Mad Skills

Story Collections as Novel Prompts

April 11, 2019 By Kathryn Craft 28 Comments

Many aspiring novelists learn their craft by first writing short stories. This makes oodles of sense: the character’s goal is more immediate, its complications are fewer, and the supporting cast is more manageable. With the end never far from sight, its layers are easier to interweave. I’ve so believed in this logic that, over the past twenty years, I’ve accumulated way too many short story collections.

Why “too many”? Because despite my best intentions, I don’t read them. It goes something like this: I’ll read one story, say something to myself like “huh,” then look at the clock. And then I’ll think, “Damn, I could be forty-five minutes into a novel by now.”

This is a shameful admission, but what can I say—that’s how much I love the long form.

Only one collection stayed on my nightstand past the typical one-story cut: The Stories of John Cheever.

The collection came to me as part of a thoughtful Christmas gift. After hearing that my writing-heavy, high-school-English track had not introduced me to many of the must-read classics, my stepson, himself a high-school teacher, gifted me a bundle—Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Steinbeck’s The Pearl, Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Updike’s Rabbit, Run—and among them was the surprise addition of the Cheever collection.

Cheever had already been gone from this world a good twenty years before I discovered him (just think on that a moment—wouldn’t you love to leave such a legacy?), but I immediately sensed that the man was telling stories from my life.

This at once both pissed off and excited me.

To wit:

“Goodbye, My Brother”

I adore this story, which begins:

We are a family who has always been very close in spirit. Our father was drowned in a sailing accident when we were young, and our mother has always stressed the fact that our familial relationships have a kind of permanence that we will never meet with again.

The narrator’s family has four children, one of whom is a black sheep, but despite their differences, an inexorable pull brings them back together at the same vacation spot each year. In the year of the story, push comes to shove.

My family had five children, “black sheep” being more of a floating determination, but despite our differences, an inexorable pull still brings us back together at the same vacation spot each year. Push came to shove at any number of those gatherings. I’m novelizing a slant on that premise now.

“O City of Broken Dreams”

This tale of a Midwestern family spending their last dime on train tickets to New York City while pursuing their dream of selling the husband’s play, and finding that nothing in the city is as they thought it would be, could have been ripped from my family’s life. Several times over. Until I’d read Cheever, I’d never before realized such a story’s inherent and relatable drama. [Read more…]

When to Let Go of Your Original Inspiration

March 14, 2019 By Kathryn Craft 31 Comments

Each time Ann Patchett writes a novel, she sets a fresh challenge that will ensure her growth as a writer. At the time she said this—2002—she was explaining her decision to assemble a group of characters that must overcome a peril, even though none of them can speak the same language. That novel became the stirring New York Times bestseller Bel Canto, in which a group of ambassadors gathered in the home of a South American dignitary are held captive during a coup.

The notion of setting a fresh challenge stuck with me, since one of the reasons I find novel writing so appealing is the way it encourages me to engage in lifelong learning and growth. When starting on my current work-in-progress, I challenged myself to write a story in which a secondary character’s presence is felt on every page, even though she doesn’t arrive on scene until the very end.

It worked until it didn’t. After several “so close” passes from publishers, last month I pulled the project to revise. My upcoming one-week residency would provide the perfect opportunity to enact my revision plan, I thought.

Three days in, it was clear I had lost my way.

Thank goodness my friend Tori was on hand to reflect upon my tale of literary woe. She said she thought the only solution was to bring the character on scene so she could drive the conflict. I reminded her that originally, the character’s absence was the conflict. Tori replied, “And thinking that way prompted this whole beautiful novel. But maybe it’s time to let that notion go.”

I saw the truth in this because I’d heard this advice before.

When I was an undergraduate at Miami University (OH), the distinguished choreographer Phyllis Lamhut came to work with our dance company. A lit cigarette dangled from her lips—in the dance studio!— while she watched our work. After barking out a harsh critique of my graduate assistant’s piece, whose work I adored, it was time to show her mine.

