Tag Archives: fiction

Abandoning the Mission

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I make my way on the orange line to the State Street train station in hopes of heading to my sacred writing space. I enter the quiet room and I immerse myself into my work in hopes of getting further along in my writing project. It sounds like the perfect set up yet when the moment arrives I find myself stopped. For awhile I thought I was experiencing writer’s block, but it hasn’t been about a lack of things to write, I’ve been trying to determine the right thing to write. Many people would call this “THE CRITIC.” The inner voice that yells “your writing is terrible” before you even get the words out. The internal editor that stops you before you even utter a word. The small voice encouraging you to put off writing until a “genius” or “beautiful” passage is created.

This constant state of paralysis while writing has made me think of my childhood. I used to read free books that my family got from shelters and donation bins. We were living beneath the poverty line so, interestingly enough, I found myself with a ton of classics portraying worlds incredibly far from my own. I was reading “David Copperfield” or “Little Women” and falling in love with books more and more each day. I was so in love with them I tried to make my own. I wrote without worry about whether my plot made sense, or if my characters were developed, or if my line breaks were in the right spot. Somehow as I got more information about literature and the world of writing, my ability to be free while writing dwindled away.

One of the reasons I’ve always loved creating, whether it was a book, a dance or my own theater play with my siblings as actors, was because it was free. And not free in the commercial sense of the word, free in the sense that what I created was mine. It wasn’t under the influence of my future inner critic, the world of publishing or a commissioner. I could create to express, explore and connect.

It’s probably impossible for me to recreate the type of freedom I had as a child, yet I am challenging myself to write whatever is in my head. I am challenging myself to let my thoughts avalanche onto a page and make absolutely no sense. I am abandoning the “project” or the “mission.” I am challenging myself to fall in love with the joy of creating something. I am allowing myself to revel in that space, if only for a moment. Until my inner critic learns what’s going on and tells me to stop, so I can start the process all over again.

-Tatiana M.R. Johnson, 2018 WROB Gish Jen Fellow 

Imagining Empathy

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At the beginning of May, I had the opportunity to go to a talk with Clint Smith, writer and scholar, and Jesmyn Ward, author of “Sing Unburied Sing.” I hadn’t read Jesmyn Ward’s latest book yet, but I was excited to hear her talk about it. She‘s been heralded as the William Faulkner of our time and the reviews of her book have suggested that she truly crafts beautiful narratives, especially in characters that are heavily flawed.

Jesmyn Ward talked about how she read a Psychology Today article that expressed that those who read fiction are likely to have an increased sense of empathy. I was surprised by this stat because I would have imagined that perhaps non-fiction or memoir would have this effect on readers. But fiction, being entirely imagined, seems to be the genre of writing that contributes to a shift in empathy amongst readers. I wouldn’t, by any means, identify myself as a fiction writer, but I do have a strong desire to write fiction. I have pieces of fiction tucked away in my computer and in the crevices of my mind. There are stories brewing yet to be created, yet I’ve always had this urgency to write poetry and non-fiction as a way of truly talking about an issue, injustice, or conflict that needs an empathetic perspective.

Hearing Jesmyn Ward talk about how fiction can create a heightened sense of empathy, was for me, novel and exciting, but also a challenge. Perhaps this is the time for me to write a new world, that a reader can enter, develop their own relationship with, and construct their own sense of understanding. Maybe it’s time I stop talking about how true and real pain is and why it deserves empathy, and construct an experience for a reader where they feel the pain, or experience it with a character that hasn’t been written before.

I decided to do a little research on what Jesmyn Ward talked about, in relation to fiction. The Scientific American provided the following quote:

“Although literary fiction tends to be more realistic than popular fiction, the characters disrupt reader expectations, undermining prejudices and stereotypes. They support and teach us values about social behavior, such as the importance of understanding those who are different from ourselves.”

There’s something inherently disruptive about constructing your own world within art. The very act of being a black woman writer and writing a story that is entirely yours is also disruptive. At the end of listening to Jesmyn Ward I found myself not only inspired, but challenged to go even further as a writer. Yes, I carry a responsibility to tell a story but perhaps I have a responsibility to craft a world that speaks to my experience and that challenges readers to enter that existence. Perhaps that is powerfully done within fiction, but maybe it can be tackled in poetry and non-fiction. Maybe empathy doesn’t just arise from a character but perhaps the readers’ understanding of a world, outside of themselves, and the injustices that can occur in those worlds. In turn, maybe this is how we gain more empathy as a society. It’s a challenge as a writer, who likes to stay true, but perhaps there’s a world that can be created where this truth shines, lives and begs to be heard.

