Author: Herb Childress

Nora and I were at the members’-exhibition open house last night at Stone Valley Arts, here in Poultney. We knew about a third of the artists, including two of the folks in our current writing group (Thanks, Melissa! Thanks, Burnham!). We snacked, we chatted, we looked at the work.

The organization of the show was interesting on its own terms. It’s different from a craft fair, in which every vendor is geographically segregated from every other—Dave’s turnings over here, Nic’s stonework over there, and so on. At this show, each participating artist had work in three or four different locations around the two rooms, commingled with the others. But it wasn’t just a dumping ground. There was a logic to the organization. 

The first thing that drew my attention to that decisionmaking was a painting in one corner that had an oval-pear form at the lower left which closely mirrored the oval-pear form of a woodturning below it. The exhibition designers had clearly seen that formal connection and emphasized it through adjacency. We viewers then saw something more than we’d have seen without that decision.

The editor plays a lot of roles over the development of a project, but the work of critique lies somewhere in the second half of the project. The work of the first half includes: 

• Encouragement and identification of what’s going well
• Deadlines and check-ins
• Expansion of opportunities
• Negotiating the writer’s intentions and the readers’ desires
• Identification of themes and organization of the work to amplify/reinforce those themes
• Preliminary thoughts on form—what kind of a thing IS this, and how is it arranged?

Just as the writer’s work changes over the duration of a project, so does the editor’s.

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Just so you know, I’m about to nerd out a little bit here. Stick with me.

Music is the space between the notes.

Claude Debussy

I’m just had the first rehearsal of the play I submitted to this year’s Theater in the Woods’ Ten-Minute Play event, in which local writers come up with very short plays that are then performed together in a pair of single-evening shows: half on Friday night, half on Saturday. (Mark your calendars for Friday November 10 and Saturday November 11, with an additional Sunday matinee of three new kids plays, too.) I’ve done that a couple of times in recent years, and it’s a fascinating experience to hand your work over to other readers in live-time.

One of the most common pieces of advice given to writers is to read your work aloud as you revise, to hear the lumpy spots. And you do—boy, do you ever. That’s kind of a normal part of my revision process. Where do I hear the emphasis within the sentence? Where do I hear vowel sounds align? Where do I place the hard-stop consonants that break long phrases into haiku?

So as I hear my plays performed for the first time, I’m not often surprised by how the actors read the words. I’ve done most of the work to let the text read itself. What I wasn’t prepared for, what was really revelatory, was hearing the silences. Hearing how long someone paused between lines. Or within a line. Silences in a conversation, or even a monologue, are the moments where we’re thinking… and I could hear these characters thinking. 

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One of the reasons I love typography (like that little separator we just passed, or the parentheses around this comment) are that they guide the reader to think in spaces and not just in sounds. We steer your thinking with all that stuff that isn’t actually words. We help you slow down, help you hit words harder, help you hear repetition. Just read the score of a piece of classical music sometime… composers offer instructions with the pace and density of an air traffic controller. Every note is guided not merely by pitch and by duration, the stuff on the staff, but also from above, a voice from God to guide us into right thinking about volume, cadence, connection or disconnection with the neighbors. He even offers little endearing Italian murmurs like affettuoso or sospirando, telling us what attitude toward life we should embrace as we play.

Text is filled with breathing instructions. The little channel between the period and the next capital letter (a gulf that’s narrowed over the past decades from two spaces to one as the pace of our lives has increased). The different tools we use to separate non-restrictive clauses—commas, parentheses, brackets, em-dashes, even footnotes—each of which signals a different kind of side trail from the main path of the sentence. One of the tools I rely on far too often: the ellipsis… a foot on the clutch to more gently shift gears, the three little dots that ease our pace as we enter the curve.

We have the word, the phrase, the clause, the sentence, the paragraph. The scene and the act. The novel and the three-novel trilogy and the whole Nancy Drew / Harry Potter / Jack Reacher oeuvre. We are taught to read by a broad taxonomy of spaces, given a chance to breathe and to think and to prepare for what’s next. Even when we binge-watch The Crown, we get to go to the bathroom once every 55 minutes, and use that moment to reflect on the collective tragedies of the last episode before we get into the next one. 

