On writing
And failing (an updated version)
Once, at a writers' retreat, I had a consultation on fiction-writing with the wonderful poet Brigit Kelly. It was only supposed to be one hour long, but she gave me two, in two separate sessions.
In the first, she asked what I liked to read, and why.
I described a short story by Aleksandar Hemon called “The Noble Truths of Suffering.”
I said that I didn’t always like the sentences — they tended towards piles of adjectives, as I recall - but that this story was the kind of fiction I wished I could write, because of what it did, taking a minor event and turning it into art, and showing the process along the way.
By the second session, she had read both the Hemon story and my own draft piece.
She said that my sentences were good, but that the story felt like it had no stakes. This was hard to hear.
My story was about a couple of academics who have adopted a baby at birth, via open adoption and an agency, from a teenager who wouldn’t name the father.
When the baby is a few months old they are contacted through the agency by his birth father, a troubled teenager who is the same age as their college students.
He’s recently joined the army, where he is now being deployed in Iraq, and has just learned about the birth.
He doesn’t ask for any rights, only wonders if he might hear a little bit about the baby.
The parents set up an anonymous phone number, and the boy gets into the habit of calling them — or rather the mother — from the field whenever things have been bad for his unit, just to get baby stories.
She feels that these are his lifeline to sanity.
She also knows that none of her university students are likely to ever join the army: it’s a class privilege thing.
The story wraps up with the soldier being injured, and calling to tell her about it: not to talk about the baby, but to inform her, as a child informs a parent. He wonders if he can come see them after he has recovered.
The husband feels it’s gone too far: they shouldn’t be letting this possibly unstable boy into their son’s life. The mother feels that he is within her circle of responsibility.
This seemed very high stakes to me.
It was about what we all owed each other in this world, and about layers of care across generations and geography and more.
I had had moving responses when reading a shorter version of it out loud.
But somehow it was coming across as passive, low key, when alone on the page and people were reading it to themselves.
Brigit Kelly took all of this in, and then gave me the best piece of writing advice I have ever received.
She said, “Try writing in your teaching voice.”
[Am updating this for clarity, since a dear friend and reader said that it could be taken to mean writing in an authortative or instructive tone. It wasn’t that at all. It was more a brilliant intuition that the fiction lacked the kind of shared presence and two-way communication of teaching: that it wasn’t as porous and open as she knew my teaching voice was likely to be. The advice wasn’t “write as a teacher to students.” It was “try bringing the presence and connection of a two-way conversation to your fiction.” I should have realized that that wasn’t transparent here!]
Because of that day, when I have written something and am trying to decide whether it is worth publishing, I sometimes imagine offering it up in a real room, where others are more or less stuck listening, through politeness if nothing else.
If it doesn’t seem as though it would feel right — if it doesn’t seem as though I would feel, standing there, that I was really offering anything worth the room’s attention — I don’t publish it.
And that, dear reader, is why you are reading this essay instead of the one I have been working on for the past two days.
That one told a small anecdote from childhood, about meeting another bookish kid who told me that she was looked down on by her teachers, instead of praised, for being fluent in a second language.
I wanted to write about encountering unfairness in a currency that mattered to me at age 10 — adult praise — on a topic that mattered to me — learning languages — and say something interesting about it. But I couldn’t make it happen.
In the Aleskandar Hemon story, a beginning writer meets a visiting famous writer and ends up taking him to his parents house for dinner. Later, that dinner, transfigured, becomes a pivotal scene in the other man’s next novel.
In some of Karl Ove Knausgård’s novels, one sees scenes that also appear in others: reworked, new context, but essentially the same moment in utterly different books. Presumably that’s because each is a scene he finds meaning in, and is trying to use to share that meaning.
That’s part of what writing does. I wanted to convey the awful force of discovering, at age 10, that a little girl just like me could be made to feel bad for speaking a second language perfectly while I was praised for some clumsy attempts at learning mine, because hers was Spanish and came from her immigrant Mom, and mine was French and came from being taught. It was unfair and twisted, and wrong, and she believed too that her skill was not worth anything, was even bad, and I never quite recovered.
But all that was coming through was the original anecdote, the scene where she told me that, and it made her sad, and she didn’t want to play any more after that.
I couldn’t turn it into art.
[Note: this essay has been a bit revised from the original version posted. Comments below might refer to either version.]
For more on Brigit Kelly, please see
A translated poem, and memories of the poets Kenneth Koch and Brigit Kelly
A very long time ago I took a course in twentieth century poetry with the poet Kenneth Koch.
Your story sounds so good, Maria, with an important message for our times. I look forward to reading it when you are ready to share it.
You pose such interesting questions about reasons to write fiction, and for whom, to whom to write.
I have a private answer to the first, but not to the second. I find myself writing a short story when I need something through -- a problem to which I don't see an argumentative path, a problem that I can't see as one to be adjudicated or even opinionated about. A problem I need to play out in my mind.
Recently I stumbled upon criticism of "writing for yourself," which was directed at younger writers. I thought the criticism unfair because I think it's increasingly hard to picture a viable audience. A writer for whom the pandemic was a formative experience might genuinely struggle in this respect, and not because of a failure of imagination or empathy but due to a loss of time and experience that could have been gained had things been different. I'm obviously older. The pandemic was not formative for me but it definitely deepened my sense that the older I get the harder I find making friends or even getting on friendly terms with people. My sense of audiences has become abstract, a little less human and alive than I would like.
Perhaps the poet's advice to you was good. I don't know. But reading your synopsis of that short story draft I found myself thinking about how the story's stakes might be different for different audiences. And that maybe our ideas of literature, what "works" in a story and what doesn't, don't have enough opportunities of being tested and influenced by sharing in environments that aren't craft workshops or work with an editor but some sort of another viable community where stories get read. These are just loose thoughts -- sorry if they don't cohere.