Posted on - No Comments on Increasing your chances of winning a contest: not naming names, or, calling a spade a diamond

Increasing your chances of winning a contest: not naming names, or, calling a spade a diamond

After yesterday’s suggestion that it might behoove potential contest entrants who write about real-life incidents to enter their work in both fiction and nonfiction categories, this seems like the natural moment to concentrate for a post upon a category dear to my heart: memoir. As a past PNWA Zola Award winner for best nonfiction book/memoir, I have a thing or two to say on the subject. And having judged in this category, I can say a few more.

So let’s get right to it, shall we?

Let’s start with the technicalities first: please, I implore you, if you are submitting a memoir entry, FOLLOW THE RULE ABOUT NOT HAVING YOUR OWN NAME APPEAR ANYWHERE IN THE MANUSCRIPT. And do bear in mind that this rule applies to not only your entire name, but EITHER your first or your last appearing alone.

Actually, every contest entry everywhere should follow all the rules in the contests they enter, but this is the single most common way for memoir entries to get themselves disqualified — and the reason that for a memoir entry, you should NEVER just print up the opening chapter of your book and send it in.

Unless, of course, you are writing anonymously, or under a pseudonym. Even then, it is a good idea to add a note on the title page, saying that since the contest forbids the author to mention his own name, you will be using “Bobby” (not your real name) throughout. Because, you see, it’s practically impossible NOT refer to yourself by name in the story of your own life — and judges are aware of that, and become accordingly eagle-eyed.

And why is that a problem? Everybody, sing along with me now: because the judges are trying to weed out as many entries from the finalist running as swiftly as possible. As usual, it all comes down to time.

The no-name rule, however, exists for a very good reason: for a contest to be worth its salt, it must be able to claim that its judging procedures are not biased; the first step to assuring lack of personal bias is to institute blind judging, where no judge knows the name of any given author. Now, as I explained in my earlier blogs on how to pick the right contest for you, some competitions are only apparently unbiased, but for the most part, contest organizers take authorial anonymity very seriously indeed.

So no, finding a clever way to get around the rules is not going to endear you to them. Not at all.

Make yourself comfortable; I’m going to tell you a little story. I went to college with Danny, a very clever, very ambitious writer who periodically contributed pieces to the on-campus humor magazine. Now, it was the practice of the magazine to publish all of its pieces without bylines, to encourage collaboration amongst members of the writing club. But as I said, Danny was ambitious: he, like many of the other writers in the club, was anxious to graduate with clippings he could use to promote his work later on.

So Danny did something exceptionally crafty: he inserted his own name into every ostensibly anonymous piece he wrote, much as Jerry Lee Lewis used to refer to himself in his own lyrics, so radio listeners would know who sang the song. Danny’s favorite way of doing this was to have an imaginary conversation with himself, so an alter ego could address him by name, as in, “Danny boy, you’re really in trouble now!” Occasionally, he would vary it by having an authority figure yell at his narrator: “Wilson, you’re out of line!”

(For the sake of MY own credibility, and because Danny is now a fairly prominent magazine writer, I should say straight away: to protect his identity, Wilson is not Danny’s actual last name.}

Now, as my parenthetical aside just told you indirectly, Danny’s little stratagem actually did help him generate the clippings he coveted, but he was relying upon his club’s editorial indulgence to let him get away with breaking the rules. In a contest, this practice would have gotten him disqualified immediately.

I bring this up not because there are legions of Machiavellian-minded rule-breakers out there, but because I have seen so many contest entries that have apparently done inadvertently what Danny did on purpose. Within the first-person narrative common to memoirs, narrators tend to talk to themselves all the time, À la Hamlet: “Danny, you get ahold of yourself, now.”

And that single reference, to a judge who was looking to pounce upon contest rule violations, could get a memoir entry disqualified. Yes, even though it would be highly unlikely, without the judge’s having the list of memoir entrants by his side for first-name cross-referencing purposes, for the judge to guess the author’s identity. Simply the implication that the author might have referred to himself can appear to be a rule violation.

So a word to the wise: innocent mistakes can knock your entry out of competition.

Now, I think this is pretty mean, personally. Usually, the author’s name (almost always the first) comes up as an unconscious slip, where it’s pretty obvious that the author thought she had expunged all relevant references to herself. But, as I have been telling you for the last couple of weeks, the submitter has absolutely no control over who is going to read his manuscript; it would behoove to prepare your entry, like your queries, under the assumption that the judge who is going to read it is the nastiest, most curmudgeonly nit-picker since, well, me.

“But Anne,” I hear you cry, pale at the prospect of encountering yours truly as a contest judge, “if this mistake is usually made inadvertently, how can I hope to avoid it?”

Well asked, oh fearful trembler. Experience sharpens the editing eye. Rest yourself upon the judge’s reading couch for a moment, and take a look at where these slips most commonly occur.

Let’s say the memoir’s author is named Biddy MacAlister-Thames, not a name anyone’s eye is likely to encounter on a page without noticing. Biddy should check her entry especially carefully in the following scenes:

(1) When another character directly addresses the narrator: “Biddy, have you seen the our pet tiger, Max?”

(2) When another character is talking about the narrator behind her back: “Ward, I’m worried about the Beaver. He’s paying too much attention to that Biddy next door.”

(3) And, in the VAST MAJORITY of childhood memoirs, when the narrator gets in trouble, some adult says: “Elizabeth Deirdre MacAlister-Thames, you come in this house this instant!”

Remember, in order to violate the rule, even if a character OTHER than the author appears with the author’s last name, it can cost you. So our Biddy should keep her eye out for these kinds of situations, too:

(4) When a third party addresses a family member: “Mrs. MacAlister-Thames, your daughter is under arrest.”

(5) When the narrator refers to her family collectively, or to a possession as theirs: The Easter Bunny had been unusually generous to the MacAlister-Thames family that year.

And, as I mentioned above, self-references to EITHER your first or last name, not just to both together, count as rule violations. So Biddy would be wise to do a search-and-replace for BOTH your first AND last names in your entry before you print it up.

Yes, it’s a tedious thing to have to do, Biddy, and yes, you have my sympathies for having to do it. But frankly, I would rather see you annoyed and on the finalist list than not proofread and disqualified. I’m funny that way.

Keep up the good work!

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Writing the real, part V: Characterization

Before I launch into today’s installment, I am delighted to have some good news to report about a member of the Author! Author! community. Remember last month, when I announced that long-time reader Janet Oakley was a finalist in the Surrey Writer’s Conference Literary Contest, for her essay, DRYWALL (from a larger work entitled TIME OF GRIEF)? Well, she WON! Everyone, please join me in a great big round of applause!

As I mentioned before, Janet is no stranger to contest recognition: her novels THE TREE SOLDIER and THE JOSSING AFFAIR were both past PNWA contest finalists. Primarily a writer of historical fiction, she has published articles and essays on a broad array of subjects, in everything from Rugby Magazine to Historylink.

Congratulations, Janet, and may this be a stepping-stone to many more victories for you! And everybody, please keep sending in your success stories – I love to be able to report good news about my readers.

Okay, back to the topic at hand. Throughout this series, I have been using an anecdote about a conference to show the dangers of incorporating real-life stories into your fiction submissions. Quite apart from the fact that such stories can sometimes feel very peripheral to the plot (come on, most of us have shoehorned a scene we liked into a book at least once), they often, perversely, lack the ring of truth when reproduced in a fictional context.

In this series, I have been trying to show you how and why. Let me try telling the anecdote again.

I was at a small conference in Montana, sitting by a plate glass window the size of a woolly mammoth, gazing out over a well-trimmed golf course toward the nearby blue mountains of Glacier National Park. I had given a class on manuscript submission dos and don’ts – necessary, but hardly thrilling – which, I am grateful to say, attracted many conference attendees to share their book ideas with me, looking for advice on how to impress agents with them.

However, even the most well-meaning of helpers needs a break from time to time, so I was sitting with one of the other presenters, enjoying a cup of the local stand-a-spoon-up-in-it coffee, the old West kind that keeps even latte-hardened Seattleites like me up for days on end. Suddenly, a dear little old lady plopped herself down in the middle of our conversation, introduced herself hurriedly as Ellen, and started telling us both about her book.

At length. As in the age of the woolly mammoth might have come and gone in the course of the telling.

I wasn’t altogether surprised. Ellen was, after all, the person who had brought the screenwriting class to a screeching halt the day before: when asked to give her three-line pitch, she spoke for the following twelve minutes nonstop. Four of those twelve minutes were unrelated anecdotes about her early life, begun in response to the screenwriting teacher’s polite but increasingly strained attempts to get her to narrow down her story to, well, three lines. I had to give her points for personal style.

