A not-so-recent article in the New York Times raised the question of the writer’s isolation, going so far as to say we all belong behind bars. That, apparently, is the only environment in which we’re capable of creating our masterpieces. Regardless of whether or not we agree with this statement, it goes without saying that there’s something to be said for distraction. In Stephen King’s On Writing, he claims that if there’s anything a writer needs it’s “a door which you are willing to shut.” “The closed door,” he adds, “is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business.”

But even behind the safety of that closed door, if you’re taking King literally, is your writing machine. Given that we’re already well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, I’m willing to bet that your writing machine is also an e-mail machine, a blog machine, a magazine and newspaper machine, a Facebook machine, a Twitter machine, and in some cases a pinball machine. Even if the door to your office or bedroom or walk-in closet is shut tight and the cracks have been stuffed with strips of foam, the metaphorical door is still open. The e-mails are still coming. The tweets are still tweeting. Your friends are still unfriending you over all the gay rights stuff you’ve been posting¹.

For most of us, writing is our core interest. It’s our passion, and every day we make more changes to our lives until they’re structured around first drafts, revisions, cover and query letters, class proposals, etc. If this sounds unfamiliar to you, I hope you’re enjoying your brief foray into an entertaining hobby before you move onto something more fanciful, possibly involving toothpicks. If this does sound familiar—excruciatingly so—then you’re also aware of the corollary truth about writers: the act of writing is agony. Of course there’s something exhilarating about it—something riveting—but if it were all roses we wouldn’t be notorious procrastinators. King advises writers to set a goal for themselves—a daily minimum—and to lock yourself in that closed room until you meet that goal. It sounds like punishment, when he says it, and in a way it is punishment, but without a doubt the kind that teaches us a lesson, that helps us grow. If we get one or two thousand words out of that confinement, we can’t hate ourselves for the pain we went through.

The problem, of course, is that metaphorical door left wide open, all manner of Internet blowing in with the leaves.

Over a year ago, I was trolling the basement rooms of an antique shop here in Minneapolis. I have a penchant for buying silver² and was in the market for a butter dish. What I came across instead was a 1940 LC Smith Super-Speed—a behemoth of a machine that weighed a good 45 pounds. The ribbon was completely spent, but otherwise all the keys worked and the little bell rang every time I reached the end of a line. I had a friend with me and she told me buying a typewriter was the stupidest waste of $40 she could imagine. I ignored her, of course, and brought it home with a smile on my face. A few weeks later, after my ribbon had arrived in the mail, I used it to type a letter to my mother.

That’s what it was, primarily, for the first year I owned it—a letter writing machine. I love getting letters in the mail, and part of getting them is to be sure you send them. I had fantasies about using it for fiction. I imagined hauling it up to a cabin somewhere and writing a novel over the winter. I’m a romantic. Fault me for it if you wish. Even with that temptation, I kept writing all my fiction on my laptop.

I’m not sure what exactly triggered the decision to finally try it out for fiction. It was probably around the time when I decided that every single thing I wrote—120,000 word novel or 500 word character vignette—would require a completely rewritten second draft. Everything I did would be retyped, no matter what it was, for the sake of getting the damn thing right. With that thought at the forefront, I decided I’d give the typewriter a shot for my newest short story. It would be a shorter one—that I understood—and I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted it to look like. The results were startling.

I’m not a very fast writer. A first draft of a short story can take me a week or two, depending on how engaged I am. Other writers may find my predicament familiar: you finish a scene—even a short one—and lean back away from your computer like you’ve just run around a lake. The idea of jumping right into the next scene makes you sigh—you literally sigh, there at your desk—and instead you get up and go rummage through the kitchen, because surely there’s some coffee left in the pot.

What happened when I wrote at my typewriter was the exact opposite of this, meaning I didn’t even realize that time was passing. I sat down on a Saturday morning and wrote 3,000 words with a three minute break in the middle to get a glass of water. The whole story—and I’d written the whole story—took 90 minutes. Sure it was rough—sure it had its share of typos and crossed out sentences³—but the first draft was fucking done, almost like writing was something that didn’t require a little sweat, that didn’t feel like punishment. It was even fun, sitting there clacking away and listening to the bell ding every few seconds.

I wrote first drafts for five new stories in July. That’s a pace completely alien to me, meaning I have never worked that fast in my life—not even when I was in college and had no apparent familiarity with any tense but the present4. Four of these five drafts were done on my typewriter, averaging 1,500 to 2,000 words per hour. Again—these are only first drafts, and a good strong rewrite is needed for all of them—but you get the point. For the way I work, I’ve reached an ideal solution, using a machine that lacks not only Wi-Fi but every other use imaginable other than putting words on a page (quite literally, as it turns out). In fact I’m such a convert that I recently acquired another typewriter—a 1933 Royal Portable that’s so impossibly cute than I get all giggly every time I walk by it in the dining room. With the Royal, I’m one step closer to making my dream of writing a novel at that snowed-in cabin a reality. I am, by the way, planning on writing the next novel on a typewriter. If that seems crazy, remember that I wrote my first draft for my first novel in three months, going between a desktop and a laptop. I imagine I can one-up myself with my newfound process. If that’s the case, I’ll be sure to brag about it.

***
1: “Can’t you just chill out and post pictures of cats and Lady Gaga like the rest of us?”

2: ie: trays, teapots, coffee urns, sugar bowls, serving platters, and any other variety of early 20th century paraphernalia that would go a long way in hosting a brunch replete with catty homosexuals, strong coffee, and ouefs en meurette.

3: The keyboard on your run-of-the-mill vintage typewriter is not the same as the keyboard on your run-of-the-mill modern computer. Shift+8 = apostrophe, for example. Shift+2 = quotation marks. Lowercase L = the number 1. Enough said.

