Donald Maass

So You Think You Can Write?

April 10, 2019 By Sarah Callender 23 Comments

Early in the fall of 1994, I had a terrible realization: I did not know how to write.

This was problematic as I, fresh out of college, had been hired to teach high school English. In other words, I was supposed to teach something I couldn’t do myself.

But how had I never realized I couldn’t write? Worse, how was it possible that not one of my high school English teachers, not one of my college professors, had taught me how to write?

I promptly began working my way through the Ten Stages of Writing-related Grief: Shock, Betrayal, Anger, Humiliation, Chocolate, Half-hearted Acceptance, Chocolate, Despair, A Decent Amount of Acceptance. And finally, Peace.

I hunkered down in Shock and Betrayal for quite some time, wondering how this could have happened. As I hunkered, I soothed myself with chocolate chips and episodes of Seinfeld.

True, my high school English teachers were crummy and weary. They assigned writing, but assigning writing, I finally understood, was not the same as teaching writing.

My 12th grade English teacher was one of those old school, sweet-but-tough-but-good teachers who cracked her feedback whip with lovely, looping, curving, cursive penmanship.

A few decades earlier, she might have whipped me into shape, but by the time I became her student, she was getting along in her years. And losing her filter. As well as her ability to focus. On several occasions, she’d pause herself mid-lecture, tilt one ear to the ceiling, and–I am not kidding–shush us so she could listen to God. This was public school, but God, they say, is everywhere, including in AP English Lit class. So He’d interrupt our class, our teacher would listen thoughtfully, after which she’d take time to relay His messages to us. By then, class would basically be over, and we’d have gone another day without learning how to write. Because God is everywhere.

In college things were no better. Pursuing a degree as an English major, I found myself surrounded by tough and salty professors, none of whom (I see only with hindsight) spent time teaching us to write. Instead, the gnome-ish Medieval English Literature professor nearly daily recited The Canterbury Tales in a wobbly, sing-songy voice that indeed sounded Chaucerian.

In Theories of Deconstruction, the goatee’d professor spouted confusing things about Jacques Derrida’s theories (pronouncing Derrida like “Dairy-daaaahhh”). There was no writing instruction in that class either. Nor any in my Shakespeare class, nor my African American Lit class, nor my American Lit class. Nor, nor, nor. Zero, zero, zero.

It wasn’t until I stepped into my own classroom, charged with teaching 155 students how to write essays, that I realized the magnitude of this issue. What would I teach if I didn’t know how to teach writing?

Dairy-daaaahhh, the goatee’d professor whispered from the depths of my memory.

The Medieval Lit gnome then chimed in, warbling, And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

I tilted my head to the ceiling. God was silent.

I had no wisdom to share, no role model or mentor to use as my guide. But I needed to pay rent, and I needed to fund my chocolate habit, and this meant I needed to keep my job, and keeping my job meant I needed to teach students how to write. So I wiped the Kit Kat wafer crumbs from my face and started teaching myself how to write.

Acceptance.

I was happy to learn it was rather easy to learn to write essays. I was sad to learn it was rather difficult for teenagers to learn to write essays. But armed with my newfound knowledge and plied with Halloween-size Nestle Crunch bars, I was reenergized.

Peace.

“You don’t learn this overnight,” I sing-songed to my students nearly daily. “So be patient. It takes years of practice and many, many revisions of every essay. You cannot master this right away, certainly not in a week or even a year.”

They’d grumble, and I’d cajole them into revisions.

They’d grumble, and I’d remind them to stick with it.

They’d grumble, and I’d write alongside them, practicing my own essay writing, also doing every creative writing assignment I gave them.

Then one night, after five or six years of writing my own creative writing assignments, I woke, and as if in a trance, I crept downstairs and started to write a story. Right there, pajama-clad and sitting in the dark with the very heavy, very bulky laptop that required floppy disks, not only did I know I wanted to be a story-writer, I knew I needed to be a story-writer.

With this weird and inexplicable need propelling me, I started writing really amazingly amazing stories. I am not kidding: these stories were amazing. I was an amazing-story writing machine. All the many thousands of novels I had read in my life had taught me how to write. It was like magic! You just had to write what you knew, and I knew stuff!

