Yes, &… (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Radically Agree)

I attended a “low-residency” program for my MFA, which is where you attend two 10-day residencies on campus per year and work remotely with a supervisor the rest of the time. The first night of my first residency, I tried to quit. I was already nervous when I got to the “mixer” that night and once I saw how many of my fellow students seemed to already know the faculty, I got nervouser. But when I listened to these people—not just the faculty but my peers—talk about writing and writers in what appeared a casual way in a casual setting, sipping beer or wine and laughing as they threw around terms I had never heard… well, I made my exit, went back to my dorm room, called home, and said I was heading to the airport first thing in the morning because, “I had made a terrible mistake and I did not belong here.”

Luckily, my partner used her calm lawyer voice and talked me into watching some Doctor Who episodes until I got sleepy and then seeing how I felt after the first official session in the morning, which I did. In the morning, after breakfast, I filed into Gladfelter for the opening remarks and lecture, given by poet Debra Allbery. Now, I am not a poet (I dabbled in high school and early college but a bad poetry class experience my freshman year at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign put an end to my burgeoning poetry career) and, as such, I was already on my back foot, not truly understanding anything about the technical side of poetry. I felt the same feeling of unbelonging welling up from the get-go.

But then something was said—I wish I could remember the exact details, but I can’t—and I was suddenly, fully, and completely home. Because whatever it was that was said was just something I had learned from improv comedy.

I entered my undergraduate studies fully intending to become “a writer,” whatever that meant—I was going to learn whatever it was I needed to learn in order to make the putting of words to paper my career. As mentioned above, my poetry dreams were crushed early and my fiction dreams not long after when my well-meaning and talented teacher, head in hands, sent a peer out of the room after he had read aloud from his submission to our workshop. As soon as the door closed, the teacher looked up at us with the most pitiful expression and asked us, the other undergraduate students in this entry-level workshop class, “What am I supposed to do with him? He’s already better than I’ve ever been. I can’t teach him.” Now, whether this was meant to light some sort of fire under the rest of us or it was, as I suspect, some sort of mid-life crisis moment, the effect was the same on us as it was on our teacher: we were not as good as our peer who was just asked to step outside while our teacher despaired at pre-failing him as a mentor.

I was feeling pretty down, what with having my lifelong dream crushed in its infancy. Perhaps that’s why I was so vulnerable when I saw my first Spicy Clamato show. Spicy Clamato was the improv group run by the student theater troupe of which I would later spend time as both Creative and Managing Director. I fell in love with improv the moment the first scene started. These people were creating theater in front of us, no script, no net, and it was, often, very funny.

I was never an actual member of Spicy Clamato. Instead, I joined the “more cerebral” (i.e. stuck-up and haughty) deBono: A Rich Lather of Lateral Thought (we almost never used the subtitle). I started doing improv in college and I didn’t look back for right around 20 years. I went through the two big training centers here in Chicago (ImprovOlympic and Second City), was on a house team, The Fling, at The Playground Theater for almost a decade, and performed with and coached for so many other teams.

And then… it just stopped being the thing I wanted to do. It was, as most creative deaths are, a slow one. And as the drive to perform slipped away, I found myself wanting to get back to writing. Fiction, specifically. So I started a pre-MFA program and eventually, that brought me to the moment in the lecture where I had my little epiphany.

Improv is writing on stage with an audience and partners. Well, it’s drafting on stage with an audience and partners, but still. My good friend Jamie, who was in a different MFA program at the same time said to me, when I excitedly told him what I’d realized, “Well, yeah, that makes sense. At its core, improv is just rules for being creative.” He said it like it was no big deal, like water being wet.

But it was a big deal to me. Because the core tenant of improv is Yes, &… and that idea, well, it’s such a ridiculously, unassumingly, all-encompassingly useful, helpful, and true idea. In improv, Yes, &… means that whatever your scene partner says is true and that your job is to build on it with something that will also be true, no matter what. On stage, it’s procedural—you say we’re cowboys, I say yes we are and it’s great to be cowboys on the moon, and you say yes it is except it’s really hard to wear your hat under the space helmet. Or whatever. The idea becomes a rule that guides the two/three/four/etc. actors on stage so they are always “on the same page.”

When I talk about or teach writing, I like to use the term Radical Agreement in place of Yes, &…, not just because it sounds more writerly and, therefore, makes me seem all thoughtful and smart, but also because it hints at a deeper connection than even that of actors on a stage working together to create theater on the spot—Radical Agreement speaks to the connection between the writer and the work.

The biggest hiccup in mapping improv to writing was always that improv (usually) has more than one scene partner but writing is (usually) solitary. If you’re all by yourself, who are yes, &’ing? It shouldn’t be yourself because, even as a purely mental construct, that relationship puts all the onus on you, the writer, and that isn’t helpful. We need to “spread the wealth,” as it were, to not only share the responsibility but also the credit for what we write. We need an outside force to push against and bounce off of, to surprise and delight us.

Like the writing itself does at its best. We’ve all had that experience of coming back to something we’ve written, maybe the next day, maybe months and months later, and finding things we didn’t expect there. Things we notice only now, in the reading. Things that were laid in around the things you were choosing to put on the page. The work is of you but it isn’t you—you are in active control of a small percentage of what is happening as you put down words and the rest is filled in by you sub- or even unconscious mind. It’s those “uncontrolled” parts of the work to which you can then apply the idea of Radical Agreement.

