In Issue 20.1, we present a craft review feature celebrating the art of extraordinary writing. The feature was inspired by Holly Goddard Jones’s “Unreasonably Good Stories: Breaking the Competency Ceiling,” which we printed in excerpted form in the issue (available with the entire feature here) but provide here in full:
I teach in an MFA program, and it’s a very old and good one, so we get a respectable number of applications each year, and my Januarys and Februarys are generally spent scrolling through these application writing samples on Submittable. Reading in bulk this way is never ideal, but there’s no getting around it. If you have weathered your own slogs through the slush, you’ll know what I mean when I say that I try to come to the earnest efforts by these hopeful, often new writers with an attitude of generosity, but I’m hindered by my many human failings. I have a class to prepare for or a meeting to attend. I want to work on my own writing. I’m bored. I’m guilty. I’m annoyed. I’m looking for reasons to give the manuscript a thumbs-down and move on, culling the pile, even as I read just one more page, and another, out of fear that my initial impulses were wrong.
I’ve been rating these applications for over a decade, but I still don’t fully trust myself with them. I’ve noticed that the manuscripts that cause me the most anguish are not the obviously unskilled ones, which can be incredibly entertaining in their way, but the ones that occupy the intersection of competency and dullness. These are the stories that are well written—I can’t put my finger easily on anything that’s wrong with them—but I find myself reading the same paragraphs over and over because my mind keeps wandering. I think of all the times I chose to watch a rerun of The Office over reading a chapter from Moby Dick, and I wonder if I’m just not smart enough to appreciate what the author is doing. On the other hand, if an unskilled story has captured my interest more than the technically sound one, maybe I’m not the problem, or all of it—or maybe my definition of “skill” needs adjustment.
Here’s another scenario—a better scenario, because I’m not reading in bulk. Instead, I have in front of me a workshop submission by a current graduate student, and it’s already a given that I’m going to read it twice, write the person a careful letter of feedback, and then lead a discussion of the story at our next class meeting. I like my graduate students; they’re talented and hardworking, and most of them have a great sense of humor. It’s a pleasure to get to read their work and help them make it better.
And for the most part, the story is a joy. I have no trouble turning pages; my mind doesn’t wander. But every now and then, I stumble. I read a line, frown, and think. I go back up and read the paragraph again, considering the context, still unconvinced. Finally, I underline the passage and jot in the manuscript’s margin what is probably my most unhelpful but fundamental comment of critique: Hmm. Hmm is my all-purpose “I’m not where you want me to be” notation. And I’ll put even more pressure on that three-letter not-quite-word by saying that, for me, it encapsulates the gulf between competent writing and great writing. I’ve spent years now trying to understand what’s happening when I write “hmm” on a student’s story, because I owe my students more than that. I can’t just say to them, “Something is wrong here, but I don’t know what it is. Figure it out.” This essay is my attempt to frame some diagnostic approaches for those situations.
In “On Defamiliarization,” Charles Baxter describes the process of reading a student’s “reasonably good workshop story” and having a similar reaction. The story, Baxter writes, “had begun to read itself too early, and before very long it was always and only about one thing, with the result that all the details fit in perfectly. All the arrows pointed in the same direction. When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story. It is too meaningful too fast.”
Baxter goes on to add that the story’s writer “has decided what her story is about too early and has concentrated too fixedly on that one truth. Well, what’s wrong with the truth, and under what conditions does the truth grow undramatic, that is, without tension or instability?” If you’ve read “On Defamiliarization,” you’ll know that Baxter’s thesis on mediocrity is that it comes of the writer relying too much on familiar truths, and that stories only work if the writer forgets what they think they know for sure, “pull[ing] something contradictory and concealed out of its hiding place.”
One more quote by Baxter, and then I promise to stop making him do so much work for me. He says, “The truth can get dull. It may fall into a nonnarratable condition.” Now, this wouldn’t be much of a craft essay if I just repackaged Charles Baxter, though I find it hard to argue with the man and the words he wrote twenty-five years ago. But if fictional truths can get dull, perhaps we also must assume that essays such as Baxter’s can also bear—and perhaps must also bear—deconstruction, and the concept I’m particularly drawn toward deconstructing is Baxter’s notion of “truth.”
My mentor Lee K. Abbott liked to call fiction writing the “liar’s art,” but writers spend a lot less time talking about lying than we do truth-telling. As guilty as I feel about my go-to critical commentary of “hmm,” I believe it’s no less mystifying that Hemingway’s out-of-context injunction to writers to “write one true sentence…the truest sentence that you know.” This was, of course, young Hemingway giving himself a pep talk and not necessarily the swag- and meme-ready advice to writers that it’s now largely accepted as being, but even so, this goal of the “truest sentence you know” is so far beyond my comprehension that just reciting the words gives me anxiety. The truest sentence I know at any given moment—and keep in mind that I’m the mother of young children—is probably “I’m hungry” or “I need to pee,” but those are not necessarily the opening lines of stories I wish to write or read.