I know better than to even start Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 novel Ducks, Newburyport, its single sentence stretching in a uniform-bordered carpet across literally a thousand pages. (One reviewer said “this book loves itself very much.”) I don’t know how to read that. I don’t know where I would stop by choice and where I would stop by exhaustion and where I would stop from impatience, but I know I can’t stay awake long enough to read a thousand pages. It’s been called an “ambitious” novel, but I don’t feel the need to be caught up in her ambition. The weakness may be mine, probably is. That’s okay. I’ll own that. I’ll opt for the comfort of textual convention that allows readers to THINK they’re ignoring the road signs, even as those signs influence every driving decision. I mean, if I gave you a test to remember every single road sign between here and Rutland, no way could you do that. But you see them, and you use them, even as they (mostly) don’t enter your conscious thought. 

When you’re a reader, ignore all that, the man-behind-the-curtain stuff. Pretend you didn’t see it, let it be invisible. It ought to be. But when you’re a writer, start to look at something other than the 26 letters of the language. Start to see—and to hear—the spaces.

Architecture professor William Hubbard once claimed that buildings were always part of at least three different sets of discourses. 

• There’s the discourse of order: has this building been rigorous about the way that it solves formal problems? Has it set interesting problems in the first place? This is an intellectual conversation, having to do with the building’s contributions to the theory and practice of the discipline.
• There’s the discourse of worth: Is this building efficient? Does it promote the goals of the organization that bought it? Has it helped its clients teach better, heal better, work better? Has it made the client more profitable? This is an instrumental conversation, having to do with the business goals that the building advances.
• And then there’s the discourse of values: Does it promote the community? Does it “fit in” with the surroundings? Does it help bring us together and make us proud of our place? This is a community conversation, having to do with the way that a building does or does not promote collective ideals.

Different viewers of any building will not only have different opinions about it, but those opinions will be based in entirely different conversations. It’s no surprise that we don’t always like the same things.

I think that writing also responds to these same three discourses, and probably other ones as well

Literary critic Wendy Lesser reads for intellectual pleasure. She writes, “I live with, and through, literature. That, I suppose, is what I am hoping to transmit—that sense of connection with something other than oneself and one’s friends and one’s life in this time. Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as agent well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else’s past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times.”

The literary agent Janet Reid reads for economic value. “What I’m looking for isn’t a checklist. If I read something and like it (a lot!) I will consider whether I think I can sell it. I will consider how much I can sell it for. I will consider whether the author appears to be someone I can work with or if they are giving off Nutso Vibes. I’ll look at other books on my list and consider if this fits or overlaps with my current clients. A lot of those specific “things I’m looking for” are in fact responses to what we think will sell. There’s been a surge in demand for books that specifically reflect diversity in race and ethnicity, rather than the characters simply being default white.  Some of the requests reflect our knowledge of holes in the market. And some of it is just us yapping about what we like to read.”

The novelist Jennifer Weiner reads, and writes, for emotional support. During a conference talk, Weiner said there’s a “political impact of escapism. I wrote my first book almost as a life raft to the girl I had once been. I wanted girls like me—who felt ugly, or fat, or lonely, or like it was never going to get better—to be able to read something and think maybe it will. Why do we read? Yes, to understand the world, and, of course, to meet characters that are alive and visceral. But, at least to me, sometimes we do read to make friends. Sometimes we do read to escape, or find comfort, or to spend time in a world that is a little more fair and a little more kind than the world that we inhabit.”

Spend some time thinking about the things you’ve read in the last year that you really loved. And then try to write down the reasons why it was so wonderful. Those are the reasons that should motivate us, as well. We should be writing what we love to read.

We were talking with a friend this evening, whose partner was off for the second week of her bowling league. Every Tuesday night for thirty weeks. Nora said, “that’s why your writing course is going from fall through spring, right? Old habits die hard.”

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We talk a lot about “doing the research for a book,” but I think we mean several different things when we say that. I’ll give you some examples.