–2018 WROB Gish Jen Fellow Tatiana M.R. Johnson

Writers’ Math

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Some writer’s math:

The protagonist of my novel manuscript, Jonas Adams Abraham, is 12 going on 13. The manuscript itself is 12. When I started writing Jonas’s story, I was 26.

Liaa, the 15-year-old protagonist of a manuscript I put to bed in order to focus on a potentially more commercially viable book (see above) can be counted, in effort-years, as 7. I conceived of the novel while I was an undergrad at Emerson College, probably age 19.

A short graphic story featuring a 11-year-old (and later her 15 and 17-year-old selves) is approximately 7 years into endless-tiny-revisions. 3 or 4 years younger than Jonas in terms of sequence, the script represents hours rather than years of effort.

Other writing has similarly aged, as I have aged, moving further and further from our society’s specter of the overnight (and enviably young) author-sensation. As I stretch into my fourth decade of being an animal on this beautiful, awful, bizarre, heart-breaking planet, my gift of experience and dreams for what-might-be enter with me.

Together we are growing up.

[/end math!]

I attended a lecture by Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Diaz where he described himself as a slow writer. In my memory of his self-depreciating story, Junot painted his peers as writing circles around him —his works requiring long years of incubation while theirs stacked like shiny red apples at a city grocer. It was the first time I’d heard a published author describe this phenomenon and the truth hit me with a spine-straightening zap of static electricity. I took notice.

I tried that idea on: slow writer.

Some pondering:

Slow writing. Manuscripts that catch up to and then out-age the characters who roam their pages. Words with enough history to manifest their own internal humor—self-referencing for the benefit of no one in particular (beyond the author.)

What does it mean to be slow now, when fast is culturally mandated? I pose this question while typing on a tiny, high speed iPod keypad, this mini computer that I slip into my pocket as I zip across a major city in our nation of nations —where many cultures move together at different paces, generally not peaceably.

I write this understanding that time is a construct by which my body must abide. But time doesn’t truly exist in my manuscripts. And the manuscripts exist without relation to time. They are or they are not. On my good days, I do not blame my works for being what they are. I can neither stop them nor speed them up. Nothing I do has much impact except for my resolve to arrive again and again, twirling time fluffily onto a white paper cone, or maybe creating an elastic loop as I build on ideas and cultivate the gifts of my characters’ laughter and heartbreak, their triumphs, mistakes, and revelations.

It seems this could go on forever, but it won’t because I cannot. My physical self is limited in a way art will never be. Really, which one of us is slow? Which of us just is?

[/end pondering!]

Pretty words, huh? Existential thoughts even as I, in the more practical sense, park my butt on a chair, or stand leaning over a laptop, and plant a hand on the keyboard, typing in that curious one-handed way I do where the craft spools out —my right hand magically comporting itself through the middle-school-taught positions, keyboard-left and keyboard-right, without having to peek. Slow going. Real slow.

Real and slow.

-Phoebe Sinclair, 2018 WROB Ivan Gold Fellow

The Gap

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I’ll always remember when I sent my first query letters. It was two Winter Olympics ago, Vancouver 2010 – I distracted myself from my inbox by watching Johnny Weir and Evgeni Plushenko, and watched my first rejections roll in a few minutes before alpine skiing.

(I took a shot of vodka for each rejection. I realized a couple of weeks later that 1 shot per rejection was quickly becoming unrealistic.)

It was my third manuscript, but the first one I deigned may be good enough to take that next step. I got five requests for more material out of 79 queries. The first full manuscript rejection was maybe one of the kindest I’ve ever gotten to this day, the first time an industry professional ever called me ‘talented.’ And I remember how excited I was that I’d worked hard enough to trick someone into using the t-word.

Because I was, by this point, painfully aware of the gap that existed between the story in my head and the story I was putting down. I knew I wasn’t naturally talented, but I was going to make it up by wanting this more than anyone else, and hopefully that would be enough.

Eight years later, I sent another round of queries. This was my seventh manuscript. My last agent search had taken three years.

This time, it took three weeks. Responses came fast. Rejections still came faster, but form rejections were few and far-between – they were personal, they were complimentary, and the t-word was used over and over again. It was incredible. It was like all of my most self-indulgent daydreams rolled into a one-month period.

And it was weird as hell. I’d spent so much of my career feeling like I needed to catch up, and suddenly, like a switch had flipped, people were treating me like I was there already. I still kind of felt like I was tricking people. But it occurred to me, an entire eight years after that first rejection, that the people reading it couldn’t tell what was natural talent and what was hard work. On the page, it looks the same.