4: Just to be clear: I was writing garbage in college. Garbage. But we all have to start somewhere.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
by Stephen King
Sribner

Show, don’t tell. If you are a writer, you have heard this. If you haven’t, it’s time to emerge from whatever basement you haven’t left since becoming one. At its heart, the idea stems from imagery, in the loosest sense of the term. The writer gives the reader the facts—what was said, what it sounded like, where it was said, when it was said, and what that where and when looked like—and the reader is then expected to reach the same conclusions as the writer. It’s agonizing, listening to writers explain their ideas. This little dictum, traced back through decades of writing workshops, books on craft, and lecture halls, is the first thing a young impressionable and let’s be honest fawn-like writer will hear when he announces his aspiration to make a dent in the literary world. What’s bizarre, of course, is that in the realm of books on writing—you could call them manuals on craft—this advice is altogether ignored.

Stephen King is one of those writers self-proclaimed literary authors avoid reading. We perceive his books as entertainment rather than art, having long forgotten that art can entertain. He’s all about story—putting characters in tough situations and seeing how they react. He must be doing something right, because as of this moment, King has written 49 novels. Those novels, according to a BBC report, have sold more than 350 million copies. According to Forbes, King made $34 million between June 2009 and June 2010, making him the third highest paid author in the world, behind James Patterson and Stephanie Meyer. The literary sect—we scoff at money. Anyone can sell books, but, as we all know, writing is about art, not sales. Unfortunately, we had nothing to say when King, in 2003, was granted the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.

Much to our chagrin, Stephen King is a good writer. You can’t get around it.

What can we learn from him? From a man who generally writes horror, realist science fiction, fantasy, and books that are straight out creepy, we wouldn’t think it could be much. But that’s the astonishing thing about him: he’s an extraordinary teacher. When it came out in 2000, King’s On Writing was greeted with rather unfavorable reviews in the mainstream media, even prompting a New York Times Magazine article called, “What is Stephen King Trying to Prove?” “Nothing can disguise the fact,” said Gary Kirst of Salon, “that nearly all of [this book] is stuff we’ve heard a thousand times before.” The truth is that we have heard it before, but that’s not what’s so remarkable about On Writing. The truth is that we haven’t been shown it before.

King’s book is full of straight advice. “If you want to be a writer,” he says, “you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” On adverbs: “The adverb is not your friend.” On the passive voice: “[it makes] me want to scream.” “The paragraph,” he says, “not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing.” Of course a writer couldn’t put together a book like this without that basic advice. On Writing is meant for writers of all skill levels, those just starting to write or ten years at their desks. What separates this book from others like it, however, lies in its subtitle: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

The first 100 pages of King’s book is a section called “C.V.” Here the book reads like a memoir. “[My friend] and I like just about any horror movie,” he tells us, recounting his days as a pre-adolescent and giving a little insight into his taste. When a hideous, nun-like faculty member asks him why he wants to write “junk like this in the first place,” King remembers:

I was ashamed. I have spent a good many years since—too many, I think—being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it.

Here’s a book where an extraordinarily successful writer shows his audience how he became a writer. He recounts his years slaving away over a beat up typewriter in his childhood bedroom, pinning rejection letter after rejection letter to a spike above his desk. After his marriage, we’re shown a young couple struggling to pay the bills and raise two children. Meanwhile, King is tucked away in the laundry room, his typewriter on his lap, writing the first draft of Carrie. We’re excited for King when Carrie is accepted for publication, despite the $2,500 advance. “I didn’t know that [it was a small advance],” he tells us. “I had no literary agent to know it for me.” Then King’s life changes forever. Carrie goes to a paperback publisher for $400,000, half of which, according to King’s contract, is his. From there, we learn that writing, despite our perceptions, doesn’t get any easier. By the time we get to the later sections of the book—“What Writing Is”, “Toolbox”, “On Writing”, “On Living”—we trust King to talk to us about the thing we love most. That’s when he reveals his stance on adverbs and the passive voice. That’s when he tells us that “Plot is… the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.” Stories, he says, “are found things, like fossils in the ground… The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.” King’s story is a fossil all on its own—a writer who is just as passionate about his work as our most literary authors, only trying to brush the dirt away from the bone. He shows us that fossil, and the result is an inspirational, thrilling book for any writer, one that makes writing seem—though exceedingly difficult—very possible. He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t soliloquize. He gives us the facts—what was said, what it sounded like, where it was said, when it was said, and what that where and when looked like—and we make of them what we will.

Photo by John Loo[/add_caption_link]

One of the questions that torments me as a writer—and trust me, there are many—is the question of free will. Do I believe that individuals have the freedom to choose their own destiny? Or do I believe in a deterministic view, which holds that social, psychological, and economic realities are the shaping force behind our actions and desires?

I am partial to the latter view. While in my daily life I make choices—what to wear, what to eat for breakfast, what to read—I am aware that ultimately these are not really choices at all. I wear what I wear because I am offered particular items at the clothing stores where I can afford to shop. I eat what I eat because of how I was raised (in a socio-economic milieu that valued flax seed over Doritos, for instance.) I choose my reading based on what’s available, what I think I should be reading in order to keep up with my peer group, as well as which books play into the fantasy of the person I’d like to become (a fantasy to which I’m drawn because of the values and norms of my class, social location, etc.)

These ideas may be clear enough when we talk about buying things. But what about when we talk about the more complex aspect of morality? If you can believe that the small choices I make about my clothing and breakfast are a product of unseen cultural/economic forces, then does it follow that my code of ethics is derived in the same way? That an individual’s morality is not his or her own, but rather a manifestation of society at large?

So. How does this relate to writing? Well, this is where it gets tricky. If my job as a writer is to tell good stories, to examine the individual in order to expose the universal, how do I reconcile that with my view of human nature as culturally and economically determined? How can I allow my characters to choose, when, in fact, I believe the very idea of “choice” is artificial?