And so, the work itself takes on the role of your scene partner. If we listen to it, make choices about it based on what it’s showing us it wants and needs, if we react to it instead of simply acting upon it, well, that’s what yes, &’ing looks like for an author.

I have a lot more to say about this and I will say those things, most likely again and again, but for now, take a page from improv and say “Yes, &…” to what I’m saying by trying this simple exercise the next time you sit down to write:

1. Reread the most recent part of the work, the last chunk you worked on.
   
2. Underline a few things that surprise, interest, or delight you—a word, a phrase, a gesture, anything at all, no matter how “small.”
   
3. Try to revisit those things in some way as you write. Carry the emotion forward. Mirror the gesture. Raise the stakes on the plot moment. Just try to keep those small things in mind as you write and see if they don’t give you a new perspective on or, at least, some new ideas about the work.

Until next time…

The First Thing You Learn Will Be the Last Thing to Go

Our world is a sinking ship. The Royal Navy has punched too many holes in the hull with their cannons and the storm’s waves are dumping even more water from above us. The boat was barely seaworthy in the first place, cobbled together with almost as much hope as lumber and patched repeatedly with whatever was at hand. We each have a bucket but what use is it? Not much. Maybe, if we all use our buckets, it can buy enough time for the most vulnerable to get to safety, but a little extra time is all we can hope for.

The ship is going down and us with it. The only real question is: What then?

“Cold at Night” is the second single released from The Mountain Goats’ upcoming album, Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan. The album was conceived as a musical and this track (along with the first release, “Armies of the Lord”) features backing vocals from musical royalty Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is credited as “helping” with the concept of the album as it was being written. The musical is the story of a shipwreck with only three survivors, one of whom is the captain, Peter Balkan.

You see where I’m going with this, right?

“Cold at Night” will be the third song on the album (after “Overture” and “Fishing Boat”) and it most definitely serves as the kickoff to the story’s action. The music itself feels like a departure for The Mountain Goats—sprightly, light, propulsive, lots of ornamentation—but lyrically, it’s hardcore John Darnielle.

John Darnielle is a storyteller-poet. While his songs make use of (and push against, as all good art must) poetic conventions, they do so in service of a story. Here, the story is about how to survive a shipwreck and carry on. But that’s not what the song is about.

When I meet a new writer, I will always ask what they are working on. Their eyes light up and then they begin to tell me about their book or story.

It’s the story of a guy who…

It’s the story of a woman that needs to…

There’s this family and they are trying to…

90ish seconds of plot description usually follows. And sometimes it continues and they tell me what happens all the way until the end (whether they’ve written that far or not). More often, after those 90ish seconds, they stop, blink, and say something like, “Well, actually, it’s about how the Viet Nam war affected my father,” or “You see, it’s really about immigration because my grandparents came over from…”

What a story is and what a story is about are, very often, two different things.

This song is about a shipwreck and how to survive in the aftermath. And it’s about how we survive the shipwreck that we are currently experiencing and how we continue on after the tumult has died and gone.

Let’s take a look at the lyrics:

Let yourself go in the current
Only rise and fall as the angles allow
Finally make a break for the surface
Breathe in the sweet air of the here and now
Wake up in the arms of the earth
Fully present at the second birth

Well the first thing you learn is how strong you can be if you have to
And the next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night

Let the waves break where they have to break
Let the people make ready to approach the throne
Two are gonna stumble along the way
One is going to go up alone
Fire’s gathering on a distant peak
Let me get some sleep before I speak

Well the first thing you learn is how far you can go with no gas in the tank
And the next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night

Lightly row
But this much I know
The first thing you learn will be the last thing to go

Sharpen sticks and stab at the tide pools
Pitch a camp as close as we can to shore
Nobody thought to carry a compass
It’s not the 19th century anymore
On the third day you said you felt sick
I could hear the clock tick

Well the first thing you learn is there’s always a clock ticking somewhere
And the next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night

Well the first thing you learn is how strong you can be if you have to (so strong)
And the next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night

There’s a lot here, but what I want to focus on is the chorus. The second line of the two-line chorus is always “And the next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night.” We can assume it gets pretty cold and that the cold is uncomfortable if not straight-up dangerous. But… that’s always the NEXT thing we learn. The first thing we learn is always something positive (even the fact that “there’s always a clock ticking somewhere,” which I’ll get to, I promise). You’ll always first learn how strong you can be, how far you can go BEFORE you learn how cold it can get at night. And that, right there, is hope.

To underscore this positivity, the bridge tells us that “the first thing you learn will be the last thing to go.” Our strength, our resistance, those will be the last thing, not the cold, not the darkness of the night.

“But the clock thing, Eric,” I can hear you say, “that sounds, well, if not negative, at least ominous.”

It could be, sure. But if we use the rest of the song as context, I think it’s clear that the knowledge of omni-present ticking clocks is actually the knowledge that there’s always threat, there’s always danger, all the time, everywhere, and so any one, specific danger isn’t special. I think that message is definitely positive. It’s not a warning, it’s a reminder—the ticking of that clock is just the ticking of ONE clock and you’re still you and we’re still us and we’re still strong and we’re still tough.