By the end of the fortieth minute of monologue over coffee, however, her charm had begun to fade a little for me, I must admit. My initial conversational companion needed to catch a shuttle to the airport soon, so we had both begun to drop miniscule, subtle hints to Ellen that it might be time for us to stop listening and move on to pastures greener, or at any rate more airborne. Yet miraculously, each polite attempt to excuse a move toward the doorway seemed to remind Ellen of yet another anecdote marginally related to her book.

Not that it wasn’t entertaining stuff. Most of her stories concerned her grandmother’s ongoing plots with her father to humiliate her mother, who evidently was not the brightest crayon in the box, if you get my drift. Grandma was cultured, refined, the kind of lady who brushed off bores by rising imperiously and declaring, “If you will excuse me, I have some correspondence to which I simply must attend immediately.” Unfortunately, Grandma did not suffer fools gladly: her pet name for Mama was evidently “you ninny.” In fact, I gathered from the collected anecdotes, the only thing that drab little Mama had ever done in her life to please Grandma had been to marry Papa, thus providing an apparently endless stream of opportunities for the old girl and Papa to trick Mama into embarrassing situations.

Hilarity, naturally, ensued.

Amused as I was, I have to say, the more Ellen talked, the more I disliked Grandma qua character; I was starting to side with poor abused Mama, catering to that harpy for fifty years, married to that cad, AND doing all of the cooking and cleaning. Yet in each and every (and I do mean EVERY) story, Ellen presented Grandma as an admirable person, a gem forced to live in a henhouse, wreaking her well-justified revenge upon the people who supported her for their stupidity. (Oh, yes: Grandma used to target the townsfolk, too. I’ll spare you what he did to the Lutheran pastor; suffice it to say that he moved on to another parish toute suite.)

To compound the problem, Ellen’s anecdotal style was a bit diffuse, so as listeners, we were forced to be active, clarifying minor details such as, “What year was this?” “Why was it necessary to euthanize the dog?” and “What exactly did the King of Sweden have to do with this situation?” But mostly, being nice, well brought-up women, we said, “Oh, how hard that must have been for you,” and “My, how fascinating,” and glanced furtively at our watches.

As shuttle time ticked closer, our hints grew somewhat broader. We asked for the check; we paid the bill; we gathered our things, all the while murmuring whenever Ellen drew breath, “Mmm,” or, “How interesting,” or, “Look at the time — I’m going to miss my plane!” as the opportunity warranted. By the time Ellen launched into what I devoutly hoped was going to be her last anecdote, my friend and I were both standing, clutching the backs of our chairs, saying how nice it had been to meet her.

Ellen settled back into her seat, clearly all ready for hours of storytelling. Her next story concerned Grandma, of course. Seems she and Papa had worked out a system to prevent Mama from talking about herself (apparently, ever), a nefarious scheme for total domination so effective that Lex Luthor would have ground his teeth with envy. Whenever Mama began speaking on topics that did not interest the other two (all the examples Ellen gave were occasions when Mama wanted to express a personal opinion, I noticed), Grandma would interrupt her to ask Papa to fetch her something from the other room. Papa would beat a hasty retreat, with the understanding that by the time he returned, Grandma would have changed the subject to something of interest to civilized people, like the weather or Canasta.

One day (Ellen told us), Mama finally caught on. “You know,” she said, “I sometimes think that he does that just to get away from me.”

Ellen was laughing so hard that she could barely tell us Grandma’s characteristic reply: “I wondered how long it would take you to figure that out, you ninny.”

Ellen seemed quite astonished that we did not join in her laugh. This story must have been knocking ‘em dead at Lutheran potlucks for decades. “I have to say,” I observed, backing toward the door, “in your mother’s place, I would have poisoned the old woman’s pancakes the next day.”

“Just LOOK at the time,” my companion said. “I have to catch my plane.”

These seem to have been the first two sentences either of us had breathed that made an impact on Ellen. She fixed me with a fiery eye, the kind that Grandma had probably leveled at the ninny on an hourly basis. “Not everyone appreciates comedy,” she said, and, turning very pointedly to my companion, began another anecdote.

The end.

Now that story was significantly funnier in the pages-long version than it had been in the rather cursory earlier versions I told you, wasn’t it? It’s not the only way to tell it, of course, but here, I set the scene, gave you enough detail about Ellen and myself so you could follow our brief relationship, included relevant background detail, and made the narrative voice comment on what could have been a rather dull account. See the difference?

My main point this time around, though, is not about how I told the story of something that had happened to me, but how Ellen did. Ellen (naturally, not her real name) made the single most common mistake of the writer of real-life stories: she assumed that not only was every nuance of her family’s life inherently and instantaneously fascinating to people who had never met them (always a dangerous supposition, even in memoir), but also that HER point of view on who was the heroine of the stories she told was the only possible one. Yet actually, the pure facts of the tales said to my companion and me that poor ninny Mama was a more sympathetic heroine.

In other words, her dramatic emphasis boomeranged, not only negating the effect she wished her stories to have upon hearers, but causing us to switch our sympathies to the character she had cast as the villain. Ultimately, on in a manuscript, this would have turned us against the narrator for being so biased against our emotional favorite.

I can’t even begin to tell you how often I’ve seen this happen on paper. Take it as a rule of thumb: no matter how hard people at cocktail parties laugh at anecdotes, thumbnail sketches with a strong slant in favor of a single character almost never work when translated directly to the page. These stories need more telling, more fleshing out, and the author needs to pay attention to their impact upon the reader. And above all, the hero of the piece needs sufficient character development that the reader can empathize with his response to the villain.

In glaring at me, Ellen exhibited the classic real-story writer’s “But it really happened that way!” attitude. The problem was not in how the story was told, this attitude implies, but in the listener’s or reader’s RESPONSE to it. If a joke falls flat, it must be because the listener is a ninny; if the scene doesn’t work, it must be because the agent isn’t really interested in good writing.

And this attitude, unfortunately, often means that at revision time, the real-life scenes remain untouched, while the fictional scenes are revised into unrecognizability. As an editor, I can tell you: the opposite is usually what is warranted. Take a long, hard look at those real-life scenes first.

There endeth the parable. Import reality into your fiction with care, boys and girls, and as always, keep up the good work!

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Writing the real, part IV: Filling in the background shading

I know that some of you have been waiting with bated breath for me to do my promised write-ups on sterling insights from these last two conferences — do not despair. As many of you know, I’m up against a tight revision deadline between now and the end of the month, so honestly, if I didn’t write it traveling to and fro recent conferences (hooray for long layovers), it’s probably not going to be posted before Halloween. It is all coming, however.

On Friday, I deliberately told a real-life anecdote in the way that most fiction writers include such stories in novels: in bare-bones form, assuming that my reader would automatically feel the way I did about the incident when it happened to me. I told it, as most aspiring writers do in their submissions to agents and editors, exactly the way I would have told friends over coffee — which is to say, I told it rather than showed it, and my telling, insofar as I got through the story at all, was light on such scene mood-setters as characterization, locale, etc.

I told it, in short, in a way that was not likely to prompt an agent to ask for the rest of the book.

Let’s return to my story, and see if I can tell it better this time. I was at a small conference in Montana, sitting by a plate glass window the size of a woolly mammoth, gazing out over a well-trimmed golf course toward the nearby blue mountains of Glacier National Park. (Better already, isn’t it?) I had given a class on manuscript submission dos and don’ts, which, I am grateful to say, attracted many conference attendees to share their book ideas with me, looking for advice on how to impress agents with them.

However, even the most well-meaning of helpers needs a break from time to time, so I was sitting with one of the other presenters, enjoying a cup of the local stand-a-spoon-up-in-it coffee, the old West kind that keeps even latte-hardened Seattleites like me up for days. Suddenly, a dear little old lady plopped herself down in the middle of our conversation and started telling us both about her novel. At length. As in the age of the woolly mammoth might have come and gone in the course of the telling.

I’m going to interrupt myself here to ask: isn’t this a more compelling telling of the story than Friday’s, which told the reader nothing about the setting or my mindset at the time the little old lady appeared? In this version, the scene is set enough that the arrival of the antagonist is palpably disruptive of a well-established mood. See why professional readers get annoyed by writers skipping that kind of background?

So we’re definitely better off than we were in the first telling, but this anecdote is still not up to submission standard. In fact, I’ve deliberately made another couple of common mistakes in this second telling, to see if you will catch it, too. Anyone? Anyone?

Points, of course, if you pointed out that I’m still telling about this little old lady, not showing. Also, I have tossed her into the story without giving her a name right off the bat – dooming my reader to endless future repetitions of the phrase “the little old lady.” (But she was small in real life, I tell you! And she was elderly, and female! It really happened! See how ineffectual reality is as an excuse for under-description?)

A great big gold star to those of you who caught that I’ve made the extremely common twin mistakes of assuming that the fact the story’s antagonist annoyed me is the most important thing about the scene — which, from my point of view, naturally it was — and that what annoys me will inevitably annoy everyone else in North America. (Extra credit to those of you who speculated that the pace of my going through this anecdote, and thus the length of this series, may have more to do with the fact that I wrote large parts of it while sitting in an airport in Kalispell, Montana, rather than home at my desk.)