For answers, I turn to the experts. One of the finest examples of a novel that incorporates the deterministic view of human nature is Richard Wright’s Native Son. Here we meet Bigger Thomas, a poor black teenager who gets a job as a chauffeur for a rich white family. Bigger is out of his element and vacillates constantly between fear and rage, both leading up to and subsequently after one of the most violent and gripping scenes I’ve ever read.

Wright’s prose is beautiful and Bigger is a complex character with whom it is easy to sympathize. Yet what I admire most about this book is Wright’s ability to portray Bigger as both a person and a social construction, his actions and behaviors both his own and also a product of a violent and unjust society.

Here is Max, Bigger’s lawyer, at the end of the book:

Do we think that the laws of human nature stopped operating after we had got our feet upon our road? Have we had to struggle so hard for our right to happiness that we have all but destroyed the conditions under which we and others can still be happy? This Negro boy, Bigger Thomas, is a part of a furious blaze of liquid life-energy which once blazed and is still blazing in our land.

Note how Max does not simply describe Bigger as having “a furious blaze of liquid life-energy,” but rather being “a part of” it. Thus Bigger’s actions come to be seen as part of a historical continuum. Additionally, Max does not talk about making Bigger or people like Bigger happy. He instead discusses “the conditions under which” people can be happy. In other words, individual happiness is contingent upon social conditions.

Another great writer whose work occasionally expresses a deterministic view is James Baldwin. While Wright and Baldwin disagreed on political grounds (Wright was a member of the Communist Party, Baldwin was not; Wright wrote Native Son, Baldwin criticized it heavily in Notes of a Native Son) both men were committed to social justice and expressed their commitment in their writing.

Here is the narrator in Baldwin’s short story, “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon”:

…For everyone’s life begins on a level where races, armies and churches stop. And yet everyone’s life is always shaped by races, churches, and armies…The habits of public rage and power would also have been our private compulsions…

Incidentally, both Wright and Baldwin emigrated to Paris in the early 20^th century. It’s no wonder: It is in Paris where we have the birthplace of the novel as social criticism.

In the 19^th Century, Honore de Balzac was one of the first writers to popularize the form we think of today as Social Realism. He did this not only by taking us into the squalid streets of Paris, the rickety carriages and the impoverished boarding houses. He emphasized a deterministic view of human behavior. In Balzac’s world, characters are not motivated by “free will”, their “choice” to be “greedy” or “bad” or “selfish”. Rather they are the products of a corrupted society, one which values superficial displays of wealth over providing opportunities for the poor.

From Le Pere Goriot:

To an observer, and Eugene had quickly become one, her words, her look, and tone of voice were a historical summary of the character and habits of her caste. He recognized the iron hand in the velvet glove, the egoism and selfishness under the breeding, the wood under the polish, the WE, THE KING that extends from the plumes of the throne to the crest of the smallest gentleman.

Here we see how the woman’s gestures and words are not unique to her but rather an expression of her class. Thus the scene accomplishes two things at once: We get tension between two central characters, plus a bit of social context thrown in. If we are to take this novel as real social critique, we see that the ills of society do not fall upon a handful of “corrupt” or “greedy” individuals, are rather shaped by norms and institutions at large.

If we head over to Normandy a few decades later, we see something similar in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Here Flaubert gives us one of the most reprehensible and unlikable female characters in the history of literature. Emma Bovary is selfish, spoiled, narcissistic, and cruel. She would sooner see a young boy lose his leg than suffer a moment longer in a boring marriage. She squanders the family’s wealth on petty, superficial things. She abandons her child. She deceives her husband. She drags her family into ruin, destroying both her husband’s life and her daughter’s future.

Perhaps one of the reasons this book was so controversial when it originally appeared is not because of Emma’s wanton sexual escapades, but because of what her reckless narcissism reveal about the society in which she was created. Just as Bigger Thomas is a construction of racist attitudes and institutions, so Emma Bovary is a product of sexist norms that fed her luscious fantasy life while keeping her from social mobility.

Indeed, in the 1949 film version, James Mason plays the role of Flaubert on trial. When asked how he could create such a despicable character as Emma Bovary, he replies simply that he did not create her. Society created her.

When I said earlier that I was tormented, I suppose I meant it in the best way possible: I want my characters to be small in that they are recognizable and knowable to the reader. Yet I want them to be big too, larger than life, as large as the social institutions and ideological principles that created and shaped them. Bigger.

What do you think? Do you struggle with portraying social forces within your narrative? Do you think your character’s actions are motivated by social norms? How does this affect your writing?

Photo by Friar's Balsam[/add_caption_link]

Elsewhere in the news:

You’ll find everyone all over the internet talking about Philip Roth taking the Booker International Prize. The key here, of course, being that one of the three judges immediately resigned from the committee upon hearing the news. Most definitely not a fan of Roth’s fiction, Carmen Callil told journalists, “It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.” The Book Bench, over at The New Yorker, tries to give a little background on Callil’s rather eccentric comment.

Callil is a founder of Virago Press, a British imprint which is the largest publisher devoted to women’s writing in the world. In 1996, it published, “Leaving a Doll’s House,” a memoir by Roth’s ex-wife Claire Bloom, which told all about their marriage and then some in scathing tones (here’s a review at the Times). In 1998, Roth published his novel “I Married a Communist,” which concerns a McCarthy-era radio star brought to ruin when his treacherous wife publishes a book exposing him as a Communist. The reaction in the British press was tortured: Roth was a genius, but score-settling didn’t flatter him. Did he hate women? Did he not? Did Bloom deserve it? Had Roth deserved it?

In what has become an immensely popular article, author Jess Row examines the pulse of the contemporary novel. Is it still beating? Find out in the Boston Review.