Progress isn’t always a thing you can track, especially not when you’re so close to it. But sometimes after a particularly good session, when I look at the scene in my head and the scene I just typed, I don’t feel the shortfall quite so keenly. Sometimes it even feels close.

Now, I’m watching a new set of figure skaters and alpine skiers dominate the Olympics. I’m working through an edit letter I’m thrilled about. And I’m catching up to the story in my head, bit by bit. I’m not watching my inbox, not yet. That comes, with any luck, later this spring.
I haven’t completely bridged the gap yet. But now I’m not sure anyone ever does.

That is, however, what revisions are for.

It’s been such a pleasure contributing to this blog over the past year. Congratulations to our new 2018-19 fellows, and happy writing!
-Rebecca Mahoney, 2017 WROB Fellow

Not Everything Has To Be Work

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As a teenager, taking writing workshops as part of my arts school concentration, I remember submitting to a contest with a group of classmates and getting the news that all of them had placed except me. Sometime later that day, in the haze of rejection-crying and ice cream, I decided that it didn’t matter if I was mediocre– I just needed to want it more than they did.

Looking back at the rejections that followed, I can trace where that became a cycle, to match disappointment with self-discipline. The first step to being taken seriously as a writer and to ensure that writing had a foothold in my limited free time had to be treating my writing like a job. I don’t think that was wrong— it got me this far, even when that ambition could be an unwieldy thing to carry.

I’m also a person with anxiety, which means being careful about what I tell myself that I ‘have’ to do. And the problem with treating ‘wanting it’ like a job is that ‘want to’ slowly becomes ‘have to.’ You end up wanting it just about as much as you want to do any job. Which is to say, not that much.

Coming to The Writers’ Room was a big part of reframing my creativity as something fun and vital again, not a benchmark I had to meet or a fight I had to win. And for the most part, it’s been really successful. My drafting sessions are the most loose and productive they’ve been in years. I’ve started more easily questioning some of the conventional wisdom I’d internalized: that I needed to write every day to be serious, or that sometimes it was going to feel like pulling teeth but I had to push through it. I decided that whether I was daydreaming up a scene or just letting my brain go offline after an exhausting day, everything was important work in the end.

Here’s the fun thing about undoing a bad habit, though: you’re never quite as done with it as you think you are.

As I write this, I’m planning the move to a new place tomorrow, so for the past few weeks, the part of my brain that would normally be dedicated to thinking through a scene has been running through where my desk is going to fit in the new room, or where my hairdryer is. There’s not a lot of space left for my work-in-progress, currently stopped just before the climax, and I find myself worrying about its lack of real estate in my brain, or putting pressure on my rest nights to be as restful as possible. In trying to be kinder to myself, I think I was a little too successful at making everything, even relaxation, into a job.

So maybe the thing to tell myself isn’t that everything is work. Maybe it’s not everything has to be work. 

Easier said than done, I know. But I like the sound of it.

-Rebecca Mahoney, 2017 WROB Fellow

What Happens on Submission Stays on Submission

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When I was querying literary agents for the first (and second, and third) time, I kept a moderately active Blogspot. Nothing too formal, but enough to connect me to a community I’m still lucky enough to know today. I had their posts as a guidebook. Whenever I wasn’t sure if I’d been waiting too long, or if I said the wrong thing, I read their experiences, held them up to mine to make sure I was on the right track. Whenever there was a question I wasn’t sure if I could ask, the answer existed somewhere already.

When I signed with my then-agent at the end of 2012, I posted about how excited I was to go on submission to editors. And then, following the conventional wisdom I’d read about, I kept my mouth shut. It has, for the most part, stayed shut since.

The rationale behind the Submission Cone of Silence is as follows: it keeps you from saying anything you’ll regret, and it preserves the illusion that you’re a fresh talent rolling into an editor’s inbox just minutes after signing with your agent. And all those What to Expect When You’re Expecting to Sell a Book guides told me the same thing. That it’s hard, of course it’s hard, but you can tell everyone all about that after you sell.

And then I kept not-selling.

This is the point where I’d look for someone else’s story to reassure me that I was normal. This is also the point where it became clear that everyone else got the same advice I did. The blog posts were self-selecting. Submission was the longest month of my life, I must have read about a dozen times. And then I’d look at my submission list, time-stamped about a year prior, and wonder if one day archaeologists were going to find me half-crumbled into dust and still clutching my laptop.

