Hello! Last week I was complaining (a little, let’s be honest) about being too busy to write because I was enmeshed in writing-related work. This week, I have been and am getting back on track. I’m sure I’ll talk a lot more about this at some point, perhaps even do some open threads, but our amazingly bad-ass friend Ashley Blooms (whose books you should be reading) decided to lead a group book club journey through The Artist’s Way for anyone who wanted to at the Lexington Writer’s Room (the nonprofit which I am co-founder and currently chair of). I did it once years ago, when I was far more cynical and resistant to things like this…
And I’ll admit, I still kind of expected it to be a big whoop attempt (yes, I am quoting Sam Obisanya’s dad from Ted Lasso in a much more important context), but…maybe helpful thing. Instead, I’ve found it immediately helpful. Just doing the morning pages seems to have cleared my brain for Writing Again, aka Drafting Again. I’m learning a lot, and I can’t wait for us all to get together on Monday nights and talk about it. (C is doing it too, and also finding it very useful.)
(No spoilers but this scene, my heart. Big whoop.)
It’s nice to find that I have grown enough not to get in my own way with this. And the practice, the method, the thinking, the focus matters. The vulnerability matters.
I’m trying not to make this JUST a place I talk about writing, but I’m…going to talk about writing. Brandon Taylor shared a post so good it came up in a meeting of our writing group, The Moonscribers, today, which reminded me I wanted to talk about it here. Especially if you’re a new writer or a writer who is plagued by people saying your work is confusing or you hold back too much, read the whole post.
I will not quote the whole thing, but just a part:
The redactions that can plague first or even second drafts have many possible sources. The one I’ve seen the most is a fear around being unsubtle or inelegant in one’s storytelling. People have a deep fear of being obvious. They think that if they tell the reader in too direct a fashion that a character is sad or that they are grieving (it’s always grief), then the reader will think their story is simple or easily reducible. Many fiction writers struggle with the idea that information that comes to us on an oblique is morally and aesthetically superior to information that is simply expressed. This probably comes from Protestantism, if we’re being frank. This notion that knowledge must be worked for, wrenched from the stone of the world by brutal effort. We associate that which withholds with the high and that which discloses with the low. No one wants to be called broad or obvious or accused of catering to the lowest-common denominator. These ideas and their attendant false dichotomies have a lot to do with what Fiedler discusses his brilliant and very funny book What was Literature. I won’t get into the moral and aesthetic mud-slinging contest over “difficult works” and the fear of the plain-stated, or whatever. I’m just saying that there does seem to be a vibe that causes many writers to pursue subtlety as a main aim without really understanding what undergirds and makes subtlety possible. Chiefly, clarity.
Here is my pet theory. I think sometimes a writer in pursuit of an elegantly indirect means of conveying information ends up withholding information instead. They delay disclosure because this simulates mystery and depth though they are not the same thing. I believe this mistake comes from a related mistake. There is a difference between what a character knows and what the “story” knows. However, sometimes, the writer forces the reader into the position of knowing less than both the character and the story, and they imagine that this creates a sense suspense or mystery or tension when in fact all it creates is confusion and frustration on the part of the reader. I believe that mystery is achieved when the reader has come up against the very edge of what the story knows. But this can only be achieved with clarity and precision. Not from under-furnishing your story with facts and integral figures. There is no mystery in the absence of clarity.
I think all this is on the money, and I also think there’s another factor at work here—because I had to learn it myself. When you’re the writer, especially early on, it’s very difficult to separate what you know and what the story and characters know (in Brandon’s formulation). You feel like you are being so freaking obvious. Even the subtlest breadcrumb you daintily drop into a paragraph assuming every reader is reading with their Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker on feels like a giant red neon arrow saying THIS IS IT RIGHT HERE A CLUE I DROPPED A CLUE.
This is equally true of plot and of emotion. My lightbulb moment came in my agent’s reaction to the first novel I wrote that sold (note: not the first one I wrote). It’s now published as Strange Alchemy, and was originally titled Blackwood, and I very much saw it as a mystery/paranormal romance. If my work has any commonalities across all the things I’ve written, it’s that I’m always mixing and matching genres and, hopefully (!) as I get better, have learned more about knowing what protocols something will mostly likely be read with (which is another intrinsic factor in choosing how and when to deploy information/insights). Anyway, I very much saw the YA characters’ relationship story and falling in love as central. But when my agent sent me back the first notes, one of the things she said was: “Do these two characters even like each other?”