Today, too, in the literary world, a certain aristocracy sees its sun setting: the aristocracy of critics, editors, publishers, and tastemakers, still overwhelmingly white, if slightly less overwhelmingly male, who may be just beginning to realize that—for simple demographic reasons, if nothing else—the future does not belong to them. And so over the last decade, all the features of “Modern Fiction”—the relentless need to bifurcate; the urgent declaration of the new; the overblown, almost apocalyptic, need for a single definition, a final answer—have returned with a vengeance.

Fancy yourself a prose stylist? Over at Writer Unboxed, guest blogger Keith Cronin offers some helpful advice. Never, ever, consider using the word “verdant.”

My problem with verdant and the other words or phrases I’ve singled out is that they usually don’t ring true when I read them. They feel pretentious, as if they’ve been inserted by somebody who felt obligated to find a word less pedestrian than “green.”

Understandably disgusted at the recent closing of libraries across the country, poet Charles Simic asks us if we could really ever survive as a culture without our libraries. Read his comments in The New York Review of Books.

When you count the families all over this country who don’t have computers or can’t afford Internet connections and rely on the ones in libraries to look for jobs, the consequences will be even more dire. People everywhere are unhappy about these closings, and so are mayors making the hard decisions. But with roads and streets left in disrepair, teachers, policemen and firemen being laid off, and politicians in both parties pledging never to raise taxes, no matter what happens to our quality of life, the outlook is bleak. “The greatest nation on earth,” as we still call ourselves, no longer has the political will to arrest its visible and precipitous decline and save the institutions on which the workings of our democracy depend.

Don’t miss Flavorwire’s list of 10 Novels that Will Disturb Even the Coldest of Hearts.

Ever fallen in love with a phrase or a passage or even a symbol so deeply that you felt to get a tattoo of that very thing? Lisa Jane Persky explores the nature of the literary tattoo in the newly launched Los Angeles Review of Books (which you should follow on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/lareviewofbooks).

In September of last year, critic Elif Batuman published in the London Review of Books a lengthy indictment of Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Just last week, having obviously stewed over the matter long enough, McGurl gave his response in a not-quite-as-lengthy essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Jumping to the defense of MFA programs, McGurl labels Batuman’s views as elitist. Then, as a kind of mediator, Laura Miller of Salon offered her opinion on the matter, which is essentially indifference.

To quote McGurl:

This is the other, complementary side of the egalitarianism of the creative writing program and its invitation to the social masses to think of themselves as potential writers. If craft means knowing your business; if it means understanding how stories work, how they are best structured to produce certain effects, what must be put in (including, possibly, lots of research about “real things in the world”) and what left out; if it means spending at least as many hours working on your writing as you expect readers to spend reading it, then there can never be enough concern for craft. Far from simply being an expression of shame, or a call to “workmanlike” mediocrity, craft is how one earns one’s pride in one’s writing.

So let’s not get discouraged. Instead let’s go back to our sentences, read them with all our painstaking care, and tinker with them some more.

Photo by Glen Edelson[/add_caption_link]

As of today, I happen to have several friends who are in the process of querying literary agents. These are people so insane as to attempt writing novels, and furthermore so disgustingly self-disciplined that they have seen their novels through until the very last page.

But the fun is not over for these hard-working lunatics. Oh no. Now they have to write their query letters. This is a one-page letter asking a particular agent to represent their book. While it may seem like an easy task, the query letter is an art unto itself.

As an expert in query-letter writing, having personally harassed over a thousand literary agents in the greater Tri-State area, I thought I’d share a few samples of flawed query letters so that you may learn from my mistakes. Don’t worry. These are not letters that I personally ever sent.

Well, not all of them.

Too loud:

Dear Sir!

I need your attention right now!!!

You have to represent my book immediately!!! This isn’t a joke! I need YOU! To represent! Me! And/or my BOOK!!!

THE MURPHYS TAKE MANHATTAN is hot off my printer and scalding my palms! I’m not kidding! My palms are covered in blisters! This is the most shocking story about the most amazing family in the history of the most horrifying world!

The family’s name is the Murphys!!! You will not believe what happens to them! But it is nonetheless harrowingly believable!!! At the incredible but all-too-possible opening of the book, the Murphys move to New York City, the COOLEST city in the world!!!!!!!!

Right away, something awful, terrible, and extremely bad happens! There’s an earthquake!!! Everyone explodes!!!!!!!!!!!

Can you imagine the horror??? Probably not! That’s why you need, ME, a writer, to imagine it for you!!!

I have enclosed my shockingly well-written 450-page manuscript for you to read right now !!! I CAN’T WAIT TO HEAR WHAT YOU THINK!!!! May I call you? Don’t worry! I plan to anyway!!!

Have an awesome day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Becky Tuch!!!!

Too quiet:

To Whom It May Concern, Unless It Doesn’t Actually Concern You, In Which Case I’m Really Sorry To Bother You:

Hi. I hope I’m not interrupting your busy day. I also hope that you weren’t greatly troubled by clicking on the email to open this electronic query. Perhaps one day if/when we meet in person, I might massage the pads of your fingers.

Anyway, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to ask you about representing my novel. It’s not very good. It’s also longer than you’d probably like it to be. And it’s probably written in a stupid font. I was told that Courier looks writerly, but if this is a misunderstanding on my part, I’m really sorry.

The title of my novel is The Murphys Take Manhattan. It’s a dumb title. The plot’s pretty boring too. I had it workshopped 75 times and I’ve been revising it for the past six years. I think it might be the best I’m capable of.

I’m really sorry.

Please let me know if you’d like to see any pages or an outline. You probably won’t.

Even this query letter is terrible. I’m really sorry.

With sincere regret,

Becky Tuch

P.S. I hate my name and would be totally open to changing it.

P.P.S. That might be weird.