(“Extraordinary,” they’d whisper. “She was refreshing her inbox all those years.”)

I asked my friends, published and almost-published, when they sold. On the second round. On my second book. On the second round of my second book. By the time my third book went out on submission, I’d stopped asking.

I did a lot of backspacing, both in writing and in tweeting. Everything I tried to say sounded ungrateful, or impatient, or dismissive of the luck and privilege that got me this far. When my agent parted ways with me, I did a lot of acknowledging it without acknowledging it. It was easy enough to figure out if you read between the lines, but if I didn’t say as much in public, maybe no one would figure out what an Undesirable I was.

And after a while, I just wanted to own it. I’m competitive. If I was going to be an Undesirable, I wanted to be the Least Desirable Person in Publishing.

I didn’t own it. I cultivated an even better poker face. I got really good at keeping my excitement in the forefront at events and book launches, and saving the bucketsful of conflicting feelings until I walked home. I gently brushed off questions about when my book was coming out, and I said a lot of No, that’s okay. I didn’t want anyone to feel like they’d asked anything wrong. It would hurt more if they stopped asking.

This is, I know, a lot of talking about not-talking. I started this post thinking I’d talk about the times spent scribbling on the margins of my day job, the manuscripts shelved, the foothold into the writing world that I worried I’d lost until the Writers’ Room and its wonderful community helped me reshape it. These are still things I want to talk about. But then I started to wonder what about these stories was so damaging that I felt the need to sit on them for over four years.

After all, writers tend to lose perspective, stuck in their own heads. When I called my grandmother the night I received the WROB fellowship, I laughed that I finally had good news for her.

She firmly informed me that I had good news for her all the time.

–Rebecca Mahoney, 2017 WROB Fellow

In Defense of the Second Person

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Lately, I’ve been questioning the use of the second person point of view in fiction. The you pronoun features prominently in my collection, but as I work on what I hope will be the manuscript’s final story, I’m finding myself overly conscious about choosing you over I or he. I keep stopping to ask, “Is this POV earned?”

I’ve long resisted the idea that using the second person requires more justification than other narrative strategies. If I interrogate my choice to use you over I, I’ll admit that on some level, it just feels more natural. When I wake for work after a late night of writing (or Netflix binging), and I glance sleepy-eyed into my bathroom mirror, I don’t say to myself, “I look like shit.” I say, “You look like shit.”

And I know exactly to whom I am speaking.

When I read novels written in the first-person—novels that haven’t troubled themselves with an invented occasion for my reading them—I sometimes wonder of the narrator, To whom is this story being told? What assumptions have the narrator made about the recipient of this story?

With third-person narrators, I might wonder, Who is telling me this? Is that you, God?

IMG_1718In second person narration, when you stands in for I—that is, when readers or secondary characters aren’t being addressed—we understand that our protagonist is both narrator and narratee; we are privy to a telling or retelling of a story handed off to, and received by, a psyche fractured by the passage of time and/ or an altered understanding of events. This fracture, I would argue, more similarly reflects how we experience the world: Subject meets stimuli and interprets then reinterprets to create narrative; we tell ourselves the story of what is happening to us as it is happening, and many times afterward. Similarly, our second person protagonist exists both within the story’s events and in the consciousness that orders and reorders the events to create meaning.

For those of us who exist outside of the dominant culture, this experience of psychic fracture is particularly salient. As a person of color and a first-generation American, I am tasked with mastering my own cultural references and white America’s. To succeed within the larger culture, to some extent, I must cultivate a dual consciousness that often sets me at odds with myself, as I view myself through the lens of the other. The second person POV uniquely allows a character reflection through the lens of a removed self, the distance created by you implying a second consciousness.

Perhaps third person feels too authoritative to me right now because my reality is constantly in flux. Perhaps first suggests singularity, and even in the plural gestures to a cohesion that I just can’t identify with. Because, even now, the voice in the back of my head is telling me, “Shut up and write your story.”

-Jonathan Escoffery, 2017 WROB Ivan Gold Fellow

Writing… Or Not

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Writing. It’s not something that’s been happening since November for me. First there was the election, then illness, the end of the semester, holiday rush at the bookstore, more illness (it won’t go away), followed by turning in grades and prepping new courses. Right now I’m writing this blog post, but I’m still sick and still have a mound of grading.