Did John Darnielle mean this song that is most likely the inciting incident of his imagined musical to also double as an anthem for us sinking sailors of the real world? Yes? Maybe? Maybe not? Who knows? But also… who cares? Art is a vessel for meaning. The artist shapes that vessel but, I would argue, doesn’t fill it. At least, not in the way, say, a can of Arizona Arnold Palmer Lite is filled. A song, a book, a film, a painting, a poem… Art is more like an empty cup than it is a full bottle of something. I’m sure that somewhere, at some level of consciousness, Darnielle was aware of the parallels. Or if not aware of them, at least that they are present because he lives and creates in the time that he does—the artist is in the world and of the world.

The morning this song was released, National Guard from Texas were arriving in Chicago as I made the drive to take my kids to school. I teared up the first time through the chorus, a combination of feeling seen and finding hope. I listened to the song 20 or so times that morning. I don’t care whether John Darnielle meant it or not, whether he agrees with me or not, because this song means what it means to me. And that, I will argue until the day my clock stops ticking, is what makes it a great song.

Shaking Off the Dust

I swear there was an audible POP! when I opened the post editor and a cloud of dust practically billowed from my screen. I’m genuinely afraid to check my back in case it’s covered in spiders like Indy’s guide (played by an incredibly young Alfred Molina—there’s a little trivia nugget for you to store away and bring out at a party, preferably one full of nerd-y film types). I keep listening for the rumbling of a giant stone sphere hurtling toward me.

What I’m saying is, it’s been a while since I’ve been here. There’s a lot of reasons for that, some of them good (in the sense of “wow, yeah, that would keep ME away from the website, too!”) and some not so good (in both senses—crap that shouldn’t have kept me down but has AND crap that really sucked, even more than Indy’s guide not throwing him the whip after he threw the idol). But the time to put all that stuff behind me has come. The time for writing about writing and pop culture and games and all that stuff has returned. Like Marion, when Indy thought she was dead.

I should have said, “Like Indy’s dad after he drank from the Holy Grail.”

There have already been too many pop culture references.

“So, what’s the plan?” I imagine you asking. Because the only way I’m going to get through this is by imagining a “you” that wants to know my plan, is interested in my plan, wants for me to have a plan and to know that plan and then watch said plan unfold.

I’m needy that way.

The plan is to refurbish the old site and, while doing so, make sure to regularly post new things for the fans. Because I also need to imagine fans.

The first new thing will be up on Monday (10/27/25) and it will be about The Mountain Goats, which likely comes as no surprise to anyone that knows me.

So… you have the weekend to prepare yourself. The train will be barreling out of the station, and I’d love it if you were aboard.

–Eric

The Calculus of a Great Sentence

I HATE the idea that there is some formula that will yield a great story. Sure, there are blueprints out there that will allow you to make a story. And, depending on your talent with the actual language, it may even be a pretty good story. But the idea that there is some “great story” rubric out there, in the ether? Well, that whole thing pisses me off mightily. And not because it systematizes art in a distinctly capitalist mode, but because that stupid idea crushes so many would-be writers who spend days/months/years comparing themselves to Checkov/O’Connor/Saunders and feel they just can’t ever “get it right.”

So say it with me: There is no magical “right way” to write a story.

However, there is a right way to write each story.

Confusing? Yep.

But it’s true. Each individual story creates its own “rules” in collaboration with the individual writer working on it. In other words, if you and I were to write the “same” story, each of us would discover our own “right way” to tell it through our personal engagement with the work itself. In the writing, you unconsciously set up and agree to certain rules that come from your own reaction to the material you are discovering. And it’s a real chicken-and-the-egg kinda’ thing, where what you discover leads you to make choices about rules that lead you to more discovery that may lead to altering the rules and so on.

Let me offer a micro-example of this kind of “formula” on the page, and maybe it will make more sense. I’m currently reading Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan. Early in the book, during Anna’s visit with the Styles children, this sentence appears:

Beyond the windows of an adjacent front room, the sea tingled under a
thin winter sun. (p. 5)

By itself, it isn’t a stunning sentence. It’s pretty, sure, and clear in its image, but something about it rang in my brain. After thinking about it for far too long, I realized that it was the word “adjacent,” a bummer of a word if ever there was one. We say that specificity in writing is important, but I think what we really mean is clarity. “Adjacent” is an extremely specific word, but it takes a LOT of work to make it sexy. Even with its fun D-into-J sound, you’d have to work your writing magic to make “adjacent” the centerpiece of a sentence.

So why does Egan, who knows her way around language, use “adjacent” here? The answer, I think, lies in the second half of the sentence.

“…the sea tingled under a thin winter sun.” Now, let’s give credit where credit is due. If “adjacent” is a dud, the back half of the sentence does all kinds of awesome things sonically. Sea and sun give you those sibilants at the beginning and end of the phrase, anchoring you. Tingled, thin, and winter have that -in- sound, and tingled and winter also give you the hard T sound. Under and sun rock the -un-. There’s even the -th- repetition in the and thin. It’s a compact little nugget of sonic joy that really hinges on the creative use of “tingled” as a reaction of the sea to the sun.

And it’s almost too much. Even divorced from the language around it, it’s jam-packed with intention. When you take it in context, it sticks out like a sore thumb: There is little else in the first few pages that reaches for that kind of sound/image.

So, Egan applies a little “adjacent” beforehand in order to soften the impact of that final phrase. I’d argue that “Beyond” has a similar effect to “adjacent” without being quite as awkward, creating a cumulative effect in the first half of the sentence that at once both diminishes and heightens the second half. It lowers the reader’s expectations so that the musicality of the back half is a pleasant surprise, not at all over the top.

