Skin That’s Thick and Thin: Some Advice for Writers

One cliché bit of advice doled out to writers (and actors, artists, politicians, and various other people who elect professions where they face a lot of criticism) is that they should grow a thick skin. Like rhinos, perhaps. Or crustaceans of some kind. The assumption is that this will make us more successful. That might be true. Perhaps due to our society’s conflation of financial success and happiness, there’s also an underlying implication that this thick skin will lead to happiness. Or to better art. I am unpersuaded.

This week, I hung out with a friend who had a particular verbal tick. In the midst of conversation, he'd say, "I don't care about that." This struck me as a harsh way to segue from one subject to another, or to make a point. This tick can be partly explained by the fact that English is his third language; a native speaker, learning English as a child with less strongly formed opinions, might have learned some gentler way to say, “I disagree,” or “Well, I’m not sure that’s relevant to the point at hand.” This friend simply and boldly asserted that he didn’t care. He even doubled-down, voicing his admiration for a particular writer who had achieved great success by promoting unpopular theories due to his complete disregard for the opinions of critics or academics who disagreed with him.

I shared my current dilemma. My novel comes out in a little over a month, and I can’t help but hope that readers enjoy it. I attributed this to a personality flaw. “I’m a people-pleaser,” I told my friend, as though making a confession to a habit of cannibalism or necrophilia. My confessor encouraged me to go and sin no more, to grow a thick skin, to not give a -well, he didn’t use the word “care” that time- let’s just say he advised me not to donate any carnal acts to critics.

On the surface, this seems like good advice. Why should a writer allow himself/herself to be cut to the core by the rantings of some Greenwich Village hipster he’ll never meet, the invective of a mommy-blogger who was too distracted by her children to read the book carefully, the ad hominem insults of a sixteen-year-old who likes to post nasty reviews on Amazon just to see if he can get a reaction?

Why? Because those three people are readers! The guy from the village walks down to Washington Square Park, finds an empty bench, and he reads! The stay-at-home mom carves out the few precious minutes when both her kids are napping, and she reads! The kid on Amazon… okay, he’s really a 35 year-old troll who lives in his mom’s basement, and he doesn’t really read novels, but his life is sad and he deserves some sympathy. Though the writer may never meet them, the guy in Washington Square Park and the woman sitting on her toilet next to the baby monitor… They are the reason he writes. Their opinions matter, not just because they are human beings with intrinsic worth, but because they read the book. If the writer doesn’t care about that, he should stick to journaling.

But this is an over-simplification as well. I never want to achieve “universal acclaim.” First of all, if everyone knows that a book is good, they file it away as a “classic,” a book everyone has heard of and no one is excited to read. Second, if the world of literary criticism ever becomes so homogeneous in its thinking that there are no contrarian voices, the whole pursuit becomes something I’d prefer to avoid. I hope for some bad reviews. By all the gods, I’d love to have a few high profile bad reviews. But only because they would drive more people to the book. I want the majority of readers to enjoy it. At least 51%. There. I’ve confessed. I want it to be (gasp) popular.

Having a thin skin may actually help in that department. Thin skin may be fragile, but it’s also sensitive. It feels effectively. Absorbing that information allows the writer to more accurately predict what might be pleasing to the reader. Consider, who would you rather curl up next to on a thick rug in front of a roaring fire, a beautiful woman/man with very sensitive skin, or the aforementioned rhinoceros? I would hypothesize that the human is more likely to be able to satisfy your sexual desires, but I don’t know what you’re into.

Still, despite Stephen King’s assertion, writing isn’t seduction. A desire to be sensitive  to reader’s tastes can lead to trend-chasing, a bad habit that has bred a thousand Twilight knock-offs which should have stayed hidden away in fan-fiction forums. Trend-chasers are about as seductive as the kid in middle school who asked every single girl to the dance and found out they were all planning on washing their hair that night. A writer has to have some small measure of self-respect.

After writing a handful of novels, I finally decided this was the one to publish not just because I’d honed my craft to a point I could be proud of, but because this book was my bravest one yet. I was able to put the disapproval of my grandmother out of my mind on some previous projects, but this time I was finally able to risk the disapproval of my parents, my dearest friends, even my wife, because I was nine-and-a-half months pregnant with a story that just had to come out. As I wrote it, I caught myself thinking, “Oh, that line is going to piss-off Christians,” and “Oooo, Muslims won’t like this chapter very much,” and “Some atheists won’t appreciate that crack,” and “Dammit. There go the Orthodox Jews.” I didn’t set off to offend religious people. Most of my favorite people are adherents of one religion or another. The book will only offend the kind of believers who lack a sense of humor. Luckily for me, they aren’t known for their habit of searching out opinions that disagree with their own. But they are the scariest kind of believers! Their bad reviews sometimes take the form of bullets. I was aware of that. I couldn’t let it stop me, though. I was processing the loss of my own faith, and I had to turn that pain into something positive, even fun, for myself. Then I discovered that the story I needed to tell myself was a good one, one that others might enjoy.

I couldn’t back down from the story, but I couldn’t ignore my audience either. If I was going to make it available for them, it had to be more than a story for my own benefit. I had to revise and edit. Those phases are the least popular among writers precisely because they exist to serve the reader’s needs, not the writer’s pleasure. I can’t overstate their importance, though. Not only did a willingness to revise, to truly “see again,” deepen my own experience of the story, it made the novel into something I’m far more proud of. And editing? Editing doesn’t build pride; it prevents shame. Now I’m neck deep in online writer’s groups where we share marketing ideas, and I am constantly amazed by the number of writers who post ungrammatical, misspelled, incorrectly punctuated comments online. Sure, these might be informal forums, but we’re writers, for Valhalla’s sake! Every typo is an offense to potential readers. I paid good money to hire an editor to save me from any of those mistakes in my book. You can bet I’m going to try to communicate that level of quality to potential readers in every online post.