P.P.S.S. I’m really sorry.

Too casual:

Yo yo G-Money!

It’s me, all the way from Bizzoston to New Yizzork. I’m finally getting in touch about my WIP.

It’s not a WIP anymore, baby! Now it’s a full-blown W.

So check it. The Murphys Take Manhattan. There is a plot. So much stuff happens you wouldn’t believe. And characters, plenty of them. They talk and change and grow and sext. Yeah, dawg! So much sexting you wouldn’t believe. Teenagers, grown-ups, grandparents, everybody sexting, sexting, sexting. It’d be worrisome, if it weren’t for the fact that this novel is so damn good. So good you wouldn’t believe!

Think Armageddon meets Friends meets Brokeback Mountain meets The Wire. With sexting.

So when you wanna get together? Call me.

Or send a sext.

Peace out,

Bext (rhymes with you-know-what)

P.S. Sext!

Too formal:

Dear Madame,

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Rebecca Lynn Tuch. With your kind permission, I would like to request your representation of my latest opus, The Murphys Take Manhattan, in which I have no doubt that you will find the various attributes of the most exceptional works of high-literary high-upmarket high fiction.

In regards to the narrative structure, you will find in my work something of the following sequence of events: A family of the appellate Murphy relocates to the coastal city of New York, only to find themselves the unwitting victim of that most tragic of events—an earthquake of Richter measurement nine. In the selection of words that I have carefully arranged in a meaningful and syntactical order, my belief is that you will find such vital elements as descriptive setting and well-paced narrative prose.

Additionally, you will experience a catharsis three quarters of the way through. This will likely be the result of numerous colluding forces: a well-timed epiphany experienced by a lovably flawed protagonist, a remarkably operatic denouement, and the friendliness, accessibility, and edgy-but-timeless appeal of Courier, my chosen font.

Without further ado, I would like to conclude this letter by emphasizing my ravenous yearning to commence publication of my writings.

With high regard,

Rebecca Lynn Tuch, née Tuchverderber

Too much information:

Dear Agent #192,

I found your listing in the Barnes and Noble Guide to Second Tier Agents. The book cost me $29.95. I am hoping that you will be interested in representing my novel, and also that at some point over the course of our professional relationship, you could pay me back for the cost of this book.

My novel, The Murphys Take Manhattan, is inspired by several traumas I suffered as a child, adolescent, and Adult Child (of Adult Children).

The first bad thing that happened to me was at the age of five. When I asked my mother when dinner would be ready, she responded by wrapping me in a sleeping bag and placing me inside the refrigerator. Who knew that refrigerator doors could be locked from the outside? Certainly not I.

Subsequently, when I was seventeen, my father was laid off from his job. My family’s poverty coupled with my father’s exceptionally large forehead soon made us the laughing stock of the neighborhood. Devastated by his tarnished reputation, my father came to believe that only one thing could save us. Thus it was that he performed the operation on my club foot. When you meet me, you will likely notice my tapered wooden leg with the wooden ball attached to the bottom.

“Why, her leg looks like an exclamation point!” you will think, and you will not be wrong.

Numerous tragedies have shaped my Adult Childhood. First there was the slamming of planes into the World Trade Center. Then there were two wars in the Middle East. Recently, there has been another war in Libya, a terrible earthquake in Japan (a country I’d never even heard of until a few weeks ago!), as well as worldwide economic crises, riots, homelessness, hunger, and disease.

Things have gotten so bad that I recently called my mother and requested that she put me back in the refrigerator for good. Unfortunately, she refuses to acknowledge the traumatic incident, insisting that I am only remembering it this way because I am, by nature, “emotionally chilly.”

I know what you’re thinking. With such a rich personal history, why not write a memoir? It’s a question I’ve asked myself many times. The short answer is that I prefer the novel form. As for the long answer, please see the attached document, a compendium of essays entitled “My Life is So Crazy I Should Be Writing a Memoir But I’m Writing Fiction Instead: A Collection of Personal Essays.”

Because of all these experiences, I believe I am uniquely qualified to tell the story of a family living in New York, facing natural disaster. What is family life, afterall, if not a euphemism for Tornado of Shit?

I look forward to your response to my query letter (and the attached sixty-five pages of essays elaborating upon my query letter.) Additionally, I would appreciate you blocking out several hours for our first meeting.

Thanks in advance for the $29.95, as well as the hours of therapy our relationship will provide,

Becky Tuch

Too little information:

You.

Me.

Book.

Fame.

Gratitude.

B.

A few years back, I won a short story contest. So excited was I that once my hands quit shaking, I picked up the phone and called my brother. “Hey!” I said. “Remember that anti-____ phase you went through in your twenties? You know where you had very strong feelings about ____ and you did all these terrible things like _____? And mom and dad were really worried because you ____, and then you _____ and the police had to _____?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “What about it?”

“Well guess what! I wrote a short story about it and I won a prize!”

Silence.

“Isn’t that great?” I asked. “Aren’t you happy for me?”

Silence. Then, “I really wish you wouldn’t use my life in your writing.”

Boom. In a single instant, my first big break as a writer turned out to be nothing but heartbreak. I hung up the phone deflated, ashamed, and frightened of what lay in my bedroom upstairs: an entire manuscript of short stories detailing everything from my brother’s experiment with ______ to his obsession with _____, and the long phase where my whole family had to ______ to help him deal with his ______.

A mere child in the ways of the world, sensitive to every ripple in the pond of my literary creations, I stopped writing about my family. I moved on to other topics, larger social issues like criminal justice, and imaginary people I had never met in person and so could never actually hurt.

But recently, something happened. I got older. I got wiser. And after seven years of pounding my head for material, I had an epiphany: My family can suck it.

I mean, what’s the point of being a writer if not to let your resentments build over a lifetime so that you may one day slay your family members through the refracted mirror of art?