Between Baxter and Hemingway, I’d say that we already have two possible definitions for the concept of writerly “truth.” For Baxter, the truth seems to be about plausibility—if a situation, a character, or a detail strikes the reader as recognizable. In this way, a story can be both truthful and undramatic. We know, for instance, that there’s truth to stories about the stresses of new motherhood, the pain of infidelity, the wonder and angst of coming of age, and so on—but if you’re not delivering the news on those topics, as one of my former professors would say, you may as well not bother. Across his larger essay, Baxter also seems to suggest that what we think of as truth in fiction may be only capitulation to social norms and craft conventions, which is why his student’s workshop story is only “reasonably good” and not great.
For Hemingway, the truth was perhaps nothing more mysterious than plainspokenness. As he went on to add in A Moveable Feast—and this quote doesn’t look so nice on a mug or hand-lettered wall art— “If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.” This takes some of the pressure off, doesn’t it? The truth wasn’t some soul-deep insight into the human condition that only a genius writer could channel. It was, to Hemingway, just a declarative sentence with the fluff cut away. The truth is a lack of writerly affectation.
There exists, though, a third definition for writerly truth, and it’s the one that makes the Hemingway quote so intimidating if you read it on an Instagram meme and not in situ. This is the capital-T truth, the big ideas that are supposed to separate literature from beach reads and geniuses from hacks. Paradoxically—and I’m inferring this from Hemingway—the second you try too hard to achieve this lofty ambition, you’ve failed at it. So where does that leave us?
To come back to one of those situations I described before—the situations where I’m reading MFA applications or student work and I encounter lines or passages that cause me to disconnect, to reject the spell the writer is trying to cast—I’ve come to think of the “hmm” reaction as what happens when I encounter a false note of some kind. “False” is, I think, a less loaded term for our purposes than “true,” and that might make it easier for us to work with, at least initially. Where “truth” seeks to define what something is, “false” points out what something is not, and that’s a bigger target. To put you into my mindset, then, I’m going to break down for you a few examples of the sorts of lines and passages that have elicited a “hmm” from me in the past. These are imitations and exaggerations I’ve drafted myself to illustrate some of the different false notes I’m identifying, not direct quotations from student work.
Example One:
Eddie called them the “good-time girls,” and flirting with him a little was the price they all paid to get scheduled, mostly, for the same shifts. There are indignities you can happily suffer together that are almost unbearable alone, and the girls would look back on that summer fondly, not one of them remembering the way the middle-aged male patrons’ hands would graze their asses when they turned to remove plates from the tray, or how Eddie would sometimes corner them, alone, at the walk-in freezer, toothpick sketching figure-eights off his thrusted bottom lip. No, what they would remember, years later, was this: the feel of folded bills fitted into the watch pockets of their Jordache jeans; the steam off the parking lot when they all crammed into Brittany’s Trans Am at 11:30; and the ring of their laughter as they drove from work to the beach, passing a bottle of whiskey between them.
OK, full disclosure: I don’t hate this passage, despite the fact that I wrote it to illustrate things not to do. I think there’s something to the line about how there are indignities you can suffer together that are unbearable alone; there’s a truth there, a truth I unearthed from my own memories of thankless low-pay and high-stress jobs, jobs where the stresses bonded me and my peers in ways that shared happy experiences wouldn’t have. It’s not a universal truth, if such things even exist outside Jane Austen, but it’s the kind of narrative license I’m willing to grant an author, because it suggests an editorial presence—an omniscient narrator, maybe, or the retrospective perspective of one of the girls. But where this crosses into falseness, as I see it, is in the general application of this truth to the unnamed number of “good-time girls” the passage is describing. I could perhaps be convinced that one person wouldn’t remember enduring a summer of sexual harassment because the pleasures of friendship were so compensatory, but I don’t think you could ever convince me that every girl who worked under sleazy Eddie would emerge from the experience with such perfect amnesia. And in fact, even suggesting this undermines the thesis that their suffering brought them together.
This is the kind of passage I’d flag in a graduate student’s story. It rises out of a noble and even strategic impulse: the impulse to complicate your characters’ psychology by setting up an unlikely but interesting juxtaposition. In this case, that would be the juxtaposition of the ongoing harassment the girls suffered alongside their happiness, both a consequence of their double-edged power as young and female. Where it goes wrong is in its assumption that this juxtaposition is more powerful, more literary, if it it’s shared in precisely the same way by all the girls. This is a sophisticated version of the paradox that eludes so many inexperienced writers: that readers connect more with subjective, ultra-fine specificity than they do with a one-size-fits-all general approach.
How to revise this passage to pass the sniff test would depend on which impact the writer wishes to prioritize: the complex psychological coping process that would allow for such selective remembering, or what these girls had in common when they looked back on that formative summer. For the first scenario, I would probably shift from describing the group to describing an individual “good-time girl” in the second or third sentence. So, maybe something like this:
Eddie called them the “good-time girls,” and flirting with him a little was the price they all paid to get scheduled, mostly, for the same shifts. Jenny would look back on that summer fondly, not remembering the way the middle-aged male patrons’ hands would graze her ass when she turned to remove plates from the tray, or how Eddie would sometimes corner her, alone, at the walk-in freezer, toothpick sketching figure-eights off his thrusted bottom lip. No, what she would remember, years later, was this: the feel of folded bills fitted into the watch pocket of her Jordache jeans; the steam off the parking lot when she and Laurel crammed into Brittany’s Trans Am at 11:30; and the ring of their laughter as they drove from work to the beach, passing a bottle of whiskey between them.