My most recent book was set in the contemporary world, so I didn’t have to go back in time and try to figure out who was President or what might have been on the radio. I didn’t have to recreate world affairs or natural disasters.

The story was, however, set in a different place. Specifically, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, commonly known as the U. P. I went to college in the U. P. between 1976 and 1978, driving through that remarkably unpopulated landscape four times a year. The U. P. is about twice the size of Vermont, and has fewer than half as many people. The biggest city, Marquette, is just barely larger than Rutland. The U. P. has a mythological place in my mind, a colony of Detroit and Boston that shipped out all of its raw materials (iron ore, copper ore, timber, and smart children) only to get nearly nothing in return. 

I don’t live in the U. P., and I haven’t been there for decades. So I had some work to do: driving around Alger County on Google Maps Street View, for instance, or looking up the County’s governmental structure. Finding out whether the former prominence of Finnish and Welsh family names still held, finding out how far one would have to drive to buy a new car or a new snowmobile. Learning where the hospital would be, learning where the schools would be, learning how long it would take to drive to Shingleton, or to Marquette, or to the Mackinac Bridge. Learning how to pronounce cudighi, the U. P.’s unofficial official sandwich. Those are all examples of one kind of research, the sort of factual things that make a place or a job feel realistic. They are necessary—we’re not allowed to get those wrong. But they’re far from sufficient.

There’s other research that we do all day every day; we live around people and see how they dress, listen to how they talk. The imaginary town of Cornwall, Michigan is the same size as the real-world town of Middletown Springs. That means some things for everyday life: about gossip at the general store and the dump, about grudges held and about alliances strengthened. Rural life everywhere is filled with second-guessing, because rural people all have to do a lot of things well enough rather than a few things really well. So lots of guys have built a garage or graveled their driveway, and they think they know how to do it. That means everybody else is wrong. (Nora and I joke that the Vermont state motto should be “Huh… don’t know that I’d have done it THAT way…”) Same is true for pie crusts, quilts, engine repair, gardening… there’s just endless commentary about other people and their errors. Because really, in a town of 800 people, what else is there to talk about?

All of that is important, but still falls a little shy of the kind of research that I love most.

I was about to write a scene in which our protagonist Angie was asked to look over a crime site—her boyfriend’s summer cabin that had been taken over for winter use as a combination of meth lab and housing. I’ve never been in a meth lab. I don’t know what that looks like. I know it’s not clean science, like a hospital lab; it’s poor people, poorly educated, who are trying to make a dangerous product without much infrastructure. So I googled “meth lab,” and chose “images,” and saw this. 

What a remarkably rich portrait of shattered lives. The clutter, the trash. The stained walls. The plastic tubing running into and out of plastic bottles, the propane tank and the cooler. The scale. The single rubber glove draped over the edge of the sink. The deer rifle propped against the counter. The fucking teddy bear, and the same colors on the onesie on the chair next to it.

That’s what the research was for. To let me live in it. To let me understand not merely the technical facts but the despair. The research was all about experiential understanding. And it became this.

Once Sunday came, Angie met Kate at the shop, then drove out to meet the State Police at Grant’s cabin. Given that the house was a crime scene, they had to come to agreement out in the snow about what they could and couldn’t touch, where they could and couldn’t walk. 

As they were about to go up the stairs to the deck, Kate said, “You ready for this? It’s probably going to feel pretty ugly.”

“No, I ain’t ready, but we’re gonna do it anyway. Let’s go.” The trooper slid the patio door open, and Kate walked in, Angie right behind.

The curtains were all torn down and had been used as blankets, draped all over the couch and wadded into the arms of chairs. Bed pillows and couch pillows and stuffed animals alike had been pressed into dormitory service. The toolbox and chainsaw from the truck were up against the kitchen counter, the handgun and radio next to the sink. 

The breakfast table had been pushed up against the wall. On it, a Blue Rhino propane tank, an ice chest, and plastic tubing running back and forth between them, the wallpaper and ceiling above it scorched and smoke-stained. A deer rifle propped against the counter. A plastic bale of Walmart house-brand diapers, sized for six- to twelve-month-olds, on the floor next to it.