I thought I’d made it so over the top in my head, the romantic beats, and YET it was invisible to a quite excellent close reading. Oops. The thing is, writing emotion—writing anything, really—requires being vulnerable yourself. It requires putting some part of yourself out there, in a way you’d do with more measure, perhaps, depending on how good your therapist is, in real life. We withhold because the revelations we come up with reflect ourselves. And that’s kinda scary. You have to learn to be comfortable with going there on the page.
Anyway, I then went on to read a lot more romance, and I recommend this if you struggle with getting emotional arcs on the page, because romance writers are THE great masters of this. The feelings, the body, the feelings in the body, and how it effects everything around the characters and their lives. People look down on romance from a craft level at their peril, and usually just because they are being assholes who haven’t read any/enough or who mistake their own preferences for some objective value judgment (spoiler alert: it’s you, not them). I’ve felt this way ever since I started reading it. (The assholes who haven’t read enough thing is true of people who slag most genres, including, yes, literary fiction. There’s plenty of jewels and things to learn everywhere. But I’ll go to my grave saying that romance writers know more about reader pleasure than anyone.)
There’s nothing wrong with giving the reader a hand instead of unintentionally obscuring things. Now, if I feel like the writer is 1000 percent in control—say Sara Gran—I’m willing to just wait and bask and know that feeling unmoored is part of the pleasure. But if I’m reading something and I don’t sense I’m being asked to wait or are confused or being held back from for a non-great reason…that is the death kiss for me a reader. I’ll put it down. I’m paraphrasing someone, but the question should be “what next?” not the headscratching “what…now?” In the vast majority of cases.
Clarity is not the enemy. Learning to be able to hold the work at arm’s length as a writer and look at it from a reader’s perspective of what information they have at what point is crucial. Editors and first readers are your greatest ally in this. And, also, some readers will figure out the big mystery sooner. They will see a twist coming. Some won’t. Readers of a romance know the characters will end up together (OR IT IS NOT A ROMANCE). Readers come in with an idea of a shape of something that your story is like…even if the story is playing with the expectations and doing something different.
What they don’t know is how. The how is what we read for. The idiosyncratic execution and perspective, sometimes called voice. So if you obscure the how the story is happening and making the characters feel—because you don’t want to give it away or you don’t know what it is in a first draft—those are the places to add more. To tell the story. When people say they hate middles, I always say I’m the weirdo who loves writing them, because that’s where the story happens. The nitty gritty. The character transformations. The fun. The rest is set-up and pay-off, introductions and farewells.
So, yes, try to bore the reader, in that sense. Try to tell the reader a story instead of outsmarting them. Chances are, then they won’t be bored.
And, if they are, and you did your best, well, BIG WHOOP. No story is for every reader. Which is, itself, a liberating concept. I write for the readers out there who will hopefully love what I’m doing, and I absolutely know some haters will find it too and that’s okay. That’s their readerly prerogative. I mostly only read books I like and I surely don’t talk about most that I don’t, but that’s my readerly prerogative. Your peanut butter and chocolate, my salted caramel and lemon curd (not together, gross!). Whatevs.
I’ll just close by saying, is all this writing stuff magic, a little or a lot? Feels that way. Describing the things we learn about writing feels that way. The LWR is selling some extremely fancy books that our dear, bestest friends at Subterranean Press donated to us to fundraise and today there were five signed second printings of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles up for grabs (now sold). Did I rub this signature page for luck, like a rabbit’s foot? You bet I did. (The signature pages were extras from the first edition, and only a small amount exist.) If you’re into posts like this and you haven’t read Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing, it’s one of my favorites.
One of my favorite quotes from that advice tome of Bradbury’s, a book full of killer advice: “We never sit anything out. We are cups, quietly and constantly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
More soon, friends,
G
Lovely read, thanks. Lots to think on. I largely agree, though I am still new to writing and have been battling with figuring out how best to work with being subtle vs not-so-subtle, as well as seeding information and plot points. A lot probably just comes from works I've read and enjoyed and analysed why I've enjoyed. Thanks for the stimulating article and links/mentions of other things to read along these lines.
Sara Gran! <3 She's *so* good. Thanks for this lovely post, very tinely, since I'm going into a first edit of a new romance novel quite soon...