’s the mode I have for offer.

And that also helped to explain for me why short stories are less native to me than novels. Over the space of months, I can really come to know everybody in the book. I can start to learn why they do things that from the outside might look ill-advised. We all do things that are ill-advised, and if we can be careful, we can learn the underlying reasons for those actions.

Love at first sight rarely happens. Lust at first sight happens all the time, we know that. And that’s what Monday’s story was, a casual story rather than a commitment.

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This helps me think about why I was a more native teacher and researcher than an administrator, as well. In a course, I have fifteen weeks to gauge how things are going, from the points of view of people I’m coming to know better and better. I can see them as individuals, and work to embrace and enhance all of their experience. In research, I have whatever time I need to immerse myself in a community, come to see its multiplicities, develop smarter questions than the ones I walked in with.

Administrators are mostly involved with instantaneous response to instantaneous problems. I never had the luxury of time; things needed doing and there were deadlines attached. It’s long been thought that leisure is required for the development of culture, of thinking about work that goes beyond immediate survival. That’s why the classical cultures flourished through enslaving others, and why the liberal arts have that name—they’re rigorous but relaxed modes of deep thinking that are reserved for those who are free. That’s why college presidents and CEOs surround themselves with administrators as well, to free themselves up for the larger and longer-range thinking that the job requires.

The pace of the world keeps us from careful thought. There’s always another YouTube Short to watch, always another hair-on-fire editorial to enrage us again, rage being an almost perfect thought-smothering device. I need to hold my own advice, and take the time I need to love the work I do. Clever is nice, but generous is more rewarding, for all involved.

I’ve been tormenting myself by watching agents’ advice videos on YouTube. One video says a book cannot be sold without a one-or-two-sentence “hook.” But another by the same agency says that the emerging and big-selling category of “Upmarket Fiction” is a book that doesn’t have a hook. In the video about formatting cover letters, the two agents from the same agency disagree. Utter nonsense that we’re supposed to take seriously.

After watching these videos, I can say in general that we can understand what agents are looking for by thinking of books the same way we might think of any other product: hardware, groceries, sporting goods, whatever.

• Where is it in the store?
• Where is it on that aisle?
• What’s the difference between yours and the ones around it?

An example:

• Where is it in the store? It’s a condiment.
• Good. What kind of condiment? It’s ketchup.
• Good. What makes it different than the other ketchup? It’s chunky.

That’s literally all the agent wants from you. What is it? Fiction. What kind of fiction? Cozy Mystery. Why is yours different than other cozy mysteries? The dog sends messages about the crimes through letters she spells out in kibble.

And there you have it. Whether it’s chunky ketchup or Jessica Fletcher’s dog, an agent will read that and know whether or not to ask for more. It’s a discouraging way to think about books, but it’s the native language of the industry. Ignore it at your peril.

Speaking of the industry, I wrote a few days ago that I made $181.02 last year as a writer. In my professional life, I bill that much per hour. Any agent worth their cash drawer would tell me to give up the fiction nonsense and follow the known income. The fact that I don’t is the immeasurable gulf between the two cultures.

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Here’s the first installment of the skns mooc.

Books are long. But sentences aren’t, and books are made of sentences. I’d like to share a story by writing coach Joni B. Cole, of White River Junction, amended from her book Good Naked: Write More, Write Better, & Be Happier (2017, University Press of New England).

Once upon a time my friend Alison was an acrobatic pilot who wanted to build her own plane. So she ordered a kit, and a tractor-trailer arrived at her house with a giant crate filled with all kinds of tubing, cables, an engine, fuel tanks, tires, a propeller, bags full of nuts and bolts, and a thick assembly manual.

Alison worked nights and weekends on her plane, making slow progress. Still, so much remained to be done. Would she ever fulfill her dream of doing barrel rolls and hammerheads in a machine of her own making? Across the country sat thousands of half-completed planes covered by tarps, abandoned by owners who had felt overwhelmed, just like Alison was starting to feel now.

Like most people who attempt to make their own planes, Alison belonged to an organization called the Experimental Aircraft Association. After she had been working on her project for about a year, one of the organization’s volunteer advisors paid her a visit. She shared with him that she was worried that the job was too big, and that she was going to fail. Her advisor looked at all the parts of her unfinished plane scattered around her garage, her basement.

“Don’t think about all the things you have left to do,” he said. “Just touch the airplane three times a week.”