The annoyance assumption is not limited to real-life scenes that are underwritten, of course. Many writers assume (wrongly) that if someone is annoying in real life, and they reproduce the lady down to the last shoelace, she will be annoying on the page as well, but that is frequently not true.

Exposing the schmucks around you for the scum they are is, of course, one of the great unsung compensations for being a writer. As my beloved old mentor, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, was fond of saying, “Never screw over a living writer. They can always get back at you on the page.”

Just be aware that it doesn’t always work. If a reader has to know you, or the other person, or any other pertinent background not in the book (or not essential to the plot), think very carefully about whether you want to keep the scene. Be aware, too, that often in such tellings, the writer’s dislike of the real-life person so spills into the account that the villain starts to appear maligned. If his presentation is too obviously biased, the reader may start to identify with her, and in the worst cases, actually take the villain’s side against the hero.

You really don’t want that kind of ill feeling to boomerang back onto your protagonist or narrator, do you?

A really, really good test about whether it should stay: hand the relevant pages to someone who does not know you very well, WITHOUT saying “This happened in real life, you know,” and have her read it. Then (again without saying the magic phrase of justification) ask this helpful soul to tell the anecdote back to you. Does the emphasis fall where you expected in the retelling?

If it doesn’t, rework the scene or cut it. Give some serious consideration to changing a few of the facts to make it a better story on paper. (Not if it’s a memoir, of course, for A Million Little Reasons. In a memoir, real-life scenes that don’t work should just be cut.) After all, if you don’t go around trumpeting this particular scene in your novel is based upon a real event, how is the reader going to know?

Users of real-life material, please write this tip down and post it somewhere you can see it when you are sitting in your writing space: storytelling is supposed to resonate with truth AND be entertaining at the same time. Just because it happened a particular way doesn’t mean you have to TELL it that way. Because you are a fiction writer, not a reporter: dramatically, your story needs to work for your reader.

Have you noticed that I have not actually made it to the amusing part of the anecdote yet? I’m reserving that for tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work?

PS: Mark your calendars, folks up north: the PNWA is hosting one of its excellent Writing Connections events at the senior center in Mount Vernon on this coming Saturday, October 28th, from noon to 4 pm. Admission is free. Here’s your chance to meet published authors and a screenwriter and pepper them with questions!

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Writing the real, part III, in which I both stress the importance of dramatic emphasis and illustrate what you might not want to do at a conference if you want to win friends and influence people

Pardon my Dickensian title today: I’m returning to the topic of including real-life incidents in your work, and I realized that my point here is AT LEAST twofold. Truth in advertising, don’t you know. Today, I am going to continue my conference story AND my blather about the importance of maintaining dramatic emphasis in order to make a real-life incident work on paper. Which brings me at long last to the conference anecdote I’ve been threatening to tell you for the last few days.

At a recent conference that shall remain nameless, a novelist of an apparently heavily autobiographical novel was telling me about her book. At some length. As in geological time. Admittedly, I wasn’t terribly surprised by this: this was, after all, the dear soul who had filled me with glee during the screenwriting class; when called upon to give her three-line pitch, she talked for twelve minutes nonstop. I had to give her points for personal style.

So I dispatched the other attendees waiting to ask me questions with promises to listen to them at length later and let the lady hold forth. She was an entertaining storyteller, and has evidently had quite the exciting life. Her storytelling style was a tad episodic, however, and somehow in telling, she veered off from her first novel into her second, in order to tell me a series of anecdotes about her maternal grandmother.

As one does.

Her grandmother, I am sorry to say, was one of those souls whom one had to know in order to love. The best way of pleasing her seemed to be not to end up in her gun sites. In these stories, the author was always presenting her as the heroine, yet somehow, in every instance, she seemed to be acting awfully villainish…

Okay, pop quiz: what am I doing wrong in telling this story? (You thought you were going to be able to sit back and enjoy the story, but no: I have a didactic purpose here.) A little hint: what am I doing that the vast majority of true story-tellers do when they include anecdotes?

Well, for starters, I’m telling you about this situation, instead of showing it — which, admittedly, is probably the way I would tell the anecdote verbally. Almost every writer falls into this trap when she first starts writing about the real: what works in a water cooler conversation will work on paper, right?

Not necessarily, and actually, not very often. Flesh out the details.

I am also assuming, within the context of this telling, that not only are you, my readers, going to have enough experience teaching at writers’ conferences that you will be able to provide context (because THAT’S such a common background to have…) without my telling you about it, but also that you will understand that as the teller, I am actually the protagonist here, rather than the old lady. My reaction to her is, in fact, the star of the story.

Like telling-not-showing, these are vintage traps of the real-life anecdote: like the first, it leads to under-writing the scene; I’m not presenting the situation vividly enough for you to get a real sense of what was going on. The last two are assumption problems, every bit as much as including a stereotype in your work. What the writer pitches, the reader does not always catch.

To give you some idea why agents and editors tend to break out in hives when confronted with this kind of anecdotal telling, let’s do a little role-playing, shall we? You play the agent, and I’ll play the author of the piece above. Let’s say you confronted me with the underwriting, and I immediately cried, “But it happened this way in real life!” Technically, I would be justified, you know; this did in fact occur.

What would you say in response? A bit tricky, isn’t it, without launching into a governessy diatribe that either implies that the writer’s craft is poor or that she shouldn’t be relying upon her own experience at all?

And that, my friends, is why you will seldom hear agents and editors talk about this problem at conferences. It makes them sound hostile. This reluctance to talk about the problem does not, however, prevent them from routinely rejecting manuscripts that have it.

I know; it’s dreadfully unfair to judge people by standards that they don’t know exist. That’s why I’m broaching the subject here. Because here is an instance where including a real-life anecdote may well be the best, or even the only, way to help writers walk a mile in an agency screener’s proverbial moccasins.

Tomorrow, I shall deal with the more subtle problems such anecdotes often have. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Writing the real, part II: dramatic emphasis

Writing the real, part II: dramatic emphasis

Yesterday, I was talking about the dangers of including actual incidents in fiction submissions. Why are the real-life scenes so often problematic, from the point of view of a professional reader, you ask? Because they tend to be under-explained in manuscripts, as though the incidents involved were so inherently telling that they required no further justification beyond a bare description of what occurred — or even enough detail beyond the skeletal facts of the case to allow the reader to mirror the protagonist’s (or, even more commonly, the narrator’s) response to the scene. In order to begin to discuss how to fix that problem, I am going to bring up a concept that tends to make serious writers grumble: the importance of dramatic emphasis.

It’s easy to forget to see our submissions from the point of view of the people who will be judging them, isn’t it? We all like to think (come on, admit it) that our writing is so good that simply any English-speaking reader currently alive would automatically fall in love with it, but the fact is, both target market readers and professional readers have individual tastes.

Two tastes that virtually all readers share, however, are a taste for clarity and a taste for being entertained.

“Yeah, yeah,” I hear some of you out there muttering, “you told us yesterday that we shouldn’t have anything in our submissions that we would want to be standing next to the reader explaining, because that’s just not how the submission process works. All that matters is what’s on the page, you said, and we should never assume that our readers will automatically share our worldviews. Fine. But what does dramatic emphasis have to do with either clarity or assuming advance knowledge in my audience?”

Plenty, if you are submitting novels. Agency screeners, editorial assistants, agents, editors, and contest judges all tend to read in a tearing, line-skimming hurry until they decide that the manuscript in front of them is a good one — and if the story isn’t keeping their interest, they have a nasty habit of edging it toward the rejection pile without further ado. Since the acceptance/rejection decision is often made in a split second, it’s vital that your submissions bring your best ideas (and your best writing) to the fore.

If the screener does not make it to page 15, it actually doesn’t matter, alas, how beautiful the writing is on pg. 16 and beyond. You want your first scene to be dramatically interesting enough to draw the professional reader — not just your target reader in the general public, who is usually quite a bit more tolerant of build-up — into wanting to read on.

I’ve said it before, and knowing me, I’ll doubtless say it again: if the first five pages of your book are not gripping, rearrange your submission so that the first five pages of IT are. (And that, if you’re curious, is the reason why so many novels these days begin with a brief prologue consisting of a scene late in the book. It’s a way to get a dramatically interesting, well-written scene under the screener’s eyes first.)

Yes, sometimes this means changing the running order of the book for the purposes of submission; you can always change it back again after the publisher buys the book. Remember, industry types don’t consider a novel finished until it is actually in print and sitting on a shelf at Powell’s — they EXPECT authors to rearrange things based upon their feedback. No one is going to yell at you for tweaking a submission in a way that you might not a finished book.