Trash everywhere. On the floors, on the furniture, on the counters, spilling out of the lower cupboards. Empty cans for soup and beer alike. Dirty clothes, infant through adult, a Goodwill dumpster of ragged clothes and boots and sneakers and slippers.

All of this, where Angie and Grant had had their fill of one another every day and night for the past few summers. 

She hadn’t walked ten feet, but couldn’t bear any more, turned and walked back outdoors. She felt colder than she had after her rescue, but a different kind, the cold that comes from a familiar story replaced by something obscene. Kate came out to join her. “Come on, let’s go.” She walked Angie out to the one-ton, put her into the passenger seat and drove away.

And then, what Angie had seen haunted her through the rest of the day:

Angie and the crew went about their workdays, prepping for the afternoon snow, clearing a couple of frozen culverts to clear an ice wash over a back road, and then out with all three plow trucks until about eight in the evening. But the normal shop banter didn’t lift her mood for more than a few seconds. Her usual ability to be present, to see every leaf and every reflector and every visitor in a driveway, was hampered by the visual aura of that cabin. Of the lives that it represented. Which one of those young men had been the captain of the football team, the lead of the school play? Which one of those young women had been aiming to be a high school science teacher like Betsy? And what would become of a baby born to that home? How could any child climb from that hole, a hole that it had no responsibility for digging? A hole that was its only birthright?

We care about our characters, so it’s crucial that we really understand what it’s like to live that way. So an awful lot of my research is on the fly, scene by scene and day by day. What do I need to know in order to understand this moment? It’s research about the way people live, far more than about the nature of the fabrics they wore or the members of their favorite TV show. The research isn’t done to show OUR authority as writers; it’s to give us a better sense of the inner lives of our characters, to give THEM the density and authority that readers need in order to care about them. 

“Everybody is trying to sell the project to the next person in line.”

Jenna Johnson, Executive Editor, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Nora and I and our friend went down to the Southern Vermont Arts Center yesterday, to see the Red Dress exhibition. Highly recommended.

But that’s not my job in this space. What I want to talk about is the gift shop. Museum gift shops mostly contain the same array of stuff. Books and small objects related to the current exhibit. Arts and crafts by local professionals. Kids toys that promote creativity. And books about art in general. All of it aimed at people who’ve just had their ideas challenged or their eyes pleased, and who imagine staying in that state just a little bit longer.

So I bought a book. A Year in the Art World: An Insider’s View, by Matthew Israel. It’s a fascinating look into the world of people who make art, who make art possible, and who make art “important.” Each of its fifteen brief chapters is dedicated to one example of a field involved in the value chain of fine art. The first of those chapters is about “the artist.” The other fourteen are not.

Fabricators, gallery directors, museum directors, art fairs, artist estates, art writers, curators, biennial exhibitions, art schools, art online, art advisors, auction houses, conservators, and shippers/warehousers. Fourteen separate industries dependent on the fragile work of that first one, back there with the sketchpad and the weird ideas.

Some substantial majority of those players have to agree that the artist has done something important in order for the artist to enter the contemporary conversation. In some ways, it’s akin to the peer review process in academia, in which a bunch of specially-trained professionals exercise their informed judgement on work within their field.

The way it differs, though, is important. And that difference is that they all need to make money from the transaction. So their judgment of the work is always ecological, about the work within the contemporary market. “There’s no market for it” is a low consideration to the artist, and crucial to each of the other fourteen.

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Let’s look at how this plays out in books. I’ll use my 2019 book The Adjunct Underclass as an example.

I’d written an earlier book, The PhDictionary, that was published through the University of Chicago Press. I had a clear audience in mind for that one: young adults in grad school or having recently gotten their PhDs, who had come from outside the higher ed industry and thus didn’t know any of the unspoken rules and customs that would come back to smack them in the face if they stepped the wrong way. That book did okay, selling 1,411 copies as of June 30 of this year. But my editor at Chicago, the brilliant Elizabeth Branch Dyson, knew the market, and asked me to write a book that wouldn’t have occurred to me on my own.