Another advantage of this individualized approach is that it makes certain details—the specific harassments endured, the feel of the folded bills, the Jordache jeans—seem more plausible. With that last detail, the Jordache jeans, an interesting thing happens. When all the girls are wearing them, it reads like 80s-era fan fiction, especially alongside the mention of the Trans Am. But when it’s one character’s jeans, it simply seems era-appropriate.
Another option would be to temper the statement of commonality:
Eddie called them the “good-time girls,” and flirting with him a little was the price they all paid to get scheduled, mostly, for the same shifts. There are indignities you can suffer together that are almost unbearable alone, and the girls would look back on that summer with surprising fondness. Later, they wouldn’t think about how the middle-aged male patrons’ hands would graze their asses when they turned to remove plates from the tray, or how Eddie would sometimes corner them, alone, at the walk-in freezer, toothpick sketching figure-eights off his thrusted bottom lip. No, what they chose to remember, years later, was this: the feel of folded bills fitted into the watch pockets of their jeans; the steam off the parking lot when they all crammed into Brittany’s Trans Am at 11:30; and the ring of their laughter as they drove from work to the beach, passing a bottle of whiskey between them.
I ultimately prefer the first edit—it better suits the way I tend to approach character psychology and point of view—but the edits in this second passage make it more palatable for me. I can buy all three girls consciously choosing their memories of friendship over their memories of being harassed. I still think this approach prioritizes the poetry of the imagery and language parallelisms over characterization, but it could be a nice setup to a narrowing of perspective later on.
Let’s look at another imitation I wrote of false notes being sounded in an otherwise “reasonably good” work:
Example Two:
I was on my way out of the daycare center, with fifteen minutes to spare until my shift at McDonald’s started, when I spotted Fin’s mother emerging from her Range Rover. I dropped my eyes and looked at my phone, hoping she’d think I was too distracted to notice her, but she called to me loudly from across the parking lot: “Lana! I was hoping I’d catch you! I haven’t gotten your RSVP for Fin’s birthday party this weekend!”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” I had to pass her car to get to mine, so I hesitated at her back bumper. She stuck her head into the car to wrestle with her son’s car-seat buckle. I wasn’t sure if she could hear me, or if we were even still having a conversation, so I said loudly, “I’m sorry, I forgot all about it. I guess Joey will have to miss.”
She pulled her head out of the back seat and huffed her pale blond bangs out of her eyes. “But Joey can’t miss! It’s going to be so much fun. Really! We’re renting a bunch of different bouncy houses, and we’re bringing in a food truck. It’s over the top, but he’s the only one I’ve got, and he’s only turning five once. You know how it is.”
I played with the fraying collar on my uniform top. For Joey’s fifth birthday, I’d brought him home a Happy Meal with one of the coveted Beanie Baby toys that everyone went crazy for last month. I was able to save him back a lion, his favorite animal, and Joey—with his characteristic sweetness—had accepted my small offering with excitement, his eyes sparkling.
No, I couldn’t afford to get my own son a decent present, but if I allowed Joey to show up to Fin’s party empty-handed, he’d be a laughingstock.
“I won’t take no for an answer.” She laid her pale hand with its pale pink manicure on my sun-spotted arm. “See you Saturday! Oh, and Lana?”
Lisa, I thought angrily. Our sons had been in daycare together for five years and she still couldn’t get my name right. “Yes?”
“The clothing theme is nautical. Parents, too, if you want! Have you followed my Instagram yet?”
I shook my head.
“I’ve got all the preparations in my stories, if you want to see what we’re putting together. It’s going to be adorable. Please bring Joey, okay?”
“I’ll try,” I stammered. “We might have to go out of town. But maybe.”
As I climbed into my Toyota Tercel, my eyes burned with tears. Where was I going to get a nautical outfit, of all things? And how was I supposed to scrape together the funds for a birthday present?
So again here, I’ve taken what could be a good impulse and I’ve shown how a writer’s good intentions can lead to you-know-where.
What I like about the potential of this passage is that kids as young as Fin and Joey form bonds outside their parents’ view and have little to no understanding of the issues of conspicuous consumption that obsess their mothers and fathers. Then, these birthday parties start happening, and suddenly those spheres collide. People who only ever see each other in the lobby of their childcare center are suddenly exchanging text messages, social media handles, and glimpses of their intimate home lives.
What derails the passage is, as Charles Baxter would say, the too-perfect fit of all the details. There’s a clear contrast being drawn here between our narrator—low-income, long-suffering, and world-wise—and Fin’s mother, who is not just possessed of extreme privilege but is utterly oblivious to this fact and to the unfair ask she is making of the narrator. Are there people in the world as well-off and as clueless as Fin’s mother? Undoubtedly. But she is not resonating as authentic here. This has to do with multiple factors that I’ll try to carefully pick apart, so bear with me. The first factor comes back to that old but good workshop saw about how a thing being true in real life doesn’t make it seem plausible on the page. Fin’s mother is exactly what we would expect her to be, from her pale blond bangs and her manicured nails to her luxury SUV and nautical party theme. She plays too perfectly to type, and therefore she isn’t delivering any news. She’s low-hanging fruit.