My default at times like this is to cut into myself. I should be able to do everything. I should be able to juggle all my jobs and my writing and my health. After all, other people do it. Hell, even I’ve done it at other points in time. The thing that has me pausing now to reconsider is the “other people.”

life-without-envy-ego-management-for-creative-people-by-camille-deangelis-1250099358This fall, WROB member Camille DeAngelis published Life Without Envy: Ego Management for Creative People. This is not the sort of book I normally read but knowing Camille, I dove in. Camille spends most of the book focused on the dangers of comparison: because that other person published/sold/wrote/won means I should.

I saw myself in this, my sense that I wasn’t good enough not just based on the achievements of others, but also based on my past achievements. I put down the book with the begrudging feeling that I needed to be kinder to myself, but also with profound respect for Camille. Many of the examples Camille uses in the book and in discussions with bloggers are from her own life. Knowing that she struggles with the same things I do made me feel like I wasn’t alone, and that the struggle was normal.

So, if you’re currently experiencing a burst of creativity and production, I’m happy for you. But if you’re also being taken down by politics, sickness, and work, may I suggest something? Be kind to yourself and pick up Camille’s book. Get yourself a decadent drink and a cookie (and maybe some vitamins, too) and give yourself some time to check in with yourself. Maybe this takes the form of just sitting. Maybe you’re ready to pick up Camille’s book and try just one page. And maybe you find that you have the energy to write a journal entry.

As writers, we are good at empathizing with others (whether they be real people or fictional characters) but rather than giving all your energy to others, be a little selfish and give some to yourself. After all, run down, sick people can’t show up to write and, as we know, showing up to write is the hardest part.

Purchase a signed copy of Life Without Envy: Ego Management for Creative People.

-Marika McCoola, 2016 Ivan Gold Fellow

WROB Fellowship Applications Due 1/15/17!

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The Writers’ Room of Boston awards annual fellowships to four emerging local writers who lack sufficient funds to secure a quiet place to develop their work. Fellowship recipients receive full membership to The Writers’ Room for 12 months (March through February) at no cost. Fellows also receive a reduced rate for membership for another 12 months following the fellowship period. All fellows and members enjoy 24-hour access to a T-accessible, light-filled work space in the Financial District of downtown Boston and the opportunity to be part of a supportive community of serious writers.

boston_front copyAwards for the Emerging Writers Fellowship Program are based on the quality of a submitted writing sample, a project description, a CV or resume, and a statement of need. The Fellowships are open to writers working in any genre or form. Fellows must be committed to: using the Room on a regular basis throughout the 12-month period, writing a minimum of 6 blog posts for our website, and assisting with WROB readings and events.

For more information about the WROB Emerging Writers Fellowship Program, please visit this page on our website: http://www.writersroomofboston.org/fellowship/ 

Applications for Fellowships are due on January 15, 2017. Applications for regular membership are open all year.

Me in My Book

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A new friend recently told me that they’d started reading my book. Initially I was, of course, happy that they’d bought a copy and decided to make time to read it. Happiness was swiftly overcome with a sense of trepidation, here was this person still forming opinions of me about to delve into what was possibly my deepest emotional truths.

Photo Credit: Debka Colson
Photo Credit: Debka Colson

In memoir, we carefully choose what to reveal, what stories to tell, and what moments to carefully edit out. But in fiction, the unreal acts as an obscuring haze over the real, meaning we’re more likely to tell emotional and psychological truths. Because every character is a magnified faucet of oneself, reading fiction is like reading the most personal there is.

I first came to this awareness when revising. As I shouted out what, exactly, my character needed to realize at the climax of the story, I was struck with the knowledge that this truth was exactly what I struggled with most as a person. I ended up laughing off the tension then, but the realization has remained.

When my first book was published, I was most worried about my friends and family reading the book. Sure, reviewers would like it or hate it, but hey, I went to art school and am so used to criticism and rejection that maybe someone should be worried. My family and friends, though, knew me as I presented myself and told my story; what would analyzing my fiction reveal? They, of course, just told me what they liked and moved on. Was I reading too much into it, a result of a sound education in critical thought?

I recently did a revision of a book that I know is very close to my life. When I began the book, I asked my mom for permission to write it, knowing it might someday alienate us from a family friend. She, of course, gave her blessing (and the book hasn’t been sold yet, so any concerns are way off in the future). The weight of needing permission opened up all sorts of questions. What had my parents thought of the book I’d published? They’d never really said. Was there something they were keeping from me? I’m not worried about it, but I still wonder, what does our fiction reveal about ourselves to those closest to us? Is this something only a writer would think about, or is it something other readers are aware of?

If you have any answers, musings, experiences, or thoughts on these questions, I’d love to hear them.

-Marika McCoola, 2016 Ivan Gold Fellow