Since you often only have the first few pages of a submission to establish that you are an interesting, exciting writer that any agent would be a fool to overlook, you are going to want to select the raw materials of your first few pages with an eye to drama, right? Here’s a radical idea: lead with your strongest storyline, what people in the screenwriting biz call your A-story, rather than a subplot. (An AMAZINGLY high percentage of submissions begin with B-stories, or even C-stories.) Dramatically, it will be easier to draw the reader into your fictional world.

“Okay,” I hear some of you muttering, “I understand that it might be in my best interests to be strategic in my running order. But Anne, what does any of this have to do with writing real-life incidents in a fiction book?”

Again, plenty. Since, as I was mentioning yesterday, real-life scenes tend to be harder for the writer to assess in print — that old song, “But it really happened that way!” can wallpaper over a multitude of storytelling sins in the writer’s mind, and preclude dramatically-necessary revisions in the name of sticking to What Really Happened — may I be so bold as to make a suggestion? If you want to include such scenes, try to use them later in the book, rather than in the early pages of your submission.

Why? Because the real-life anecdote problem is so very well-known in the industry that quite a lot of agency screeners and editorial assistants will use it as a reason to shove a manuscript into the reject pile. It’s just safer not to do it in the early pages of your submission — wait until they have fallen in love with your voice before you start taking this kind of risk.

“But Anne,” I hear some of you cry, “it’s a NOVEL! How on earth are they going to know what is fact-based and what isn’t?”

Oh, you’d be surprised at how often real-life scenes have a big flag over them, proclaiming, “But this really happened!” One dead give-away of such scenes to professional eyes is that the reader is very obviously expected to take the narrator’s (or protagonist’s) side automatically in them. In such scenes, the protagonist is ALWAYS presented as in the right for every instant of the scene, a state of grace quite unusual in real life. It doesn’t ring true — and it’s simply not as interesting as more nuanced conflict.

A particularly common flavor for such scene: a minor character walks into the room, and is obstructive in some very minimal way to the protagonist; thereafter, the protagonist (and usually the narrative as well) responds to that character as if she had burned down half the buildings in Western states AND slaughtered a basketful of kittens. To professional eyes, such a character in a book might as well be depicted with a forehead tattoo reading, “Co-worker of the author.”

I heard the gasps out there — did you really think you were the only writer in the history of the world to do this? Honeys, if I had a nickel for every manuscript I have read that contained scenes where the reader is clearly supposed to be incensed at one of the characters, yet it is not at all apparent from the action of the scene why, I could buy a take the entire readership of my blog out to dinner in Paris, Milan, Tokyo, and Tierra del Fuego on consecutive nights, flying all of you in between on my fleet of private jets.

The sad part is that these scenes tend not to work even when they are well-written: the problem here is that a lack of perspective leads the writer to believe, inaccurately, that the reader will inhabit the scene as vividly as he did at that moment. However, readers are dependent upon the writer’s placing them there — these scenes actually tend to be LESS life-like than more fully-realized fictional ones where the author has let the reader in on the sights, smells, and tastes of the environment.

Let me posit a general rule: figuring out where to place the dramatic emphasis of a scene requires a certain amount of authorial detachment. Invariably, when professional readers flag these scenes, the writer is always quite astonished that his own take on the real-life scene did not automatically translate into instantaneous sympathy in every conceivable reader — or that his-stand-in in the scene is not necessarily all that likeable from the reader’s perspective, in that particular moment.

Or that the scene might not be all that funny. Remember, just because everyone on the airplane laughed when the beverage cart got loose and went shooting down the aisle, smashing into the cockpit door and spraying everyone in first class with a fragrant cocktail of soda, bloody Mary mix, and rapidly cooling coffee, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a fictional retelling of the scene will also be funny. As the author, it’s your job to MAKE it funny on the page — and if it isn’t, and your book is comic, it should not be in the first few pages of your submission.

My point is, be aware that often, writers’ judgment of scenes based upon their personal experiences is not as clear and unbiased as the same writers’ views on their wholly fictional scenes. Get an outside opinion of it — FROM SOMEONE WHO DID NOT WITNESS THE INCIDENT IN QUESTION — before you submit such a scene to the pros. Writing the true is a virtuoso trick, my friends: it may not take more craft to tell a real-life anecdote well, but it certainly requires a few more authorial steps backward to keep it in perspective.

Practical examples follow tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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Assumptions, assumptions revisited: writing the real

Sometimes, when I write about an issue on the blog and have a hard time coming up with a solid, memorable, real-life example to illustrate it, the universe seems to go out of its way to provide an example immediately afterward. A few days ago, the PERFECT situation occurred to illustrate the point I had been making in my Assumptions, Assumptions series. So, although that series is rapidly fading into just an archival memory, I can’t resist revisiting it, to be able to use this anecdote.

Oh, like none of you have ever manipulated the running order of a story in order to be able to include a good bit of dialogue… And I have an even better excuse than usual: I started to write about it while sitting in an airport during a layover that can only have been designed to encourage me to embark upon some particularly ambitious personal project.

Like writing ULYSSES, for instance.

Remember how I was advising you last week that it is NEVER a prudent idea to assume that your reader — be it agency screener, editorial assistant, contest judge, or eventual reader — shares your worldview, age, sex, political affiliations, etc., because your never know who is going to end up judging your manuscript? I pointed out that such assumptions render the probability of rubbing a decision-maker in the submission process the wrong way a virtual certainty — and it’s always a poor strategic move to tumble into the bad graces of someone who has the power to get your book published.

What, you DIDN’T learn that at your mother’s knee? I did. The joys of growing up in a literary household: my kindergarten years were rife with cozy moments when adults took me upon their aged knees and complained to me vociferously about their agents or editors. But I digress.

One of the more subtle, but most common, assumptions that novelists in particular tend to make in manuscripts is that an incident that was funny or touching or character-revealing in real life will be equally as touching or character-revealing on the page. In fact, many of us were specifically taught to make this assumption while writing, weren’t we?

Hands up, everyone who has ever had a writing teacher tell you that you need to dig deep into the contents of your triple-locked diary in order to get your best material. Heck, I’ve been in writing classes where I was told that it was our ONLY material, as if such endeavors as research and plumbing the imagination were merely the lazy writer’s way to avoid writing about our bastard fathers.

I’m quoting Sylvia Plath here, incidentally. My father was not in any way a bastard, I’ll have you know. Naturally, my writing teachers despaired of me accordingly.

To be fair, for many writers, sticking to one’s own personal experience can yield some awfully good material for novels. As Virginia Woolf tells us, “Good fiction must stick to the facts, and the truer the facts, the better the fiction.”

However, as anyone who has read fiction can tell you, not everything that happens in real life is plausible on paper. Why? Well, good fiction tends to adhere to rules of dramatic structure and probability; real life has a nasty habit of thumbing its nose at ol’ Aristotle’s rules.

Think about it: does your favorite story about yourself have a third act? An antagonist? Are you of royal blood (Aristotle was awfully picky about who was drama-worthy), to raise your most cherished heartbreak to the level of tragedy?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m guessing the answer is no, on all counts. And here is where having a good imagination is awfully handy, isn’t it? A talented writer can almost always improve upon the merely real. In fact, that’s what fiction writers are paid to do — i if we’re lucky, that is.

I bring this up, because I’ve just been giving feedback at people’s informal pitches at a conference, and I’m here to tell you, “But it really happened that way!” is an EXTRAORDINARILY frequent exclamation in craft classes. Even in fiction, writers are often stunned at the suggestion that a fact-based incident in their books could be changed in order to enhance its impact upon the reader. And while appealing to the truth of an incident is a terrific thing to say within the context of an interview after your book is published, it’s just not an excuse that flies in the industry.

It’s a hard, hard fact for a lot of writers to swallow, but the fact is, in a submission, ALL that matters is what’s actually on the page. No further explanations allowed.

Which would render ULYSSES well-nigh impossible to sell in the current market, come to think of it. Imagine how fast an agency screener would have moved the first few pages of THAT into the rejection pile: “What’s going on here? Coherence? Structure?”

Oops, I’m digressing again; blame airport coffee.

“But it really happened that way!” is not an excuse that professional writers EVER use — or that most agents and editors will ever accept. Why? Because it’s the writer’s job to make everything in the book seem plausible, whether or not it really happened. And in a submission, no author in the world gets to stand over the agent or editor’s shoulder, explaining why she made this or that narrative choice.

It seems so obvious, once it’s said, doesn’t it?

Yet very few aspiring writers seem to bear the no-explanations-allowed rule in mind during their pre-submission revision process. Even in the best possible situation, with an agent who fell in love with your talent from your first sentence and an editor who had heart palpitations at the very mention of your premise, you will STILL not be able to stand by their sides while they are reading your submission, saying, “Well, you see, that’s in there because it really happened…”

And in no known universe will the agent or editor then say, “Oh, really? Knowing THAT makes the scene work. Let’s not cut it.” Sorry, but it just doesn’t happen.

