Reflections on Writing Fiction
There's no better way of getting in touch with your inadequacies...
Note: I began writing short stories after retiring from my final civilian job in 2011. By 2022, when I started “Un-Woke in Indiana,” my fiction portfolio contained forty-seven tales. One of the first Substack articles I wrote was this one, which was published on May 3, 2022. To date it has had a mere twenty-eight readers, but rereading it recently, I decided that it was worth republishing for the benefit of the many subscribers who’ve joined me since it first appeared.
Most of the writing I’ve done since joining Substack has been nonfiction: history and political commentary; essays on radical lawyer Faye Stender, George Orwell, William Shakespeare; some recommended reading. But I still have a file full of story ideas, fragments, quarter- or half-finished tales that having lain fallow for a time, might now yield up their potential. This article reminds me what I’m letting myself in for.
Some of the stories mentioned below have been published on Substack, and I’ve provided links to them. The article itself has been revised for republication.
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, a mere 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 frustration, I consigned both notion and character to the waiting room of my imagination, hoping that 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. The story proved hard to write, thanks both to the emotions it stirred and because many of its details struck close to home. I saw that I needed to distance the story from those details. Thus Afghanistan was replaced by Iraq, and I handled the story’s main character with care so that he wouldn’t turn out to be Thomas in fictional greasepaint. Of my stories “Survivor” is the one most personal to me. It’s not my favorite, though, haunted as it is by those unquiet ghosts.
Sometimes, of course, it’s just fun: I had a blast writing “Gangs of Suburbia.” The story idea came to me as a bolt from the blue with that ineffable feeling of rightness. And so it proved. I had a bit of bother with the story’s opening passage—where to begin is always the key question—but once that was settled, the rest came easily. The tale of Emily and her girls, true community activists, is among my favorites. It is, incidentally, one of those stories that lean heavily on dialogue, not so much in quantity as in quality. I had to give the girls voices that matched their thing. And in that, I believe, I succeeded.
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 occured to me—was that I didn’t need to explain them: “The Path Between the Trees” would work only if it kept its secrets, only 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 that their name is Legion, for they are many. For instance, there’s the demon of over-analysis, which induces paralysis. Yes, you may 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 think things over, and rethink them, and write a couple of paragraphs, and read them over, and rewrite them—lather, rinse, repeat.
The only escape from this doom loop is to elbow your doubts to the side, push the envelope, and 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, evaluate 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 another book that I can 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 and 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 your attention 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: Writers are men and women at war with the petty little 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. 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?
My second short story collection, The Double, which contains most of the tales mentioned above, is available on Amazon in a Kindle edition and also in a handsome paperback edition.
Also on Amazon: my first short story collection, A Cold Day in August, available as a Kindle edition and a paperback edition. It includes “Gangs of Suburbia.”
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