But on top of that, our narrator is too perfectly her foil. Lisa is the kind of poor person loved by literary writers: wise, articulate, noble. Her son is so kindhearted that his eyes sparkle over his mother’s “small offering” of the McDonald’s toy birthday present. She doesn’t just work at McDonald’s; her uniform top is fraying. She doesn’t just drive an older economy car; she has a Toyota Tercel, a subcompact car last manufactured in 1998. As a product myself of the working class, I find portrayals like this to be more patronizing than complimentary. It’s deeply disingenuous to allow Lisa to notice things about Fin’s mother that elicit the reader’s judgment without Lisa herself ever casting any judgment directly. Lisa’s being poor doesn’t mean she has to uphold a higher standard of patience and generosity than the rest of us.
The other thing that bugs me about this passage is that it sets up a conflict of the kind you encounter in sitcoms and network primetime dramas, a “major problem” that could actually be avoided, in the real world, quite easily. All Lisa has to do is tell Fin’s mother that she already has plans on the day of Fin’s party. The scene ignores this obvious solution and therefore dumbs down the sociopolitical themes the story is trying to engage. Similarly, a boy Joey’s age would almost certainly not be a laughingstock for neglecting to bring a present to a party. The mother might elicit judgment from other parents, but these judgments probably wouldn’t touch the child in a way he recognizes. If this were a student’s work and I were attempting to diagnose the causes of these missteps, I’d make two guesses. The first is that the story’s sociopolitical commentary is driving the characterizations rather than the characterizations driving the sociopolitical commentary. The second is that the writer probably doesn’t have a lot of experience with five-year-olds.
This rewrite, I think, is a few steps in the right direction:
I was on my way out of the daycare center, with fifteen minutes to spare until my shift at McDonald’s started, when I spotted Fin’s mother emerging from her SUV. I dropped my eyes and looked at my phone, hoping she’d think I was too distracted to notice her, but she called to me loudly from across the parking lot: “Hey, Lisa! I was hoping I’d catch you! Is Joey going to be able to come to Fin’s party this weekend?”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” I had to pass her car to get to mine, so I hesitated at her back bumper. She stuck her head into the car to wrestle with her son’s car-seat buckle. I wasn’t sure if she could hear me, or if we were even still having a conversation, so I said loudly, “I’m sorry, I forgot all about it.”
I hadn’t forgotten. Joey had shown me the invitation Fin’s mother put in his cubby—fancy, on heavy cardstock, with a little blond cartoon superhero that looked a lot like Fin. FIN TURNS FIVE! the invite screamed. Joey couldn’t read the invitation’s promise of bouncy houses and a visit by Batman, but word gets around preschool classes, apparently. He was desperate to go, and I’d been giving him the runaround. I didn’t want him to be the only kid in his class to miss out, but I also really didn’t want to spend my only Saturday off this month with a pack of screaming preschoolers and a bunch of parents I barely knew well enough to nod to.
She pulled her head out of the back seat and huffed her bangs out of her eyes. “Fin really wants Joey to be there. He talks about him all the time.”
“Joey is not my best friend!” Fin yelled from inside the car, and his mother’s cheeks pinkened. She rolled her eyes.
“He’s just saying that because he likes to argue. Anyway, we’re bringing in a food truck for the parents. It’s over the top, but he’s the only one we’ve got. You know how it is.”
For Joey’s fifth birthday, I’d bought him a LEGO set and took him to a movie at the dollar theater. It was fun. He was happy.
“And you don’t have to bring a present. You know, if you decide at the last minute you can come.”
Oh, sure, the invitation had said as much: Your gift is your presence. But no one ever listens. And I knew what she meant, telling me that; I knew the look she was giving me. I checked my phone. “I’ve got to go to work,” I said. “We’ll see. We might have to go out of town. But maybe.”
You can see I’ve dialed Fin’s mother way back in this version. She doesn’t have to be a cartoon to still have some of the problematic qualities of a certain kind of middle-class privilege, and she reads now more plausibly as someone who might actually share a childcare provider with a person in Lisa’s situation. Her dialogue has fewer exclamation points. She is less aggressive. The moment when she causes the greatest offense, in fact, is when she makes an attempt to be sensitive to Lisa’s financial reality, and I much prefer this over the offense Lisa feels when Fin’s mother keeps calling her Lana.
The passage is also helped by an adjustment in motivations for Lisa. I’ve stripped this of the sitcom problem of Lisa being unable to simply tell Fin’s mother, this woman she seems to feel little obligation or affection toward. Instead—and this is much more plausible—the pressures rise out of the obligation she feels toward her son, who has already gotten his hopes up about the party. Similarly, I think the differences in class realities between Lisa and Fin’s mother are highlighted more realistically and poignantly by the fact that Lisa gets only one Saturday off a month than by the issue of the cost of a birthday present.