So dear hard-working writers, you loving siblings, devoted sons and daughters, so careful to toe the line, ever so protective of your human relationships, I say, get over it. It’s just family.

If you’re not sure how to proceed, here are some fun and easy things I’ve done. You may want to try them too:

Mother

I have a great mother. As a child, she bathed me, clothed me, and even fed me on alternating Mondays. But after a lifetime of protecting her feelings and safe-guarding her privacy, I’m done with the good daughter thing.

These days most of my short stories feature mothers that are monsters. They eat their children. Their skin is made of rippled leather and they have bloody yellow fangs for teeth. Smoke oozes out of their eyeballs while black ink dribbles out of their ears. Their voices rub like sandpaper on an open wound. Their breath smells like death.

When my mother reads these stories, she always thinks it’s about her, and by extension, that I am making a statement about my own childhood.  “Was it that bad?” she whimpers.

For the sake of playing along, I say, “Don’t worry, mom. It’s not based on you.”

“Really?” she says.

Then I tell her, “No. I was just kidding. They’re all based on you.”

“The lizard mother who feeds her children shredded glass and then lights them on fire? That one’s based on me?”

I nod. “That one especially.”

Father

Men are notoriously delicate creatures. While it may seem that their broad shoulders and hard biceps function as shields against emotional pain, most men are easy to make cry. My dad is no exception. Throughout my childhood, I often watched him weeping at the dinner table. “Dear Lord,” he would cry. “What have I done?” Sometimes just looking at me would set him off: “When will this agony be over?”

Because of my father’s extreme “nervous condition,” I have tried hard to protect him from my own self. But I’m not getting any younger. If I want to make it as a writer, I’ve got to tell the truth. So I’ve decided it’s time for my father to know the real me: Becky Tuch, Drug, Sex, and Yogurt Addict.

Since my dad insists on reading everything I write, last week I went ahead and sent him my latest work of autobiographical fiction. It’s a short memoir/novel excerpt called, “My Life of Constant Drugs, Sex, and Yogurt.”

Personally, I think it’s one of my better works. Where else will you find two transgendered space aliens having sex with a curly-haired heroin-junkie, while snorting cocaine off the lid of a yogurt container?

When I called him yesterday, our conversation went like this:

“Hey, Daddy! Did you read the thing I sent you?”

“Um…yes…sweetheart.”

“Well? What do you think?”

“I…It’s very good, sweetie…You’re really…growing as a writer …Your style is…um…”

“You hate it.”

“I don’t hate it. I just wonder…is this based on…?”

“Don’t worry, Dad! It’s just fiction!”

Then I hung up the phone. The Dannon truck was passing my house.

Grandmother

I’ve been writing fiction since I was eight years old. That means that I’ve spent the past twenty-three years of my life looking for ways to offend my grandma. At last, I think I’ve found the perfect story:

A young girl takes a bus to Connecticut to visit her grandmother. Over the course of dinner, the young girl announces that she’s eaten enough and pushes her plate away. The grandmother says, “Sweetheart, would you like some more food?” The granddaughter, smiling politely says, “No, thank you, grandma. I’m full.”

The End.

I’ve already tested this story out on a few of the local grandmothers in my neighborhood. After reading the part about the young girl turning down food, I observed their lips pucker into horror as their hair turned from white to purple to cerulean. “This is very upsetting!” they cried.

Mission accomplished!

Significant Other

My boyfriend’s an asshole. I’m not even exaggerating. He sucks.

On the scale of terrific relationships, with one being the lowest and a hundred being the highest, my relationship falls somewhere between negative infinity and imaginary numbers.

Fortunately, I can write whatever I want about him because my boyfriend—the slimebag—happens to be in Canada right now.

What’s that you say? They have the internet in Canada?

Come on.

Really?

Children

This is a tough one. Children, being simultaneously jaded by mass media and also extremely naïve and gullible, are perhaps the trickiest family members to offend.

I can’t exactly speak to this, as I do not have children.

But I am the child of two very deranged people. And I can tell you, as a child, just about everything my parents say and do offends me.

So, if you are a parent looking to offend your children—don’t worry. Your very existence is offensive enough.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the novel. What it is, what it does, and what it means.

My musings crystallized in a writing workshop last week when my students asked me to talk about “narrative arc.”

Normally, in workshop, I am quick to share definitions and advice: Characters should want something tangible. Descriptions must develop character and move the story forward. Protagonists should be in danger, and for pity’s sake don’t use dialogue tags every single time someone speaks.

But on this question—“What is narrative arc?” I found myself unusually hesitant.

“I could tell you some standard definitions,” I said. “Like how your character should want something and not get it, and the wanting and not-getting goes on and on for many chapters until the character has an epiphany and everything changes.”

They were taking notes as I spoke—always a horrifying thing to witness.

“That’s kind of the traditional model,” I added quickly.

And then I threw my hands in the air. “But I don’t want any of you to follow the traditional model. Or, what I mean is, I don’t want you to feel constrained by it. Because what it’s easy to forget is that a novel can be and do many, many things.” I told them about novels constructed as a series of vignettes. We looked at a five-page novel excerpt consisting entirely of descriptive sentence fragments. And of course, there is Georges Perec’s brilliant novel written entirely without the letter “e.” Finally, I said that there was plenty of advice about this kind of thing on the internet, if they wanted it. But I personally was reluctant to tell them, “This is what a novel must be.”

After all, what is a novel, exactly?

More importantly, if there is a definition, who created it?

Who decided, for instance, that characters ought to have rich inner lives? That plot must move forward in linear time? That character growth can be measured by the acquisition of internal attributes such as ‘self-awareness,’ ‘understanding’ and ‘compassion’? Who decided that growth is even a virtue at all?