So what does this little gem of a sentence have to do with the idea of making our own rules as we go? Well, there were approximately one million and forty-thousand ways (± 1,040,000) Egan could have pulled off this same sentence. However, from inside the work itself, through her engagement with both what she had already written and what she intended to write, she settled on this approach. She created her own math, the calculus of a great sentence for this passage, this chapter, this section, this book, etc.

Egan’s math may not work for you. It may do the trick nicely. It may simply suggest some ways your own calculus can and will shake out. But, remember, fellow writer, that her way is only the right way for her while writing this particular story. She may never use this particular math equation again. Just like you and me, she may well have to discover all-new math, exciting formulas, and ridiculous tricks the next time she sets out to write.

Paying attention to your process is almost as important, early in a work, as paying attention to the words on the page. It is through this attention to our own engagement with the story we’re telling that these rules are revealed/created.

Where Are Your Feet Planted?

I once got into a fairly heated argument with my friend David (well, we’ve had many heated arguments, if I’m being honest). We were on the crowded porch of the dorm during one of our Residencies for grad school, so the topic was, of course, writing (as have been all the others). David had recently, if not that very day, had his story workshopped and, in discussing the experience, said that he was willing to change any- and everything about his story “to make it better.” I called him on that—surely there had to be something that he wouldn’t be willing to change, some element, maybe tiny, maybe teeny-tiny, but something.

He stuck to his guns, adding literally to his statement. He was willing to change literally any- and everything about his story.

I still, to this day, think he was lying. To me, certainly, but also to himself. Because, if you are truly willing to change any- and everything about your story, from POV to plot to character to any given minute detail, well, then why the eff are you writing the story in the first place? And how can you judge whether any given change will make the story “better” if you have no allegiance to anything the story contains?

The answer to the first question relies on the answer to the second. The only way to make something “better” when you have no internal consistency is to compare it to some outside benchmark. For our purposes, that means that you must believe that there is a quantifiable, objective standard for “good story” and that it is possible to measure any given story against that benchmark and receive usable results.

This, of course, is insane. But, for the sake of argument, if such a quantifiable, objective standard exists, then you would be totally justified in having “meet-or-exceed” as your goal for writing.

If it doesn’t exist (it doesn’t), then you need to define your “goal” in writing any given story. If it’s “to make money” or simply “to get published,” well, then, you can certainly manufacture your own “quantifiable standard” by comparing your story to stories which have achieved your specific goal. It won’t really be an objective standard, due to the subjective vagaries of editorial interpretation/enjoyment/aggravation with the world that affects the editor’s perception of your work, but you can build yourself some guidelines and try to build something within those guidelines that is entirely mutable.

If your “goal” boils down to something closer to “to tell this particular story,” well, now you’re capable of putting together a quantifiable, objective standard from inside the work. You are addressing, in other words, the bedrock of the story, the place where your feet are planted as you leverage every craft tool at your disposal in order to create your story. So, it stands to reason, that figuring out pretty quickly where, exactly, you are planting your feet would be real helpful in writing a “good” story.

Let’s, by way of a fer instance, take a look at the short story I’ve been working on recently. It started when a sentence popped into my head, unbidden: Shoshanna looks like a big old dipshit when she flies. Now, I’m definitely never going to change the fact that Shoshanna can fly—and trust me, someone will suggest it because, “Um, people can’t fly and what are you writing, fantasy? Cut it. Make it, like, driving or something.” But see, I have this recurring dream where I can fly EXCEPT I have to flail my arms and legs in order to do it. Once I get up high enough, I can glide smoothly for a bit, but eventually I have to start with the flailing again. So obviously, this idea is important to me and demands I write a story. So, there: flying is staying in.

Now, on to the less obvious things. First off, that phrase “big old dipshit” is important. It came to me as a part of the original sentence and when I first typed it out, those words felt like they were in neon lights. To me, the phrase implies a voice, a perspective. It brings with it an attitude, not just toward the characters or the events, but toward the whole enterprise of telling this story. It’s important here to note that what’s “important” to a story at this, the drafting stage, is very personal. You may not think that the phrase “big old dipshit” implies or brings with it any of the things that I associate with it. And that’s fine because, honestly, it doesn’t matter what anyone other than the writer thinks at this point. If something speaks to the author, it speaks to them, it inspires them, and it is useful to them. So that phrase, and all it brings with it, stays, no matter what.

Next is the name Shoshanna. It’s a loaded name. It’s a female name. It’s a Hebrew name. I am neither a woman nor Jewish. However, it feels important to me that the character be both those things. The name was just there in that first flash of inspiration. So, no matter what, I’m sticking with Shoshanna. I’m not going to change her into a straight, white, recovering-Christian male because that would be easier for me to “inhabit” or any of the crap. Shoshanna came with the inspiration, she stays.

Now, past those three little things: flying, “big old dipshit,” and Shoshanna, anything else I come up with will be flexible. But those three things, those are the things with which I will begin to build my quantifiable, objective standard. Right now, if my story serves those three elements, then it is working well. There have been elements added to this list as I’ve worked (Shoshanna discovered her ability to fly during a suicide attempt; Shoshanna’s father can fly, too, but has never told her and doesn’t come clean when she tells him what she can do—secrets are important and these specific ones won’t budge) and more may be added, so the standard will change accordingly.

However, knowing “where your feet are planted” can do WAY more than just let you judge the “quality” of your story. These elements are signposts, they are a map for the story. When you get stuck or lost, just make a big choice that relates to one or more of these elements and you will be assured that you are moving the story you want to tell along. These elements are touchstones to keep you on track and to give you a place form which to leap.