If I can make a general recommendation based on this passage, it’s this: even when your object is social critique, complicating your characters and the situation is your best route. Now, that’s not necessarily going to apply if we’re talking about satire or absurdism, and I’ll address those subgenres shortly, but in general, I like to try to subvert my own understanding of my characters, to lean into their complexity and humanity. This strategy of complication can begin as mechanically as deliberately introducing a mismatched element into the characterization. So, to use this daycare revision scene as an example, I threw in that part when Fin yells out that Joey is not his best friend, allowing Fin’s mother a moment of embarrassment to humanize her and balance the scales a bit between her and Lisa. Again, when the details all fit too perfectly—when the scene’s clear intention is to unequivocally demonstrate that Fin’s mother is an oblivious, upper-class jerk—you start to lose your reader. They trust you less. I don’t have a whole lot in common with the mother who’d order multiple bouncy houses and a food truck for her five-year-old’s party, but I know very well how it feels to have my kid yell something inappropriate in mixed company. It’s what kids do. Forging this point of connection between myself and a person I might otherwise quickly judge and dismiss always improves my storytelling. You can think of it as a version of the “yes, and” technique used by improv artists: Yes, she’s a wealthy woman who is clueless about the assumptions she makes based on privilege. And she’s the mother of a young kid, buckling under some of the same pressures affecting Lisa, though she buckles differently than Lisa and has additional resources to manage the buckling.
Okay, for the last example, I want to shift gears a bit. I mentioned earlier that some of my recommendations about avoiding false notes won’t necessarily apply if the writer’s object is writing outside our reality, and so I wanted to give you an example of the kind of passage I sometimes encounter—and it’s a type I’m seeing more and more frequently at the graduate level. Now, “outside our reality” is a very broad category. It can mean, of course, stories with a magical bend, such as those by Kelly Link, and stories that are speculative, such as those by Margaret Atwood or George Saunders, but it also includes works with surreal or absurdist psychological approaches, or stories that are overtly satirical. Does the issue of falseness apply even when you’re dealing with overt elements of unreality? This is a sincere and tricky question, and one of the greatest challenges I’ve faced as a teacher, especially in recent years, is feeling like I’m doing more good than harm when I try to give feedback to young writers who are playing among these forms.
The problem with responding to stories by students who are doing more overtly experimental work, or who are deliberately blurring the boundaries between genres of the unreal, is that the density and high conceptualization of their premises makes it harder to perceive the line we’ve been discussing between goodness and greatness, between falseness and “truth,” however you wish to define that loaded term. I want to help these students write the best possible version of the thing they like to write. I’m not serving them if I try to force them to arbitrarily choose their lane and stay in it, but I’m also not serving them if I give up and decide that the mantle of “experimentation” means they can do whatever they want, and the reader just has to get on board.
In an attempt to make this difficulty more concrete, I’m going to subject you to one last hyperbolic imitation I’ve composed in the ways a deliberately unreal story can sound its own false notes. This is a longer passage, but I won’t make you wade through rewrites of it, so bear with me.
Here goes.
Example Three:
On the BabyMama app, I matched at 93% with Wynette Carolla, a seven-month-old female of Pacific Islander and European descent, mild wheat allergy. Her likes and dislikes seemed manageable:
Likes: Swinging, cucumbers, Beatles songs, pretend sneezes
Dislikes: Tummy time, hummus.
Her parents were suggesting a 75/25 custody split, days of the week negotiable, with full-week options at Christmas and midsummer. They would cover healthcare and provide a grocery/entertainment stipend. The BabyMama would have to provide a suitable living space, including crib, toys, diapers, etc. The BabyMama didn’t have to practice the Carollas’ faith (Episcopalian) but had to raise Wynette in accordance with it. College degree preferred, stable income a must. I hit the LET’S MEET! button.
The BabyMama Childsharing Rules and Best Practices required our initial meeting to last no longer than an hour and to take place at a neutral location. The Carollas suggested a place called PLASTERED where, for $35 and an additional studio fee, you could craft a sculpture while enjoying a craft cocktail. I wasn’t sure if this was the best place for me and Wynette to start getting to know each other, but my Van Goghtini (grapefruit juice, black pepper simple syrup, celery bitters, white tequila) was very tasty, and Wynette (her parents called her Why) seemed happy enough in her biomother’s lap, plopping her plump hands into a pile of clay while Mrs. Carolla (“Call me Lynn”) and the mister (“You can call him Al”) laid out their lifestyle, hopes, dreams, and thoughts about the role their BabyMama (maybe me) would play in raising Wynette.
“Basically,” said Mrs. Carolla (Lynn!), “what we’ve found at this point is that Why is compromising our ability to commit fully to our passion projects. My artisan birdseed company has taken a hit, and Al’s band is talking about finding a new lead singer.”
Al nodded sadly. He didn’t talk much. Lynn said he was resting his voice over the weekend in anticipation of a big performance at Costco.
“We love Why, but we’ve decided that we’ll all be better off achieving a healthier balance between our lives and our core biorelationships. So, what about you? Why do you want to be our BabyMama?”
I told them about the shock of Charles leaving me and how I only had another year until my ovaries reached Geriatric status and began their government-mandated self-destruct sequence. Rather than resting my hopes on finding a new partner, I figured a childshare would allow me to keep my job, which I liked, and help raise a child. I had a lot of love to give.