So, if this novel is any kind of model, writing should have some measure of swagger. It should be hard at its core but soft on the outside. It should be confident but also sensitive. On second thought, I guess Stephen King was right about seduction.

In my life, my need to please others has led to my most embarrassing moments (made all the more excruciating by the fact that I’m so sensitive to embarrassment), my most ill-conceived blunders (desperate, impulsive attempts to win favor), and my most shameful acts (failed efforts to make people like me at the expense of others). However, the same impulse has led to my greatest successes. When I wanted the approval of the right people and went about acquiring it in the right way, I not only found my greatest joys but brought the most joy to others. Furthermore, my need to please demands that I look for the good in people, give them the benefit of the doubt at every turn, and though this has burned me quite a few times, it’s also proven to be a good bet; most people, it turns out, are worth pleasing.

My paper-thin skin may be sliced to ribbons shortly after the book hits shelves. I certainly won’t participate in a public melt down like some have. I plan to take the best advice I’ve heard about book reviews: Say Nothing. If it’s bad, Say Nothing. Maybe have a good cry or a stiff drink. If it’s good, Tweet it, Facebook it, send everyone to it, but on the page itself, Say Nothing. Here’s what I’d like to say to a reviewer, though: “Thank you for reading the book. If you didn’t like it, I’m sorry I failed you. Truly sorry. If you liked it, that makes the whole process of revision and editing and publishing worthwhile. But, either way, I care about you, and I’m grateful for you.”

So here’s my current advice for writer, such as it is: Don’t grow thicker skin. Instead, change your clothes.

1) First, put on your best suit of armor. Climb into an M-1 Abrams Tank. Drive it into a nuclear submarine. Write like you are invincible. (Warning: People in suits of armor in tanks in submarines are lonely. And cold.)

2) Change into your shortest skirt. Revise for the reader. But remember what you learned from the movie Pretty Woman: Don’t kiss on the mouth. Some things are off limits.

3) Put on a tuxedo. Adjust your cufflinks. Button the top button. Check your fly. Straighten your bow tie. Edit to protect yourself from shame.

4) Strip down to a swami’s loincloth and sit cross-legged under a tree for a while. Publish after a great deal of consideration.

5) Then, acknowledge that you’re basically naked. Run as fast as you can toward a garden of sweet, juicy blackberries and long thorns. Be willing to hurt.

That willingness to suffer shows more courage and more respect for the reader than any runway high-fashion name-brand rhino-skin apathy.

Learning to Read like a Writer

[originally published at amwriting.org, here, in June of 2011]

Here’s a secret writers need to learn in order to master their craft: Writers need to learn to read. They don’t need to consume all the books on the New York Times best sellers list just to see which kind of monster is producing the most sales. Writers need to learn to read differently from readers. Writers need to understand that reading is part of practicing.

Part of my job as a high school English teacher consists of teaching students to become better readers by teaching them to identify the purpose of their reading. Are they reading for pleasure? Are they seeking information? Are they analyzing an argument in order to be persuaded or to refute the author’s position? Good readers can do these things. And that’s enough.

But it’s not enough for writers. Writers are artists, and artists need to be able to examine the works of their peers and betters in a different way.

Consider, as an analogy, film. When one of my sixteen-year-old students goes to see the newest big Hollywood blockbuster at the Cineplex this summer, he is satisfied by the experience. As a viewer, he was looking for entertainment, and the movie delivered. Done and done. Now, the cinephile goes to the movie theater and watches the same film (not anything high-brow, but something competently-made) and is also entertained. But she thinks about the structure of the story, the characters, the setting, the themes: She is, in short, a reader of film as text, and because she can do all the things we try to teach good readers to do when they pick up a novel, she gets a lot more out of the movie. She does not, however, come out of the theater talking about the tracking and handy-cam shots, diegetic and non-diegetic sound, side lighting and back lighting, fast cuts and slow fades. These were the techniques that gave the movie its punch and made it satisfying, but they aren’t her business.

These techniques are the business of the movie critic. The critic studied film back in college. She can not only tell you that The Conversation is her favorite Francis Ford Coppola movie, but she can explain why in great detail. She watches movies for a purpose, but it’s not to be entertained or to be informed or to be persuaded. At least, those aren’t enough. She watches movies because it’s her business, her livelihood, to evaluate them based on her vast knowledge of the way they are made, as well as what they make her think and how they make her feel.

And then there’s the film director. He watches movies differently than the casual viewer, the cinephile, and the critic. He watches to learn. For him, watching movies is part of his artistic education. It’s practice.

Writers need to do the same thing. When we pick up a novel, we can remember why we fell in love with books when we were young. We can enjoy being transported to new places, getting to know new people, and absorbing new ideas. We can even evaluate the works in the same way critics do. But we cannot afford to stop there. We need to read differently. For us, every choice of simple or complex vocabulary, every choice about following the basic rules or breaking them, every choice about revealing the minutia about a character or hiding it serves as a lesson which will make us better writers. This is because we recognize all these things for what they are: Choices. Choices made by writers. Writers just like us, only better. Admitting that last part is absolutely essential to becoming better writers ourselves.  As long as we hold fast to the same choices we’ve always made, believing we are God’s gift to our readers, then not only is our writing a waste of time, but our reading is, too. Arrogant writers aren’t just obnoxious; they’re missing out on vital time to practice.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, talks about a group of psychologists who studied violin students in Germany. They divided the students up into three groups based on ability as determined by their teachers, then tried to figure out what made the great ones great and the mediocre ones mediocre. What they found was that the great ones practiced more. Not just a little bit. A lot more. In fact, they found a magic number necessary to become a virtuoso: 10,000 hours of practice. At a good clip, that takes ten years. They also didn’t find too much deviation from that. None of the virtuosos got by with very little practice, and none of the mediocre violinists practiced for 10,000 hours and remained mediocre.