Just a month or so into my story-writing amazingness, I started submitting these very stories to a few small publications: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, a few others of that ilk. When I got cordial “no thank you” responses, I figured the fiction editors were probably as joyless as the college professor who had tried to teach me about Jacques Dairydaaaahhh. Or as batty as my God-loving English teacher. In other words, the problem was they, not I.

As the months passed however, and more and more “no thank you’s” arrived in the mail, I started to wonder if, in fact, it was I, rather than they.

Going back to reread and reexamine my amazing stories, I felt myself flush with shame. The clarity that comes with time and distance revealed that these stories were not amazing. They were not even stories! They were descriptions of characters and scenes. There was no conflict. The characters wanted nothing. And the plots were so weird! I wrote a story where a guy blankets himself like a burrito on his therapist’s sofa and vanishes into thin air. And I sent it to The New Yorker!

I added Regret and Overwhelm to the Grief Stages and thus began my journey through the Twelve ~~Ten~~ Stages of Writing-Related Grief. I wallowed and wandered, at every stage popping M&Ms into my pie hole, until Chaucer’s words finally saved me: And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

Yes! I thought. I wolde gladly teche myeself story-writing just as I had gladly taughte myeself essay-writing!

But as I wrote and wrote and wrote, I had yet another epiphany: I still didn’t understand what a story was. I could pick a story out of a line-up, but I didn’t know how to teach myself to write one.

And gladly wolde she lerne, and gladly wolde she fynd sumone else to teche her.

Yes. I needed to find a teacher who could teach me how to write. [Read more…]

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The Extraordinary World: How Soon and How Little?

April 3, 2019 By Donald Maass 26 Comments

Two months ago here on WU, I examined the concept of the “ordinary world”, familiar from the plot template of the Hero’s Journey, the early story phase in which the normal state of things is established, the platform from which a protagonist will depart for adventures and to which a protagonist will return when all is accomplished and the world is again set right. We found that the seemingly-humdrum world is, in fact, shot full of tension that presages the story to come.

On the other hand, what about story settings that are far from our own time and/or place? Different cultures, different countries, different periods of history and even made-up times and places, as in fantasy fiction, present another kind of challenge. Such settings need to convey to readers what is dissimilar to our familiar world, while simultaneously making the exotic world understandable and relatable, meaning in some way perfectly ordinary. How can that be accomplished smoothly, without infodump or a deep-end dive into what is bewilderingly new?

In some cases, a straightforward introduction to a different world is a good approach. Jenny Han’s P.S. I Still Love You (2015), is a sequel to her charming YA romance To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2014), the story of sixteen-year-old Korean-American girl Lara Jean Song, who writes secret love letters to the boys she’s crushing on, letters which she naturally keeps hidden. When the letters are mistakenly (?) posted to their unaware subjects, complications, as they say, ensue.

In P.S. I Still Love You, Lara Jean’s crush on hunky Peter is now widely known, as is a notorious interlude with him in a hot tub on a lightly-supervised school trip. As the novel opens, though, it is New Year’s Day, which entails special traditions in Lara Jean’s Korean culture. Dressed in a hanbok, she participates in one of them:

We get the bowing out of the way first. In Korean culture, you bow to your elders on New Year’s Day and wish them luck in the new year, and in return they give you money. The order goes oldest to youngest, so as the oldest adult, Grandma sits down on the couch first, and Aunt Carrie and Uncle Victor bow first, then Daddy, all the way down the line to Kitty, who is youngest. When it’s Daddy’s turn to sit on the couch and receive his bows, there’s an empty couch cushion next to him as there has been every New Year’s Day since Mommy died. It gives me an achy feeling in my chest to see him sitting there alone, smiling gamely, handing out ten-dollar bills. Grandma catches my eye pointedly and I know she’s thinking the same thing. When it’s my turn to bow, I kneel, hands folded in front of my forehead, and I vow that I will not see Daddy alone on that couch again next year.

Were you caught by surprise? Did the lonely couch cushion next to Lara Jean’s widowed father, and her kneeling before him, hands folded in front of her forehead, tug at your heart strings? Jenny Han knows how to slay us. Lara Jean’s compassionate ache for her father, and the absence of her mother, is something we can instantly relate to. Furthermore, Han is not coy about culture. She presumes that her readers are mostly not Korean-American. Why should she? Why presumptively limit the novel’s appeal? Han just goes for it: “In Korean culture…” What might have been self-conscious instead becomes a winning cultural pride.