So I did. I conducted all of the research and had all of the ideas and wrote all of the text. I was supported in that work by the equivalent of the fabricators: Elizabeth giving me conceptual guidance, and the gifted (and patient) copy editor Renaldo Migaldi making sure that my text was both correct and elegant.

But after it left my hands, it entered a machine that I’d never considered.

Elizabeth had already gained approval for the book by the Press’s editorial team and its board of directors, but once it was near the finish line, she passed it off to two other groups: production and marketing. On the production side, the book designer created a comfortable page logic and a lovely cover, and then it went to a print shop. But on the marketing side: Wow.

They generated a list of a hundred or so reviewers who would each get a free copy. They made posters for the London Book Fair, where the Press introduced its Spring 2019 releases, and sent one or more folks to that event as well. They carted the book off to other trade shows in higher ed and in education research. They pitched the book to major bookseller chains, and to major book distributors. They plowed and fertilized so that the book’s tender little seed might sprout.

Then the reviewers themselves went to work. Some of them were within the world of literature, some within the world of higher ed, some within the world of labor relations. Each of them put the book into conversation with their own thinking and interests, and presented the resulting discussions to their own readership.

Booksellers themselves. From the Amazon behemoth down to the small indy shops, individual buyers had to decide whether and how many. (A couple of those stores invited me to come talk, which was fun, too.) How and where do those books get placed within the vast snowdrifts of ideas that comprise every good bookstore? Is it “new and notable,” or is it just slotted spinewise on its designated shelf, elbowing its way into the crowd like a subway passenger in the morning rush?

And then, finally, readers. Thank you. I’ve made some good friends through that book, people who would otherwise have been completely unknown to me but who have become trusted voices through our correspondence.

As of June 30, that book has been translated into traditional and modernized Chinese, and made into an audiobook. In its original form, it’s sold 4,275 copies, 71 of which (1.7%) were during the most recent fiscal year. Its current Amazon ranking is #647,157 of all books. Now four years old, it’s entered the geriatric phase of its life, available at half price twice a year from the Press’s warehouse sales.

There have been so many people along the way, each of whom had to decide that the book was worthy of participating in their discourse. I’m grateful to all of them, but it makes me aware of just how big, and how selective, the machine is. And how many good writers won’t get through the doors.

Nora invented a word on Saturday. It might already exist, but I don’t care. It’s perfect for our times.

As with many new words, it started from an existing one. We all know the idea of an affront, a thing that causes offense or outrage. It’s usually used as a noun. We also know the idea of affronted, which is an adjective describing the condition of having received an affront. But Nora’s word, sprung from much of our public life these days, was affrontational: the attitude toward the world that makes almost anything likely to be seen as an affront.

We all know those people. Brittle, spring-loaded, ready to be offended by any random remark. The platform of Twitter/X exists to bring us hot takes, quick responses, clever jibes. It’s a terrific tool for people ready to toss out some angry remark that generates an affrontational cycle for days or weeks, until a new tempest emerges within a new teapot.

This is the summer of WAAAAAAAAnthems like “Try That in a Small Town” and “Go Woke Go Broke” and “Rich Men North of Richmond,” affrontational songs that wail their offense at the modern world. Babies are affrontational, too, wailing their offense at anything less than their ideal.

I think physical distance makes an affrontational stance more likely. When we’re together in the same space at the same time, we’re interacting with a real person rather than reacting to cold text or secondhand video. The internet has made affrontationality (my new word, you’re welcome) the easiest condition to fall into. We used to talk about flame wars and beefs, but sometimes it seems those are more the norm than the exception.

I’ve left behind most of my religious education, but something that Pastor Fry said in seventh-grade Catechism has stuck with me for fifty years. In commentary over forgiveness, he said “it is equally a sin to give offense and to take offense.” If we think of offense or affront as a sort of perverse gift, then we can disrupt the affront by either not offering that gift and by not accepting it. Somebody has to be the circuit-breaker that interrupts the cycle of ill-will.

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Hey, it’s a mooc!