I immediately regretted performing in my own piece, which gave her two ways to find me incompetent. My knees shook as the music began. The concept I was playing with was about space as a lone dancer’s partner (a concept I would revisit in my debut novel, The Art of Falling). As I moved, I could feel the heat of Lamhut’s glare on my skin. [Read more…]

Seeking Truth in Fiction

January 10, 2019 By Kathryn Craft 19 Comments

A few weeks after my first husband’s suicide, when I was able to think again, one thought pulled me forward through the difficult years of recovery to come: I was meant to write about this.

But how? Back in the late 90s, the memoir revolution had not yet gained purchase. People would read books about family suicides by Joan Rivers and Judy Collins, but who would care to read about a dance critic from Allentown, PA and her two sons? Memoir was out.

I considered self-help. I’d become a bit of an aficionada after all, gobbling up any book with clues to help me through and beyond, but lack of credentials and platform discouraged this route.

Journalism seemed an obvious choice, if somewhat of a genre hop. I’d already been a dance critic for fourteen years. Yet gathering facts and analyzing statistics, while a valuable exercise, did not promise what I was really seeking: a way to write a better story for my family.

When the need to express myself smacked against the cold hard wall of publishing pragmatism, I turned to fiction.

Creative writing is not an escape. It’s the opposite. Fiction demands that we dive headfirst into puddles of conflict others might choose to sidestep. It asks that we scratch and dig until we unearth emotional truths, and then find a way to convey them so that a reader we’ve never met can share the same journey.

With this challenge in mind, I want to share a few passages from novels whose authors’ mad skills rely on details, yes, but not facts. They are rooted in feelings. They made me pause to think, “Wow, that is so true.”

In The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon, two girls set out to find a neighbor who has gone missing. You have to love a writer who can help you see anew something as pervasive as heat.

There was nowhere to escape the heat. It was there every day when we woke, persistent and unbroken, and hanging in the air like an unfinished argument. It leaked people’s days onto pavements and patios and, no longer able to contain ourselves within brick and cement, we melted into the outside, bringing our lives along with us. Meals, conversations, arguments were all woken and untethered and allowed outdoors. Even the avenue itself had changed. Giant fissures opened on yellowed lawns and paths felt soft and unsteady. Things which had been solid and reliable were now pliant and uncertain. Nothing felt sure anymore. The bonds which held things together were destroyed by the temperature—this is what my father said—but it felt more sinister than that. It felt as though the whole avenue was shifting and stretching, and trying to escape itself.

[Read more…]

Welcome the Darkest Hour

December 13, 2018 By Kathryn Craft 15 Comments

We’re just eight days away from the longest night of the year. What better time to think about the dark moment in your novel?

Until now your protagonist has been facing increasingly difficult obstacles to get what she wants, but at the dark moment, all hope for a good outcome seems lost. It is worse than falling short of her goal—it is the opposite of success.

The structural bones of your story will point you toward what this moment might look like. The examples for today’s discussion are brought to you by the mad skills of author Janet Benton in her historical novel, Lilli de Jong.

Inciting incident/story goal

To construct an effective dark moment, you need to look back at what it is the character wants, and why she wants it so badly.

Raised as a Quaker, Lilli de Jong values education, independent thinking, and a strong moral character. But when she soon finds herself completely at odds with her dreams for her life—pregnant, left behind by her lover, banished from her congregation and teaching position, and cast from her father’s home by his new wife—Lilli must face alone a society that has little compassion for unwed mothers. With no other option, Lilli enters a haven for wronged women to deliver her child. The expectation for this charitable support is that three weeks after delivery, she will allow a married couple to adopt her baby.

After giving birth, Lilli writes in her diary:

The doctor has cut the fleshy cord that connected us, but an invisible one has taken its place. I begin to suspect that this one can neither be cut nor broken.