Doing the work of discovering where your feet are planted in any given story will also be of great use during revision. By the time you reach the end of your first draft, you’ll have a list of the elements that are most important—it may be only the list you started with or maybe you’ll have added things as you wrote. These elements can help you decide where to expand, where to cut, where to change, and where to double down on what you’ve already done. As long as you keep these elements in mind and aim to make the choices that most support, highlight, and explore them, you’ll be making the “right” choices. And, since the “importance” of those elements is so personal, what is “right” will also be personal, so you’ll be serving your initial impulses, that spark of original inspiration, the story you wanted to tell all along.

Boredom Is Part of the Process

A friend recently posted a question to the Facebook group dedicated to our MFA program. She was looking for guidance in the face of 20 or so unfinished stories, for advice on how to get herself to finally finish them.

Many-much good advice was given. One strand concerned the writer’s possible boredom with the stories and what that boredom might mean for their future. The suggestion was made and then echoed that perhaps the fact that she had become bored pointed to a “problem” with the content of the stories, an issue of their validity as projects to be continued. Maybe she had lost interest because they weren’t really what she should be writing. Boredom with a story is, in the estimation of several very smart people, fatal.

This line of thought set my Spider-Sense all a-tingle. It’s not to say that it couldn’t be true, but to have that option be anything other than the absolute last resort struck me as dangerous. Because, as the title of this post posits, I believe that boredom is a part of the process.

Boredom isn’t fatal—it’s normal. It’s a roadblock, for sure, but it isn’t fatal. Every story I’ve ever written, I’ve written 1/3 to 1/2 of it, then got bored and left it—sometimes for a week, sometimes for years. But I have, to this point, always come back and written to something like an ending. And then I’ve gone back in and fixed the beginning to better match the ending. And then I’ve  massaged/tinkered with/rewritten the middle to fit everything together more smoothly. And then I’ve tweaked the ending to cap off the new beginning and middle. And then I’ve gotten bored and walked away again. And eventually I’ve come back again and really finished the thing once the full shape of it is out in the open.

Our brains are pattern recognition machines. Story is pattern fulfillment and denial. We talk about theme or voice or plot or arc or… and what we really mean is the indiscernible “thing” that holds a work together. That thing is, at its heart, pattern. We may think of that pattern in terms of arc or plot or voice or theme, that may be our conscious entry point into the pattern, but it’s bigger than that. It can be a complex, goofy, labyrinthine thing, but it comes from the basic idea of your story (what you know about it; where your “feet are planted,” the elements that you can’t change without no longer writing the story you set out to write, which will be a blog topic soon) being the filter through which every observation and choice you make about the work passes.

I firmly believe that boredom is simply the point when a pattern becomes too familiar. So sometimes, the simple passage of time is the answer—get far enough away and the pattern becomes fresh. Take a step back and when you return, you’ll be delighted by the pattern you’ve forgotten about and want to keep playing inside it, following it, disrupting it, altering it.

However, you can import an idea from improv comedy (because when do I ever not try to import an idea from improv into everything I do?) in order to maybe force the issue—make the bold choice. “Today is the day!” is a common refrain in improv classes: the day they finally have that tough conversation, the day they actually do hook up, the day the dog really does get put down. Make the bold choice and, I promise, it will reignite your interest because the bold choice almost always disrupts/alters the pattern (which is awesome, because it, in effect, establishes a new pattern which encompasses the old one and provides the beginnings of the old “surprising but inevitable” thing we’re told is so important in endings). This alteration/disruption should make the pattern newly strange, even to you. And strangeness & wonder are what we’re chasing, whether we know it or not.

This does NOT mean you should make an “unmoored” choice. Don’t just decide to stick a vampire in the middle of a story. Instead, re-read what you have and then think, “What is the biggest, strangest, boldest choice I can make RIGHT NOW?” And commit to the choice. Commit to it, because it came from your story brain. Your brain is the only place the world of your story exists and therefore, in my humble opinion, it is vitally important to trust any decisions that come from that same place (consciously or subconsciously or even unconsciously). Trust those choices until they have absolutely proven themselves to be bad choices. And then trust them further, because usually its better to alter things so the choices work than to make different choices.

Take all this with, of course, a comically oversized grain of salt. It may not work for you at all.

But I bet a bazillion dollars it will.

Genre: A Screed (Or “You Got Superheroes in My Cancer Memoir!”)

Genre, man. What a total fucking bummer.

And I’m not talking about Sci-Fi, Horror, Romance, Mystery.

I’m not even talking about those hybrid mofos, super-intense-niche-genres like High Sci-Fantasy Alt History, where TechnoMage Winston Churchill battles Scion of Cthulhu Adolf Hitler. (Note to self: write this.)

Nope, I mean Literary Fiction vs. Commercial Fiction. (I’m using Commercial Fiction here because the other, more prevalent term, Genre Fiction, makes the whole talking about genre thing confusing.)

Vampires aren’t Horror. Robots aren’t Science Fiction. Magic Swords aren’t Fantasy, gumshoes aren’t Mystery, and ripped bodices aren’t Romance. Commercial Fiction isn’t defined by its tropes, it is defined, I think, by its emphasis on plot.