Robert Pirsig, in his one great book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, discusses what he calls “gumption,” or the willingness to continue.

Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven’t got it there’s no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it there’s absolutely no way in the whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed. It’s bound to happen. Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption.

As part of this conversation, he names a few “gumption traps,” or things that make us lose enthusiasm for a project. Some of them are technical: 

• You’ve got the whole thing together and discover an internal part left aside, and you have to take it all back apart again.
• You discover that a part is missing or faulty, and you have to stop until it arrives.
• You discover that something is working most of the time, but there’s an intermittent failure that you can’t explain.

All of those drive me nuts. Guaranteed dead stop for a while. But there are other gumption traps that are more systemic, and more pernicious:

• Preset values that keep us from seeing possibilities
• Ego attachment that keeps us from learning 
• The opposite, anxiety that keeps us from imagining we can ever do it right
• Impatience, wanting it done more than wanting to do
• Incorrect categories, the either/or thinking that keeps us from reimagining the problem
• Tool traps—bad tools, bad working conditions, interruptions 

The first category, which Pirsig calls set-backs, are wholly external. They just happen, on any project. They’re unavoidable, at least once in a while. But the second category, which Pirsig calls hang-ups… those are invisible because they’re within us. And they’re as pertinent to writers as to motorcycle mechanics.

• Preset values: believing that a character should do or want something, rather than listening quietly to what they themselves do and want.
• Ego attachment: I know how to write this kind of work, and so I’m going to replicate this thing I know how to do. Every dog has its tricks, and we know how to get patted on the head. But maybe we can, even at our advanced age, learn some new ones.
• Anxiety: I’m no good, who the hell do I think I am, I can’t even spell right…. We all have our own array, but they’re always there.
• Impatience: truncating our work on one scene because we’re eager to get onto the next. 
• Incorrect categories: good guy/bad guy. Important character/background character. Show/tell. All of these labels keep us from seeing the thing as it is.
• Tool traps: Joyce Carol Oates says the thing that holds up most writers isn’t lack of talent, it’s interruptions. We can gain privacy through scheduling (before the kids get up), through physical enclosure (the door’s closed, dude), through distance (going on a retreat), and through anonymity (writing in a coffeeshop where the world ignores us). And if your pen is leaky or your computer is balky, you’re just creating a less pleasant experience for yourself.

The good news is that if we’re aware of these hang-ups, we can start to recognize when they occur, and develop strategies to interrupt the downward cycle.  More about that soon.

I was reading my daily email from The Creative Independent, a series of brief interviews with artists of all sorts about their creative practice and inspirations. Today’s was with the comedian and musician Jaboukie Young-White, who said something that struck me about his dual practice.

In stand-up, you do a bunch of intellectual labor to get a reaction out of people, whereas I’ve gone to concerts, and musicians will, in between songs, be like, “Water,” and everyone’s going crazy, dying laughing, and I’m like, “This room is so hot right now. If I could do a tight five, it would crush so hard.”

Yep. As I mentioned in the prior post, our audiences are prepared for something. And if we don’t deliver it, we lose them quickly. But some of that preparation is beyond our control.

Being an early-career standup comedian would have to be the worst job in the world, because you’d constantly be facing a cold room. On open-mic nights, the people before you wouldn’t be very good either, and it’s hard to tell a joke that enlivens a room rendered dull by boredom. They’re drinking, they’re having conversations with their friends, they’re getting an easy laugh from their buddies by mocking the people on stage. A bored room might be the best possible outcome; it could be actively hostile.

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I don’t have my copy of Cathy Park Hong’s brilliant book Minor Feelings at hand right now, so I’ll have to perform an injustice by paraphrasing. In one of her later essays, she talks about taking classes in stand-up comedy and improv as part of her self-training as a performing poet. She says poetry readings are among the deadliest social events we know of, that every poet knows it, and that we replicate all those bad performance habits anyway. She says she can’t count the number of times that a professional poet has neared the end or her or his reading by saying “Only two more.” It’s like going to the dentist, where they kindly tell us that the pain is almost over. She participated in that herself for a long time, and finally decided that there had to be a better way.