What if a novel’s culture is not as charming or easy to like as that? What if a culture is actually a problem and a source of conflict? Angie Thomas’s YA best seller The Hate U Give (2017) is exactly that: a novel about a world of trouble, specifically the world of Black Lives Matter, in which unarmed young African-American men can be gunned down by police without consequence. Thomas cannily situates a sixteen-year-old African-American girl, Starr Carter, between two cultures. On the one hand, Starr lives in the crime-ridden neighborhood of Garden Heights; on the other hand, she attends a luxe private school for the privileged, Williamson Prep.

As the novel opens, Thomas must portray the world of this caught-between-cultures girl, as so we find her at an out-of-control party in Garden Heights with her friend Kenya: [Read more…]

Nasty, Menacing, Murderous: Protagonists We Love…and Why

March 6, 2019 By Donald Maass 27 Comments

I wonder what literary historians will make of the fiction of our times?

Dark times often produce light stories. After World War I, for instance, British crime fiction took a cozy turn. In contrast, economic prosperity can bring us tales grimly pessimistic. The year 1949 produced the novel 1984. The year 2008 gave us The Hunger Games. The economy crashed that year, true, but the novel must have been written earlier when high-risk mortgages and credit default swaps were like candy.

Currently, our economy has been on a path of tepid, unequal recovery for ten years—nothing to brag about but not wholly bad either—so you might expect that such a time would produce a literature of mild discontent. Nope. Our era has produced more unabashedly dark fiction than probably any other era in literary history.

Why now? I’ll leave the question to academics to answer, but dark fiction generally involves an element both puzzling and important for writers to understand: dark protagonists. Nasty, menacing and murderous protagonists are wildly popular. Go figure. Is it exciting for readers to vicariously enjoy being amoral?

Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night (2006) is the story of Edward Glyver, a Victorian booklover, scholar and murderer. His first killing is of a randomly chosen stranger, a murder for which feels no remorse—but for which he has a reason:

Now I knew that I could do it; but it gave me no pleasure. The poor fellow had done me no harm. Luck had simply been against him—together with the colour of his hair, which, I now say, had been his fatal distinction. His way that night, inauspiciously coinciding with mine in Threadneedle-street, had made him the unwitting object of my irrevocable intention to kill someone; but had it not been him, it must have been someone else.

Until the very moment in which the blow had been struck, I had not known definitively that I was capable of such a terrible act, and it was absolutely necessary to put the matter beyond all doubt. For the dispatching of the red-haired man was in the nature of a trial, or experiment, to prove to myself that I could indeed take another human life, and escape the consequences. When I next raised my hand in anger, it must be with the same swift and sure determination; but this time it would be directed, not at a stranger, but at the man I call my enemy.

And I must not fail.

Let’s think about that confessional passage. Glyver claims no remorse, and yet he describes the murder as “a terrible act”. He has no pleasure in it, sounding almost indifferent, and yet he calls his victim “the poor fellow”. Do you get the feeling that Glyver’s sentiments and words are at odds with what he’s done? They are.

Thus, we can discern the most fundamental trick of putting over a really terrible person: The dark protagonist who purports to have no conscience actually has one. Furthermore a “bad” protagonist, if palatable, is necessarily and somehow and in some way, to some degree, good. [Read more…]

The Ordinary World: How Much and How Ordinary?

February 6, 2019 By Donald Maass 46 Comments

Even if you are not familiar with The Hero’s Journey, there’s a good chance you know that its first step is establishing the Ordinary World. That, commonly understood, is a baseline view of a protagonist’s life and location.

Establishing the Ordinary World is like playing the first chord in a musical composition: It’s the safe and satisfying sound to which we will long to return during the many variations to come. Until we know a protagonist’s “normal” we won’t know what order needs to be restored. We’ll lack the heart and home anchors that make a protagonist both relatable and motivated. We won’t meet the people who need to be protected and saved. A protagonist without an Ordinary World will be a hero without a cause, and so we need to spend some time there.

That, anyway, is the common idea; however, that idea is limited if not wrong. In too many manuscripts it leads to early pages laden with the domestic clatter of the daily routine. Characters do what they’d do on any ordinary day followed shortly, or so the theory goes, by an interruption that brings the first hint of trouble.