Since I’m apparently just bursting with advice today, I’m going to codify this into a hard-and-fast rule: if you ask yourself, “Why is this scene here?” or
“Why does the scene need to play out this way?” and your answer contains any flavor of “But it really happened that way!” it’s an excellent idea to have an impartial reader take a look at that scene, to see if it works dramatically. Or if — and I tremble to suggest this, but it is what an agent or editor interested in your work would ask — if it even needs to be in the book.

In other words, the excuse itself may well be telling you something.

Oh, dear — I have come to the end of my space quota for today, and I haven’t even begun to tell you the anecdote that prompted this train of thought yet! There’s a lesson about the value of writerly discipline, isn’t it?

But speaking of discipline, my revision calls, so I must bid you adieu until tomorrow. Keep up the good work!

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Manuscript revision VIII: har de har har har

My, I went on a tear yesterday, didn’t I? Well, better get comfy today, too, folks, because this is going to be another long one. Although, as a writer of comic novels on serious topics (my latest is about when the first AIDS death happened at Harvard, hardly inherently a chuckle-fest), the topic du jour is very close to my heart: making sure the funny parts of your manuscript are actually funny, and revising so they will be.

Why, you may be wondering, am I taking up this topic immediately after the issue of freshness of voice? Well, to professional readers, humor is often a voice issue. Not many books have genuinely amusing narrative voices, and so a good comic touch here and there can be a definite selling point for a book. The industry truism claims that one good laugh can kick a door open; in my experience, that isn’t always true, but if you can make an agency screener laugh out loud within the first page or two, chances are good that the agency is going to ask to see the rest of the submission.

Hey, there’s a reason that my novel, THE BUDDHA IN THE HOT TUB, opens with the death of the protagonist’s grandmother in a tragic bocce ball accident in Golden Gate Park. (After consultation with his fellow players, the murderer is allowed to take the shot again, with no penalty.) The smile raised by it buys the novel good will with editors for pages to come.

But if a submission TRIES to be funny and fails — especially if the dead-on-arrival joke is in the exposition, rather than the dialogue — most agents and editors will fault the author’s voice, dismissing it (often unfairly) as not being fully developed enough to have a sense of its impact upon the reader. It usually doesn’t take more than a couple of defunct ducks in a manuscript to move it into the rejection pile.

All very technical, I know. But as I’m relatively certain I’ve said before (about 7000 times, if memory serves), the more you can put yourself in your dream agent or editor’s reading glasses while you are revising your submission, the better off you will be in the long run.

Humor is a great way to establish your narrative voice as unique, but it can be a risky strategy. Why, you ask? Well, unless you are lucky or brave enough to be a stand-up comic, or have another job that allows you to test material on a live audience — okay, I’ll admit it: back when I was lecturing to college students, I used to try out jokes on my captive audience all the time — you honestly cannot tell for sure if the bits that seemed hilarious to you in the privacy of your studio would be funny to anyone else.

Trust me on this one: your first test of whether a joke works should NOT be when you submit it to the agency of your dreams.

So how can you know what works and what doesn’t? Personally, I read every syllable of my novels out loud to someone else before even my first readers or agent see them. If an expected chuckle does not come, I flag the passage and rework it, pronto.

Now, this isn’t a completely reliable test, because I have pretty good delivery (due to all of those years honing my comic timing on helpless college students, no doubt), but it does help me get a sense of what is and isn’t working. Reading out loud is also one of the few ways to weed out what movie people call bad laughs, the unintentional blunders that make readers guffaw.

This strategy only works, of course, if you are open to the possibility that the sentence that you thought was the best one-liner penned in North America since Richard Pryor died is simply not funny, and thus should be cut. Admittedly, this kind of perspective is not always easy to maintain: it requires you to be humble. Your favorite line may very well go; it’s no accident that the oft-quoted editing advice, “Kill your darlings,” came from the great wit Dorothy Parker.

But be ruthless: if it isn’t funny, it should go — no matter how much it makes you laugh. As any successful comedy writer can tell you, in the long run, actually doesn’t matter if the author laughs himself silly over any given joke: the reaction that matters is the audience’s. (And no, the fact that your spouse/mother/best friend laughed heartily does not necessarily mean a line is genuinely funny. It may mean merely that these people love you and want you to be happy.)

Lacking an audience, it is still possible to weed out the unfunny. There are a few common comic mistakes that should set off warning bells while you are editing — because, believe me, they will be setting off hazard flares in the minds of agents and editors.

First, look for jokes that are explained AFTER they appear in the text. Starting with the punch line, then working backward, is almost never as funny as bits told the other way around: a good comic bit should produce a SPONTANEOUS response in the reader, not a rueful smile three lines later. (And to an agency screener, explaining a joke after the fact looks suspiciously like the bit fell flat in the author’s writing group, and the writer scrambled to justify the joke in order to keep it in the book.) If background information is necessary in order to make a joke funny, introduce it unobtrusively earlier in the text, so the reader already knows it by the time you make the joke.

Second, ANY real-life situation that you have imported because it was funny should be read by other people before you submit it to an agent or editor. No fair telling it as an anecdote — have them read it precisely as you present it in the text. Keep an eye on your victims as they read: are they smiling, or do they look like jurors on a death penalty case?

The humorous anecdote that slayed ‘em at the office potluck VERY frequently rolls over and dies on the page. Just because everyone laughed when Aunt Myrtle’s prize-winning carrot-rhubarb pie fell onto your dog’s head at the Fourth of July picnic doesn’t necessarily mean that it will inspire mirth in the average reader. Especially if that reader doesn’t already know that Aunt Myrtle’s pies are renowned for making Mom swell up from an allergic reaction, so Dad generally arranges to have some tragic pie-related incident occur every year — which brings us back to problem #1, right?

Again, this is an assumption problem: there’s a reason, after all, that the language includes the phrase, “you had to be there.”

Don’t feel embarrassed, please, if you find that you have included such a scene: even the pros make this mistake very frequently; you know those recurring characters on sketch comedy shows, the ones that are only funny if you’ve seen them a couple of dozen times? Often, those are real-life characters pressed into comic service. (In the extremely unlikely circumstance that good comedy writer Ben Stiller will one day upon this message in a bottle: honey, that bit with the guy who keeps saying “just do it” has NEVER worked. It wasn’t funny in the often-hilarious THE BEN STILLER SHOW; it still wasn’t funny a decade later, in the not-very-funny STARSKY & HUTCH. Kindly stop telling us how funny it was when the guy did it in real life — it’s irrelevant.)

Third, you should also take a very, very close look at any joke or situation at which a character in the text is seen to laugh immoderately. (And if, after you reread it, you find yourself tempted for even 35 seconds to exclaim, “But everyone laughed when it happened!” go stand in the corner with Ben Stiller.) I like to call this the Guffawing Character Problem; it is ubiquitous in first novels, so much so that agency screeners often just stop reading when it occurs.

Why? Well, to professional eyes, having characters whoop and holler over a joke reads like insecurity on the author’s part: like the laugh track on a TV series, it can come across as merely a blind to cover a joke that actually isn’t very funny. It makes the reader wonder if, in fact, she’s being ORDERED to laugh. Agents and editors don’t like taking orders from writers, as a general rule.

The device also sets the funny bar unnecessarily high: the broader the character’s response, the more pressure on the poor little joke to be funny. If the character’s laugh is even one millisecond longer than the reader’s, it’s going to seem as though the writer is reaching.

Fourth, excise any jokes that you have borrowed from TV, movies, radio shows, other books, or the zeitgeist. And definitely think twice about recycling comic premises from any of the above. This is a freshness issue: by definition, a joke that has been told before by someone else isn’t fresh, right?

This may seem like rather strange advice to those of you who have just spent summer conference season being told endlessly by agents and editors that they are looking for books like this or that bestseller, but honestly, copycat books usually don’t sell all that well. (Witness how quickly chick lit fell off agents’ hot lists, for instance.) As Mae West liked to say, there are a lot of copies out there, but if you’re an original, no one can mistake you for someone else. No one remembers the copies.

Don’t believe me? Okay, name three books patterned after COLD MOUNTAIN. Or SEX IN THE CITY. Or, if you want to go farther back in time, CATCH-22. I thought not.

#5 is really a subset of #4, but it is common enough to warrant its own warning: if you use clichés for comic effect, make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that you have used them correctly. You would not BELIEVE how common it is for writers to misreproduce clichés. (I would not believe it myself, if I had not been a judge in a number of literary contests and edited hundreds of manuscripts.) If you’re going for a recognition laugh, you’re far more likely to get it with “It’s a dog-eat-dog world” than “It’s a doggie-dog world.”

Trust me on this one. An incorrectly-quoted cliché will kill any humorous intention you had deader than the proverbial doornail. So make sure that your needles remain in your haystacks, and that the poles you wouldn’t touch things with are 10-foot, not 100-foot. (How would you lift a 100-foot pole without the assistance of a dozen friends, anyway?) When in doubt about the proper phraseology, ask someone outside your immediate circle of friends — your own friends may well be making the same mistake you are.