Then, the psychologist began looking into other fields, and they found that the same magic number held up in every endeavor they examined. 10,000 hours. Athletes. Computer programmers. Ballerinas. Composers. And yes, writers.

The quality of those hours matters as much as the quantity, and that’s why writers need to change the way they read; it’s the difference between 10,000 hours of entertainment versus 10,000 hours of practice. One of Gladwell’s examples of 10,000 hours is the early Beatles before the British Invasion, when they were just a struggling rock band trying to find gigs. They worked in strip clubs in Hamburg, Germany and would often play for eight hours straight to non-English speaking audiences and compete for attention with the strippers. Not only did this give them a chance to compose songs that are probably on your iPod right now, but they also had to learn dozens, probably hundreds of covers, and not just of rock and roll songs but of Jazz standards and other genres. What Gladwell doesn’t discuss is the influence of the music Lennon and McCartney were listening to, both before the Beatles formed and during this time. I would bet good money that these guys were not only reading the crowds to see what was working, but they were also listening carefully to the music on the radio and on the albums they bought, and listening in a different way than you or me. They were reading the music to become better musicians.

My preferred example (as a die-hard NBA fan), would be a basketball player. If a basketball player practices his shot for 10,000 hours, he will get to the point where he can sink his free-throws a very high percentage of the time, he’ll know where he can hit the highest percentage of three-pointers, and he’ll make some very tricky moves under the hoop on a drive. And he will lose. Why? Because he didn’t spend some of that time reading the scouting report about, and watching tape of, his prospective opponents. His 10,000 hours were spent becoming an oddity, a guy who could mop the floor with you at HORSE, and in its own way that is becoming a virtuoso. But he won’t be a great basketball player, because he didn’t learn to read his opponents.

Sure, the analogy is imperfect. Writing is at once less collaborative (despite great writing communities like #amwriting, we do our work in isolation), and less competitive (we don’t go head-to head with another author or team of authors. It’s not a zero sum game. More good books can generate more readers.) Maybe we’re less like players watching tapes of their opponents to learn to beat them and more like players watching the greats to learn from them.

So pick up a copy of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games and learn from her choice to write the book not only in first person, but in the present tense. Crack open Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and learn from his choice to eschew dialogue tags and conventional punctuation, then follow up with All the Pretty Horses or No Country for Old Men to reassure yourself that it’s not a fluke that just happens to work brilliantly but a conscious and careful choice he’s not always bound by. Read Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and learn how a premise that seems doomed to be saccharine and trite becomes beautiful and powerful because of careful choices of characterization and intentional withholding.

Then go grab that guilty pleasure book on your nightstand. You know you have one. This is the huge hit by that debut novelist that fills you with rage when you read about the sales figures, and you grouse about it so publicly and with such vehemence that you can’t possibly admit how much you enjoyed the book yourself. Now, when you are flying through that weak prose, that thin characterization, or that awful adverb-filled dialogue attribution that makes you want to throw the book at the wall, stop and figure out why you don’t. Sure, it’s fine to identify the things you don’t like about the book. Note those choices so you will make different ones. But also acknowledge that there’s a reason that book is in your hands, and other copies are in a lot of other hands at the same time.

If you’re willing to do that, to learn from your betters (and yes, that hack on the New York Times best sellers list is your better, at least in some way) , then reading becomes part of your practice time, part of the 10,000 hours you need to rack up in order to become a true master of the art. Writing is practicing your shot. Reading is watching tape. You must do both to be great.

On Sharing the Draft of a Novel with Friends

[originally published here in January of 2011] Before Christmas Break, I asked four of my colleagues from the English department at the high school where I work to read the first draft of my recently completed manuscript. That was foolish, because I then spent my whole break feeling a consistent, low-grade anxiety about their possible reactions. I recently asked my wife to read it, and she promised to start today. Now I’m a nervous wreck.

One of the things all these people have in common, besides being people I respect and care about (my wife most of all) is that none of them ripped the book out of my hands, squealed with pleasure, and ran off to tear through it in a single sitting. In fact, when I returned from my anxious break and found that most of my colleagues hadn’t read it, I was greatly relieved. As much as I would be horrified to hear that they hated the book, I think I would be even less capable of responding appropriately if they loved it. At least, when they apologized for not getting around to it, I knew what to say. “That’s okay. You’re busy. It’s no big deal,” I lied.

Don’t these people understand a writer’s relationship with his or her novel?

Of course they don’t. That’s a stupid question. To paraphrase my African-American friends, “It’s a writer thing; you wouldn’t understand.” More specifically, it’s a novelist thing. I’m not sure anyone who hasn’t written at least one novel can really understand the relationship.

I’ve been thinking about that relationship (as I’ve stewed and fretted about my coworkers avoiding me because they hated my book), and I remember hearing more than one writer describing his or her novel as a child to whom they’ve given birth. I categorically reject this metaphor. It’s wrong in too many ways. In fact, any writer who utters this kind of drivel should not only avoid using metaphors in his or her own work, but should probably also not be allowed to have children.

A novel is only like a child in the most superficial ways. It’s fun to start. It takes a while. It hurts to finish. And then it’s ready to be presented.

But even these similarities don’t stand up to close inspection. When you begin a novel, as you fall into the joy of the story and pass that point where you know it can’t all fit in a short story, you inevitably begin to dream about the rest of the book, its reception, the fame and wealth it will bring when throngs of adoring fans beg for a sequel. Not so, for children. If, in the act of making babies, you start to think about your future child, even if you limit yourself to only the most positive parts of child-rearing, the way your father will shake your hand outside the delivery room, your mother’s happiness when she picks up the baby for the first time, the look on your son’s face some Christmas morning, the pride your daughter will take in some spelling test or piano recital, the funny stories you’ll tell to his prom date to embarrass him before he heads out the door, the moment you walk her down the aisle… Any one of these moments would sufficiently ruin the mood enough that no one would ever make babies.