Even stories that begin with trouble—a dead body, say, or a special -ops mission—can retreat quickly to a “normal” atmosphere and tempo, as when a detective in Chapter Two goes home for a shower, or the team returns to base to debrief. Getting to know protagonists is important, obviously, but pouring cereal or joshing around do not automatically produce tension. In my experience, they almost never produce tension at all.

My colleague and friend Chris Vogler in The Writer’s Journey, his distillation and interpretation of mythologist Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces for writers, elaborates on the utility and purpose of the Ordinary World. Chris explains that the purpose of the Ordinary World is multi-fold. It can create a metaphor for the story world and its problems. It can set a story’s context, which is to say the framework for coming conflict. The Ordinary World can feel tame compared to the Special World later on, but the seemingly tranquil base can nevertheless contain the seeds of trouble. The hero’s problems do not begin elsewhere; they are already present at home. Pretty obvious when you think about it.

The Ordinary World phase of a novel can also foreshadow the Special World and raise the story’s dramatic questions. Heroes makes entrances, certainly, yet they can also sweep in along with them all of their baggage and hang-ups. We want to like heroes, unquestionably, but there is also no reason that heroes’ lacks, flaws, needs, wants, wounds, burdens or yearnings need to wait. The story’s stakes and theme are likewise in the air already. How could they not be? Stakes are always present and any issue worth writing about is already with us now.

Thus, the seemingly placid surface of the Ordinary World is deceptive. The Ordinary World is anything but settled and safe. Dangerous currents exist in the water close to shore. Any life that appears serene is actually loaded with suppressed conflict. A routine that feels comfortable and easy is in reality a situation in which a protagonist’s weakness is only temporarily tolerated. Heroes are not yet heroic at home, and if we look closely that is immediately obvious. Heroes have growing to do. They need to be tested. All of that is made plain in the Ordinary World.

Look at in that way, the Ordinary World doesn’t seem so ordinary, does it? Let’s take a look at some Ordinary Worlds already on the shelves.

S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967) opens with Ponyboy telling us about his world; in particular, the distinction between his social class and another: [Read more…]

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The Inner/Outer Balance

January 2, 2019 By Donald Maass 29 Comments

Do you talk a lot about yourself, or are you the bottled-up type? Which is better? Which type of person do you suppose is easier for others to know?

Talking a lot about yourself doesn’t necessarily mean that we know the real you. By the same token, being tight-lipped could well make you easy to read. Neither personality type is better, ask me, it is only a matter of how easily, and how well, we sense who you are. What you’re feeling. How you see things.

Thing is, we want to know you. Share your experience. Connect. Find out what we have in common. Know that we are not alone. Are you willing to let us in? Do you feel safe doing so? If you’re an open book, that’s great. If you need time to reveal yourself, that’s fine too. The point today is to understand yourself because how comfortable, and how quickly, you open up is connected to how you handle your characters on the page.

When reading a story, what we want above all things is to connect. Exciting plots and lofty prose are nice in a novel, but the deepest involvement we feel comes from those moments when our hearts fuse with your protagonist’s, and when something happening in the story feels like it is happening to us.

What happens in a story is not happening to us, of course. What characters are going through can seem like it is magically transferred to us but, actually, it’s not. What we read stimulates in us recognition. We associate story experiences with our own real lives and the wealth of feelings that we’ve banked. When an association is strong, we naturally—although incorrectly—ascribe what we feel to the story. Readers make comments such as, “It’s like the author was writing about me!”

Obviously not, but let’s focus on what produces that “as-if” feeling in readers. Back in November here on WU, Dave King gave us a terrific post on immersive POV, in which he edited a scene in which a wedding photographer is coaxing spicier shots from her bride-and-groom subjects. Dave shaped the passage to emphasize the photographer’s thought process, thereby immersing us more completely in her POV.

Today, my question is: How much immersion is effective? What’s the right balance of interior thoughts and feelings versus outward action? This question is often posed as show versus tell. That’s an accurate way to pose it, to a point, but framing the issue as show versus tell leads us to a false value judgment. Either showing or telling must be inherently better, right? (Mostly show gets the nod.)

The truth is that neither is superior, what matters is the effect you are having on your reader; whether your reader is experiencing recognition. Spelling out interior thoughts and feelings can do that, but so can implying those through outward action. However, not just any thoughts and feelings or action will work. There is a trick. Let’s turn to a couple of examples to examine both the benefits and pitfalls of either approach. [Read more…]

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