Cancer, abusive parents, failed love, socio-political commentary, and/or beautifully, terribly, devastatingly sad and graphic sex scenes aren’t Literary Fiction. Again, tropes don’t define the thing. In Lit Fic’s case, I’d argue that the emphasis on prose does.

So, if we look at it this way, Plot vs. Prose, well, then, doesn’t that make things a whole lot freer and fun? Since we all know I hate rhetorical questions in writing, let me answer that for you: yes, it very much does.

I want to point out that I in NO WAY mean to imply that prose is inconsequential to Commercial Fiction writers or that plot ain’t on the radar of the Literary Fiction crowd. It isn’t a Boolean, On/Off, Yes/No, 00|01 thing. It’s a matter of degrees.

This has suddenly become very important to me, beyond my love of superheroes and monsters and spaceships, because I’m starting a new novel. And this one is going to have what would be referred to as “genre elements” in it. However, my drive isn’t plot. Hell, outside of some very broad strokes, I don’t know what the plot is going to be. But I know what the story is about and what it’s about, at least in part, is superheroes. What they mean to those of us who picked up Claremont’s X-MEN, Giffen/DeMatteis’s JUSTICE LEAGUE, or any other four-color wonder at a tender, formative age and, inside its pages found what we were looking for. It’s not “about” superheroes or comic books at all, really—it’s about stories, what good they are, can be, should be.

And I sincerely do NOT need to be wrestling with whether what I’m writing will be “accepted” as LitFic while I’m busy figuring out how, exactly, to bring the feel of comics to prose (it’s been done before but not by me and we can watch someone ride a bike but have no real idea how to do it ourselves). So, do yourself a favor: if you’re a LitFic reader, try some of the fringe stuff (Vandermeer’s BORNE, recently out from FSG, is a good start). If you’re a Commercial Fiction reader, try something from the same fringe (BORNE will trip your triggers, too). That way, when my book comes out (in, like, 40 years), you (or, I guess, your grandkids) will be ready to read it.

 

Why? (or Some Thoughts on Rhetorical Questions in Fiction)

In manuscripts that I’ve been reading recently—workshop pieces, early drafts from friends, etc.—I’ve been noticing a LOT of rhetorical questions in the narration. Things like, “What would my sister think of me?” or “What could I possibly do?”

Now, sometimes rhetorical questions can be good: when the question itself is surprising (I didn’t think she’d care what her sister thought…) or…

Ok, that’s it. That’s the only case I can come up with in which rhetorical questions are good. Otherwise, they just pop me right out of the story. I was having trouble pinning down exactly why that is, though. Something one of my mentors, Fred Shafer, recently said helped me figure it out.

We’re reading Elizabeth McCracken’s The Giant’s House (which is great, BTDubs). At the end of Part One, there is this long passage of interiority where Peggy, the narrator, “decides” to finally love James. At one point, we get the following paragraph:

 

“I did not love him like a brother. I did not love him like a son. And though I loved him because of his body, it wasn’t his body that I loved, not the body of some manI dreamed would hold me, a body containing secrets that would somehow transform my own. Some will hear this and say, librarian, spinster: clearly there’s a block, clearly there are problems here. But I’ve thought about this enough, and I’ve dreamed of other men’s bodies that way, and I know the difference.” (pp 88-89)

 

This is a novel writing workshop and Fred’s point was how long passages like this are more or less necessary in novels, whether they are scenes or interiority or something else. In talking about how McCracken may have discovered such a passage, he pointed to the above paragraph and said that she hadn’t settled for the question from Peggy, “How will I love him?” That question would be fitting for her to ask—she is a woman in her early 30s, James is a teenage boy afflicted with gigantism. However, Fred pointed out that sustaining a passage like this is a matter of taking those kinds of questions and not just posing them to your character(s) but forcing them to answer, to answer and answer until you hit the truth. And yes, in some cases, you may cut a lot of what you write and just keep that last nugget, the surprising truth, but sometimes the passage that you discover is something beautiful. He wanted us to see how to sustain these moments in order to make our novels more full.

But suddenly, I realized why I hate rhetorical questions in fiction so much: they are, at best, moments of missed opportunity; at worst, they are a neon sign pointing to the author’s fear. You are simply letting your character off the hook when you type one of those little suckers, relieving them of any responsibility to look deeper. If, instead, you pick that question up and stick in your character’s face, make them answer it, well, what treasures you might find. And how NOT BORED I, as a reader, will be.

Think of my first example: “What would my sister think of me?” Now, imagine plucking the question off the page and asking it directly of the character: “What would your sister think of you?”

She’d think I was terrible.

*BUZZ*

She’d think I was a lowlife, a liar, a cheat, a crook.

*BUZZ*

She’d think I wasn’t any better than our father.

*BU— “Wait, ok, why would she think that?”

Because he was a lowlife, a liar, a cheat, a crook.

*BUZZ*

Because she hated him.

*BUZZ*

Because we hadn’t seen him since the day he’d left three stacks of blood-stained bills on the kitchen table. His teeth were stained pink and when he kissed me on the forehead he left an imprint like mom used to, faint red lips. He hadn’t kissed Marcia, just took his hand off the bloody hole in his shirt and put the hand on her shoulder, squeezed briefly, ruined her dress.

Or, you know, something like that, something deeper, something important, something interesting and possibly new, a game-changer, that little whiff of mystery that can make your story so much more than it was.

This is a great revision exercise. Take that early draft and scour it for any rhetorical questions you may have left on the page. Open a new document and keep asking the question and follow-up questions and newly discovered questions until you find something or are sure you won’t. If you do find something, it may turn out to be just what the next draft needs.