Even better, leave the clichés out altogether. Most agents and editors dislike clichés with an intensity that other people reserve for fiery automobile crashes, airplane malfunctions, and the bubonic plague. They feel (as do I) that a writer worth rewarding with a publishing contract should be able should be able to make it through 50 pages of text without reverting to well-worn truisms, even as a joke.

If you are new to writing comedy, allow me to let you in on a little secret: many jokes that garner chuckles when spoken aloud fall flat in print. This is particularly true of the kind of patented one-liner people on the street are so fond of quoting from their favorite sitcoms, movies, and sketch comedy shows. Take a gander, for instance, at these zingers out of context:

From the 1970s: Excu-u-use me!
From the 1980s: You look mahvelous!
From the late 1990s: I don’t know karate, but I do know cah-razy.

Now, if you close your eyes and conjure up vivid images of Steve Martin, Billy Crystal, and Owen Wilson, respectively, saying these lines, these old chestnuts might still elicit the odd chuckle. Go ahead and chuckle your head off, if you are given to atavistic clinging to the popular culture of your past, but please, I implore you, do not make the (unfortunately common) mistake of reusing these kinds of once-popular catchphrases in your writing. Not only are such bits seldom funny out of context, but it will date your book: what is humor today probably will not be in a decade, and one generation’s humor will not be another’s.

In fact, if you aspire to perfecting your comic voice, it might behoove you to take a good, hard look at the careers of Mssrs. Martin, Crystal, and Wilson — and Mssr. Stiller and Madame Mae West, for that matter. All of them started out as comedy writers, writing material for themselves and others, and all became progressively less funny (in this writer’s opinion) as soon as they started performing comic material written by other people.

An accident? I think not. They became less funny because their individual comic voices had gotten lost.

Oh, the people who were writing for them have tried to recapture their quite distinct original voices, but the copy is never as vivid as the original. Why any of you stopped writing your own material is a mystery to me. But I digress…

And so will an agency screener’s mind digress, if you drag gratuitous pop culture references into your submissions. People tend to have very strong associations with particular periods in their lives, and for all you know, the reference you choose to use may be the very one most favored in 1978 by your dream agent’s hideously unkind ex, the one who lied in court during the divorce proceedings and hid assets so cleverly that their daughter’s college fund had to be used to pay those unexpected medical bills of Mother’s. Then the car broke down, and all of those checks bounced, and the orthodontist tried to repossess Angela’s braces…

See what happened? One little pop culture reference, and POW! You’ve lost your reader’s attention entirely.

So even if you are using pop culture references to establish a particular period, do it with care. Be sparing. Even if your teenage son quoted SHANGHAI NOON endlessly for six solid months while the entire family cringed in a Y2K fallout shelter, do be aware that your reader might not have the associations you do with those jokes. There are a myriad of associational possibilities — and almost none of them will make YOUR work more memorable or seem fresher.

Which brings me full-circle, doesn’t it? One of the advantages to using humor in your submissions is to demonstrate the originality of YOUR voice — not Owen Wilson’s, not Steve Martin’s, and certainly not that anonymous person who originated that joke your best friend from college just forwarded to you. If your individual voice is not inherently humorous, don’t try to force it to be by importing humor from other sources. Lifting material from elsewhere, even if it is genuinely funny, is not the best means of establishing that YOU are funny — or that yours is a book well worth reading.

Or better still, remembering AFTER having read and offering to represent or publish.

People still remember Mae West, my friends, not her hundreds of imitators. Here’s to all of us being originals on the page — and keep up the good work!

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The myth of objectivity

Hello, readers –

I have received some interesting responses to Monday’s post about the relative weight public and private history should bear within the context of a memoir or novel (Getting the Balance Right, April 17). A couple of people have asked: what about objectivity? Aren’t there times when an objective statement of what is going on in a situation is appropriate?

A good question, and one that certainly deserves discussion.

Obviously, there are writing situations where a certain narrative distance from the subject matter is helpful to telling the story, but I’m not convinced that narrative distance, even far narrative distance drained of personal commentary, is inherently the best way to describe anything. Nor is it actually objectivity. Objectivity, it seems to me, does not lie in discounting the personal experiences of the individuals actually affected by the larger phenomenon being described, or in stripping a story of emotional content; these, too, are reflective of the storyteller, conscious choices in selecting a style of narrative. True objectivity, I think, consists of showing a complex story in all of its emotional roundness without judging the characters.

Or, as Mme. de Staël put it, “Philosophy is not insensitivity.”

I know, I know: this is most emphatically not how we generally hear the term objectivity bandied about. Most often, we hear it when the news media praises itself: they like to plume itself on presenting stories objectively. However, as anyone who reads a newspaper regularly can tell you, how journalistic objectivity tends to be more about balance than distance.

The imperative to balance, as if there were two – and only two – sides to any issue, often results in articles that are only superficially objective, or in presenting only the extreme ends of the opinion spectrum. In an effort to be fair to both sides, both of the sides presented are depicted as equally reasonable, and often as though humanity itself were split absolutely 50-50 on the point. Which in turn often gives the impression that every group involved is equally large. (I’m not giving the obvious example here, just in case any future president should want to appoint me to the Supreme Court.) And while the journalists who write such articles seem to be adhering strictly to the rules of objectivity they were taught in journalism school, the necessity of selecting which two POVs to highlight as the only two relevant arguments, and which to relegate to obscurity, is in itself a subjective choice.

We’ve all seen such articles, right? The structure is invariable: begin with personal anecdote about Person A on Side 1; move to description of overarching phenomenon; state what the government/institution/neighborhood proposes to do about the phenomenon; bring in the opinion of Person B on Side 2; discuss what that side would like to see done; project future. Then end with an emotion-tugging paragraph on the lines of, “But for now, Person A must suffer, because of all of the events mentioned in Paragraph 1.”

Now, is that truly objective? It is balanced, sure, insofar as Side 1 and Side 2 are both presented, but since the structure dictates that the reader gets more personal insight into Person A’s plight, doesn’t the choice of which side to highlight first dictate where most readers’ sympathies will tend?

How a journalist or any other writer – or a researcher, or a pollster, for that matter — chooses to frame a question is necessarily subjective. Heck, how we decide what is important enough to write about is a subjective decision. If you doubt this, I suggest an experiment: the next time a telephone pollster calls, pay attention to how the questions are worded. Are they encouraging certain answers over others? How many questions does it take you to figure out who commissioned the poll?

I’m not saying that writers should throw objectivity out the window; far from it. However, I think we are all better writers when we recognize that how we choose to define an objective stance is in itself a subjective decision. Once a writer acknowledges that, taking authorial responsibility for those choices rather than assuming that distance equals objectivity, and that objectivity is good, all kinds of possibilities for nuance pop up in a manuscript.

Which bring me back to my original point: from the reader’s POV, the objective facts of a story are only important insofar as they affect the characters the reader cares about – and that can be liberating for the writer.

Movies and television have encouraged the point of view of the outside observer in writing, because no matter how close a close-up is, the camera is always separate from the action it is filming to some extent. But not every story is best told from the perspective of a complete stranger standing across the room from the action; even in an impersonal third person narrative, the author can choose, for instance, to take into account the observations of the crying toddler being held in the arms of the protagonist. It is not better or worse, inherently, than the detached, across-the-room perspective; it is merely different. Considering it as a possibility, along with a wealth of other perspectives, gives the writer much more control in producing the desired emotional impact of the scene.

Not all editors, writing teachers, or readers would agree with me, of course, but as there were so many writers trained in the early-to-mid 20th century that a Graham Greene-like narrative detachment was the best way to tell most stories, resulting in a generation and a half of schoolchildren being taught that the third person SHOULD mean complete narrative detachment, I’m not too worried that all of you out there won’t hear the other side’s arguments.

I’m not a journalist, after all; I am under no obligation to show you Side 2.

One final word on objectivity for those of you who write about true events: many, if not most, members of the general public confuse their individual points of views with objectivity, as if we all went through life testifying in an endless series of depositions. They insist that their individual, subjective POVs are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and therefore the only possible version of events.

I bring this up, because literally every author I have ever met who has published a book about real events that took place within living memory (myself included) has been accosted at some point by someone whose life was touched by the events depicted in the book. These accosters then summarily inform the author that she is WRONG; the events certainly did not take place that way, and no reasonable person could possibly think that the author’s POV on the subject was accurate. Obviously, then, the author must have maliciously twisted the facts on purpose, to create a false impression. Because facts are objective, by gum: in a well-ordered universe, everyone would tell every story exactly the same way. And the author is left standing there, open-mouthed.

I just wanted you to be prepared.