I’m going to begin just by making a few observations about what’s happening here—what elements are in the mix. The first observation is that this story takes place in some near-future or parallel reality where current app-based social and economic trends have resulted in childsharing, an arrangement where—apparently—mothers and fathers can choose to cede some amount of custody of their children to another party. That gives this story a speculative or even dystopian element, depending on how such a scenario strikes you. The story is also clearly doing some satirizing. Some of the objects of satire include dating apps, make-and-take art studios, hipster cocktails, artisanal businesses, middle-aged band members, the upper middle class, contemporary parenting, and attitudes toward women’s health. I could probably name some others.
There’s a third element in the mix here, and it’s connected to both the near-future reality and the satire but not perfectly overlapping with either. This is the story’s psychological approach. It was harder for me to demonstrate this sort of technique in a confined, self-contextualizing space, but what I’m talking about, essentially, is a story deliberately having its characters speak, think, and behave in ways that would strike most of us as unnatural. What is “natural,” of course, is highly subjective, but I’m talking about a level of psychological contrivance that deliberately draws attention to itself. Here, I’d point out specifically two of Mrs. Carolla’s lines of dialogue: “What we’ve found at this point is that Why is compromising our ability to commit fully to our passion projects” and “We’ve decided that we’ll all be better off achieving a healthier balance between our lives and our core biorelationships.” There’s satire here, sure, but it’s not so easy to lock down as the other examples I’ve cited. What’s indisputable is that Mrs. Carolla and her husband view their daughter as a component of their lives that can and must be managed and relegated to its limited, clearly defined space. And what’s more, they express this desire with a confidence that can only come of society largely sharing their mindset; and indeed, the existence of a childsharing app supports that, as does the accepting reaction of our point-of-view character. If anything—and this would complicate the story’s satirical commentary—Lynn and Al’s mindsets run counter to the prevailing attitude among the parents in our world who most resemble them, which is that your children require mindful and precise cultivation.
So the excerpt is spinning at least three plates: its parallel or dystopian reality; its satirical commentary; and its conspicuous psychological contrivance. Each one demands that the reader relinquish control of the strictly real, but little is done to help a reader track how these differing categories of unreality are in conversation with one another. I keep trying to find ways here not to say that a story needs an anchor, some steady reference point, because that seems so reductive—but I’m not sure of a better way to say what I mean. Without an anchor, it’s hard to know what the story is—what the author is critiquing versus what the author is endorsing. As I wrote to one of my graduate students in a feedback letter:
The issue wasn’t so much the genre-lessness of this story as it was the way it constantly cycled through different sets of terms and tones. I couldn’t find any firm footing. I couldn’t decide how emotionally invested I was supposed to be in [the character’s] situation, if conventional emotions are even supposed to apply. I couldn’t decide what critique you were attempting to make (if any) in your depiction of [the character’s] reality.
To return, then, to my fabricated story passage about the childsharing reality, my strategy was to have a high-concept situation in mind and then to throw as much at it as I could, prioritizing the fun of individual lines over the overall impression such a story might make. I’ll confess that this was an exhilarating way to work. I’ve had this childsharing story idea in my head for almost a year now, but it’s never reached a point of liftoff, probably because I’ve never figured out what my emotional connection is to the material. Relieved of that burden, and of the burden of actually making a full-fledged story, I could just focus on being clever, on amusing myself. But there’s no way I could sustain what I’ve started here, and even if I could, I’d finish the drafting process with no clue what my own story is even about. What am I making fun of? To return to those three foundational elements I cited—the story’s speculative reality, its satirical targets, and its sideways psychological approach—I’d say that the problem, aside from generalized excess, is that these elements aren’t interacting harmoniously. They’re not even really interacting. For instance, the juxtaposition of the childsharing app’s rules with the take-and-make studio serving Van Goghtinis suggests that these are somehow connected areas of critique, but as I said before, I don’t know if I’d recognize the artsy, artisanal, middle-class hipsters-of-the-future who’d decide that their own children aren’t part of the living half of their lives. I could be convinced to see the connection, but this passage isn’t doing that work, or beginning to do it. So there you have it: a major false note. But it’s a tricky false note, because it’s the kind that can hide among a lot of clutter and cleverness, giving the misleading impression that there’s elusive substance where, in fact, there’s only style.
If I were to ever try to finally launch my babysharing story, here’s what I think it would take. First, I’d have to sacrifice some jokes. You don’t have to call Lynn’s husband Al, and in fact, if more than half the people reading this essay even know what that joke is referencing, I’d be surprised. Speaking of Al, he probably wouldn’t need to be resting his voice for a Costco gig, and maybe Lynn wouldn’t be passionate about artisanal birdseed. Maybe she could have an equally pretentious but less ridiculous vocation. The make-and-take studio bar could be a fun setting for a scene, but I’d have to give some real thought to who Lynn and Al are and why they’d choose this as the location for their first meeting with their daughter’s potential co-parent. Perhaps it’s meant to speak to the ways they privilege their own pleasures and priorities over their child’s, but this sentiment needs to find its way concretely to the page, maybe through a more sharply critical narrative lens. Why not let my narrator be smart enough to form her own theories?