In Terry Eagleton’s wonderful overview of literary history, Literary Theory: An Introduction, the critic tells us that “In eighteenth-century England…What made a text ‘literary’ was not whether it was fictional…but whether it conformed to a certain standard of ‘polite letters.’’

Taking a radical critical position, Eagleton argues that our notions of ‘literature’ were originally formed by society’s elites.  “With the need to incorporate the increasingly powerful but spiritually rather raw middle classes into unity with the ruling aristocracy to diffuse polite social manners, habits of ‘correct’ taste and common cultural standards, literature gained a new importance ….The criteria for what counted as literature…were frankly ideological.”

In other words, since people were not going to church as much, what would continue to soothe and pacify the masses? The answer was clear: Beautiful stories.

Nowadays, I highly doubt the guys at Big Publishing House are sitting around the boardroom saying, “Hm. How can we indoctrinate a spiritually alienated middle class? I know! Let’s publish a Da Vinci Code sequel!”

What I do know is that in much of today’s memoirs and literary fiction, we see displays of love for children and animals, a desire for romance, a need for connection and better interpersonal relationships. We see the dangers of excessive indulgence–drugs, alcohol, food, sex. Throw in a personal quest where a character’s struggles are emotional or psychological (as opposed to social or political), plus the hunger for an “authentic” soul/self/identity, and you’ve got it–a recipe for a novel designed for a non-revolting, well-functioning middle class!

Perhaps by now one might wish to shout, “Hey! Who cares? I just want to tell my story!”

That’s great. The wanting-to-tell is a writer’s best resource. Go ahead. Tell that story.

But also, now and then, it might be useful to consider the structure you will use for your narrative. What is the shape? How does it move? Where did that shape originate?

And if and when you do break the rules, consider this: might you also break free of history?

Last week I published an article about women and submitting—my thoughts on why women may submit less frequently to literary magazines than men and why, in turn, women get published less frequently. I wrote the article on an airplane coming back from a writer’s conference. I did not expect many people to notice, care, or respond.

But that week the blog on which the article was posted broke the record for site visitors. Nineteen people left comments, some thanking me for the post, some half-agreeing, and some not sure whether they agreed or not. Whatever their stance, it was immensely gratifying to see the community forming around this issue.

Cut to Saturday night. I’ve been waiting tables for the past nine hours. It’s two in the morning. My head is buzzing with table numbers and drink orders. I’m distraught about the money I lost by accidentally cashing out a table that paid with credit card. (Wherever you are, young women, I hope you’re enjoying your free dinner!)

Enter: Self-googling.

Two hours later (it’s now four in the morning) I am awash in articles featuring my name. One blogger is happy by the article I posted. Another backs me up. Still another shows her support. Then, there’s the fallout. I am dubbed a “gender-warrior,” accused of practicing “pissy” “reverse-sexism.” My article is construed as an attack against “repressive patriarchy” and “chauvinistic men.” I am accused of going “on and on,” “ready to do battle with men and society…and…the good old ‘glass ceiling.’”

Enter: Blood boiling.

There are numerous ways to cope with criticism, and if you find yourself lucky enough to have your work publicly mauled, no doubt you’ll find outlets for your frustration or disappointment. But if you need some support, below is a list of suggestions that might help pull you through.

Feel honored. However nasty or erroneous the charges against your work, the reviewer’s attention is still a compliment. Somebody considered your work important and central enough to the public discourse to bear commenting upon. Remember when you were a lonely writer desperate to be heard? Well, consider yourself heard.

Step back. Keep in mind that it is not you the person is criticizing, but your work. As writers we define ourselves by our work so this may sound like frivolous advice. But once you’ve created and published something, it enters the public space as a commodity. Let it be.

Know the rules of the game. When people do step away from the ideas on the page and take to labeling you as a person, by calling you a “gender warrior” for example, this is called an ad hominem argument. This is a personal attack intended to invalidate and belittle your position. Any critic who does this can be rightfully ignored.

Proceed with caution. If you must self-google (because you do not have google alerts or because you are absolutely sure your google alert is malfunctioning since your name hasn’t appeared in the past ten hours), have a system. One good rule is to wait a few hours before commenting on things that irk you. Another is to not comment at all. Even as your fingers twitch on the keyboard, remind yourself, “Don’t say anything! Wait a day! It’s the rule!”

Mind your manners. If you do comment, be nice! As I said earlier, I didn’t expect many people to read my blog, let alone tweet about it, comment on it or write entire blogs in response to it. Others may be writing articles and blogs with similar sentiments—spilling their hearts out into the void with no sense of who might be listening. If you disagree with what a blogger has said about you, sometimes a gentle comment along the lines of “Hi, thanks for the article,” reminds this blogger that you’re real. This might soften their touch when they review work in the future, or may even encourage them to reconsider your own work. If not, you can at least take comfort in knowing you took the high road (and kept yourself from lawsuits and death threats!)

Expect nothing. My boyfriend is a political activist. I am continually humbled by how hard he works, how much time he puts in to his organization, and how little people actually care what he is doing. Worse, many people disagree with what he’s doing and in some cases work to prevent his organization from succeeding. Still, he soldiers on. He doesn’t expect people to listen, agree or  care. I admire this and have tried to cultivate this attitude in my own writing practice: Here is what I need to say. I don’t expect anyone to agree, understand, or care. Thus when they do, it’s a joyous surprise.

Keep going! Do not let a fear of being criticized keep you from putting your work into the public sphere. Let it go! Get it out there! Tell yourself you’re a shitty writer, nothing you say is original, your arguments are all regressive and your metaphors are so hackneyed they’re practically photocopies of other people’s work. Your sentences are bloated. You have no talent. Your ideas are primitive. Everything you say is the worst thing you could ever possibly say and no one will ever respect you once it’s published.