My friends in the Duke writing program who were trained in composition programs used to talk about “the rhetorical circumstance” of a piece of writing. What conversation are we entering? What kind of contribution do we intend to make? Is the mode of conversation gentle and luxurious, or quick and combative?

So let’s think about the rhetorical circumstance of reading our work. It’s theater, and specifically monologue. All eyes are on us… people are quiet and attentive… we’re facing the group, often standing while they’re sitting… and we’re on our own. That’s a mode that carries powerful performance and audience expectations.

If we’ve ever read our work aloud, we recognize that so many performers don’t recognize their responsibilities to the room. They haven’t rehearsed, they lose their place, they shuffle papers, they apologize for what they’re going to read, and they haven’t any sense at all of how long ten minutes is. I was about to write that they give us a little backstory between poems and thus break the spell, but that’s not quite right, because they never tried to cast a spell over us in the first place. We’re all polite audience members, we don’t burp loudly or start talking to our neighbors the way we might in a nightclub, but we’re waiting for the pain to end.

Let’s go back to Jaboukie Young-White’s statement, and focus on the term “tight five.” Every professional comedian has a five-minute set that they use on talk shows or talent competitions, and it’s sharpened to a razor’s gleam. It’s not tossed off, it’s not improvised. Even if the performer looks casual or awkward, that’s the role they’ve taken on; the performance of that character has been highly refined.

Here’s an example that’s easy to enter, Drew Carey’s first televised standup set, on the Tonight Show in 1991. Listen to the intro: “He’ll be appearing this weekend at The Funny Bone in Schamburg, Illinois, and then Tuesday through Sunday at The Funny Bone in Naperville, Illinois.” This is clearly not a comic who has made it yet. But after this performance, he almost immediately got a TV show. He comes on stage at :20 into the video, and he’s done by 6:55. It’s old-school comedy in the Dangerfield mode, and it’s a little dated now thirty years later, but this awkward schlubby Clevelander has perfected every scrap of his stage persona, down to the glint off his glasses in the stage lights.

When we read our work, no matter how dark or how complex or how sophisticated, we become entertainers. We have entered the rhetorical circumstance of performance, and we have to respect that. We become a very specific version of ourselves for those minutes, and we have to win the room’s trust. Even harder if that trust has been violated by prior performers.

Practice. Know your timing, and your time limits. Don’t apologize for your work. Don’t rustle pages around and lose your place. Make eye contact.

That stage is yours. Stand up there like you fucking own it, and then leave it better than you found it.

I’m leading a fiction and memoir workshop for the next ten months, and as always, I’m writing along with the group. I’ve revived a project that I’d had underway and left at the side of the road a couple of years ago. Now I know what it’s about. That helps.

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Rich Hall wrote a book in the 1980s called Sniglets, in which he invented words that didn’t exist but should. One of those words was “triorities,” which he defined as three things that all had to happen first. 

That’s what the first chapter of a book is. We have so much stuff to do! We have to introduce the characters and the setting and the time and the personalities and the narrative voice and the fundamental problem they’ll all face and the relationships between everyone and all that stuff has to come first. It’s absolutely impossible.

The good news is that we don’t really have to do all that.

My friend Nathan said something once that has really resonated with me. “The first chapter of a novel teaches you how to read the book.” And I think that’s absolutely true, what we encounter in the first few pages needs to set us up for the emotional journey that we’re about to go on. 

• If it’s a plot-focused book, like a mystery or a thriller, then we need to understand the stakes right away.
• If it’s a character-focused book, then we need to feel the complexity and the inner workings of this character right away.
• If it’s a setting-focused or circumstance-focused book, then we need to lay out the landscape right away.
• If it’s a literary book filled with ideas and delicious language, then we need to be introduced to the complexity and density of the language right away.
• If it’s a book about a relationship, we need to see that relationship early on.

Basically, the first few pages of the book establish the deal we’re making with our readers. We’re promising them a particular kind of experience, in exchange for their investment of time and attention and emotion. If, to quote Peter Ho Davies, the novel is a machine to keep us reading, one of the ways that machine can fail is by delivering an experience other than the one we promised.