And yes, writing a novel is a significant investment of time, but unlike a pregnancy, there’s no natural mechanism which assures that it won’t take a year, or five years. And if you don’t finish your novel that might be a bit disappointing, but let’s not fool ourselves about the false equivalence to the heartbreak of losing a pregnancy.

I’ve heard that labor hurts. A lot. In the process of crafting your novel, you may run into barriers that might make you cry out in exasperation, but that’s not quite the same thing. Also, those frustrations, while far less pronounced than the pain of childbirth, don’t come exclusively at the end of the process. Writer’s block is the unpredictable false contraction that pops up during the first trimester, or the second, but doesn’t mean you’re anywhere close to finishing the book. Oh, and if that false contraction is bad enough, you can walk away from the novel for a year or two. I’m pretty sure you can’t take a hiatus in the middle of your pregnancy. But again, I’m not speaking from experience.

And then, when your baby is born, it’s really born. It’s out in the world, fully formed and ready to go. Your job instantly changes. And people can immediately see your baby, and coo over it, and no one I’ve ever met says, “I don’t really have time to look at your baby right now,” or “I’ve examined your baby and he just doesn’t do it for me,” or “Your baby is pretty enough, but I’m just not sure what she’s trying to say to us.” The baby is there and perfectly wonderful. The novel is a rough manuscript and you have to schlep around, begging for some agent to pimp it to publishing companies. If you treat your baby this way, immediately looking for someone to pimp him on the streets for cash, you should be locked up.

So what is a writer's relationship to his novel like? What metaphor might explain this better to that first group of prospective readers who just don’t understand how important this is to you?

I think writing a novel is more like trying to build a boat in your backyard. At first, you’re excited about the drafting of the plans. Everything is possible. Will it have a motor? Will it have a sail? Why stop at one? Maybe a crow’s nest, and replica cannons, and a satellite navigation system! Throw them all in there! Why the hell not? And if your spouse is noticing that slightly mad gleam in your eye, you don’t have to show her the plans quite yet. They’re just sketches, after all. Who cares, right?

And then you actually go and buy lumber. Very quickly you realize that you aren’t quite up to this task. You know a thing or two about boats, but mostly from pictures and movies, and there’s really not enough room in your backyard to build the Queen Anne 2. But you’ve nailed some boards together, and you’ve made adjustments to your plans, so why not continue, right? Who cares?

Now the hull is starting to take shape. You find yourself telling friends that you’re building as boat. After their reactions, you find yourself keeping it a secret again. Don’t worry. They’ll forget.

You make time in your schedule, but not too much. It would be embarrassing to have to cancel engagements because there’s a half a boat in your back yard. The neighbors complain about the hammering after dark, so you move some things around and try to do most of the work on weekends during daylight (okay, well maybe that’s the exact opposite of the novel, but we’re still closer than a pregnancy), and you just keep adding more lumber. You realize you’ve made a significant investment in this thing, but it’s a sunk cost (you do note the pun), so you can’t stop now.

You find that you’re acquiring all these new tools, too. Back in high school, your shop teacher seemed like a nice enough guy, but you just didn’t understand how he got so excited about this kind of thing. Now you imagine calling him up to show it off, but you reconsider and decide to wait until you know it will actually float.

You start to get really worried that the neighbors will look over the privacy fence and see what you’re doing. You know they’ll call you "Noah" behind your back and make jokes about the coming flood. They would call your sanity into question, and you’re not sure you could blame them. But it’s really coming together.

At the end of the building, there’s a lot of sanding and painting involved. If you hadn’t committed to the thing a long time ago, you’d never go through all this drudgery, but now it seems like an act of love. You wonder how it has come to pass that you actually take pride in your new talent for sanding. It’s not exactly something you could put on a résumé, but you’re pretty sure you’re above average at it.

Now you think it’s finished, but that means you have to decide who will see it first. It’s just too big to put on the trailer all by yourself. Plus, even though you’ve walked around the thing a thousand times, you worry that someone else will immediately see a gaping hole in the hull you managed to miss. And what if your friend takes one look at it and says, “That’s going to sink,” or “That’s the ugliest boat I ever saw,” or “I don’t get it”? Bearing these possibilities in mind, you don’t want to throw a big party, pull a huge sheet off the thing, and yell, “Tada!” So you choose very carefully, make those selective phone calls, and ask for help.

And then they say, “Yeah, I’ll come help, but I’m busy, so it might be a while.” And you want to scream, “I have a yacht in my backyard! I built it with my own two hands! We’re talking His Majesty’s Sailing Ship ‘Novel’ here! I’m not kidding, it’s a giant f---ing boat!”

But you don’t do that. Because you are already the guy crazy enough to build a boat in your backyard, and crazy people can’t afford to shout at their friends.

So that’s where I find myself.

Now, assuming my friends and my wife don’t try to save me from embarrassment by dissuading me from proceeding, I’ll try to get an agent. Basically, I’ll be asking people to climb aboard and find out if she sails or sinks once we’re off shore. I understand why people don’t want to be on that maiden voyage, even the people nearest and dearest to me.

But I wish they could understand why I’m being so weird. I’m telling you, it’s a giant f---ing boat!

Why Reading Literature Is Essential

[originally published here in February of 2010] One of my colleagues, (and, I'm proud to say, my former student teacher) Sam Cornelius, has given me a homework assignment. He found this piece by Nancy Atwell, "A Case for Literature" and assigned me to weigh in. Atwell's concern is that the powerful forces pushing for national curriculum changes do not recognize the merits of reading literature because it does not satisfy their interests in profiting from more expensive curricula, more expensive testing, etc. She cites some research that shows that independently reading literature, and lots of it, not only increases reading proficiency, but is one of the best predictors of over-all academic success. At first glance, this is preaching to the choir, and I don't know how I'm going to satisfy Sam's assignment.