And speaking of that lens, I’d probably choose the story’s unnamed narrator, and her yearning to be a mother, as my anchor. When I wrote that last line, “I had a lot of love to give,” I landed, despite myself, on a sentiment of clear-eyed sincerity that cut through the other delightful nonsense about Van Goghtinis and self-destructing ovaries. The world of the story can be absurd and over-the-top, but if that narrator’s desire for a child is real—I can work with that. I can imagine how she’ll navigate the reality of sharing a child with a couple as self-involved as Lynn and Al, in a country where the government deems your fertility invalid at a firm cutoff date. And, through my narrator, I might even start to know what those other absurdities mean—what they say about America in the 2020s.
My husband once told me that when he was a kid, one of his favorite things about getting dragged to his big brother’s baseball games was going to the concession stand and ordering a Tutti Fruity. A Tutti Fruity is when equal parts of each available soda are poured into the cup, so you get some RC, some Upper 10, some Big Red, and some Tab, or at least you do if you’re a southern Kentucky boy in the 1980s. I’ve since tried a version of this drink, intrigued by my husband’s fond memories of it, and I can tell you that the only thing it has to recommend it is its novelty. It tastes like nothing but sugar and weirdness. And that’s the risk you run when you treat a story like a Tutti Fruity: the final product is bold, but the flavors cancel each other out. You’re left, at best, with a temporary rush; at worst, with your teeth set on edge, and a general sense that what you experienced was odd for oddity’s sake, and a little unpleasant.
What, then, makes a story truthful and dramatic? How, I’ve wondered, working with graduate students, can I offer some practical guidance to help them pull that “contradictory and concealed” thing Baxter talks about from its hiding place? The conclusion I’ve reached is that the stories that invoke in me recognition, surprise, and delight do so through an interaction between the following three elements, and you need them all if you want your story to rise above dull competence—if you want it, to pervert Charles Baxter’s original statement, to be “unreasonably good.” Before I begin this list, let’s assume the qualities of “reasonable” goodness are already in place: the story is well structured; the characters have some complexity; there is an attempt at subtext; the language is pleasing. With those as a given, here’s what I would argue are also crucial:
Authorial ethos. I don’t want to wade into the topic of authenticity without noting that one of the things in the mix is the identity of the author and the issue of whether that person has the experience and authority to tell certain stories. I don’t have new insights to offer on the subject, beyond saying that I occupy a space, as a reader, where I can both appreciate the nuanced, empathetic way thrice-divorced, adulterizing Andre Dubus wrote his women characters and understand the widespread outcry at the publication of American Dirt. The maxim “Write what you know” is a dismayingly limited imperative, but at minimum, ask yourself this question: If I’m writing what I don’t know, what’s my agenda? And is there any feasible way I can acquire the knowledge and experiences necessary to make my voice on this subject necessary?
Cellular-level knowledge. In answer to that last question, what I’m talking about here is a writer’s level of such deep, generous understanding of their characters and those characters’ worlds that this understanding permeates every image, sensory detail, and word choice. This knowledge obviously comes from organically acquired experiences, but writers can strive to attain it too, through research and sought experience—what journalists would call reporting. I’ll add that this knowledge is also the product of training yourself to be a keen and empathetic observer, which leads me to the next and final point.
Emotional intelligence or (gulp!) moral authority. I was lucky enough at an early season in my writing career to attend several bookstore events with Edward P. Jones, and a question he kept getting asked was what kind of research he’d done to write The Known World, his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about a black slaveowner. And Edward’s response each time was that he spent nearly a decade researching the Antebellum South, but it wasn’t until he put these books to the side and stopped worrying about things like the historical accuracy of the drapes that he was able to tell Henry Townsend’s story. The lesson I took from this wasn’t “Research is unnecessary.” Rather, it was that research can tell you what the drapes looked like in the early nineteenth century but not whether the character in your story would notice those drapes or, if so, the language he would use for the noticing. It can be helpful to have the historically accurate drapes at the ready, on the cellular level of your knowledge base, if you find you need them, but putting them into the story simply because you’ve learned they existed is letting the tail wag the dog. If pressed to offer what I believe is the baseline minimum skill necessary for literary talent, I’d say that it’s an ability to offer the right detail through the right perspective—and this is a talent lodged in the heart. Luckily, though, the heart is a muscle. You don’t need me to tell you that writers aren’t all good people, and in fact, I’ve known some writers who were awful people. But the writers who were good on the page, even if they were awful in real life, managed to excavate something decent and generous within themselves and commit it to the page. And this decent thing, if you ask me, is as simple as living in the world in a way that allows you to recognize points of connection: opportunities for drawing a line between yourself and the reader you hope to encounter. This decent and generous impulse is what allows a writer to understand why summer sunlight filtering through pale yellow curtains might make a woman’s sinuses ache with unshed tears. If the drapes she’s looking at are historically accurate, great. But they need to be necessary, first, and then correct.
