Reflections on Writing Fiction
There's no better way of getting in touch with your inadequacies...
Having written some fifty short stories since 2012, I think I see what the late Philip Roth meant when he quipped that “Writing is frustration—it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.”
Sure, sometimes it goes easily. The words become sentences, the sentences arrange themselves into paragraphs, the paragraphs evolve into story. “She Has More” went like that. I got the idea one Saturday morning, sat down, and wrote the story in about two hours. Reading it over a week later I found that I hardly needed to change a thing. Admittedly “She Has More” is a short-short story, little more than a trifle, but it’s one of my favorites—not least because it gave me no grief.
Let not the above anecdote give you a wrong impression, however. Most of the time writing a short story is hard work, replete with false starts, wrong turns, bad patches, brain cramps and yes, the angst described by Roth. Take my story “Virus.” It began well, but 1,000 words in I hit the wall. The problem: I wasn’t working with a fully developed idea but with a vague notion, based on a single character. I hacked away at it for a bit longer, but uh-uh, nothing doing. So in my frustration I consigned notion and character to the waiting room of my imagination, hoping they’d mature down there in the dark, which eventually they did. Then over a period of two or three weeks, I wrote “Virus.”
Sometimes a story idea causes trouble because it strikes uncomfortably close to home. Writing “Survivor,” which is loosely based on a battlefield incident that my daughter Alex, an Army veteran of Afghanistan, related to me, I found that I’d summoned up a cohort of unquiet ghosts: my childhood bout with polio—Vietnam—the tense, fearful year of Alex’s deployment. Though I knew what I wanted to do with “Survivor” the story proved hard to write, both emotionally and because close to home as it was, I wanted to create some distance. Thus Afghanistan was replaced by Iraq and I handled the story’s main character with care, so he wouldn’t turn out to be Tom in fictional greasepaint. Of my stories “Survivor” is the one most personal to me, I’ve been told that it’s good, but writing it left me with a sad, diminished feeling that somehow I’d failed.
Then there was “The Path Between the Trees,” my first shot at magic realism. I had a problem with that one because the original idea seemed frivolous, maybe even lame: a haunted back yard. I decided to give it a shot anyway and as sometimes happens, the tale developed in unexpected ways. But how to explain its mysterious occurrences? The obvious answer—well, it seemed obvious when finally it came to me—was that I didn’t need to explain them: “The Path Between the Trees” would work only if it kept its secrets, if the mystery at its heart remained a mystery. That’s the point of pairing magic with realism, isn’t it? So I quit worrying about explanations and just wrote the damned story.
And really, that’s all there is to it: Just quit worrying and write the damned thing.
Granted, that’s easier said than done—as countless books and articles on the art of writing attest. Of the pitfalls of the craft one may say their name is Legion, for they are many. For instance there’s the demon of over-analysis, which induces paralysis. You may indeed have a fairly clear idea of where your story is going and how you want it to turn out. But always there’s the fatal temptation to bite your lip and wring your hands and think things over, and rethink them, and think again, and write a couple of paragraphs and read them over and rewrite them. The only remedy is to elbow your doubts to the side, keep writing, push the envelope, see what happens. An idea that doesn’t pan out or a false start leading to a change of course can be discouraging—I’ve got a folder full of quarter-finished tales and notes and notions that didn’t pack the gear. But they were among my teachers; in one way or another they moved me along to the tales that did get written
Teaching. A dispute rages as to whether the craft of fiction writing can be taught at all; personally I doubt it. Either you have what it takes to live in your imagination and translate what you find there into vibrant prose and gripping story, or you don’t. Not that I think creative writing courses are useless: Discussion and criticism can certainly help beginning writers hone their talent. While there are no hard-and-fast rules involved in the writing of fiction, there are useful guidelines relating to such things as point of view, crafting dialog, the rationing of adjectives and adverbs, revising and editing, etc. So take that class, read those books and articles, weigh the advice they give and take it if it seems sensible. But remember that it didn’t come engraved on stone tablets.
Oh, and you should read. A lot. And widely. I could easily list dozens of short stories and novels that helped me to understand how fiction works. Here’s one: “The Little Black Bag” by C.M. Kornbluth. Here’s another: “The Swimmer” by John Cheever. And here’s a third: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Don’t restrict yourself to fiction, either: I learned a great deal about writing from the essays of George Orwell and the nonfiction of Joan Didion.
There’s one other book in particular I highly recommend: How Fiction Works (2008) by the British literary critic James Wood—extremely valuable because it contradicts so many conventional assumptions about the craft. You may not agree with this or that aspect of Wood’s analysis; some of it may sail over your head, as it did mine. But thinking about the issues he raised was helpful to me, and I commend to you his remarkable treatise.
And we need all the help we can get. Writing fiction is a battle—a unrelenting daily battle against laziness, boredom, fatigue, doubt, despair. It’s what Philip Roth was getting at, I think: that writers are men and women at war with the petty devils of their nature. And he was right, but still there’s the fun part: the slam-dunk feeling when you get an idea you know will work; the rush when a plot problem resolves itself; that brief moment of satisfaction when the day’s work is done, and well done. Such modest pleasures are the writer’s true reward.
But even the fun is not finally the point. The work is necessary; that’s what I’ve learned. I do it and you do it because—well, what the hell else can we do?