Then, very calmly, put your work into an envelope (or an online submissions manager), and send it on its way.

Given the numerous magazines in which this particular gentleman has been published, Xenith readers may have already stumbled across Andrew MacDonald’s short fiction. At 24, Andrew is working on his masters in creative writing and has been published in The Fiddlehead, Blackheart Magazine, Existere, qwerty, Feathertale, echolocation, and many other magazines. He also maintains a blog at caughtwithstring.blogspot.com. In this interview, he touches on the writing and revision process as well as his experience with publishing in the small press.

As someone who has primarily published fiction, you’ve developed an undeniable skill for it. When you contrast your writing now versus your writing from when you first started out, what is the most marked difference? What, if anything, has remained the same?

That’s a good question. When I first started out, I didn’t pay much attention to plot logistics. I focused a lot more on style, mostly of the high fallutin’ kind. Lots of big words, lengthy descriptions, tons of exposition. Nowadays I’m more interested in crafting stories, not sentences. An old mentor once told me that writers tend to be stylists or storytellers. I used to classify myself as the former; now, not so much.

The more I write, the more I realize that language will always service the idea. That sounds complicated, but it’s not. Your goal is to entertain, or otherwise engage, your reader. An alienating text is rarely successful. Or at least I avoid them like the plague. Everyone denigrates the Dan Browns, the JK Rowlings, the Grishams. Not me. I admire their mastery of storytelling craft. We like to think that writing is all about beautiful words. Maybe that’s part of it, and certainly it’s one of the first things I worked on when I started. But the art of crafting a plot is a huge part of writing fiction, and lately that’s the part of the game I’ve been focusing on. Someone like John Irving is a good example of a, quote, literary writer, who pays attention to plot, makes things happen, and doesn’t have a really graceful style. I think of Dickens too, or Graham Greene (though some people might disagree about him).

Other than that, developing discipline and shedding the title of weekend writer. You have to take your writing seriously if you want other people to.

Almost everyone has some definable method of organizing thoughts and ideas in preparation for writing. What is the typical series of events that takes place between the initial spark of your short story and writing the first sentence?

I like to have a vague idea of where I’m going, but I’m open to change. Usually something hits me, a sentence, an idea, some weird event, and I’ll try to work through the possibilities. Once I have something, anything, I’ll write a few sentences. Most of the time they’re not in any kind of coherent order, at least on the page, but in my brain they fit like jigsaw pieces in a bigger picture. The less time I spend being anal and planning the better. The less restraint, the better. The less time I spend analyzing what goes into that first draft, the better.

So when you tell someone that you’re working on a story, and they ask you what it’s about, it’s pretty safe to assume that you aren’t sure yet? In that vein, when someone asks the same question on a finished story, are you able to answer?

Sure. For me, the summary is really about isolating the story’s conflict. You hear agents throw around this piece of advice all the time for novels, and I think it applies to fiction of all flavors: if you can’t summarize your story in a sentence or less, you might need to do some thinking. Going into a story I’ll probably have a good idea about what it’s going to be a about. At least generally. It could change as circumstance dictates.

How would you describe your revision process? What do your first drafts generally look like in comparison to the copy that goes to the publisher?

Revision’s more fun that writing the first draft. Still painful, though. Sometimes my first drafts are pretty solid, but mostly they’re awful, putrid, stenchy.

Let’s throw in a quote by Charles de Gaulle: “Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.” What lambs have you digested? Who shows up in what way?

That was elquently phrased. Well done, Chuck. Immediate influences? Salman Rushdie, Mordecai Richler, John Irving, Zadie Smith. Recent digestifs include Shalom Auslander’s Foreskin’s Lament, Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, Bechdel’s amazing graphic novel Fun Home, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.

Conversely, what lambs have given you indigestion?

This will get me chirps from both ends of the litgeek spectrum, but Chuck Palahniuk and Jane Austen. I think Chuck’s got a good marketing team and a bagful of gimmicks he employs every book. I enjoyed Fight Club. Anything after that . . . he just gets worse and worse. Sigh. Plain Jane’s got skills I respect, she’s just not my thing.

There’s no getting around the fact that you have an impressive list of publication credits. What is your usual process for submitting a piece of writing? Do you let it sit for a few months, awaiting revisions, or do you submit immediately after finishing? Do you submit to several magazines at once or just pick what you think would be a good fit? Do you write pieces and think, “Hey this would be a good fit for Fred’s Magazine” or do you come to that decision much later?

I used to be impatient, sending everything out the second I lifted my fingers off the keyboard. Which meant I’d have ten pieces floating in submission land, and ten rejections coming a few months later. While that didn’t yield particularly stunning results, it was an important step: send your stuff out there. Be too big for your britches. Grow thick skin and get used to the process.

Getting work out there, published in journals, is rough: the pay is crap, the wait is long, and most people don’t care. On the other hand, it’s a good way to build your CV and your confidence. And who knows who might be reading? An agent caught the story a friend of mine wrote in a nationally distributed literary journal and asked if he had representation yet. I don’t send stories out anymore unless I’m confident in them, and even then I expect a rejection letter. What used to be a week of editing a story has turned into months. Having one really sharp story is probably worth more than a handful of clunky ones. I’ve done some small-time journal editing and know from experience that editors are looking for reasons to trash your stuff.

I tend to avoid writing for specific markets, partly because I get caught up in writing what I want to, for better or for worse, and partly because I just plain suck when I try. Most of the places I submit to frown upon simultaneous submissions, so it makes for long waits. Duotrope is a fantastic resource and I use it every time I submit to a publication.

What would you say is cardinal advice for authors looking to start submitting their work?

Cardinal advice? Just do it. Follow the guidelines and get work out there.

If you could boil it down to something specific, what is the most important lesson you have learned in the years you’ve spent improving your craft?

Keep going when everyone else quits.