Luckily, the very first commenter on the comment page, Tomliamlynch, after claiming to agree with Atwell, writes, "English education has never had a convincing rationale for teaching literature; thank heaven for writing, as at least a teacher knows when a student does it! Literature has always been--and continues to be--use-less: it doesn't have a clear use that translates into a value for non-literature-teachers... Teachers don't know if and when students really read. They can't know; reading is wonderfully private."

Oh boy.

First of all, we don't teach literature for its own sake. Literature, on one level, is entertainment, just like films or music or any other art. We wouldn't expose a student to a famous painting just so they can say they've seen it. Similarly, when I teach a book (or a film, or a short story) my focus is always beyond the text itself. Now, that work of art can do many things, and I'm hesitant to tier them because they're all important, so these are not in a particular order.

Literature, like any art, teaches its appreciators how to participate in that art in the future. Tomliamlynch alludes to this by making a connection to writing, and that's certainly one part of the value. Reading makes students better writers. But if that were the limit, that a piece of literature might allow a student to become a professional novelist someday, we would be devoting far too much time to prepare such a tiny fraction of the population that we would be criminally negligent. But reading literature not only allows a student to participate in the art form as a creator, but as a different kind of consumer. Beyond simple comprehension (essential, but merely foundational) a reader of literature learns to make connections between a work and other works in that medium, in other media, in their own lives, in their culture, and across cultures. A bad reader can understand that Jack and Jill go up the hill to fetch a pail of water. A good reader asks why these two children are going up to get a resource that's usually found at a lower elevation, what the task says about their socioeconomic level, what the pairing might imply about a familial or romantic relationship, what the language might tell us about the time frame, how this might be different in another country, culture, or time, and what this might relate to in the reader's own life. These processes might be private if the student is reading at home, and eventually I want my students to be able to do this on their own, but as a teacher it is my role to make sure these processes are public, conscious, and intentional.

These skills are not useful in some tiny, compartmentalized way. Last night I was sitting with a couple dear friends arguing about the TV show Lost. All of the language we were using came directly from specific and targeted instruction provided by out English teachers. But these skills don't just allow us to interpret other art. They allow us to interpret Narrative with a capital "N." Whether I'm trying to follow the story of the debacle of the health care bill making its way through the Congress, or studying the way The Big Bang produces a singularity, then energy and time, then later matter, or the process by which the used car salesman evaluates his costs and benefits as he negotiates with me over the price of a '91 Isuzu, I need to be able to interpret a narrative.

Which brings us to the greatest virtue of literature (I know I said I wouldn't tier these, but I lied): We are stories. In fact, we are stories within stories within stories all the way down. If I can't understand the arc of a plot, the influence of a character, the consequence of a choice, the vagaries of fate or coincidence, then I cannot understand myself, my family, my faith, my community, my culture, my country, my world, or my universe. Try teaching history without narrative. Every discipline has a history. For that matter, try successfully teaching science without narrative (imagine teaching the water cycle without sequence). The skills one acquires when learning how to interpret literature cross over into every other field. In fact, if there is some kind of brain injury or developmental disorder which prevents a person from understanding all stories, I would bet that person also cannot be successful in any other field. (Somebody do some research on this for me.)

It should also come as no surprise, consequently, that people who do not know the same stories have trouble relating. Our culture is a composition of our stories. On the surface it just might seem like a person can't get the clever jokes on The Simpsons, or some off-hand Biblical allusion tossed out in a conversation. But it goes far deeper: If a person doesn't know the same stories, they can't understand another person, validate (or even fully respect) their decisions, or work effectively with them toward a common goal. Find two people in a crisis situation working toward some shared goal at the base of Maslow's hierarchy (a subsistence farmer in a third world country and the Peace Corps volunteer who's come to help provide emergency relief) and I'll bet you'll find two people telling each other stories. They are interpreting each other's literature, because if they don't they will only understand even the most basic needs from their own cultural contexts, and they will not be able to make larger plans or connections.

This sounds hyperbolic, but without narrative we cannot make meaning of our life experience. In short, without stories, life is meaningless. The more stories we are exposed to, and the more skilled we become at interpreting those stories, the more meaning we can make.

Education without literature (on paper, encoded digitally, filmed, etc.) is not only diminished; it's pointless.

Short Story: Fea's Tenses

I've written this story for a big-deal writing contest, and I want to get some feedback before I send it off. (That's allowed by the contest, don't worry.) The story is long, but if you have fifteen minutes and would be willing to look it over, please let me know what you think in the comments section below before I send it off. Thanks!

[Update 3/30/12: Thanks to all the folks who've given me feedback, here in the comments, on Facebook, and by email, I've made some significant changes to the story. I want to especially thank Megan Geigner, a PhD candidate at Northwestern (bio here), and Wendy Hart Beckman, owner/president of Beckman Communications, a professional writing service. Both of these friends went above and beyond the call of duty, and I am so grateful for their honesty and thoroughness. I hope they're pleased with the changes. I still have time to make more, so keep those suggestions coming!]

[Update 3/17/13: Though the story didn't win that contest a year ago, I've continued to polish it and get feedback from even more friends and students. The story is now available on Kindle, so I have to remove it from this blog, but if you're so inclined, you can still get a copy (less than a buck!) here:

 
 
http://amzn.to/WthJ3m

 Again, thanks to you all!

Student Wish List, Teacher Heartbreak

I'm in the midst of a marathon essay-grading day, but I have to stop and write about this immediately, because it has to be one of the saddest things I've ever come across.