Sentences I Love #2

There are sentences I read that stop my heart. Used to be that’s as far as I got: “Damn, that’s a great sentence. Come on heart, get moving.” Since I’ve been studying writing, which means also practicing the art/skill of close reading, I’ve been able go a step further in my appreciation of these great sentences. So every once in a while I’m going to spend some time on the old blog looking at one of these little gems.

So, I’ve been considering writing a post about this particular sentence for quite some time. I’ve actually got a lot to say about it or, more precisely, about what else is going on before it that makes it such an effective sentence. I ran into it again just now and I’m finally gonna go for it.

First, the sentence:

“I hope the people who did you wrong have trouble sleeping at night.”

Nothing super-special about that sentence. It’s a funny understatement, perhaps, but nothing earth shaking is going on.

Now here’s why I hemmed and hawed over writing this:

The sentence isn’t from a story. It’s not even from a poem (well, not a printed poem, anyway). It’s a lyric from the song “You Were Cool” by The Mountain Goats. To be fair, I firmly believe that John Darnielle’s lyrics fall somewhere between story and poem and many of them should be recognized as literary achievements. Making it even more obscure, The Mountain Goats have never officially recorded the song—you can find many YouTube clips of live performances, but it doesn’t appear on any album. It’s hard to find and it isn’t encountered as a written sentence, so what’s it doing here, now?

In a number of the live performance videos, this line elicits a sincere cheer from the audience. The first time I heard it, I was filled with a righteous light and had to stop moving for a few seconds to come down (I was walking the dog at the time and had stumbled upon this unknown Mountain Goats’ song I just had to hear). I felt it, the crowds in many of the videos felt it, but what is “it?”

There is a lot going on lyrically in this song to grant such an innocuous sentence so much power, and looking at how Darnielle manages the build-up is, it turns out, highly instructive, so here we go…

(I’m going to collapse the various verses and choruses into sentences and paragraphs, doing away with the line breaks, in order to look at the individual sentences.)

The first sentence of the song is, “This is a song with the same four chords I use most of the time when I’ve got something on my mind and I don’t want to squander the moment trying to come up with a better way to say what I want to say.” It’s a long sentence, making up the entirety of the first verse. It is also metatextual, calling attention to the personal nature of the song—Darnielle is telling us something about himself, the songwriter. But what is [i]really[/i] interesting here is how the unadorned diction combined with the run-on quality of the syntax deny craft—this is an artless sentence. The first words we hear in this song are conversational, plain, and entirely without artifice (“squander” isn’t an exotic word for Darnielle). This sets up the rest of the song beautifully. Much like the opening of a “ghost story,” where the author needs to “make room” for the ghost to exist, this opening is making room for the conversational tone, the confessional feel of the rest of the song.

The next sentence is another long one and serves as the song’s chorus: “People were mean to you but I always thought you were cool, clicking down the concrete hallways in your spiked heels back in high school.” No metaphors, no similes, nothing. The use of the childish “mean” and “cool” though, enacts a form of mimesis—Darnielle is talking about high school, after all. The opening sentence makes this one seem more crafted, too, as is the intention.

The next sentence makes up the entire second verse, and this time Darnielle gets a little “flashy” with it: “It’s good to be young, but let’s not kid ourselves, it’s better to pass on through those years and come out the other side with our hearts still beating, having stared down demons, come back breathing.” There is tension in this sentence, between the clichés of “good to be young” and “let’s not kid ourselves,” and the staring down demons, the beating hearts and breathing. Even the phrase “pass through those years” seems more imagistic than anything that’s come before. This pivot reveals the depth of the emotion hiding underneath the plain-spoken recounting. Nothing that’s said here raises to the level of lyricism, but there is passion in this sentence that we haven’t seen yet.

The chorus reappears here, and this time, the same sentence takes on a different shade, as if Darnielle can’t believe the truth of the situation, that there has been injustice done.

The final verse breaks the established pattern of single long sentences:

You deserved better than you got, someone’s got to say it sometime because it’s true. People should have told you you were awesome instead of taking advantage of you. I hope you love your life now like I love mine. I hope the painful memories only flex their power over you a little of the time. We held on to hope of better days coming and when we did we were right. I hope the people who did you wrong have trouble sleeping at night.

The first two sentences are, again, cliché. “Awesome,” in it’s colloquial sense, operates like “mean” and “cool.” The third sentence is probably my second favorite because it is just doing so much work, altering the tone slightly, raising the quality of image, but also making sure we know this isn’t a love song—Darnielle is happy with his current life, a life without the person to whom he is writing. The fourth sentence has probably the strongest lyricism in the entire song, the idea of painful memories being able to flex their power. The fifth sentence comes back down to Earth a bit, although “of better days coming” is a slightly more difficult syntax than the average of the piece.

Then there, at the end of this final verse, is my sentence. By this point, the speaker is soaked in a combination of righteous anger and frustrated helplessness, passionately sorry for what happened “back in high school” but limited in his expression, in his actual ability to do anything. He can’t place a pox on the houses of the oppressors or curse their lineages or anything so grandiose. The best he can do is to hope they don’t sleep well because of what they’ve done, that guilt taints their rest (but doesn’t even do away with it completely, just makes it less comfy). There is a reality at work in the sentence, a feeling of absolute moral certitude (what, exactly, these people did is unclear, and therefore a more severe punishment may not even be advisable).