One thing that implies is that we might have to go back and rewrite the introduction sometime later on, once WE know what the book is about. There’s no need to understand right off the bat what a book is about. We might discover that along the way. If we’re writing truthfully, we probably WILL learn that the story has more going on than we imagined when we started.

The term “novel” has come to mean any book-length, continuous work of fiction. Romance novel, mystery novel, historical novel, literary novel… whatever the iteration, we now understand the word to have three essential components:

1. It goes all the way from one cover to the other, unlike something that’s part of a magazine or a newspaper or a collection.
2. It concerns itself with one story, whether that story takes place on one day or over decades. It is differentiated in this way from the single-author short-story collection, which is more discontinuous in character or setting or focus.
3. It is overtly a work of imagination rather than reportage. There is no expectation of factual verisimilitude.

There are, as always, exceptions to any of these, but in lay terms, these three things are what we anticipate when we see the little words “a novel” on the book cover.

I’d like to offer an alternative. I’d like us to think of ourselves as creating extended works of ecological ambition. (“Novel” is easier to say, though, isn’t it…) “First I went here and then I went there and then I did that” is a story, sure, but it’s not a very interesting one. Why not? Because it has no system of referents within which it has meaning. And I think that’s one thing that strong memoir and strong fiction and strong personal essays have in common: they create a whole world, a cultural ecosystem in which individual actions mean more than their individual instances. In which people’s choices are constrained in particular ways, in which some possibilities might never occur to the characters even though they clearly occur to us readers. Conversely, a world in which possibilities exist for those characters that never would have been apparent to us at all. We westerners are so immersed in individualism, the idea that we have free will and an open playing field, that it’s easy for us to lose track of how much a part of a time and community and culture we all are. But every one of us work both within and against our context, and the very best longer stories have the opportunity to really play out the systems within which individual lives carry on.

A bad romance novel, for example, really doesn’t matter where and when it is. The Fifty Shades books were desperately awful in part because they didn’t take place in any knowable human landscape at all. The characters were young and attractive and rich and that’s all that mattered; it could have been in 19^th C London or 21^st C Hong Kong and told exactly the same story. Paradoxically for a work of supposed erotica, there was no friction: nothing that Christian and Anastasia had to work within or against. Contrast that against Helen Hoang’s wonderful The Kiss Quotient, in which Stella’s life with Asperger’s sets her apart from an easy mainstream of romantic life, and her work in consumer algorithms is by contrast far easier and more rewarding. It’s a body of work that’s enormously specific as to its time and place and way of life. 

The writer Charles Baxter says that one of our roles as writers is to be a cultural curator, to hold for history the details of what it was like. It’s one thing to toss in a note in our story that Lindbergh just landed in Paris; that’s enough to tell us that the story’s set in 1927. But it tells us nothing at all about what 1927 was like: how the buoyancy of his daredevil flight was spurred by the buoyancy of the Golden Age and the belief that the party could never end; that The Great Gatsby in 1925 was part of that same heedless, reckless optimism; that the first sound movie “The Jazz Singer” premiered just after the great Mississippi flood killed 700,000 destitute people; that Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in a fit of anti-immigrant fury. It tells us nothing about what it’s like to live in the first half of Prohibition and the rise of organized crime, in which poor people were blinded by homemade liquor and the wealthy had champagne and brandy without interruption. It tells us nothing about Jim Crow, nothing about sharecropping and tenant farming, nothing about the growth of mechanized agriculture.

Science fiction and fantasy writers talk about “worldbuilding,” which Wikipedia (the source of all knowledge and wisdom, and a clearly 21^st century reference) describes as “developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities.” All of us are responsible for developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities, whether that’s a 19^th C Vermont settlement or a 21^st C Nebraska corn town or a planet in Solar System EMN298y65. And then we speculate what the lives within that would have been like, at the smallest detail of clothes and slang, at the largest forces of religion and politics. 

What our characters do is meaningless without close attention to the landscapes around them.

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.