This year, one of the classes I'm teaching is Language Arts in Spanish. It's not a Spanish class, but a class on reading and writing skills taught in Spanish for students who are learning English in other classes but also need language arts credit. For the semester final, I gave the students a collection of prompts taken directly from the state's example state test writing prompts, just translated. One prompt asked students to imagine they could switch places with anyone in the world and tell the story of what would happen. This student lost track of the prompt during the outlining process and ended up turning in a list of things she wished she could change about herself. It's absolutely heartbreaking.

She starts by saying she'd like to be taller, because she's sick of being called a midget. Then she says she'd like to be prettier, because she's sick of being called ugly. She capitalized Ugly, as though people use this in place of her name. Then she wished she had blue eyes, that her hair weren't so black, and that it weren't so straight. She also wished she could be a bit fatter so people would stop calling her Skinny. She wished she could do well in school so that someday she could become a lawyer. Then she wished she were more intelligent. She wished she could speak English better so she could speak to more people at school. Finally, she wished she could get a job so she could help out her family and contribute more to her household.

I certainly can't reveal this student's identity, but I think I can share this essay because there are a half a dozen girls in that class who could have written this list, and dozens of boys and girls in my other classes who could have written a variation on it in English. Here's what I can't figure out how to say to her, and to all those students, male and female, carrying around all this self-loathing: "These values you aspire to are cultural constructions. You want to be fatter because you get called Skinny, and some of the other girls are risking their health and maybe their lives because they are so afraid of being called Fattie. You want blue eyes because that's the color of the contact lenses the models plop in before the photo shoot. You want curly hair while the girls (and boys) with curly hair want straight hair. And those desires to reach an unattainable standard of beauty (a standard that has been intentionally designed to be unattainable so you will buy lots of expensive and unnecessary beauty products to look any way but the way you were born to look) will eat away at you on the inside until you are filled up with anger and pain. And then you will lose the best thing you had going for you, your kindness. That warm smile you wear when you come into my classroom will fade and be replaced by a sneer. That great, quiet, nervous laugh you have will become a derisive snort. And someday you will see someone who looks just like you, or just the opposite, or anywhere in between, and you will call her Ugly. Please, oh please don't let that happen. Do not accept the behavior of the kind of asshole who would even consider calling you Midget or Skinny or Ugly or anything other than your given name, and don't replicate that behavior yourself. And don't internalize that kind of person's judgement, or you will find yourself in relationships with people who hold just as low an opinion of you as you do. Don't let that happen. Please. I'm begging."

But I can't say that (and only partly because I shouldn't be using the word "asshole" when talking to my students, even when I'm referring to someone that fills me with rage). I'm going to try to get her an appointment with one of our school's counselors, and I'm going to have a talk with one of her other teachers, a smart, successful Spanish speaking female teacher I think this student will more readily accept as a mentor. But I also can't have the conversation because there are two competing voices in my head, and they both make me so angry that I'm in no position to calmly share my fears with this student. I hear these voice coming out of my TV, I read them in the comments sections online, and now I can't get their echoes to stop. Here's what I'd like to say to those two voices.

"Hey, doofy, naive, post-millennial 'liberal' voice, shut up. No, I'm not going to tell her that she'll be a super model one day. No, I'm not even going to tell her that she can be anything she wants to be, and that, if she tries really hard, she can become a lawyer. She can hardly speak any English, and unless she stumbles on a pot of leprechaun's gold, she's going to go to work to help out her family rather than continue her education long enough to make up for the deficiencies in her English skills. Your ridiculous notion that everyone can be exactly what they want to be is well-intentioned, but also hurtful and stupid. I'm not going to tell my kids to settle, but I'm also not going to tell them that they will have it all. Self-esteem like hers is a real problem, but a self-concept that is out of touch with reality is just a gateway to narcissism, or to a crushing disappointment when she finds out that the people who told her she was perfect were liars. She is good and kind. Why isn't that enough? And why do you want me to lie to a good person?"

"And you, callous, privileged "conservative" voice, you can just shove it. I hear what you're muttering under your breath. One minute you're saying poor people need to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The next you're whispering about illegal immigration and English-only education. I know nothing about her legal status, and neither do you. The difference is that I don't want to know, because I know that we're all better off if everyone in our country is educated, while you want to pass moral judgements based on an over-simplified view of a deeply flawed system you don't understand. I do know a bit more than you do about teaching people English, and I know that if I'd dropped you into a Chinese or Iranian school when you were a kid you would not have been a big fan of Chinese-only or Persian-only education. Guess what? You probably wouldn't have learned Chinese or Persian as quickly in an immersion model, either, but you would have been so focused on learning Chinese or Persian that you would have fallen years behind in science and math and never caught up to your Chinese or Iranian classmates. So don't tell me my business. Now, as for your pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps BS, here's a perfect example of why that's garbage, and only somebody who starts out with some advantages (white, male, intelligent, or wealthy) can possibly let those words come out of his mouth without sarcasm. She's right in front of you. She's a human being. She has all kinds of disadvantages, and she won't just catch up no matter how hard she yanks on her bootstraps. Don't you look away from her! She's hurting right now, and your entitled disregard for her pain is disgusting."

So you can see why I'm the last person in the world who should try to console this poor kid. There's too much shouting going on in my own head. But she handed this wish list to me. What does that say about the rest of her world?

Killing the Pain of Rejection: A Writer’s Failed Experiment

Today I shot my rejection letters. It didn’t make me feel better.

Sharing this story may be a mistake. It’s very bad form to whine about rejection letters. For one thing, it is whining, and that’s bad enough. No one likes whiners. But it’s even worse when it seems that a writer is slagging on an agent, so let me be very up-front about this: I am not angry with the two agents who rejected my most recent novel this week.