By building up this muted, plain-spoken sense of injustice, Darnielle imbues the final sentence with as much power as a different song that may have ended with “I hope they fucking die” or some other expletive-filled zinger. By managing the syntax and diction to show restraint and/or an inability to articulate rage, the final line feels like catharsis.

(The chorus makes one last appearance, playing the song out, and in performance, the energy is that of an anthem, a strident call to action.)

Pics or It Didn’t Happen

(A couple days ago, the Jersey Devil was all over my social media feed due to some blurry “sighting” photo being shared. I wrote this in response.)

My iPhone wakes me, my Twitter blowing up, dingdingdinging, like the bell at the front of Charon’s stupid boat. I always hated that bell. And that guy, with his fraying robe and his damn skeleton hands. Anyway, I spread my wings and flap over to the banquette—I swear, these Thunderbolt cords are much shorter than the USBs that came with the iPhone 4—where I see a scroll of recent tweets concerning a sighting of the Jersey Devil.

I instinctively look around my domicile. The braided foliage covering the cave mouth is undisturbed, the only prints in the dirt of the floor are cloven-hooved, and the Sigil of Concealment etched into the stone of the celling is unmarred. I swipe on the most recent tweet, one that contains a bit.ly link that I assume is a picture of this sighting, then tap in my security code, 6… 6… 6…

6. Stupid four digit security codes ruining all my fun. Why can’t they offer you the option of different length security codes? Surely that would increase security, anyone trying to hack it or whatever having to know not only what digits you used but how many—

The picture pops up on the phone.

What the fuck?

What the actual fuck?

That is so obviously a stuffed llama with wings sewn on it that someone threw in the air or sailed on a wire or something.

It’s a retweet. It’s been retweeted 774, 987 times.

I look in the scratched, faded glass of the mirror above the banquette. What I see is in no way, shape, or form mistakable for a stuffed fucking llama with sewn on wings. I am a goat-headed monstrosity with a gaze that can peel the hope from a soul. I am Satan’s son, the beast that screams. I am terror incarnate.

I mean, look at these fucking wings. There are claws at the tips. I have wing claws. That’s it, I’m taking a fucking selfie. Right now. I’m not letting what happened to the Mothman happen to me. Fucking Richard Gere.

I dig through the pile of refuse next to the banquette, all the stuff I’ve accumulated from the remains of my meals. That one brunette girl, the one in the hockey jersey and black tights, she had one…

Ah, yes, here it is. I was starting to get worried I’d have to destroy another Amazon drone so I could get a selfie stick. But old Mother Leeds taught her darling boy that you never throw anything away that might end up useful. That’s why I still have her spleen. And her eyeballs. You never know.

Also, I’ve never been keen on eating eyeballs. Squishy. Yick.

I screw my iPhone to the end of the selfie stick then stand in front of the banquette, strike what I consider an ominous pose, and take the shot. It’s pretty good. My fangs are prominent, my wings horrifyingly translucent, and my eyes really pop. I mean, of course, the collection of uneaten eyeballs piled on the banquette—my eyes are startling pits of liquid black sin.

I start flipping through filters. While I’m a sucker for sepia, I think that’ll undercut the whole vibe, so I go with “hipster,” hit Share, and type “Hell is real! #JerseyDevil.” That should get ‘em.

It takes almost an hour for someone to retweet it. @OneInTheStink sends it out to his 842 followers.

@OneInTheStink: Ooooooo, spooky! What a joke! #JerseyNotvil

Hastag Jersey Notvil? Notvil? That’s not even a word! What does that even mean? Like I’m not the Jersey Devil, because I am. I’m the Jersey Devil. The terror that stalks in the night. The Demon Seed of Mother Leeds. This kid’s a d-bag.

The replies start almost immediately:

@SarahBoBarah: Look in the mirror, you can totes see the zipper! #JerseySadvil

@RedRightHand: Look at those little tyrannosaur arms! #JerseyDumbvil

@SaltyDog: Swipe left! #JerseyTindervil

@TinaSezHi: Wanna watch Hemlock Grove? #JerseyNetflixAndChillvil

@BobbyS: It’s like a goat fucked @TonyRocketCock’s mom! #JerseyMILFvil

@TonyRocketCock: At least my mom is getting laid. #JerseyNoDadvil

@BobbyS: Fuck you, @TonyRocketCock! #JerseyKickYourAssAfterGymvil

I throw my iPhone against the cave wall. It shatters into pieces and leaves a dent in the rock, I’m so superhumanly strong. I rear my head, open my throat, and let loose one of my patented shrieks. I’ve killed men just by screaming. And, like, cops and shit, not just the guys who come out here for a little rough trade.

Used to be people believed their eyes, believed the word of other people. The tales of my devilry spread far and wide with only a little evidence: a cloven hoofmark, a shock of hair whitened by my scream, the thick sibilance of wings. Now these pukes can’t even believe what they see with their own eyes!

That’s it. I’m going home. I lift the rusted iron ring in the floor, strain with all my considerable might, and the circular door begins to open. The smell of brimstone and sin rises, comforting me. The steps down are slick with the tears of the unjust. Before I descend them, I gather the spleen of Mother Leeds, her eyeballs, all the eyeballs from the banquette. As an afterthought, I grab the selfie stick—never know when it’ll come in handy, even in Hell—and I begin my winding way to a place that still makes sense to me.