Just touch the airplane. I think there is something so compelling, so right about this gentle advice. When I am feeling particularly resistant to quotas and accountability, I call on those words to beckon me to my own workbench, with the only expectation to visit the page, to get a feel for my story. Who knows? Maybe some ideas or scenes will fit together.

I would like to second this idea. The more time you spend in the world of your story, the more time you spend listening to your characters and the places they live and the work they do, the more you’ll be able to be honest and accurate about them… the more you’ll be able to be generous toward them. If you’ve got absolutely nothing in the tank on a given day, go back and re-read a section of your book—not to edit it, but to listen to it. As Fay Weldon once wrote: Nothing happens. And nothing happens. And then everything happens.

So for the last three years, I’ve led a short-story group that I call Eight-Week Fiction, in which local friends go from blank page to admirable short story in eight weeks. But a number of participants have larger projects in mind, so I’ve just started a new group that I’m calling the Spruce Knob Narrative Society, after the name of the gravel road I live on. From August 1 2023 through May 31 2024, a dozen of us will create full book-length works of other-focused narrative craft: fiction, memoir, or biography. (Yes, memoir is other-focused, because it’s about someone you aren’t any more.)

I’ll be doing a lot of coaching of the group, hosting twice-a-month sessions, reading bunches of drafts and scraps. But I’d like to offer some of that to you as well.

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Back in the days of lunatic optimism over online education, MIT announced that it would put its entire catalog of courses online, free for anyone to take as they liked. MIT OpenCourseWare, it was called, but it launched a utopian model commonly known as MOOCs, or Massively Open Online Courses. Thousands, or tens of thousands, of people could take a course—listen to lectures, read texts, do problem sets. What they DIDN’T get, of course, was feedback.

The MasterClass commercial course subscriptions are much the same. You can watch David Mamet give twenty short lectures about playwriting, or Joan Benoit Samuelson do eleven sessions on distance running. You watch them at your own time and your own pace, You won’t get to talk with your instructor, won’t get direct feedback, but you might learn some things or pick up some inspiration nonetheless.

So what I’m going to do here in this space is put up all of the materials I’m sharing with the Spruce Knob Narrative Society, and you can have them all for free. I can’t do coaching with all of you, but you might learn some things or pick up some inspiration nonetheless.

They’ll come up one at a time, because I’m building the sessions based on local need. So there’s no curriculum I’ll walk you through, just the things that I’m seeing that are relevant at any particular moment. Sounds like a blog, doesn’t it?

So for the next ten months, expect this space to be focused a little more than normal on the techniques and the practices of fiction. Happy to have you with us.

I do love a good joke. The clean set-up, the surprise twist of the punch line. Here’s my favorite of the last week, amended from a delivery by Ray Romano:

This guy’s always being harangued by his wife for not doing any housework and not paying attention. She says, “the next time you ask me where something is and you should already know, I’m not gonna talk to you for a week.”

So he’s doing the dishes, and goes to the drawer for a dishtowel, and they aren’t there. He panics, looks in the other drawers. No towels. Finally, he screws up his courage and asks his wife, “Honey, I looked in the dishtowel drawer and didn’t find any. Do you know where they are?” She says, “Oh, I just did the wash. They’re in the dryer.”

Dodged a bullet there, the guy thinks. I better not ask her where the dryer is.

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But today’s joke is only partly a joke. What’s the difference between a writer and a large pizza? A large pizza can feed a family of four.

Every few months, I’m reminded of that when I get my royalty statement. Over the course of the last year, my two books—one from 2016 and one from 2019—have sold a total of 87 copies. In a week or so, I’ll get a check for $181.02. That’s what being a writer made me last year: about fifty cents a day.

Really, though, that’s like a lot of professions. Raising strawberries, for instance, or running a restaurant. Doesn’t matter how good it was, it’s now over and you’ve got to do some more.

Hardly any writers make a living writing. They make a living teaching writing. They make a living doing writing-adjacent work like grant proposals, airline magazine profiles, content for the local weekly shopper. It’s all about the daily practice, not the imagined heroic life of press tours and best-seller lists. According to long-time literary agent Miriam Altschuler, about seventy percent of all literary fiction sells two thousand copies or fewer. At two bucks royalty apiece, that’s four thousand dollars for your year’s work, or five years’ work, or a life’s work. We can talk all we want about Donna Tartt and Nicholas Sparks and the other ATM writers who spew out fortunes on demand, but the daily reality for most of us will be something significantly different.

All we can do is the work.

But I’ve got some good news, too, coming tomorrow.