I have a great deal of respect for literary agents. This isn’t some form of brown-nosing because I want one of them to accept my work. I respect them because I understand what they do. Even this knowledge has been gleaned thanks to the generosity of agents; I’ve never been an agent nor do I know any personally beyond a few evenings’ conversation, but some agents keep great blogs about their work, and these give insights into why agents do what they do. First of all, agents love books, love writers, and love connecting writers with readers. They’re our advocates. They’re on our side. The trick is getting a generic someone who is generally on the side of writers to become a very specific someone who is advocating for you, personally. That’s arduous, to say the least. But I believe it’s worthwhile, and not just because of the dollars and cents (though I’ll be the first to argue that taking 15% off of something is better than keeping 100% of nothing). But agents also make our work better, and not just once we’ve acquired one. Trying to please these gatekeepers forces us to ask important questions as we write. “Who will the agent sell this to?” forces us to think about audience. “Will this grab an agent on page 1?” forces us to write a first page that will also hold a reader. “Can I pitch this to an agent in under thirty seconds?” forces us to think about theme and character in a way that can increase the coherence of a novel. Agents serve us before they ever hear from us.

And then, when they do hear from us, they try to do right by us. If they love our work and believe they can sell it, “doing right” involves signing us, helping us edit the manuscript again, and pitching it to publishers. But when they have to reject us (and they do), they really are concerned about our feelings. I’ve never met or read about an agent who took that duty lightly.

So why do rejection letters seem so curt and even callous? There are a few good reasons, none of which make a lie of the agents’ concern for the writers they deal with. First of all, if agents wrote lengthy, detailed rejection letters, they’d be wasting the time they owe to the writers they’ve already signed. An agent who writes you a five page rejection letter is an agent you wouldn’t want signing you, because she would then spend her time writing five page rejection letters to everybody else in her slush pile instead of selling your work. Besides the time management issue, agents don’t write long letters because they are making a clean break with you. Think of that horrible ex-boyfriend your friend was dating. Instead of breaking off the relationship, he acted like a jerk until she finally did it. He was a coward, and it hurt her more than if he’d come clean when he didn’t want to be in the relationship. Agents don’t want to send the false impression that they might say yes if you tweak this or that part of the manuscript. When they write “It isn’t right for me,” by “it” they mean the whole thing. That doesn’t mean they hate you or that the book is garbage. They mean they can’t enter into a relationship with that book, even if it stops leaving the toilet seat up or does the dishes more often.

I was lucky. I’d met both of the agents who rejected me at last week’s Willamette Writers Conference. They were kind and encouraging in person and followed up with supportive letters that were much longer than necessary. I would have understood if they’d sent me a one line reply, but one of them gave me two paragraphs. Both of them are on my short-list for future novels if this one doesn’t pan out. I sent them short thank you notes in which I said I was genuinely grateful for their time and consideration, and guess what? I was being genuinely genuine.

And there’s the rub. Rejection hurts. Some writers hide from that pain by blaming the agent. “She didn’t recognize my genius!” they seem to say. Bull. First of all, appreciation for any given novel is subjective. What one person my find brilliant, another may find tiresome or confusing or in need of major revision. That’s not the agent’s fault. Criticizing her for that is like saying she has the wrong favorite color. Also, agents are working, not just reading for pleasure. Maybe she enjoyed your book but didn’t think any publisher would buy it. More specifically, maybe she didn’t think any editor would buy it from her, in which case she’s done you a favor by directing you to find someone who thinks she can sell it.

Some writers blame the whole industry. I think this inclines some people to look to e-publishing, indie-publishing, or vanity publishing (not the same things, mind you). That decision should be based on other factors, like platform and audience, rather than on a knee-jerk reaction to rejection. The great thing about the self-publishing world is that there are no gatekeepers. Consequently, some readers who wouldn’t have been served by the traditional market are being connected with some writers who would have been barred by that system. But those readers have to wade through a sea of mediocrity and worse to get there, and that sea just gets more polluted when writers who fear rejection throw their muck into it without concern for who their audience might be and why the traditional publishing industry isn’t snapping them up.

Some writers turn that rejection inward. “She’s saying I’m a worthless human being.” Again, writing is subjective. Plus, she’s not saying anything at all about you. She’s saying something about your manuscript. It’s not personal. Of course it feels personal to us, because we poured our soul into that book, but, at this stage, it’s important to remember that we’re more than one novel. Faced with the choice between blaming the agent and blaming myself, I think it’s healthier and more honest to take responsibility, as long as it motivates me to write a better book next time, but not if it makes me want to reach for the bottle of vodka in the back of the cupboard.

But the pain is still there. I can’t let it consume me, and I can’t direct it at the agent who sent me the letter. So what am I to do with this feeling?

I had an idea. I decided to try to externalize it and attack the feeling directly. I printed out the rejection letters, then added a digital “REJECTED” stamp and crosshairs. They looked like this:

Even before I shot at them, I suspected it wouldn’t work. For one thing, I don’t go target shooting out of anger. I’ve only recently become a gun-owner, and I bought them for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I want to be prepared should I ever need them to feed or protect my family. Second, firearms are an interesting subject to learn about, and I’m only now realizing how completely ignorant I’ve been regarding this vast area of study I’ve completely neglected. Third, I’d like to come across as at least somewhat believable when I write about people using guns in my fiction. Finally, I admit, it’s a lot of fun. None of these reasons inclines me toward any kind of hostility involving firearms. They were the wrong tool for my purposes. I’d brought a gun to a feeling fight.

But I tried. I shot the ever-loving s--- out of those rejection letters.

As I’d expected, the exercise did little for my emotional well-being. It got a few chuckles out of some friends and family when I explained my plans. But once I was shooting, the pleasure of the experience came from trying to hit the target. I completely forgot about the abstract emotional goal. I could have been doing any other fun, competitive task. I might as well have been practicing my free throws or trying to learn a musical instrument. It had no effect on my feelings about rejection in general, or the specific disappointment those letters produced.

