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When Worlds Collide

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Have you ever felt out of place?  I’m sure.  We all have.  Meeting the new in-laws.  An interfaith church service.  Asking the price of a necklace at Tiffany’s.  The ER.  CIA headquarters in Langley.  Strange environments where people are different.

One summer day commuting to work on my bike, I stopped at Sander’s Bakery on Lee Avenue in the Brooklyn neighborhood of South Williamsburg.  A bakery is a bakery, right?  Well, no.  Sander’s is in the heart of Brooklyn’s vast Chasidishe, ultra-orthodox Jewish community.  The shop was filled with men in long sideburns wearing black coats, Tzizit vests and beaver hats.  Women wore wigs, calf length skirts and sturdy shoes.  All spoke Yiddish.  The shelves were brimming with challah, strudel, rugelach, kippelech, sufganiyot, Napoleon cake and cookies.

In my jeans, black tee and bike helmet, I stood out.  Customers avoided my eyes.  I am goyim.  A non-Jew.  An outsider, suspicious, not unwelcome but not welcome either.  Cyclists have been attacked in South Williamsburg.  To some, I would be less than human.  Some, I knew, might believe that I literally lack a soul.

But hey, why should that stop me?  I was there for cinnamon rugelach.  The gentleman behind the counter accepted my money and spoke kindly.  I bothered no one and left quickly.  The rugelach was delicious.  No one was hostile.  The stereotypes of Hasidim are stereotypes.  (Gay bashers, child molesters, women oppressors, bad drivers?  Please.)  The Hasidic world is not my world, it’s just their world and so what?  They are entitled to live according to their faith.  And, hey, they have cinnamon rugelach.

In that trivial anecdote, note a couple of things.  The different place: South Williamsburg.  The different cultures: beaver hats versus my bike helmet.  The resolution: They are different but we find something in common in yummy cinnamon rugelach.

Most of all, though, note the source of tension.  Goyim.  Outsider.  Cyclists have been attacked in South Williamsburg.  Those feelings came not from anyone inside Sander’s Bakery.  They came from me.  When worlds collide, visual differences create contrast, true, but what creates conflict is the apprehension inside of a POV character.

When worlds collide, it is mostly inside. [Read more…]

Woke Writing

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In Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal takes on the task of stripping theatre to its roots, insisting that “all theater is necessarily political, because all the activities of man are political and theater is one of them.” For Boal, theatre at its most elemental was the “dithyrambic song”–a melody “created by and for the […]

A New Year for Writers

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It would be all too easy to write a January 2018 post heavy with angst and uncertainty. I could dwell on the unsettling political changes of the last year or so, both international and domestic. I could ponder what kind of world we will leave for our children and grandchildren. I could talk about challenge […]

Legendary

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Recently, a young agent on my staff requested a really good manuscript.  She wanted to represent it.  Naturally, so did a number of other sharp-eyed agents and thus my young colleague found herself in a so-called beauty contest, a familiar competitive event in our profession. To back up my young colleague’s bid, I arranged a […]

What to Give Yourself This Year

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It’s easy to look ahead to a new year and make resolutions about new habits—I’ll write 1,000 words a day, I’ll write seven days a week, I’ll finish/start that novel/short story/novella—you get the idea. But instead of resolving to do better, try harder, work smarter (not that there’s anything wrong with that), why not look […]

A Defense of Spoilers

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For a culture so obsessed with “enjoying the journey,” we sure do hate a ruined ending — isn’t that contradictory? A ruined ending — and the subsequent spoiler alerts that follow — belies our secret obsession with the destination: to enjoy the journey, we need to know how it ends. We don’t want to know how […]

Three Ways to Discover Your Character’s True Motivation

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Please welcome Jim Dempsey back to Writer Unboxed today, this time as our newest regular contributor! Jim is a professional member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders and works as a book editor at a company called Novel Gazing. In his own words, Jim tells us that: I’ve been editing for just over 20 years, […]

The Fine Line Between Humor and Tragedy

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Please welcome our guest, Jared Reck, to Writer Unboxed today! Jared is the author of A Short History of the Girl Next Door (“Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this unrequited love story will appeal to fans of Jennifer Niven, John Green, and Jesse Andrews”). He lives in Hanover, Pennsylvania, where he’s an eighth-grade Language Arts teacher. […]

The Sell-Out or the Purist?

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The other night, as a party of writerly types was winding down, I was caught up in a commercial versus literary discussion. Purity of purpose versus reaching out to readers. Aesthetics versus money. Art versus entertainment. Respect of the literati versus wide readership. As a novelist who has published over twenty books, I’ve written both […]

Getting Back to Grateful

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If there’s one universal truth about all types of writing and all types of writers, it’s probably that this is hard. Writing is difficult. If you pursue it with any persistence and passion, you’re certain to come up against obstacle after obstacle, even if they’re of your own making. And if you’re pursuing publication, many […]

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