(Don't) Stop Me if You've Heard This Before

This book is a product of nearly four decades of teaching fiction writing. More specifically, what follows are discussions of topics that arose in my conversations with developing writers, from undergraduates to MFA students to doctoral candidates, topics that aren’t basic components of fiction and that either my students or I felt weren’t (yet) sufficiently addressed in the various handbooks and books on craft available to them. 

For instance: the discussion of what I call power plays arose from ongoing conversations about the old notion that every story arises from conflict. Students felt that was reductive, and I agree (I resist nearly every assertion that “every” story does or should do anything). Even so, it can be useful to think about the ways stories arise from imbalances or shifts in power or authority. The discussions of first and third person narrators were the result of years of conversations about point of view and narrative distance. The essay on the strategic release of information is a direct response to certain students’ resistance to exposition (in their own work; some of the same students happily read enormous fantasy novels with dozens of pages of expository world building); the discussion of motifs was one I had to write out so as to be able to explain them to students who suggested that if they didn’t notice images as they read, the images must not be significant.

An exception is the discussion of asides and digressions, which arose from something I recognized in a lot of the writing I enjoy, and from a conversation with one of my old teachers (and later colleague), the wonderful poet Steve Orlen. For fifteen years, my job involved a lot of public speaking, and over time I indulged in elaborate, comic digression. Steve simply asked me, “Have you ever written a story like that?” I hadn’t, and his question sent me off in a new direction. As is often the case, the advice that he offered was advice he had received, resulting in his movement away from short lyric poems to the longer, seemingly conversational ones that allowed him to express himself uniquely. (If you don’t know Steve’s poems, look for The Elephant’s Child.)

While I refer to my experience in classes and workshops, and these essays are in conversation with others on craft that students are likely to come across, my hope is that this book will also be useful to writers working on their own, or exchanging manuscripts with one or two fellow writers. With that in mind, the appendix includes a discussion of workshop practices that can be put to use by a group of friends as well as by a student or teacher in a degree program, and a discussion of annotations, a tool developed by the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College that can be put to use by any writers intent on developing their work. I’ve used them everywhere I’ve taught. Students are almost always unhappy about having to write them, and they’re almost always surprised to discover how helpful they are. 

Finally: I’ve used a variety of fiction to illustrate various points, and I discuss a few of the stories and novels from multiple perspectives: the richest work benefits from that sort of attention. The writers referenced range from old men of what used to be called the canon (Charles Dickens, Chekhov, Mark Twain) to notable voices of the late 20th and early 21st centuries (Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, J.D. Salinger, E.L. Doctorow), to more contemporary writers (Jenny Erpenbeck, Adam Johnson, Mohsin Hamid, Jai Chakrabarti, Yoko Ogawa, Deborah Eisenberg, Olga Tokarczuk, Colson Whitehead). These are not the only writers whose work could illustrate these points. An interesting version of this book would have blank pages, so you could choose stories and novels you admire and look at them through these same lenses, and detail your own analyses. That’s a book I encourage you to write, if only for yourself.