A published story I admire, one that encapsulates these three elements I’ve discussed—authorial ethos, cellular-level knowledge, and emotional intelligence/moral authority—is “The Finkelstein 5,” part of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s collection, Friday Black. It takes place in a slightly different version of our own world, where outrage over the not-guilty judgment in a white-on-Black mass murder has resulted in a campaign of deliberately staged retaliative acts of violence against random white people. You can tell from this description that Adjei-Brenyah has committed boldly and ambitiously to making concrete one of white America’s deepest fears: what would happen if oppressed people demanded not just equal treatment but a complete balancing of the scales. This is the sort of concept that could easily never attain liftoff beyond delighting in its own highly contrived cleverness if Adjei-Brenyah weren’t also possessed of the emotional intelligence and moral authority to find the perfect lens for this material. He tells the story through the eyes of a character whose grief and trauma drive him to the edge of an act that is somehow both unthinkable and understandable, and the story turns on the question of whether Emmanuel will embrace his rage or suppress it. Reading the story the first time, I felt a mounting unease at the narrative trap of these two options, and somehow Adjei-Brenyah pulls off an ending that validates Emmanuel’s desire for justice without robbing him of his humanity. Adjei-Brenyah is clear on his story’s objects of critique but never simplistic. Each time I reread this story, I finish it with questions—not about what happened but about what is in my own heart.
The paragraphs I share now are both from early in the story:
That morning, like every morning, the first decision he made regarded his Blackness. His skin was a deep, constant brown. In public, when people could actually see him, it was impossible to get his Blackness down to anywhere near a 1.5. If he wore a tie, wing-tipped shoes, smiled constantly, used his indoor voice, and kept his hands strapped and calm at his sides, he could get his Blackness as low as 4.0.
The next paragraph is a couple pages later, when Emmanuel is getting ready to go to the mall to buy something to wear to a job interview:
In a vague move of solidarity, Emmanuel climbed into the loose-fitting cargoes he’d worn on a camping trip. Then he stepped into his patent-leather Space Jams with the laces still clean and taut as they weaved up all across the black tongue. Next, he pulled out a long-ago abandoned black hoodie and dove into its tunnel. As a final act of solidarity, Emmanuel put on a gray snapback cap, a hat similar to the ones two of the Finkelstein Five had been wearing the day they were murdered—a fact George Wilson Dunn’s defense had stressed throughout the proceedings.
Emmanuel stepped outside into the world, his Blackness at a solid 7.6. He felt like Evel Knievel at the top of a ramp.
Without belaboring my previous points, I think it’s immediately clear here how Adjei-Brenyah’s ethos as a young Black American male gives him access to a cellular-level of knowledge that writers lacking his ethos—no matter how talented, no matter how well-meaning—probably couldn’t access. But it’s the third element, the element of emotional intelligence and moral authority, that imbues these passages with the power not just to evoke a particular experience but to make a connection between that experience and a reader who may not ever have experienced anything like it. I’ve never come close to feeling like the clothes I choose to put on in the morning are an Evel Knievel–level of life-threatening audacity, but Adjei-Brenyah convinces me this is the case for this particular man. He does it by carefully mounting specific details across the story’s first pages and calibrating the reader’s sense of what this character’s Blackness scale means in practical, psychological, and thematic terms. As a middle-class, middle-aged white woman, I’ve registered the general impression offered through popular media of what a threatening Black male looks like, and I of course recognize the symbolic import assigned to hoodies, but Adjei-Brenyah also gives me the cargo shorts from a camping trip, the patent-leather Space Jams with their perfect laces, and the snapback hat that draws a line between Emmanuel’s “vague move of solidarity” and the tragedy he is trying, in his way, to express solidarity with. This list of items with their little backstories shows me that the outfit Emmanuel is donning is both costume and uniform, comprised of some bits that are sincerely him and some that are, paradoxically, meant only to elicit a reaction. The choice of a close third-person point of view lets us eavesdrop on Emmanuel’s rationalizations without having those rationalizations be clouded by a first-person narrative agenda. The overall impact of these moves is a satisfying and deeply affecting harmoniousness, and that’s as close as I’m going to be able to come to defining what fictional truth ought to look like.
Getting from good to great is easier for some than others. It comes innately to a few writers, whom we try not to hate, and for the rest of us, it’s a skill developed through lots of reading—reading so often and so broadly that the moves of these genius writers imprint upon us—and lots of practice. When you’re revisiting a draft of a story that strikes you as promising but not quite lifting off, try starting with the moments—and you’re going to know exactly what moments I’m talking about here—that have never, ever felt right to you in the writing or rereading process. Those moments where you threw something on the page, hoping a better idea would later strike you, and instead the stand-in barnacled to the draft’s hull, ugly and unyielding. Notice it again. Pry it loose. Consider what false note it may have been sounding. Is a detail out of sync with the point of view? Is there something unnatural about the staging? Are you being fancy when you should be getting out of the story’s way? Are you throwing in a “suddenly” moment to eject your character from a plot dead end? The good thing about working at this granular level is that it feels manageable and discreet but often ends up having necessary story-wide implications. And maybe that’s the bigger lesson here, if I’m capable of offering one on such a huge, abstract, and often frustrating subject as the competence ceiling: it can feel to us like breakthroughs are the consequence of magic, or of finally cracking the lock on our hidden reserve of God-given talent. It can feel like we get better as writers only when we figure out some necessary capital-T truth. But in fact, these breakthroughs usually happen when we’re doing the humblest work.
Holly Goddard Jones is the author of two novels and two story collections, most recently Antipodes: Stories (University of Iowa Press, 2022). She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at UNC Greensboro and is on faculty at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