That shouldn’t surprise me. I’m sure there are more emotionally evolved people who can export specific feelings, physicalize them, and confront them. They’re probably mostly Buddhists, and they are unlikely to project those emotional constructs into paper targets and shoot at them.

I’m not a Buddhist. I’m just a writer. I shape feelings into letters and words and sentences. Then I hope that someone is willing to read those sentences. A reader’s empathy provides the comfort that small, singed holes in paper never can.

That’s the moral of the story: To confront rejection, put the gun away and get back to work.

Writing My Way Through a Short Summer

So I recently returned from a trip to London, Paris, and Madrid. I took a group of forty high school students, parents, and fellow teachers. Great fun was had by all, and much exhaustion was produced. If you'd like to read about the trip, I blogged the whole thing here at:

Central High Europe Trip

Now, after some days of decompressing, I am finally getting started with a real summer break. My plan was to put in flooring, dry-wall, and a drop ceiling in an unfinished room in our new house, but according to the guy at H&R Block it takes two to three months to get the eight grand stimulus-for-buying-a-new-house-money from the gov'ment. Without that job, I thought I'd work on school stuff, paint myself a copy of Picasso's Don Quixote for my classroom, maybe paint the walls in the living room (if Paige and I can agree on colors), and generally sit on my butt until early August, when we head out to Cincinnati to see my family. It's my mom's sixtieth birthday (man, that sounds weird. Mom can't be sixty!) and she wants to go to Dollywood. As much as I'm looking forward to the time with the family, those of you who know me can probably imagine just how well I'll fit in at the Country and Western version of Disneyland. Imagine a half-naked, foam-cheese-hat-wearing, body-paint-covered Green Bay Packers fan screaming his head off at Wimbledon, or a golf tournament at Pebble Beach, or a televised chess match. That will be me. I haven't worn an earring in five years, but I'm thinking of finding my old skull and crossbones earring and putting it back in just to heighten the effect.

Anyway, that leaves a month in the middle for my summer. So I started the painting of Don Quixote, then realized that, as much as I love the painting and the story, I really should read the book. So I started it (spoiler: it's really good) and I got an idea for another novel. Now, I know I haven't finished the trilogy (quadrilogy?) I'm two books deep in right now, but since no one is nibbling at those, and this will probably be more marketable (what the hell do I know about marketability?) I've started writing this new one, and I'm going to see how much I can crank out over the next month. It's fun because I'm writing in the voice of a woman looking back on her high school years and a) I'm not a woman, and b) she's funny, so it's really challenging to get her voice just right. I considered teasing out the first few chapters here, but I know I'll want to do lots of editing before I take that leap, and, at the very least, I should let Paige read it before I completely humiliate myself. Still, I think the project has promise. Wish me luck!

P.S.
Does one wish writer's luck? Actors are encouraged to break their legs (it's a dangerous profession). Should you wish me carpal tunnel syndrome?

Two Book Recommendations

I know I haven't posted in a while, which means I'm breaking the two cardinal rules of blogging: Posts should be frequent and short. Well, I'll try to manage one of those by keeping this brief (I know. Too late.)

I would love to say I've been slaving away at my lesson plans for this next school year all summer, but that would be a lie. I've been camping a lot. And napping a lot. Everything else has fallen by the wayside. I have been trying to catch up on some reading, and I've just finished two very good books. Normally, a book recommendation is the worst kind of advice to give me. I write down the title, say I'll get to it one day, and promptly forget where I put the name. If you, dear reader, have the same proclivity, this might help. These book recommendations have time limits, because both these novels are being made into films, and after reading both, I fear the movies will be monumentally awful. They will either be overlayed with voice-over narration because anyone with any sense wants to make them into movies because of the beauty of their prose, or they will be vapid chronicles of the events in the books which really aren't the point of either novel.

Read The Lovely Bones. I am not a crier, but I teared up more than once. The writing is very good, and the picture of a family dealing with grief is so spot-on that you forget your first reaction, which is that the idea of a murder victim narrating her observations of the living is at best clever and probably lame, and instead decide it was brilliant. This isn't true, but the quality of the writing almost makes it so.

Time Limit: Read by 3/13/2009
(Peter Jackson is attached, but I'm worried this will be far more King Kong than The Lord of the Rings. At least it won't possibly be Meet The Feebles.)

Read The Road. Imagine Mad Max meets No County For Old Men (a novel also by Cormac McCarthy) but with a father and son set-up that rips your heart out over and over without ever getting schmaltzy. Not even once, and that's saying something. McCarthy could teach Hemingway a thing or two about the economy of language. It was the first time I ever felt a physical pain in my chest caused by words the writer didn't include. McCarthy plays with your ears, so you hear things the characters don't say on the page, and sometimes you're deafened by their silences, too. The text itself is scant, but the thick subtext (midtext?) makes you read the book more slowly, like a great basketball player who knows how to control the tempo on both sides of the court. When I finished I was so full of feeling it reminded me of the kind of passion I could manage as a teenager, only the book indulges (and even exhorts) an adult recognition of nuance so that I can't understand, let alone articulate, exactly which direction these feelings are pulling. When you finish it, please post a description of your emotional reaction here, so I can use your road map to navigate my own.

Time Limit: Read by 11/26/08
(The cast looks amazing. Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pierce, Viggo Mortensen. At the height of their powers, these folks might be able to convey a lot of what's going on inside these characters. But then we miss out on the prose. Plus, they'll need someone with Robert Duvall's skill and resume to play the four or five-year-old boy. Macaulay Culkin will not do.)

Okay, well, now I've managed Infrequent and Long. If you still have any free time left, read both these books.