Sadly, there is little the author can do in response to this sort of attack. It’s been my experience, and my true story-writing friends’, that it does not aid matters to try to explain the basic principles of subjectivity vs. objectivity or point of view to people who insist there can be only one POV. It’s easiest to treat such vehement amateur readers as you would a professional POV Nazi: thank them warmly for their input and get out of the room as fast as you can. If you see them in future, run the other way. (For further tips on handling the POV-insistent, see my posting, Help! It’s the Point-of-View Nazis!, April 4 and 5.)

I honestly do wish that I could give all of you who write about real events a talisman that would protect you, but this is one of those areas where writers tend to view the world very differently than others. If you doubt this, just try explaining to someone who has never tried to write what it’s like to be so grabbed by a story that you feel compelled to lock yourself up for months on end to get it on paper, without anyone paying you to do it. By non-artistic standards, the creative drive just doesn’t make sense.

I say that we should just embrace the fact that we think differently from other people. Let’s revel in our subjectivity, because insightful subjectivity is the cradle of original authorial voice. Let’s not be afraid to tell stories from various subjective POVs, where that’s appropriate. And above all, let’s not fall into the trap of believing that there is only one way to look at any given event. Or even two. Because that kind of attitude robs writers of the power to choose how best to tell the story at hand.

As Flaubert tells us, ”One does not choose one’s subject matter; one submits to it.” Let the story’s complexities dictate how it needs to be told.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

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Getting the balance right

Hello, readers –

I don’t want to disturb you, if you are one of the countless many rushing to get your tax forms postmarked by the time the post office closes, so I shan’t burden you today with a description of what tax time is like for the full-time writer. There will be time enough for that tomorrow, after everyone’s had a good night’s sleep.

In the meantime, please be extra-nice to postal employees today, because this is one of their most stressful workdays of the year — would you want hundreds of panicked last-minute filers rushing up to your workstation all day? — and I shall devote today’s posting to a writing insight I had over the weekend.

As many of you know, I have a memoir in press and a novel on the cusp of making the rounds of editors. In my freelance editing business, I regularly edit both, as well as doctoring NF books, so I consider myself pretty savvy about the tricks of the trade. This weekend, as if to remind me that I should always keep an open mind, a deceptively simple but undeniably useful rule of thumb popped into my mind while I was editing (drum roll, please):

The weight a given fact or scene should have in a manuscript is best determined by its emotional impact upon the book’s protagonist, rather than by its intrinsic or causative value.

Is that too technical? In other words, just because an event is important in real life doesn’t mean that it deserves heavy emphasis in a story. In a memoir, events are only relevant as they affect the central character(s); in a first-person novel, this is also true. Even in a third-person narrative told from a distant perspective, not every fact or event is equally important, and thus the author needs to apply some standard to determine what to emphasize and what merely to mention in passing.

To put this in practical terms: if you were writing about characters who lived New York in September of 2001, obviously, it would be appropriate to deal with the attacks on the World Trade Center, because it affected everyone who lived there. To some extent, the attacks affected everyone in the country, and in the long term, people in other countries as well. However, not everyone was affected equally, so not every book written about New Yorkers, Americans, or world citizens during that period needs to rehash the entire 9/11 report.

This may seem obvious on its face, but in practice, writers very often misjudge the balance between personal and public information in their manuscripts, as well as between historical backstory (both impersonal and personal) and what their protagonists are experiencing in the moment. In fact, it is a notorious megaproblem of memoirists and first-time novelists alike.

Sometimes, balance issues arise from a genuinely laudable desire to ground the story believably in a given time period. Memoirs about the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, tend to include extensive disquisitions on both the Vietnam War and hippie culture, the writerly equivalent of director Oliver Stone’s amusing habit of decorating crowd scenes from that period with a visible representative of every group in the news at the time, regardless of whether members of those groups would ever have attended the same event in real life: a protest march including Abbie Hoffman flanked by Gloria Steinem and several Black Panthers, for instance, with perhaps a Rastafarian, two of the Supremes, and Cat Stevens thrown in for good measure.

I bring up movie-style time markers advisedly, because, as I have pointed out before, how movies and television tell stories has seeped into books. On a big screen, stereotypical images are easier to get away with, I think, because they pass so quickly: have you noticed, for example, that virtually every film set in a particular year will include only that year’s top ten singles on the soundtrack, as though no one ever listened to anything else?

Frankly, I think this is a lost opportunity for character development, in both movies and books. Music choice could tell the reader a lot about a character: the character who was listening primarily to Smokey Robinson in 1968 probably thought rather differently than the character who was listening to the Mamas and the Papas or Mantovani, right? Even if they were smoking the same things at the time.

To use an example closer to home, in high school, if my cousin Janie and I walked into a record store at the same time, she would have headed straight to the top 40 hits, probably zeroing in rather quickly on big ballad-generating groups like Chicago. She was always a pushover for whoever used to warble the “I’m all out of love/I’m so lost without you” equivalent du jour. I, on the other hand, would have headed straight for the razor-cut British bands with attitude problems, your Elvis Costellos and Joe Jacksons. I am quite sure that I was the only 7th-grader in my school who was upset when Sid Vicious died.

Quick, which one of us was the cheerleader, me or Janie? And which one of us brought a copy of THE TIN DRUM to read on the bleachers when the football game got dull? (Hey, it was a small town; there was little to do but go to the Friday night high school football game.)

Such details are very useful in setting up a believable backdrop for a story, but all too often, writers spend too much page space conveying information that might apply to anyone of a particular age or socioeconomic group at the time. It’s generic, and thus not very character-revealing.

If I told you, for instance, that Janie and I both occupied risers in the first soprano section of our elementary school choir, belting out numbers from FREE TO BE YOU AND ME, much of the Simon & Garfunkel songbook, and, heaven help us, tunes originally interpreted by John Denver, the Carpenters, and Woody Guthrie, does this really tell you anything but roughly when the two of us were born?
Okay, the Woody Guthrie part might have tipped you off that we grew up in Northern California, but otherwise?

When books spend too much time on generic historical details, the personal details of the characters’ lives tend to get shortchanged. (And, honestly, can’t we all assume at this point that most readers are already aware that the 1960s were turbulent, that people discoed in the 1970s, and that it was not unknown for yuppies to take the occasional sniff of cocaine in the Reagan years?) It’s a matter of balance, and in general, if larger sociopolitical phenomena did not have a great impact upon the protagonist’s life, I don’t think those events deserve much page space.

I think this is also true of minutiae of family history, which have a nasty habit of multiplying like weeds and choking the narrative of a memoir. Just because the narrator’s family did historically tell certain stories over and over doesn’t mean that it will be interesting for the reader to hear them, right?

You would be amazed at how often memoirists forget this. Or so agents and editors tell me.

This is particularly true of anecdotes about far-past family members. If your great-grandmother’s struggle to establish a potato farm in Idaho in the 1880s has had a strong residual impact upon you and your immediate family, it might be worth devoting many pages of your memoir or autobiographical novel to her story. However, if there is not an identifiable payoff for it from the reader’s POV — say, the lessons she learned in tilling the recalcitrant soil resulting a hundred years later in a certain fatalism or horror of root vegetables in her descendents — the reader may well feel that the story strays from the point of the book. James Michener be damned — consider telling Great-Grandma’s story in its own book, not tacking on a 200-page digression.

I think we all know that the earth cooled after the Big Bang, Mr. Michener. Let’s move on.

Because, you see, in a memoir (or any first-person narrative), the point of reference is always the narrator. Within the context of the book, events are only important insofar as they affect the protagonist. So even if the story of how the narrator’s parents met is a lulu, if it doesn’t carry resonance into the rest of the family dynamic, it might not be important enough to include.

In my memoir, I do in fact include the story of how my parents met — not because it’s an amusing story (which it is, as it happens), but because it is illustrative of how my family tends to treat its collective past primarily as malleable raw material for good anecdotes, rather than as an unalterable collection of hard facts. “History,” Voltaire tells us, and my family believed it, “is a series of fictions of varying degrees of plausibility.”

I don’t say whether this is actually true or not; as a memoirist, my role is not to make absolute pronouncements on the nature of truth or history, but to present my own imperfect life story in a compelling way. So in my memoir, I reproduce the three different versions of the story of how my parents met that I heard most often growing up, with indications of the other dozen or so that showed up occasionally at the dinner table during my most impressionable years. I include them, ultimately, because my family’s relationship to its own past was a terrific environment for a child who would grow up to be a novelist.

Most of us are pretty darned interesting to ourselves: it’s hard not to have a strong reaction to your own family dynamics, whether it be amusement, acceptance, or disgust. That’s human; it’s understandable. But as a writer dealing with true events, you have a higher obligation than merely consulting your own preferences: you have a responsibility — and, yes, a financial interest, too, in the long run — to tell that story in such a way that the reader can identify with it.