And soon:

My shoulders, back, arms, and neck ache from holding her; my nipples are scabbed and sometimes bleeding; yet the most worn-out, painful part of me is my heart. It stretches so wide when she’s contented that I believe its fibers are tearing. When she suffers, it shrinks and throbs and hardens into a knot.

Lilli sees herself and Charlotte as an emotional, spiritual and physical unit. Her goal, further motivated by the strong bond she had with her recently deceased mother, is to keep her.

Stakes

To appropriately plan for the dark moment, you must return to the stakes, for this is where your protagonist will suffer from them the most. Lilli’s bond with Charlotte deepens through nursing, but as her three weeks of safe harbor near their end, Lilli attends a church service and has this epiphany:

I saw laid out the whole of my upbringing, which had urged me to live honestly; my coming situation, where lying would be the rule; and the cowardice that had kept me from admitting this divergence…

But the moment I let go of Charlotte and pretend she never existed, my life of sin begins. Lies will color—no, suffuse—my most intimate relations. The pain at my center will stay closed and festering, while lies spread like a layer of lard beneath my skin.

[Read more…]

How to Recognize the Finish Line

November 8, 2018 By Kathryn Craft 7 Comments

A story a dancer once told me: It’s opening night. Six dancers wait in the wings, nerves taut. Their entrance is imminent—the overture has begun and they are counting the music—when the choreographer, heeding an infamous penchant for change, rushes over to them aflame with last-minute inspiration. The dancers do the only self-preserving thing they can do—stick their fingers in their ears and ignore him.

You’d think writing is more set—after a certain point, you are limited to the little black marks on the printed page, right? Ha—that’s what the “delete” key is for! And I’ve seen more than one author pause a public reading to decipher last-minute changes scribbled in the margins.

Truth is, we could tinker forever. But all artists—painters, poets, and novelists alike—eventually have to trust that it’s time to let a project go.

Deadlines and other useful delimiters

This post was pulled from a larger collection of wisdom than I could use, but I was limited by: 1) how much I could cram into a reasonable word limit, and 2) my deadline. But is reaching imposed limits reason enough to consider a piece “finished”?

In some cases, preset parameters can both inform a project’s conception and provide a sense of its completion, says writer and painter Joe Skrapits (Allentown, PA). This is particularly true in one of his specialties, plein-air landscape painting.

“The light is at a certain angle, or of a certain quality, or the shadows are in a certain place, and so you give yourself an hour or two to state what that is,” says Joe. “When the light changes, you don’t keep changing. It puts a limit on your participation of that day, anyway. And sometimes that’s good.”

A novel can’t be written in a few hours, but Skrapits offers a useful metaphor. Creating limits around your work is one way to practice walking away from it. A baby’s nap can give you an hour or two to free write. A contest provides a deadline. NaNoWriMo sets a one-month, 50K word-count goal. Creating limits will bring your finish line into clearer focus.

Perfecting vs. finishing

So how can you be sure you’ve come up with the perfect combination of the 90,000 words in your manuscript?

Of course, you can’t.

You will use the word “finished” many times in the life of your novel (you’ll finish… each draft. Developmental edits. Beta reader edits. Concision edits. Agent edits. Publisher edits. Copy edits.) But beyond the mechanics of writing “The End,” from whence comes your sense of completion?

“A piece is finished when it satisfies the artist’s intention,” Skrapits says, adding that his definition presupposes that the artist has a fairly clear vision of what he or she wants to achieve.

That leads us into the first of many ways to define “finished.”

Philosophical: What were you trying to say, and have you said it? Such a simple question and yet we can forget to ask it. Writing a new synopsis after each draft will help determine if your accumulation of words has indeed fulfilled your intention.

Editorial: Is it as tight as it can possibly be? Readers won’t want to wade through excess verbiage to find your story and publishers won’t want to cut down one more tree than necessary to print your book. Make every word count. [Read more…]