Remember, fascinating people are not the only people who find themselves and their loved ones interesting; many a boring one does as well. And if you doubt this, I can only conclude that you have never taken a cross-country trip sitting next to a talkative hobbyist, a fond grandmother, or a man who claims his wife does not understand him.

Quoth D.H. Lawrence in SONS AND LOVERS: “So it pleased him to talk to her about himself, like the simplest egoist. Very soon the conversation drifted to his own doings. It flattered him immensely that he was of such supreme interest.”

So if you are writing about your kith and kin, either as fiction or nonfiction, take a step back from time to time and ask yourself: have I gotten the balance right?

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

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Doing your homework

I received an excellent question from a blog reader the other day:

I’d be interested in how you went about doing your research for any background, setting for your work. I’ve had some essays published on family stories and in addition to talking to family members (sometimes the stories are different POV), I made sure that any historical or political and culture matters were also correct. What do you do?

First, good for you for being brave enough to write up your versions of your family stories. Too many of us think of family history as set in stone, doubtless due to the frequent repetition of family lore around the holiday dinner table. Sometimes, it feels as though Uncle Ernie has told the story of how he got his first job as a longshoreman so many times that everyone in North America must have heard it by now, right?

Actually, family stories are far more ephemeral than even the most fleeting joke bouncing its way via e-mail from workstation to workstation. At least the jokes are written down. Uncle Ernie may well have told that same story every day for the last thirty years, but the very fact that he has told it so often probably means that no one in the family has ever taken the time to write it. Thus, when Uncle Ernie is no longer able to tell it, the story may well pass out of family lore.

If you are hesitating about writing about your family, consider this: some day, it may be the only record left. Those telling little details of yesteryear may survive in your work alone.

Even academics now recognize that there is distinct historical value in personal and familial historical accounts. It has gone out of fashion to thank Marxists for anything, but in the 1960s, a group of Marxist social historians revolutionized the way scholars studied history: instead of concentrating upon monarchs, presidents, and huge social and economic movements, they started paying attention to how the ordinary person lived. Before, the day-to-day details were left to newspapers and novels to record, but now, your Uncle Ernie’s timeworn story might be just the piece of oral history evidence that allows a social historian to piece together the early days of the longshore union.

My questioner is already doing the most important thing: listening to her family members. Even if you have heard any given family anecdote five hundred times before, it is worth asking to hear it again —- and, taking a page from the new social historian’s rulebook, asking pertinent questions.
It is also worth asking other members of the family and family friends to give their renditions of the story; you may be surprised at how different Aunt Rose’s view of events actually was.

To give those of you new to interviewing fair warning: Uncle Ernie may be thrilled at first that you are so interested in his life story, but he may well appreciate it less when you interrupt the flow of his story to ask follow-up questions. He may think you are doubting his word, especially when he learns you have also asked Aunt Rose for her version.

Here again, use the social historian’s methods, and treat your interview subject with care, for an angry Uncle Ernie may not only refuse to talk to you again, but also take some steps to dissuade Aunt Rose. Once the rumor is afoot in your family that you are going around shaking closets to dislodge well-concealed ghosts, you may find it rather hard to get the people you want to interview to talk to you, out of fear of offending the complaining relative. Tread with care.

The simplest way to sidestep issues of belief is to allow Uncle Ernie to tell the story uninterrupted once, making appreciative noises and taking copious notes on questions you would like to ask. Then tell him, “I love this story, but I’m going to be writing it for people who have never met you. I want to make sure that I capture your wonderful wit/incisive analysis/technique for loading boxes onto a ship accurately. Do you mind if I ask a bunch of very nit-picky questions?”

Few interviewees will respond with hostility to being told they are fascinating, but if Uncle Ernie says no, let it drop. Pay him the courtesy of asking if you can talk to him again later, even if you think he has told you every detail of his life in excruciating detail. Remember, by providing you with background information for your writing, he is doing you a favor. Respond accordingly, and make it clear that you are enjoying listening to him.

It would also be polite to ask him to recommend any other family members or old cronies who might be able to tell you more stories about the period or the event. Volunteer to take him to visit an old coworker he hasn’t seen since 1962, or for a walk along his old waterfront stomping grounds, so he can tell you stories as familiar environments prompt his memory. The more you can make your interviewee your partner in the research process, rather than merely a passive subject for your pen, the less likely you are to provoke a negative reaction to your snoopiness.

Try grouping together different combinations of speakers —- and make sure you give each interviewee an opportunity to speak when no one else is listening but you. Aunt Rose may well have kept her opinions about certain aspects of the event you are researching to herself for the last fifty years; she probably will not just blurt out her reserved views in front of others.

If your interviewees will allow it, consider tape-recording these conversations. This may seem a tad professional for an informal family chat, but believe me, you will be happier if you do not rely upon your memory or your notes alone. First, you may not remember accurately: the shock of ever-quiet Aunt Rose’s revelation that she was a steamy chanteuse in a speakeasy may well throw your listening skills for a loop.

Second, the most important detail revealed in any given conversation may not be immediately apparent. With a recording, you can always go back through the conversation again.

Third, and most important for the sake of intra-family tranquility, you will have an easy, non-judgmental way to defend yourself if Aunt Rose later denies ever having told you about her days as a gangster’s moll. (Contrary to a certain ilk of TV movie may have led us to expect, interesting people of the past were not necessarily all that prone to meticulously documenting every last aspect of their exploits, tucking the evidence away for decades until some enterprising relative stumbles upon it hidden just behind some everyday object.)

Before you launch on your interviews, it is a good idea to read up on the period your writing will cover, both for background and so you can ask intelligent questions. Please don’t assume that you already know, even if the period was relatively recent. Pop culture has a way of distorting the life of the times.

You know how annoying it is when a movie about a period you know well fills the screen with nothing but clichés? As someone who was a teenager in the 1980s, it drives me nuts when crowd scenes set then (particularly when those scenes are set in high schools) will show Izod-shirted preppies chatting with guys with safety pins through their noses and mohawks: those two groups would have studiously avoided each other. Similarly, most films about the 1950s feature the same ten songs and every woman decked out in poodle skirts or Chanel couture; all to often, films purporting to depict Vietnam protests depict Abbie Hoffman arm-in-arm with Timothy Leary and flanked by Black Panthers, feminists, and, if it’s an Oliver Stone film, a few pointlessly topless young women to signify bacchanalia. It is not how people who were there remember it.

It is equally annoying to someone being interviewed about his experiences when the interviewer’s notions of what life was like is primarily based upon the big movements and fads. Not everyone who lived in the 1920s had a raccoon coat, Charlestoned, or got drunk with Scott Fitzgerald; do be sensitive about implying that you interview subject should have. Traditionally, most fashions and the bulk of the fads have been beyond the financial reach of most people: I, for one, could not have afforded a pet rock when those were the rage.

Try to keep in mind that life during any period of history was complex, hard to reduce to universally-shared experiences. Be open to stories that buck the prevailing views. Grace Metalious’ PEYTON PLACE (1956) and William S. Burroughs’ NAKED LUNCH (1959) were written within a few years of each other, but no one could argue that they showed the same aspects of the 1950s.

My point is, your sense of any period will be better if you do not rely upon a single source to learn about it. Generally speaking, I would advise reading four or five history books and/or well-researched novels written during the period you are writing about (not just books SET in that period) for background. My long-ago academic training was as a political scientist, though, so my instinct is to research to the hilt. If you want to be really thorough, read books from the period with opposite political slants —- what each side considered appalling should provide you with a wealth of socio-political detail. Ask Aunt Rose and Uncle Ernie what their favorite books were back then, and read them.

Of course, you should always check facts, particularly dates, which often become confused in the memory. A good history textbook or encyclopedia will help you here. I know many people swear that the Internet is the best and fastest way to gain information, but I would advise against relying upon it exclusively. There are very few controls, and even fewer truth monitors, governing who can post what. You do not know if the person who posted that very informative timeline on Abraham Lincoln (born 1242, died 1968?) was a genuinely credible history buff or someone with an oddly historically-based sense of humor. Double-check the facts, and keep records on where you obtained pertinent information.

If you are looking to check an obscure fact or are having trouble confirming a date, call your public library and ask the reference librarian for research guidance. The Seattle Public Library boasts a terrific Quick Information Line, where the nice operator will either look up odd facts for you or refer you to someone who can. I love this service —- when I was writing a novel about a scholar who specialized in Eastern European studies, the Quick Information people found me (for free) an expert who happily talked to me for half an hour about common linguistic mistakes made by people in the early stages of learning Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian. It would have taken me months to find comparable information on my own —- but there was my beloved city, stepping up to provide me with exactly what I needed.

This may seem like an awful lot of work for the sake of a few family anecdotes, but doing solid background research will help elevate your writing from the all-too-common temporal truisms and into the realm of the real. To a writer, there can be a more important praise from someone who lived through the incident she’s written than, “Oh, my, that feels so true!”

Thanks for the great question —- and keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini