Here are 12 things that film teaches us wrong (and 4 that it teaches us right) about writing fiction or narrative nonfiction.

1) The most important thing is eyes!

Look at even the sappiest love stories of the 1900s, and eyes, eye color, and eye contact are barely mentioned. Jane Austen gives us the lovely dialogue “I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow,” but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone gazing deeply into someone else’s brown eyes. Yet do a Control+F on “eyes” in any mediocre modern novel and you’ll get not only “I stared into his soft green eyes” but also a constant commentary on where someone is looking. (“He cast his eyes to the floor,” “Her eyes met Ralph’s,” “He glanced toward the audience,” etc.) So… What changed around 120 years ago to make us so obsessed with eyes?

Film happened. Specifically, two things: The closeup shot on an actor’s eyes to telegraph emotion (self-explanatory), and the “shot-reverse” shot, which might need some explanation. This is the film editing technique wherein a two-person conversation is filmed over the shoulder from one side, then the other side. In order for us to believe they’re really talking to each other, and for a sense of spatial continuity, the director makes sure characters are matching the “eyeline.”

That’s all fun stuff, but there’s no reason we need to bring that fixation to the page. It might be familiar from the screen, but is it really true to life? Is eye color honestly the first thing you notice about someone? Are you constantly tracking where someone else is looking? Really? (If so, stop doing that. It’s creepy.)

*Adding a week later: Enough people have taken the above to somehow mean “Never mention eyes!” that I feel compelled to say: Umm, of course that’s not what I’m saying. (?!?) I’m saying don’t use them like they’re the only tool you’ve got.

2) Scenes of people going about their daily lives with no real change are engaging and fun!

On screen, this might look like women around New York getting dressed in the opening montage of The Devil Wears Prada, or it might look like someone stuck in normal bad traffic on a normal bad day in Office Space. But onscreen, you’ve got music, camera cuts, closeups, colors, pretty faces… and the whole thing maybe takes one minute, tops. On the page, you’ve got none of those things, and a three-page scene will take people six long minutes to read (longer if they zone out and have to reread) and no one comes out happy.

3) You’re not allowed to tell us what’s going on!

In a movie, unless you have a voiceover narrator, this is true. You’re going to have to get all the context across through dialogue, little clues, maybe someone conveniently turning on the TV news at the exact right moment so the newscaster can give an update on the relevant situation. You want to show a lot of time going by? You have to show the seasons changing or all the calendar pages flipping. You want us to know it’s someone’s last day of high school, and this character is his older brother? You need for the older brother to say “Heyyy, little brother, congrats on your last day of high school!”

On the page, we have this amazing thing called exposition. The narrator can just tell people stuff. It’s the coolest trick. If you ignore that, and you teach us information by having a character say “Hi there, neighbor! Haven’t seen you since the funeral. How are you getting on without your wife, the big-shot lawyer? I hear the big 6-0 is coming up!” we’re going to kind of hate you.

4) You’re not allowed to tell us what people are thinking!

Quite similar to the above…

On film, we need to know that a character is lying, but kind of sad about it, and so the camera zooms in realll close, and lingers on Jodi Foster’s face doing its thing, and the music goes sad. That works really well! But you don’t have camera zooms or music or Jodi Foster’s face helping your story. So you need to tell us what someone’s thinking. Hey, here’s an entire series I wrote on interiority!

I don’t always blame this move on film consumption. Both journalists and lawyers, turning to fiction, have a hard time suddenly being allowed to put thoughts in someone’s head. This would be irresponsible journalism, and in a courtroom you’d get called out for speculation.

I also blame both this one and the one above on people hearing “show, don’t tell” and assuming it means they’re essentially supposed to write a screenplay. “Show, don’t tell” is largely applicable to emotion. If a student writes He displayed rage or She acted embarrassed, I’m likely to write Show this plz? in the margins. What it does not mean is that you’re not allowed to give us exposition or interiority. Neglect those tools at your peril.

5) It’s easy to acclimate people quickly to a complicated, unfamiliar setting!

You want to set your movie in a futuristic New York where every building has a flying car port on top and there are highways through the air and half the people are genetically modified to be 7 feet tall and the sky is red and everyone’s left hand is a phone and all the police are robots? Cool—that will take you all of about ten seconds to get across onscreen.

You want to do all that stuff on the page? You’ve got tougher options. Some writers think they’re going to get away with devoting about ten seconds worth of space to establishing the context, or not mention it at all until it’s way too late. Because it’s never mentioned in the movies, it just is! Other writers try to take the time necessary to let us see, in detail, everything we’d see on the screen in ten seconds, and that turns out to be around thirty pages—because on the page, everything needs to be explained. Readers will want to know exactly what those air highways look like and how they work and maybe even where they came from.

So what are we supposed to do? It helps to weave those descriptions in on a need-to-know basis (e.g., the first time a cop shows up we learn about the robots), and it helps to simplify. What might have been colorful texture onscreen just takes too much of a reader’s energy, and it turns out we don’t really need those robocops after all to make the story work.

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6) Or! Settings are neutral backdrops!

One thing they love to do in Hollywood is save money when possible. You need two people to have a conversation, and a coffee shop set that’s already built and on the lot is a lovely choice. It’s got nothing to do with the story, and it’s meant to be kind of invisible, and that’s great.

I do think that setting is one of our most underutilized tools on the page, and there’s absolutely no reason to limit yourself to the budget or visual language of film. You have, right now, no matter who you are, an unlimited budget. And you might want to do something more interesting with setting, like picking one that puts pressure on characters, or one that presents opportunities for dynamic interaction.

7) It’s always best to throw people into a story with no context whatsoever!

Occasionally, a movie will start with a helpful voiceover or an effective establishing shot so we know what’s up, but usually we’re cast immediately in the role of the outside observer, just waiting and watching to see who everyone is and what their deal is. If you’ve ever watched a movie with someone who says “Now who is that?” five minutes into the film when a new character appears, you’ve probably found yourself saying things like “We’re not supposed to know yet,” or “We’ll find out.” And that’s part of the fun of watching movies; we’re both voyeur and detective, and since everything’s right there in front of us visually, we aren’t stuck not knowing what to picture.

On the page, though, a lack of context makes it very hard for readers to orient themselves. We don’t know what to picture, so we picture nothing, or the wrong things.

8) Once you’re in a scene, you’re locked in, beat per beat!

I once found an entire Reddit thread of people who grew up outside the US thinking that Americans end phone calls abruptly, without saying goodbye. They learned this from TV and movies, where you can’t really leap forward in time, but it would also be absolutely deadly to replicate the end of a realistic phone call. (“Okay, so I’ll talk to you on Tues—right, yeah, no, Wednesday.” Long pause… “Ten your time, or ten my time?” Long pause… “Oh, cause I’m on Pacific time till Friday.” Long pause… “Okay, tell your mom I said hi!” etc.) So what can a poor screenwriter do but have the character say “It’s a plan!” and just hang up the phone?

Fiction writers, not wanting their characters to be rude, are more likely to just give us the entire damn conversation, punctuated by He glanced out the window and …he said, tapping his cigarette. In other words, once the writer gets into a scene and starts to believe it’s real, and starts to picture it beat by beat, they write down the whole thing, cigarette tapping and all. This doesn’t just go for conversations… I’ve seen students needlessly replicate the entire process of going through airport security, the entire drive to the grocery store, someone’s entire nighttime routine.

We have two magical moves on the page that eliminate the need to do this. One is summary. You can write, “It’s a plan,” he said. They firmed up the details and then he hung up, finished his cigarette, and went to find Margot.

The other is just plain skipping ahead. “It’s a plan,” he said. Ten minutes later, he was on Margot’s doorstep, coughing from his cigarette-induced emphysema.

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9) It’s fun to make people think they’re seeing one thing and then zoom out like “Ha ha, you fool, it was something else!” People totally love that!

I usually hate this even in movies. Someone is finally giving the heartfelt speech they need to give, but then we zoom out and Psych! they were only rehearsing it in the mirror. These are called visual reveal shots or pullback reveals, and when they work, that’s why they work—because they’re visual.

I do love a surprise narrative shift, as in Life of Pi, in which we learn the narrator hasn’t been entirely straightforward; or one like in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, in which the narrative turns out not to be what we thought it was. But both of those are fundamentally different than, say, learning that the person our point-of-view character has been dealing with throughout the novel is (surprise!) her daughter, and both of them knew it all along. That just becomes withholding, and it’s a point of view failure.

10) Everyone can hear the music in your head!

I love a great movie soundtrack. I particularly love modern TV ending an episode with the absolute dead-on perfect song. (Think “You Are Sixteen” ending that one episode of Mad Men.) But there are fiction writers out there trying so hard to give their novels a soundtrack for ambience or coolness, and it mostly doesn’t work.

And it’s one thing if you mention songs just about everyone can hear in their heads, like “Our Love is Here to Stay” or “Let It Be” (without quoting them, please, unless you want to shell out thousands of dollars, since those songs are not in public domain…) but it’s another if you can’t stop name-dropping your favorite fringe bands. (A notable exception would be when the story is about music and about those lesser-known bands or even made-up bands—e.g., Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.) Those songs are probably deeply evocative for the author, but most readers just feel nothing at best and excluded at worst.

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11) A story is always made entirely of scenes, with very little summary!

Someone needs to write a doctoral dissertation about American literature coming of age with cinema and adopting a scene-scene-scene-scene structure that is of course not the only mode of storytelling. But in brief: Other traditions use more summary, more meandering exposition. And other eras in history relied far less on scene. Writing scene-based fiction is absolutely fine—it’s what I mostly love to read and write—but it’s important to know it’s not your only choice.

12) Memories are full transportations back in time that you need to be startled out of!

Of all these, this might be my biggest pet peeve. And this topic is complicated enough that it deserves its own post, which I’ll be doing soon. But in brief: When you have a memory, do you stare into space while you’re transported back in time, where you then relive the memory precisely, in full chronological order, until someone calls your name and “startles you out of your reverie”? No?? Then (with love) why the hell are you writing memory that way? And why, to begin with, are you assuming that every glimpse into the past has to come through the vehicle of character memory rather than just being offered in narration?

You’re doing it because you’re copying film and its limitations. For absolutely no reason at all. More on all that (and other options) soon.

BUT! There are some things we can absolutely learn from screenwriters, craft elements it’s often easier to observe onscreen.

Like for instance…

1) Clear, clear, clear stakes help hook people in.

Watch any cheesy reality show and they’ll remind you again and again what’s at stake and why it matters to people. Will Agatha pick the $500 more conservative wedding dress her conservative mother wants, or the $15,000 dress that makes her look like a deranged mermaid but will thrill her creepy fiancé and make her feel hot even if she can’t breathe in it? Find out after the break! When you see the interview portions of a show like Top Chef, you can tell the producers have asked questions like “Why can’t you go home this week?” and “Who would be proud if you won?” and “What are you afraid of right now?”

Fiction is often going to approach this much more subtly, but at any point in your story it’s helpful if both you and the reader have an understanding of what success would look like for your characters, and what the worst case scenario would be.

2) Every scene is there for a reason.

It’s quite hard to find a throw-away scene, or a redundant scene, on film… because everything costs a lot of money. If there’s a pointless scene that shows people doing stuff they’ve already done, someone is going to notice and cut it before millions of dollars get spent.

While you do have that lovely unlimited budget, theres a lot to learn here from those who don’t. You’re spending space and time, if not money. Don’t waste either of those.

3) Even then, amazing stuff gets cut.

We lost something beautiful when they stopped making DVDs with directors’ commentary and directors’ cuts. I (no joke) learned more about writing from a Darren Starr voiceover commentary on one Sex and the City episode than I learned in several writing classes. I’ll tell you about it another day. But it was always so useful to see the cut scenes, to see what they did spend big money to shoot and then still cut. The Gosford Park DVD had these gorgeous scenes with an entire cut storyline for Derek Jacobi’s character, a character that was reduced to a stolid, nearly dialogueless butler in the final cut. And they were amazing scenes! Starring Derek Frickin Jacobi!

The thing is, the better you get at writing, the better the content is that you have to cut—which hurts. Let’s assume Shakespeare cut a lot of beautiful lines that didn’t ultimately serve the play. Imagine Shakespeare balling up the page—a page that contained literal lines of Shakespeare!!—and tossing it into the fire. You can’t witness that firsthand, but you can see the scenes that took days of filming and passion and talent and money, and that ultimately weren’t essential.

4) Structural expectation can be a form of momentum.

Anyone who’s ever gotten hooked into a Top Ten Videos of 1992 countdown or a House Hunters episode or a season of Love is Blind knows the experience of not even really wanting to watch this, but feeling almost contractually obligated to see this thing through to the end of the promised setup. We could call that “structural momentum.”

Some writers make quite literal use of this force, writing stories structured like lists or ones that adhere to a formula (like the romance novel) with strong structural expectations. But there are other ways to harness this, too. For instance, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier begins: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” We’ve been promised something, and now we want to read not just for the intrinsic plot, but to see why it’s so sad. Or think of something like Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in which he uses two kinds of structural momentum: First there’s the promise that Scrooge will be visited by three ghosts, and so we can’t look away till we’ve met all three; and then there’s the countdown to Christmas morning, the structure of Christmas itself, another expected arrival we can’t look away from.

This is what the folks who produce reality shows are obnoxiously good at. (Only five days left till the weddings! Will they say ‘I do,’ or walk away forever?) The next time we’re sucked in, we can at least learn from it.

Let’s keep brainstorming…

In the comments, please tell me other things you’ve learned, or had to unlearn, from film. And please recommend some good movies to me… I’m about to have a long plane flight and need a well-written distraction.

We’re going to go on a quick journey here from literal, overt second-person all the way to pieces in which any sense of “you” is absolutely invisible (but still present).

What we’re going to be reading for here is what I call “the ear of the story”—who, in theory, is being spoken to?

After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events. On the stereo you play your favorite harp and oboe music. He tells you his wife’s name. It is Patricia. She is an intellectual property lawyer. He tells you he likes you a lot. You lie on your stomach, naked and still too warm.
- Lorrie Moore, “How to be an Other Woman”

This one is a literal second-person point of view, with listener-as-protagonist. It’s essentially second-person-as-first-person, the implication being that these events are narrated by this character to herself, or perhaps that an outside narrator is telling the it to the main character as it happens. (Don’t think too hard about the logic here. It works.)

Choose Your Own Adventure books also use a second-person protagonist, but one that is unnamed, ungendered, and really has no other signs of selfhood separate from the reader. The reader is invited to imagine themself in this story.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
- Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler

This is a weird one. The ear seems to be the literal reader of the book, about whom not a lot of further details are given (i.e., it’s probably very close to the actual reader, who is also about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel).

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere…
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride”

This one is similar in that the “you” is the actual literal listener… But in this case, it’s fairly unlikely that those listeners are children. Also, we’re probably reading it, not listening to it. So we’re essentially being cast as children; the contract we enter into with this poem is that we will “listen” with the wonder of children, as if we’ve never heard this story before.

Dear Sir,
I am writing to you to object to the word cremains, which was used by your representative when he met with my mother and me two days after my father's death.
- Lydia Davis, “Letter to a Funeral Parlor”

Davis’s story continues from here, and is contained within this one letter. So we have a named character as intended “ear,” someone absolutely distinct from the literal reader of the story, unless the literal reader happens to be this one funeral director.

You give your hand to me
And then you say “Hello.”
And I can hardly speak,
My heart is beating so.
And anyone can tell
You think you know me well,
Well, you don’t know me.
No, you don’t know the one
Who dreams of you at night;
And longs to kiss your lips
And longs to hold you tight
Oh I’m just a friend
That’s all I’ve ever been
Cause you don’t know me.
- “You Don’t Know Me,” Cindy Walker (sung most famously by Ray Charles)

If you want a huge variety of fascinating second-person pieces, look at love songs. In this case, the addressee or “ear” is a person who will not, by definition, ever hear it.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta… Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

This one’s all over the place. It sounds at first like he’s addressing Lolita herself, but no, she’s going to be a third-person character here. The actual addressees are the ladies and gentlemen of the jury—presumably not a literal jury, but the judgmental public. And that same public/ear is the ones whose questions he’s anticipating (Did she have a precursor? Oh when?).

Lolita also has a brief frame narrative, in which the man who has found Humbert’s manuscript in his prison cell after his death is presenting it to the world… So we’re also that audience, at the same time. In both cases, we are pretending to be members of the public, much like ourselves, but in a world in which this story is true.

Let’s begin with the first clean fact, James: This ain’t no war story. War stories are out—one, two, three, and a heave-ho, into the lake you go with all the other alewife scum and foamy harbor scum. But isn’t it a pity. All those crinkly, soggy sorts of laid-by tellings crowded together as thick and pitiful as street cobbles, floating mushy bellies up, like so much moldy shag rug (dead as rusty-ass doornails and smelling so peculiar and un-Christian). Just isn’t it a pity, because here and there and yonder among the corpses are some prize-winning, leg-pulling daisies—some real pop-in-the-oven muffins, so to speak, some real soft lobbed, easy out drive lanes.
But that’s the way of the world, James, or so the fairytales go.
- Larry Heinemann, Paco’s Story

This one is wild. “James” is addressed throughout the novel, and we never learn who James is or why he’s the addressee. I imagine this would be an even stranger read if your name is, in fact, James. In any case, it gives the narrative voice a sort of pinpoint focus, one person who needs certain things explained, doesn’t need others explained, someone who doesn’t quite know “the way of the world” yet and perhaps expects more of a classic, romanticized war story.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

- J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

There’s still a literal “you” here but we’re getting less specific now. We can assume from what Holden Caulfield says here, and goes on to say, that this “you” doesn’t know Holden’s life yet, but is perhaps around his age and can be spoken to much more casually and frankly than he might speak to his elders. And yet Holden postures a lot, too. “You” is someone he kind of wants to impress.

At some point, a rich old man named Ryland W. Peaslee had made an enormous donation to the program, and this was why not only the second-year fellowships he’d endowed but also the people who received them were called Peaslees. You’d say, “He’s a Peaslee,” or “She’s a Peaslee.” Each year, four were granted. There were other kinds of fellowships, but none of them provided as much money—eighty-eight hundred dollars—as the Peaslees. Plus, with all the others, you still had to teach undergrads.
- Curtis Sittenfeld, “Show Don’t Tell” (opening)

And now the only literal “you” is one that doesn’t include the listener; “you” stands in here for “one.” But there is absolutely still a sense of the listening ear. Notice how some things need to be explained, and some things don’t. We are assumed to know what “the program” is, as if we had just asked the narrator about it. And yet we do not know about “Peaslees.” So we could assume that we did not attend this particular MFA program in Creative Writing, but that we have some familiarity with the writing world and its graduate programs. And note that some of what we’re assumed to know about (e.g., the program itself) is fictional. No reader will actually know it, because it doesn’t exist. Instead, we’re being cast as people who know it, and as we read we pretend on some level that this is true.

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In accordance with the laws of social physics the group of four had begun to draw others into its conversational orbit: Melanie Richardson from the ICA, Nathalie Porter who worked on Art Review, and Scott Thomson, whom Jeff had known, on and off, for more than a decade.
- Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (pp 28-29)

Similarly here, we’re assumed to know some of this world, but not all of it. The (fictional) people Dyer names here are not ones we’re assumed to be familiar with. But we do know the organization and the publication. So we could say that we’re assumed to be/pretending to be people who know the art world pretty well, but either don’t know these particular people, or need reminders on who they are.

We can start to think now about what effect some of these decisions might have on the reader in terms of feeling included in, or excluded from, the story. In both this and the Sittenfeld, our assumed familiarity feels like inclusion and trust. And the generosity of the narrator in explaining to us what we don’t know also feels quite inclusive. But there’s still that hint of being an outsider, a newcomer.

Outside an isolated Ojibwe country trading post in the year 1839, Mink was making an incessant racket. She wanted what Mackinnon had, trader’s milk—a mixture of raw and distilled spirits, rum, red pepper, and tobacco. She had bawled and screeched her way to possession of a keg before. The noise pared at Mackinnon’s nerves, but he would beat her into silence. Mackinnon was from a family of powerful healers. She had been the beautiful daughter of Singobii, a supplier of rich furs.
- Louise Erdrich, “The Flower” (opening)

Now there’s absolutely no “you” at all. But what information is it assumed that we need? We are clearly new to this story, to these people and this place, or we wouldn’t need to be told the year and the setting. We also don’t know what “trader’s milk” is, because we needs its ingredients listed. Interestingly, we aren’t told who Mackinnon is—but it doesn’t seem to be implied here that we ought to know him, more that he’ll be explained later.

To me, this feels welcoming and generous, but not like I’m being included as part of this world—at least not quite yet. The fact that we have access right away to these characters’ thoughts does promise that we’ll soon feel comfortable here, if not like insiders.

One day Mala lowers her mask and says to Jesmin, my boyfriend wants to marry you. Jesmin is six shirts behind so she doesn’t look up. After the bell, Mala explains. For months now she’s been telling the girls, ya, any day now me and Dulal are going to the Kazi. They don’t believe her, they know her boyfriend works in an air-conditioned shop. No way was he going to marry a garments girl. Now she has a scheme and when Jesmin hears it, she thinks, it’s not so bad.
- Tahmima Anam, “Garments” (opening)

In this story opening, in contrast, nothing is explained. Everything that we learn, we learn from strong context clues. “Six shirts behind” suggests some kind of work with clothing. The bell and the mask hint at a factory. Since it’s notable that her boyfriend works in an air-conditioned shop, we can assume this place is not air-conditioned, and their position in society is quite low. Then we got “garments girl” in passing, and we can confirm some of our previous assumptions.

So in this case, we are assumed to already know everything, thus needing nothing explained—and yet we’re very quickly filled in, given information before we have time to wonder or feel lost. And she’s doing it all quite subtly and gracefully. Done poorly, these kinds of context clues can feel awkward and heavy-handed.

The effect here is very much one of inclusion. We aren’t outsiders looking in. At this point, we might also start to think about the political/theoretical/ethical issues around the question of glossing a culture for outside readers. It’s not likely that a majority of readers of this story (published in English, in the US) are intimately familiar with the workings of a Bangladeshi garment factory. And explicating everything for an outside gaze might feel problematic or, to use a technical term, “icky.” But not everyone will make the same decision on that glossing of culture; see the Erdrich, above.

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My name is Kathy H. I'm thirty-one years old, and I've been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That'll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isn't necessarily because they think I'm fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who've been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space. So I'm not trying to boast.
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Now things get really fun. This is the opening of a novel that is set in a world somewhat like our own, but (it’s clear from the opening) also eerily different. If the angle Ishiguro took here were to fill us in on everything as outsiders, he’d either have to explain what’s going on, or make his narrator willfully, tauntingly, keep information from us. Instead, by casting us as people who already know this world, he finds an excuse for Kathy H. to leave out crucial information.

It’s a strange mix of inclusion and alienation… We’re implicated in this world immediately, but we also fundamentally don’t know what’s going on.

I also want to note, though, how clear Kathy is in what she does tell us. While we aren’t going to learn yet what a carer is or does, she isn’t also mentioning fifteen other things we’re unfamiliar with. The sentences are short and declarative and easy to follow. Readers will instantly understand that they’re in good hands, and all will be revealed in due time; they aren’t just missing something, the author didn’t just forget to explain something.

This mode tends to be a solid choice for speculative fiction, including science fiction and fantasy. Talking as if we already know this world has the added benefit of making the world seem more real, more convincing—not like it was made up five minutes ago for the purposes of this story.

Let’s do one more, from a weird, postmodern masterpiece:

He crawled out of the gorse-bush, brushed the prickles from his nose, and began to think again. And the first person he thought of was Christopher Robin.
("Was that me?" said Christopher Robin in an awed voice, hardly daring to believe it.
"That was you."
Christopher Robin said nothing, but his eyes got larger and larger, and his face got pinker and pinker.)
So Winnie-the-Pooh went round to his friend Christopher Robin, who lived behind a green door in another part of the Forest.
- A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

I’m not sure I can even begin to parse what’s going on here. The conceit is that Christopher Robin is listening to these stories, which are being made up for his benefit. And he can occasionally interrupt these same stories. But the narration about those interruptions is not being directed at Christopher Robin, but rather at some outside observer. So we have a double narration, and a double ear for the story. With narrative interruptions that occasionally influence the telling. What the actual fuck?? It’s brilliant and weird.

If I haven’t given you a migraine with all this, I invite you to read for the concept yourself. Pull ten novels off your shelf and look at the opening pages, asking yourself what we’re assumed to know or not know, how we’re being spoken to, how included or implicated in the story we are, and what kind of person we’re being cast as.

And for paid subscribers, read on and I’ll take you inside my own thinking on how the ears (plural!) work in one of my own novels, The Great Believers.

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There are quite literal versions of second-person in which there’s a “you” who’s the main point-of-view character (think Choose Your Own Adventure—You open the door and hear a noise. It’s a monster! Do you run or stay?—or novels like Vendela Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty); and there are ones in which a narrator (usually a first-person narrator) is addressing all or much of the text to a named “you” character (as in Elizabeth Crane’s story “Ad,” which is addressed to Owen Wilson, or my own novel I Have Some Questions For You).

But we can back way down from either of those modes and simply think about the flip side to point of view, which is: In theory, who is being spoken to or written to here? To whom is the story addressed, even tacitly? This is what I call “the ear of the story,” and while that’s my own term, not one you’ll find in a craft book, I think it’s the best and simplest term for what we’re talking about.

Before I break this down, I want to say that this is important. I’ve ranted before that most problems on the page are point of view problems, but to be more specific, when we get to advanced writers, a huge number of them are in fact problems with ear. Plenty of writers manage the issue unconsciously, and plenty have to think it through eventually… Because when it’s off, it derails the entire manuscript.

An example, before I lose you:

Let’s say we meet at a conference. We awkwardly shake hands, and then I do my signature move, which is to gesture with a cup of coffee in my hand and spill it all over the place. You tell me it’s fine and leave, mopping coffee off your sweater. Your best friend, who also reads this Substack, is at the same conference, and you run into her in the hall. She asks what happened to your sweater and you say, “Oh my God, I met Rebecca and you’re right, she’s an absolute klutz, this is her coffee, she wouldn’t stop apologizing. Did you see her ADHD posts? I think it’s all one big issue.”

The next day you go home, and your spouse/roommate/family member asks what happened to your sweater. You say something like, “Remember how I was hoping to meet Rebecca Makkai so I could tell her we both know Zach? Zach, my friend from college, with the mullet. Yeah, well I ran into her and this is her coffee.”

The next day, you take your sweater to the dry cleaner, and she asks what happened. You say, “I was at a writing conference and I was talking to this writer, and she sploshed her coffee all over me.”

The next day, you run into a time traveler from 1300s Bulgaria. This person asks what happened to your sweater. You say, “Ah, well, we have a brown drink called coffee that many people enjoy. It gives energy! And we sometimes walk around with this drink and drink it while we talk. I went to a big meeting of many storytellers, and one of them—a woman, because we sometimes let women tell stories in public now—she spilled her drink on me. Coffee tends to stain. We did not execute her! Haha, no, we mostly don’t do that anymore. Only sometimes. Not for coffee!”

In all four instances, you are telling the exact same story. But based on the information the listener already has, you are not only focusing on different details, but giving different information. I go from being “Rebecca” to “Rebecca Makkai” to “this this writer” to “a woman.” The conference goes from needing no introduction to “a writing conference” to “a big meeting of many storytellers.” And so on. The point of view in all these scenarios is the same. It is you, first person singular, the person who witnessed this happening on this day and time with a fairly similar amount of remove. You witnessed it. Your experience hasn't changed. The reason that your language has changed is that the ear has changed. You are calibrating the story you tell. In real life, we do this constantly.

If you've ever spoken to someone who gets it wrong, it's disconcerting. They might talk about their friends as if you know who they are when you don’t. They’ll say, “Sarah told me…” and you're like, Who the hell is Sarah? When I was a kid, I would find it alarming—I still do—when people who were not my sister said things like “Mom called.” She is not my mom! Why are you saying it that way? Or a subpar storyteller might give you more context than you need (telling you things you’d already know) or far less context than you need (and now you can’t follow the story).

All of this is what I mean by “ear.” To whom is the story calibrated? And it’s always calibrated to someone.

Here comes some literary theory, beware:

If this feels wildly intimidating/is giving you flashbacks of school, feel free to skip on down and just read “Narrative Audience.”

Literary theorists rarely agree with each other and often use competing terms for the same things. So the following are not terms you neglected to learn in 11th grade. It really doesn’t matter what you call anything. It matters if you're doing it. (A lot of these, if you’re interested, are from narrative theorist Peter J. Rabinowitz.)

Enunciatee: A (usually named) person or entity to whom a piece is being addressed. (In my last novel this would be Mr. Bloch, a sketchy music teacher, who is fictional.) In Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale,” the nightingale, who might be real but is rather unlikely to ever read the poem, is the enunciatee. Or the enunciatee could be a real person; Claire Dederer’s memoir Love and Trouble includes a section that starts, Dear Roman Polanski, As I grow older I think about you more and more often. In fact, sometimes I find I can't stop thinking about you. Of course not all pieces have an enunciatee.

Narratee: Someone or some group of people to whom the story is being overtly narrated. Think of “Paul Revere’s Ride,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere… He probably didn’t literally intend for his poem to be read only by children, but within the text, that’s the conceit; he’s narrating this to kids. Or think of Jane Eyre, in which Charlotte Bronte’s Jane writes/says, Reader, I married him. Bronte is acknowledging a reader to whom this is all narrated—something not all texts do. Or consider this passage right near the end of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “Ah!” I can hear you say, “so it was all a buildup to bore us with his buggy jiving! He only wanted us to listen to him rave!”

Actual Audience/Readership: This one is easy! The literal readers of a work. The humans who went to the bookstore or library and found the book and are reading it.

Authorial (or Hypothetical) Audience: The hypothetical audience for whom the text is composed. These are again literal readers, but they’re the ones the author is hoping for/picturing/aiming the text at. As you write, you might imagine a certain type of reader, or you might imagine Barack Obama picking up your book, or you might think of your workshop or an awards committee, or your ex (who will weep tears of despair). This group might overlap somewhat with your Actual Audience, or it might not.

Narrative Audience: We’re back in the world of the text again, not in the literal real-world bookstore. This is the audience to whom the narrator is narrating. I'm reading a sci-fi book, and this author is talking to me as if I already know this planet and these spaceships—and so I pretend, on some level, to be a person who knows this planet and these spaceships. And I assume the author will soon fill me in, via contextual clues. Or I'm reading a text that says, Listen up, girlfriends, here's one kind of man not to date. I'm not your girlfriend. And plenty of readers might not be girls. But for the purposes of this text, the narrator is speaking to me conversationally, calling me girlfriend. Upon picking up this text and engaging with it, this is the relationship I’m committing to. In the case of fiction, the narrative audience is asked to consider the (fictional) events of the text as actual occurrences.

(Rabinowitz then breaks this down further, writing about Ideal Narrative Audience and Actual Narrative Audience, the former being those to whom the narrator wishes he were narrating. The best example I can think of is someone like Nabokov's Humbert Humbert in Lolita, who wishes that he were narrating to the “ladies and gentlemen of the jury” who are going to find him sympathetic; he's talking to us as if we're going to be on his side and find him innocent. But then that text also has an actual narrative audience; there's a brief frame narrative around the main story, with a narrator (John Ray, Jr., PhD) who's found Humbert’s pages in a prison cell after his death, and he's presenting us with this lurid text—so we're actually meant to be the people reading that text, not Humbert’s sympathetic jury members. This is a complicated one, and in most texts it’s not that easy to split.)

Thank God the literary theory is over:

You made it! So, while I love geeking out over all these things, I think a lot of them can be combined. When I say “ear of the story,” I basically mean “actual narrative audience”—but that audience might also be a narratee (a named or implied group with certain characteristics) or an enunciatee (a named person)… And there are times when someone’s writing, say, a personal essay that addresses, as “you,” its actual readership (whoever finds it on that website on that day)… and “ear of the story” encompasses all of that.

Essentially: There’s the point of view (Who’s telling the story, and when, and why, and how?) and there’s the ear (Who are we? Who is being addressed?)

One big practical example:

Theodore is writing an autobiographical novel about coming of age in Montana in the 1960s as the son of French immigrants; it’s also about crochet.

He workshops his opening chapters, and someone in the group says, “I don’t get why sometimes you’re just giving us French on the page, and sometimes you’re translating the French.” She points to examples: On page 5, the text reads “Au revoir,” Philippe called, indicating his departure. But on page 12, we get “Va t’acheter une vie!” Philippe yelled, and left the room.

Someone else points out that in the early pages, Theodore gave us the history and layout of his town, as if we were outsiders who’d never been there. But then in chapter 3 he says, Years ago, after the school burned, Old Mrs. Beason asked the mayor to open up City Hall for classroom space, but the kids knew the legend of the statue in the attic and refused to enter the place. And we never heard anything before about the school burning, and we don’t know who Mrs. Beason is, and we don’t know about this statue. If this came in the middle of a different kind of story, a story in which we were pretending to know this town, it would make sense. But here it doesn’t.

Sometimes crochet is elaborately explained; sometimes Theodore does a “half-treble front post crossover,” and we get no help.

Sometimes Theodore’s narration says things like But you know how Mom can be, and sometimes he says things like My mother, who was born to a different era and had old-world values…

Sometimes he says I went to the shoe store and they x-rayed my foot, as if we’re all old enough to find that normal; sometimes he says In those days, there were payphones on the street corners, as if we’re all young enough that we don’t know this.

And the workshop group concludes that Theodore has a point of view problem. At least they’re halfway there! Often this kind of writing just feels “off” in intangible ways; it’s a hard thing to pinpoint. But what Theodore actually has is an ear problem. He has not stepped back to make decisions about who we are, who is (in theory!) being addressed. Do we speak French or not? Are we as old as he is, or younger? Do we know Montana? Do we know his mom? Are we crocheters? And any combination of answers is fine here.

Theodore might decide we know all of it, or none of it. Or he might decide that he’s going to speak to us as if we are his age and we know Montana, but we don’t speak French or know crochet or his family. And yet his narrator is speaking to a close friend, one with whom he can be casual and honest, not one for whom he’ll need to posture.

He might, in fact, decide that in the present day, Theodore has been good friends with someone for the past ten years but has never told him about his past, and this is a story told over drinks with increasing vulnerability. But then he never puts that friend or their barstools on the page. This is just a purely hypothetical listener for him to picture as he writes, so that everything stays aligned. This allows him to tune every phrasing choice to that listener.

Or he could make that barstool friend literal. He could start his entire book with Have I ever told you about where I grew up? No, not just Montana in a general way, but have we talked about the summer my mom adopted a rabbit? Wait, Phil, pass the ketchup over here. Yeah okay, so my Mom… And certainly there are books narrated this way. However, and I cannot emphasize this enough, you absolutely do not need this kind of frame narrative. I say this because 95% of the time when I explain this concept to someone they decide they really need a frame narrative, and I swear you don’t need it. Most published books/stories/memoirs do not have a frame narrative, but most of them do have their ear sorted out.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Is my narrator speaking to a specific person, named or otherwise?

• Is my narrator speaking to a specific group of people, named or implied?

• Does the ear/narrative audience know absolutely everything about this world up to the point when the story starts?

• If not, what is the ear/narrative audience assumed to know, whether or not most of the actual audience will know these things? Do we (the audience) know these people? Do we know this place? This time? This fraction of society? Do we know the general state of the world? Are we implied to know things about a certain field/industry/area of expertise? Are we supposed know about certain phenomena (how time travel works in this world, for instance)? (An example: If a short story begins with Helene received a lime green Birkin on her fifteenth birthday, we are assumed to be people who are wealthy enough/versed enough in fashion to know that this is a very expensive handbag. If the author is worried that the actual reading audience might include people who don’t know this, and she wants to include them, she might drop hints in the next sentence—e.g., It couldn’t hold much more than makeup and keys, which hardly seemed to justify the $80,000 her Aunt Susan had spent, but you couldn’t put a price on iconic. And note that “her Aunt Susan” implies that we do not know Aunt Susan, whereas just plain “Aunt Susan” would imply that we do know her.)

• With what formality, intimacy, veracity, and trust is the narrator speaking to the implied ear? (e.g., Salinger’s Holden Caulfield speaks to “us” very casually, as if we are fellow teenagers who will understand his slang, his complaints, his world—but he also does quite a bit of posturing and obscuring, as if he wants to impress us.)

Next time…

There’s a lot more to say. In the next part, I’m going to dive into examples of everything from overtly second person narratives to pieces where that second person (the ear) is completely invisible but just as important.

Meanwhile, if you’re a paid subscriber (OMG thank you!) please feel free to ask your questions below… This is a heady concept but such an important one, and if I were giving this as a live talk I’d have stopped for questions at least five times by now to make sure you weren’t languishing in confusion.

Last month I started writing about point of view on the page, and how nailing it down will solve like 90% of your problems.* That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s endlessly complicated. The other good news is there are relatively easy fixes. The other bad news is that eggs now cost $56 each.

*Only your problems with writing fiction, sorry.

A few years ago, attempting to break down all the different facets of narrative point of view (mostly for my students, but also for myself), I constructed a kind of ridiculous eight-page checklist. Yes, eight pages. I soon realized that when I sent it to students I needed to include directions on how not to panic… For that reason, I’m not going to share the whole thing here yet, just the first part.

Today we’re going to break down first person (and when I say “break down” I mean like what an over-zealous chef does with a chicken). What follows is all (or at least most) of the considerations for first person—that is, all the questions you need to be able to answer, the things that should be consistent in your text.

I’m not going to put names to any of these, but I’ve given examples where I can… If you have more examples, please post in the comments!

For First Person (“I” or “we”) Narrators:

1. Who is telling the story?

   1. Plural (we)

      1. A true “hive mind” plural, with no characteristics of an individual narrator standing out from the rest (Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides)

      2. A stated or implied singular within the plural (e.g., we know our narrator is
         Jake, but everything is about what “we,” the Cub Scout pack, did)

      3. Individual members of the collective “we” are described and given 3^rd person scenes, but there is no central protagonist or narrator (Ferris, Then We Came to the End; Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic)

   2. Singular (I)

      1. We have one point of view for the entire story

      2. We rotate between multiple first-person points of view

   3. A funky combination

      1. First-person narrator occasionally inserting self into otherwise 3^rd person story

         1. As a named or implied character (Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

            1. This is obvious from the start

            2. The narrator is slowly revealed as someone we know from the story (Greer, Less)

         2. As a disembodied voice, an “I” with opinions but no identity within the story (Martin Amis, The Information)

         3. As the author (A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh)

      2. First-person narrative enveloped or framed within a 3^rd person narrative, or within another 1^st person narrative (Martel, Life of Pi; Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Shelley, Frankenstein)

      3. Third-person narrative enveloped within a 1^st person narrative reader (i.e., “Here is the story as it was told to me…”; Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights)

         1. That story is received from a reliable source

         2. That story is unreliable or imagined (Wharton, Ethan Frome; Erens, The Virgins)

2. Whose story is it, really?

   1. For one person’s point of view:

      1. Narrator is protagonist, the one who changes (Holden Caulfield)

      2. Narrator is the observer of the one most dramatically transformed (Nick Carraway)

   2. For rotating/multiple 1st person points of view:

      1. The epiphanies/revelations are for the reader, in the eventual coming
         together of these viewpoints; the characters might remain unchanged, or
         unaware of the connections between their stories, connections only the reader is in possession of (Krauss, The History of Love)

      2. The epiphanies/revelations are for one specific character

      3. The revelations are for multiple characters (Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury)

         

3. How is the story told?

   1. The narrative is explicitly written, and refers to itself this way (Nabokov, Lolita; Walker, The Color Purple; Egan, The Keep)

   2. The narrative is explicitly “told”

      1. It is told with some premise for the telling (Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint)

      2. There’s no premise for the telling, but there are references to an audience (Sebold, The Lovely Bones; Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye)

   3. The narrative just exists

4. To whom (theoretically or explicitly) is the story being told?

   (Big footnote here. I talk a lot about what I call “the ear of the story,” and this is where we’re getting into that territory. This is complicated enough—and important enough, and rarely enough discussed—that I will do a whole post on it soon. Meanwhile…)

   1. The narrative has a named or implied audience

      1. The implied audience is the narrator herself (often a diary format; Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary)

      2. The implied audience is the whole world/anyone who will listen

      3. The implied audience is a specific group (e.g., “ladies and gentlemen of the jury…” in Nabokov’s Lolita)

      4. The implied audience is a specific type of person (e.g., a story that starts “I bet that like me, you’ve been on bad blind dates with handsy guys.”) (Note that this is not the implied commercial audience of the book, but the implied audience within the narration)

      5. The implied audience is one specific fictional person (e.g., the psychiatrist in Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint)

      6. The book is addressed to the one specific but anonymous person reading it at that moment (e.g., Jane Eyre – “Reader, I married him”)

   2. The narrative is simply being put into the world, with no implications of an audience or the lack thereof (*although this isn’t as simple as it seems)

   3. The narrator would be horrified if anyone “heard” their thoughts
      

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5. Who knows what?

   1. About this world:

      1. We are being spoken to like we already know this world and all the people in it (e.g., a story starts “The second time I found her, she was at Sal’s, holding that damn bagpipe again.”)

      2. We are being spoken to like we don’t know anything about this world or people at all (e.g., “When I was nineteen, I lived in a small town in Idaho called Fish Falls, and there I met a girl who played the bagpipes.”)

      3. We are being spoken to like we know some things about this world, but not all of them (e.g., “My first full year in Fish Falls, right after that whole thing happened with my brother, I met a girl who played the bagpipes.”)

   2. About this story:

      1. The narrator knows more than the reader simply because this story already happened, and there’s a bit of foreshadowing/a sense that this story is already known to the narrator.

      2. The narrator knows more than the reader and seems to be withholding information, waiting to tell us things, even teasing or taunting the reader; (Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle)

      3. The narrator seems to know the same amount as the reader (especially common in a present tense story)

      4. The narrator knows less than the reader (e.g., he hasn’t figured out yet that his wife is cheating on him, but it’s pretty obvious to the reader) (Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”)
         

6. In what tone is the story being told?
   (This has a lot to do with who, in theory, is being spoken to)

   1. There’s a sense of openness and intimacy

   2. There’s a sense of caginess

   3. There’s a sense of formality and distance

   4. There’s an attempt at humor

   5. There’s an assumption of camaraderie and understanding

   6. etc. etc. etc. (this one is really limitless, but always worth defining as you proceed)

7. When is the story being told?

   1. The story is told in the present tense or in the recent past, as if it has just happened

   2. The story is told at some distance

      1. How much of a distance?

         1. It’s being told from a stated time in the future (“Now that I’m a parent, I remember those days differently.”)

            1. We know the current situation of the narrator (“I’m staring out the window of my retirement home, remembering the year I turned fifteen.”)

            2. We only know how much time has passed.

         2. That distance only implied (“I walked to the payphone. Remember payphones? And I dialed my uncle, who was still alive.”)

      2. What has the narrator learned?

         1. The narrator knows the same amount as when the story occurred

         2. The narrator knows more now (about life, or what actually happened back then) than when the story occurred

            1. This is implied (through language, irony, etc. – John Updike’s “A&P,” T. C. Boyle’s “Greasy Lake”)

            2. This is stated (“Looking back, I realize they must have been in love”)

            3. The narrator has learned things between the events and the telling

            4. The narrator learns things right in front of us, through telling the story

         3. The narrator know less now (this is a strange one, but Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon pulls it off)

8. How reliably is the story being told?

   1. The narrator is reliable, and we have no reason to doubt their honesty, intentions or perceptions

   2. The narrator is unreliable

      1. We suspect we are being lied to (Nabokov, Pale Fire)

      2. The narrator is aware of us as an audience, and is posing, posturing, or defending (Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; Nabokov, Lolita)

      3. The narrator does not understand everything that is happening (Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime)

      4. The narrator does not remember things correctly

      5. The narrator is basically honest but is hiding certain things from us

         1. These things are never revealed

         2. These things are revealed later in the story

      6. The narrator is unreliable for brief periods (e.g., when she is drunk, or a chapter that reads as straightforward and we find out later was an episode of wishful thinking (Amis, Money: A Suicide Note)
         

9. Why is the story being told?

   1. There’s a sense that the story is being told… because the listener(s) really need to hear it

   2. … as a way for the narrator to process what happened

   3. … for posterity

   4. … out of guilt or regret

   5. … to prove a point or prove why the narrator did things that way

   6. … to teach someone or everyone a certain lesson about life

   7. … to ask a question that still bothers the narrator

   8. … to mislead people about what really happened

   9. There’s a sense that the narrator is, through the telling, realizing or remembering certain things for the first time

   10. There’s the sense that this is the first time the narrator has ever told this story

   11. There’s the sense that the narrator has told this story before

       1. for similar purposes

       2. for different purposes

HELP!

Yeah, okay. You’re probably not going to sit down with this list before you begin your story. It would be a hell of way to cramp your creativity. But at some point, perhaps in revision, you need to get things straight.

You could do that by painstakingly working your way through this list, or you could decide on the circumstances of telling. This doesn’t have to be a logical or realistic situation, but one that makes sense to you, and that you stick to consistently.

Some examples of that:

(But first, I want to note that most of these are only situations that exist in the author’s mind. You do not need to state this literally on the page.)

• Theoretically (although I’m never going to say this), the story is being told by Gillian when she’s an old woman, looking back on those years. She’s talking to anyone who will listen, and needs to get things off her chest before she dies. She has not thought about George in fifty years.

• Theoretically, Angie is telling this story five days after the incident, and she’s still trying to process what happened. Theoretically (not on the page!) she’s talking to her friend who goes to another school, so she’s speaking informally. This friend already knows her, but doesn’t know the other characters.

• I’m going to create a frame story in which Eleanor is sitting down on a first date in grad school, and telling her date this story to warn him about what kind of person she truly is.

• Theoretically (not literally on the page!) Louie is narrating this after his death, at a magic confessional booth in heaven that makes everyone tell the truth, even when they didn’t know those truths during life. I am never going to mention this scenario.

• Theoretically, Marco is looking down from a cloud years later with access to his own past self but also with much greater insight into his parents’ minds, now that he himself is an adult.

And once again, I’m going to shout at you that YOU DO NOT NEED TO MAKE UP A LITERAL FRAME NARRATIVE IN ORDER FOR YOUR STORY OR NOVEL TO MAKE SENSE. I’m shouting (sorry) because every time I talk about this stuff in class, my students all decide they need to insert a cumbersome frame narrative, and while that’s cool if you really want to you absolutely do not have to do that.

Most books you’ve read do not have a big, overt setup around how and when the story is being told. What they do have is consistency. So we don’t get a story in which at first the narrator doesn’t know what’s coming and then they do and there’s a lot of foreshadowing, and then there isn’t; and they’re talking to us like we don’t know this world, but then suddenly we’re just expected to know who “Lucky Linda” is, and we have a random “way back then” thrown in just one time for no apparent reason. Those are the inconsistencies that will give a reader a headache.

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Third Person Will Be Easier, Right? Or at Basically Least the Same?

Bwaaaaaaahahahahahahahaha, you poor sweet child. No. Stay tuned.

How About Some Sample Passages?

You deserve at least that much.

Here is the opening of Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were; let’s come at it completely cold:

We should have known the end was near. How could we not have known? When the sky began to pour acid and rivers began to turn green, we should have known our land would soon be dead. Then again, how could we have known when they didn’t want us to know? When we began to wobble and stagger, tumbling and snapping like feeble little branches, they told us it would soon be over, that we would be well in no time. They asked us to come to village meetings, to talk about it. They told us we had to trust them.

Here’s what we can pull from this:
- At least so far, there seems to be a true collective “we,” with no individuals yet distinguished.
- There’s a later point of telling; that is, we’re looking back at this from some unspecified point in the future.
- The narrators now know more than they did at the time; and they’re letting their audience in on this knowledge.
- We are being spoken to as if we already know this world, who “they” are, what environmental disasters are in play.
- There’s a sense of anger and regret, and perhaps a hint that this is one of the reasons the story is being told.

Here’s Pamela Erens’ The Virgins, referenced above for a strange framing that won’t yet be evident here:

We sit on the benches and watch the buses unload. Cort, Voss, and me.
We’re high school seniors, at long last, and it’s the privilege of seniors to take up these spots in front of the dormitories, checking out the new bodies and faces. Boys with big glasses and bangs in their eyes, girls with Farrah Fawcett hair.

What we can tell so far:
- Although the first word is “we,” this is a first-person story.
- We’re being spoken to like we don’t actually know much about these people or this place. (We need to be told they’re seniors, told about senior privilege…)
- The present tense might suggest that this all just happened, and if we kept on in this mode, we’d keep that assumption. But then check out the beginning of chapter 2:

It’s late September, early October. Let’s say October, that first week, the peak of foliage season.

Woah, okay. This is definitely being remembered at some distance. And our narrator is at least a little bit unreliable. (Spoiler: This narrator is verrrrry unreliable.)

There are two more examples (good ones) below the paywall, for paid subscribers (because I love you). Meanwhile, for everyone: If you’re into this, pull five first-person books off your shelf and see how much you can glean from the first lines about the point of view choices that have been made.

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What I’m in fact talking about are the Point of View issues that plague writers and also, like, a lot of modern society. But I can only help the writers at the moment! So here we go.

This is going to be part 1 of a series, and yes, it merits more than one post. I say this with zero exaggeration: 95% of the problems that I see in the work of advanced students can be traced back to point of view. That 95% includes issues with orientation and clarity, issues of framing, issues of meaning and change… all of which stem from foundational missteps on the narration itself.

What exactly is narrative point of view?

“First or third person!” shouts the guy in the front row. “Omniscient or limited!” Let’s give him partial credit.

Point of view, in all its complexities, is also what we could call “narrative perch”—everything about the angle from which a story is told. That includes:

• Who exactly is narrating the story and what their deal is (even if it’s third person, and even if you’re dealing with a disembodied narrator)

• When, in relation to the story’s events, the story is being narrated

• To whom, theoretically or literally, the story is being addressed

• For what purpose the story is being narrated (and I don’t mean why are you writing it, but why, in theory, in the world in which this story is true, it is being told at all)

All of those are wonderfully complicated and merit extended discussion, which is why this will be a series. So I’ll leave you hanging on those…

Meanwhile, I’m going to put a big thesis statement out there. Making solid, considered decisions on all of these points, and working hard to get into and stay in your chosen point of view, in all its depth, will prevent myriad problems down the road. I really mean this. Imagine me shaking you by the shoulders and yelling it in your face.

Where does it fall apart?

These are the major symptoms of POV Disorder. If you experience any of these, please talk to your doctor today about Cialis.

Inconsistency

Sometimes the narrator knows what’s going on in the killer’s head; sometimes the narrator does not know. Sometimes the narrator explains chess terminology like we (the audience or listener) do not know it, and sometimes the narrator says “The Alapin Variation left him en prise,” with no explanation at all.

Once you understand the decisions that need to be made, you can make them. And once you make them, you can stick to them.

Failure of Theory of Mind

This is a big one, and requires a Psych 101 detour.

“Theory of Mind” is essentially the ability to understand or guess what others might be thinking or feeling in a given situation, including thoughts or reactions that would be different from your own.

The classic test for this, the “Sally-Anne Test,” was developed by the philosopher and cognitive scientist David Dennett and then named in 1985 by a group of psychologists that included Simon Baron-Cohen, who is disappointingly not Borat but apparently his cousin.

It goes like this: We (and in this case, “we” is probably a small child) meet Sally and Anne, two dolls. Then there’s a little skit: Sally hides a marble in her box. She subsequently leaves for a walk. While she’s gone, Anne (that little hussy) takes the marble out and puts it in her own box. Sally comes back and the researcher asks, “Where will Sally look for her marble?”

The children who understand that Sally will look in her own box are demonstrating that they understand Sally’s perception, which is different from their own. This is not about what they know, but about what they understand Sally to know and not know.

Most children achieve theory of mind, and can answer correctly, by age four. Over time, this test has been used (not without controversy and disagreement) to assess cognitive skills in autistic children, learning-disabled children, and AI. Wikipedia also includes the following amazing sentence: “Eye tracking of chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans suggests that all three anticipate the false beliefs of a subject in a King Kong suit, and pass the Sally–Anne test,” and I really just want to interview the research assistant who has to wear the King Kong suit.

But for some reason, theory of mind falls apart for an inordinate number of writers. I see student work all the time that contains passages like this: I finished the pie and wiped my face, leaving a streak of blueberry across my cheek. Or: Hector, alone in the woods, surveyed the path, leaning against the tree. His brown eyes sparkled in the sun. Or: Aung [whose head we’ve been in the whole time] knew it was time to go. He checked his watch. As he walked down the path, he looked like a departing ghost. The problem with all of these: Your point of view character cannot see her own face, cannot see his own eyes, cannot see himself from behind.

Similarly: We’ve been in Gertrude’s mind the whole time, and then we get something like Gertrude felt a pain in her left shoulder. She looked over at Brad, who was fondly remembering his childhood piano teacher. Unless Gertrude is an incredible psychic, that makes no sense.

But beyond these flagrant abuses of the laws of physics and logic, I think having just a weak theory of mind regarding our characters leads us to do things like omit physical sensation, neglect interiority, and make illogical character decisions.

Here’s the litmus test. When you picture the world of your fiction or memoir and think about your point-of-view character, are you picturing your character from the outside, or are you picturing what your character would see? In other words: If your character is in the passenger seat of a car, weeping, are you picturing the side of a car and someone’s sad face through the glass, or are you picturing the dashboard, as blurred by tears? (And certainly it’s okay to consider both angles as you’re drafting—but if you’re mostly not in that character’s body, you’re missing a ton.)

I’ll note here that we absorb a lot of unhelpful habits from film. In film, you are almost always fundamentally looking at the main character, reading his face for clues, rather than seeing what he sees and hearing what he thinks.

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Lack of Realism

This is pretty closely related to the above. When characters make illogical decisions just because you need them to end up in a certain place, you’re letting go of the realism of their point of view. If someone makes a note on your manuscript like “I don’t get why she’d just suddenly throw the radio into the sea” or “Does she even like this guy?? I can’t tell!” or “Wait, why????” those are indications that you haven’t thoroughly put the reader into the head of the character… which is, in turn, likely an indication that you haven’t really lived there yourself.

Lack of Depth

I wrote recently about all the levels of interiority we can can reach with a point-of-view character, levels we often neglect. This relates both to first-person narrators and to any character whose thoughts we have access to. Making conscious decisions about those questions above is going to to help enormously. If you know, for instance, that your first-person narrator is telling this story ten years later, that distance and further knowledge are likely going to lead to a double interiority; what they think now, and what they thought at the time. If you’ve decided that your third-person narrator has access to the thoughts of any character at any time, and carefully introduced that mode, you can make great use of it and let them give us not just their perceptions of the action, but their memories and fears and associations.

Lack of Physicality

If you haven’t fully immersed yourself in a character, you’re unlikely to remember that we should feel the cold countertop under her elbows.

A one-easy-trick solution, in fact, if you keep looking at your character: Have her eat something. Describe the mouth-feel of the food. It’s very hard to do that from the outside. Physicality is a product of solid point of view, but it can also help get you there and anchor you there.

Lack of Experimentation

When you don’t understand the nearly infinite possible choices you could make regarding point of view, you’re going to be stuck with a few inherited modes. First person singular with no sense of retrospect. Close third person with access to only one person’s head. Head-hopping, with a new character taking over for each chapter.

There is nothing wrong with any of those, but egad, you have so many more possibilities! Think of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, in which the narrator is looking down from heaven. Or Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in which the narrator slowly reveals himself as a character in the novel, but one with access to scenes he wasn’t there for. Or Nabokov’s Pale Fire, in which the narration happens entirely in the footnotes to a poem, and the delusional narrator accidentally lets us know that he probably murdered the poet. Or (and I’m serious here) Winnie-the-Pooh, in which the author-as-narrator is telling us about telling these stories to Christopher Robin, who then occasionally interrupts to ask questions or to alter the story being told.

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I Can Talk To You About This

As I said, this will be a series—but meanwhile, I’m teaching a one-session online class soon that will cover a lot of the above, and more, in greater depth. I taught once before for Five Things I’ve Learned, which has classes on writing, history, politics, philosophy, etc. and really loved it. This one will be Sunday night (Feb. 23, 2025) but at some point in the future it will also be up on demand.

We’ll talk about establishing depth and veracity for point of view; identifying the “ear” of the story (a complicated but very fun concept); understanding theory of mind and how to access a character’s interior life; writing unfamiliar points of view; and pushing ourselves to break out of tired point-of-view tropes. I’ll leave you with examples, reading recommendations, a few exercises, and some challenges and goals for both drafting and revision.

(Here is a video invite I made for them. I feel extremely awkward on video, so if you watch this please look at my messy office instead.)

Diagnosing the Country

We can debate all day to what extent fiction and memoir develop empathy in readers, but just about every study suggests that they do. I’d argue that since it’s the only experience we regularly undertake in which we’re asked to consider life from a different point of view (not as a voyeur, like in film, but as the person in question, or with access to different people’s thoughts), reading is the best tool we have for building and extending that ability to imagine life from another perspective.

I believe this avenue to empathy is (subconsciously) what’s behind a lot of book bans. It’s not a fear that kids will learn, for instance, that gay people exist, which they could easily learn from the internet; it’s fear that the book will put them in those shoes, ask them to empathize at length with someone who is gay. To certain people, that act of empathy is so foreign that it’s scary, and perhaps it’s hard for them to imagine someone empathizing and not then somehow turning into the character. (And yikes, if we start empathizing with poor people, we’ll be tempted to feed them! If we empathize with trans people, we’ll be tempted to admit they exist!) somehow, we’ve gotten to the point where a right-wing theologian has just published a book called The Sin of Empathy.

All this to say: The effort that writers put into developing and strengthening point of view matters. It matters so much that it terrifies some people. And they’re right in a key way: Fiction can’t turn you gay, but it can turn you empathetic.

Let’s continue to terrify these people.

A man gets on his moped to deliver pizzas; he brings along someone named Agatha. He picks up the pizzas, he drives along, he talks to Agatha and tells her about his day. He remembers his fifth birthday party, and tells Agatha about it. He notices that it’s getting colder and worries he should have brought a coat. People answer the door to receive their pizzas, they pay the guy, they say hello to Agatha. This goes on for fifteen pages. Eventually the guy drives home, parks his moped, and carries Agatha into the house. Because—we finally learn, on the last page—Agatha was a cockatiel, this whole time! The End.

There are many reasons this is a terrible story, but let’s talk about the two biggest problems, which are related.

1. Absolutely nothing happens in this story. Our buddy is going about a very normal day, with his bird. He has known that she’s a bird the whole time. So, presumably, has she. The only thing that changes is that we, the readers, suddenly learn something. But we aren’t in the story. We don’t count. Nothing happened in this story.

2. If we are in this guy’s point of view, remembering what he remembers, seeing what he sees… then we should know what he knows. And he knew damn well all along that he was talking to a bird. (As did everyone who answered the door to get their pizza.) So why was this one thing kept from us? Obviously, the author wanted to trick us, because… apparently we’ll be charmed by such manipulations? (We will not be.)

Let me tell you another story! (Oh boy.) Here’s the opening of a fake novel that will never be published:

The night that it happened, we were all waiting. Waiting for it—yes, the thing. But there were three of us—three, if you count the spirits. It happened shortly after The Sorting occurred. And it happened in the place where it usually happened. But never like this. No, not like this. They’ll never be the same.

And let’s figure out why this one also sucks.

1. We have absolutely no idea what to picture. Maybe a laundry room, where laundry is being sorted? Maybe a prison? Maybe Neptune?

2. The narrator knows what’s happening. The narrator is, ostensibly, telling us (or someone) a story. Then why the hell would the narrator not actually explain what’s happening?

3. It reeks of desperation. This author seems to hope that we’ll be drawn in by the mystery of it all, when what we actually get is vagueness. And when was anyone ever drawn into anything by vagueness?

What’s going on in both these stories is “withholding”—and yes, that can mean what your father did when he refused to show you affection, but it also refers to when a narrator or point-of-view character withholds information from the reader. And while there are times when this works (we’ll get to those later) we usually use the term when we’re pointing out what’s not working.

We can define narrative withholding as any time the reader is not filled in on important information known by the narrator or the point-of-view character, in a timely manner.

This absolutely does not mean that you need to fill us in endlessly on every possible detail. If you say that someone sat on the couch but don’t tell me the color of the couch, that is not withholding—largely because it doesn’t matter.

Here’s the litmus test: If two readers could come away with wildly different guesses for what’s happening, and if those guesses would change the meaning of the story, you’ve got a problem.

So, reader 1 imagines a blue couch, and reader 2 imagines a red couch. We’re fine. But if I said He kept a secret stash in his sock drawer, one he only dared to look at on occasion—and then I didn’t immediately explain—some people are picturing drugs, some are picturing money, some are picturing porn, some are picturing Skittles. And the difference matters.

Why would anyone do this?

Given that this is among the top three problems plaguing student work, I’ve developed a lot of theories over the years for what’s going on, and I believe there are six major reasons a writer might attempt it:

1. We learn it from film

When you watch a movie, you are fundamentally a voyeur, looking in from the outside and trying (especially in the first few minutes) to catch on to what’s happening. Here’s a guy crying over a pair of socks, and we don’t know why, or who he is. That’s fine because we aren’t confused about what to literally picture (here it is, right in front of us) and because film tends to move a lot faster than prose; it’s only a minute or two before we’re fully filled in.

But this does not translate well to the page. That’s because reading is harder than watching a screen; the reader needs to do half the work, picturing the right things, and choosing to read the next sentence and the next. Without enough information, we can’t do our work. And we won’t want to do it, either.

Plus, one of the main advantages text has over the screen is that on the page, we have access to people’s thoughts and perceptions and memories. We aren’t stuck in that voyeur role. But if we’re supposed to have that access and then you limit it for no good reason, we feel betrayed.

2. We’re insecure about the elements of the story

You know how a body language expert will tell you that people tend to (subconsciously) cover their mouths when they’re lying, as if to mask the faulty words? This is similar. You don’t believe what you have is good enough, or you think it’s too little or too much, or you worry the reader won’t buy in. And so you obfuscate. I promise, it does not help.

Rather than luring the reader in with confusion, how about luring the reader in with the actual elements of the story? If you start a story and there’s a guy on a moped, a cockatiel on his shoulder, delivering pizzas, I’m going to be fully on board. Now of course if that’s the full extent of your ideas you’re going to have push yourself to see what happens next, but that’s a good thing. When you play all your cards early, you usually discover that something new and amazing that was hiding behind them. If you don’t play your cards till the end, you’ll never know what else the story could have been.

And it doesn’t matter if the the elements of your story are absurd or complicated or even simple and dry; at the beginning of a story, we’ll accept just about anything. It’s a story about people waiting for the mailman to land in his hot air balloon? Okay, great! It’s a story about a woman doing needlework and watching the news? Fine! Bring us in with those things, not with fog.

3. We’re desperate for intrigue

If a story lacks a conflict, or tension, or friction, the writer sometimes reaches for mystery instead. And that would be great if it were a mystery within the world of the story—like there’s a guy who’s dead on the Orient Express, and a pizza delivery guy and his bird must solve the case. Or the mailman hasn’t shown up for five days, and everyone’s wondering why. But if the mystery is just for the reader (that mystery being, basically, “Huh??”) that is no substitute for your story having a plot.

4. We’re excited to write a story with a Big Reveal

I addressed this one in more detail in a recent post, but briefly:

Okay, maybe you grew up on O. Henry. Or you love it when you’re sucker-punched by a story. I love that too! But when these things work, it’s almost always* because it’s also a surprise for the point-of-view character, too—not just for the reader.

*We’ll get to the exceptions below.

5. We feel super awkward about filling the reader in on all the details of this world

It’s impossible to tell your readers everything they need to know on page 1, so we’re going to have to hold some things back. But that’s not the same as withholding.

He approached the house and smelled the lilacs. A middle-aged woman in an apron came out the door and waved at him. “Hi, Mom!” he called.

Here’s the problem: We were in his head, right? Did he actually think “Here comes some random middle-aged woman. Oh wait, it’s my mom!”…? Or did he think “Here’s Mom”? Unless he’s dealing with cognitive issues, probably the latter.

It’s absolutely fine that you did not tell us about his mother on the first page. It’s fine if we meet her for the first time on page 30. But we should know what he knows as soon as it’s relevant.

6. We want to talk about this world as if the listener already knows it

This can be a useful move, pretending that the reader/audience is already in the story with you. Maybe you don’t want to start your story with Once upon a time, I was working at a movie theater and then I got fired. You’d rather start with I was so good at tearing those tickets in half, and go from there. That’s great! But then you’d better work fast to drop us enough clues. Maybe your next sentence is Whenever some hotshot handed me two tickets, his and his date’s, I’d rip through them both and hand them back only to the date. I’d say, just to her, “Enjoy the film!”

It’s a popular tactic in speculative (fantasy or sci-fi, etc.) fiction for the story to pretend we already know and live in this world; it makes it feel more real, perhaps. But of course the more unusual the world of your story, the more work you have to do then to orient us along the way.

Bonus reason: It’s unintentional

There are times when it looks like a writer is withholding information, when the real issue is that they thought they were clearly showing us where we were and what was happening, but they didn’t get what they needed onto the page. You can read more about that here.

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When does it work?

Occasionally, intentional withholding works brilliantly. I’ll give some examples, but the governing principle here is that there should be a damn good reason for what you’re doing. And I don’t mean a reason like “I want to be spooky!” or “People will be so surprised when she turns out to be a bird!” I mean a reason that makes narrative sense, a reason the narrator would present the story this way.

(All of these are 1st person examples, but a 3rd person version of these would be possible. It would entail the invisible narrator really having a personality of its own, though, which almost makes it 1st person again, even if it never uses the word “I.”)

The narrator is keeping things back out of guilt or something like it:

Consider Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Our narrator, Merricat, is 18; she and her older sister are the only two surviving members of the Blackwood family. When she was 12, all her other relatives were poisoned at dinner. Either she or her sister did it. And she is not (until very late) ready to reveal to us which of them it was. The narrative is sometimes teasing, often cagey, as if she’s talking to someone she trusts a little but not enough to spill it all.

The narrator is having a hard time admitting things even to himself:

Taylor Antrim’s short story “Pilgrim Life” (which, sadly, I believe you can only find in Best American Short Stories 2012) is narrated by a young man who was responsible for a car accident. He only slowly reveals what’s happened, as if admitting it not only to us, but to himself for the first time.

The narrator is engaged in self-protection:

The delightfully unhinged narrator of Nabokov’s Pale Fire might or might not have murdered the poet whose poem he’s annotating In the copious footnotes to that poem, we start to get clues, ones that seem mostly accidental. He doesn’t totally realize what he’s revealing.

There’s a specific addressee, to whom not everything would be revealed:

Let’s imagine a story that’s written like a letter from a woman to her ex. At some point she says, I had a great date last night. I’ll spare you the details. His name is Joe.

We really are being cast as voyeurs, even though this is on the page:

We don’t have access to any character’s mind, so we don’t wonder why we aren’t being told what they know. This is a very unusual move, but Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is a good example.

And there could be other reasons, too. Shame, embarrassment, playing coy, etc. But in every example above, there is a logical reason.

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Anyway…

If I’m hurting your feelings because person-turns-out-to-be-a-bird was the whole premise of your novel, I’m sorry. But not really.

Listen: Get your act together. Stop being cute. Don’t be afraid to actually tell the story, up front, unashamed, no hiding. Don’t worry that your readers will have to be lured in by trickery. Don’t let “Haha, gotcha!” be the whole point of your story.

(And now is when I reveal that this whole post was written by a cockatiel. My sincere apologies.)

The Fear Factor:

My biggest writing fear is cheesiness! You touch on that but I'm not quite clear on what NOT to do when adding tension. I think your point was that the narrative should be robust enough to drive the tension much of the time, rather than jazzing up an inherently saggy story with ambiance or unanswered questions. Are there things you see writers consistently getting wrong with this? Thanks so much for the deep dive into tension!

Okay so first of all, let’s talk about the cheese factor.

Because writers have overactive imaginations, we’re always going to imagine what will happen if we go too far, regarding any advice we get or any move we might make. Someone tells you to use strong verbs, for instance, and you instantly fear that if you start doing this, you’ll take leave of your senses and write something like “Glowering eastward, Howard perambulated toward the exit, which he then oped, subsequently penetrating the doorway.” You’re probably not going to do that! So don’t let your fears stop you from moving a reasonable amount in that direction.

Or, let’s say you do go too far… Either you’ll recognize it, or one of your early readers will tell you so. That’s great! Now you know where the edge of the cliff is. Before, you didn’t know. Now that you know, you know how far you can go without fear.

There’s also the fact that it’s all in the execution. If I just describe the plot of Hamlet to you, it’s going to sound like horrible slapstick comedy. “…and then he tries to stab his uncle through the curtain, but it turns out it’s his girlfriend’s father!” Seriously, try it. Or try The Great Gatsby or Beloved or Frankenstein, but try worrying about the cheese factor as if it were your own work. “Really, self? You think people are going to believe that he just stitches this giant guy together from dead bodies and then it comes to life, and then it all ends with a chase scene in the arctic tundra? What is wrong with you?” These books all work because the author worked diligently to pull it off (and, okay, was also a genius—but so are you, probably). In other hands, it might have been a mess. But you can’t judge whether something will work just from the synopsis.

(This is, incidentally, the reason I can never answer the questions “Do you think it will work if I ______” or “Do you think it’s a good idea to write a novel about _______?” I don’t know, man. Would you have told a friend it was a good idea to write a rap musical about the founder of the US Treasury? Probably not. But it turns out, no one can know ahead of time.)

But you’re asking about this regarding tension. In terms of how much is too much, see above—risk going too far so you can find the cliff edge. But equally important is the quality of the tension. And you partly answer this question yourself. Tension that just comes from the environment (Ooh, there’s a thunderstorm!) or that’s just dangling cryptic questions in front of the reader, when the character already knows the answer (What is in the box that our narrator is guarding?) can fall flat or seem desperate. You want your tensions either to come organically from your characters, or—if external—to change your characters. Or both.

Tension coming from the characters might look like a story opening with one person trying to convince the another to lend him ten thousand dollars.

External tension might look like the city going into lockdown for Covid, and this forces one character to quit his job as a Chippendales dancer and another to propose to his girlfriend.

Using both might look something like two adult brothers, stuck at their parents’ house for the Covid lockdown, arguing over whether one will spend all his money on an engagement ring or loan his brother 10k to get by without his Chippendales income.

Notice that I didn’t mention tension between the reader and the story—the “Wait, what’s going on?” kind of tension. You can of course use that in small doses, but it’s not load-bearing; it can’t hold up a story.

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The Perfectionist:

I’ve rewritten the opening of my WIP 17,000 times, trying to find that perfect starting point. What trips me up is striking the right balance between establishing the main character’s life before the big change with enough to get the reader invested, but not so much that they get bored before stuff really happens.

If you haven’t written the entire draft yet, my advice to you is pretty simple: Forget about it. Leave the opening behind in the dust and get to the end of this thing. Then, once you have a full draft you can actually meet your story for the first time, you can do a retroactive outline, and you can start to figure out what it’s all about.

If you have a full draft, or once you have a full draft: Look back at what you have and ask yourself what is the latest point where you could reasonably start the story.

Since we were talking about Hamlet above, let’s stick with it. Shakespeare had infinite options here. He could have started when Hamlet’s father was alive and well, then shown the murder, then the wedding, and then had the ghost show up and so on. It’s actually a bold choice, when you think about it, to start the story after the murder. But doing this lets it be a play about revenge, not about murder—and keeps it down to a nice, crisp <checks notes> three hours and fifteen minutes.

It would be hard to start the story any later than he does. If we started with Hamlet playing mad, and then we had to learn that he’s only doing this because his father’s ghost showed up and told him to avenge his death, we’re going to get lost in backstory. He starts us at the last reasonable moment to start us—with the ghost showing up—and it’s not coincidental that this is just moments before Hamlet, our protagonist, experiences a seismic shift in his life, one that will set all the other events in motion. Of course his father’s death was also a change; but it didn’t change what Hamlet does, or who he is. This visitation, on the other hand, redefines him.

So what I’m saying is: Write the whole thing. Realize that what you have on your hands is really a play about revenge (or a novel about grief, or a short story about lost love). Then try to find the latest starting point that will keep that theme and arc intact, or (ideally) help emphasize it.

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The Back-and-Forth:

In a dual POV (alternating chapters but in the same time frame), how do you handle the inciting incident? Can one occur early on and the other perhaps not occur until the end of Act I?

So let’s imagine that we’re bouncing between two timelines, looking like this:

Timeline A: Fifteen people have gone missing from the convention center. Chaos ensues!

Timeline B: Marjorie goes for a walk.

Timeline A: The national news gets involved, and the detectives lock everyone in the exhibition hall.

Timeline B: Marjorie picks up her mail.

Timeline A: The Prime Minister of Canada arrives, and everyone learns that his mistress is among the missing!

Timeline B: Marjorie feeds the dog.

How are readers going to feel every time they leave Timeline A and start reading about Marjorie’s amazing day? Probably not thrilled.

Of course this is an exaggeration, but milder forms of this risk failing to engage readers, too.

When I’m alternating timelines (or, okay, the one time I alternated timelines) it’s important to me to read and edit each timeline through many times independent of the other text. So when I was editing The Great Believers, I needed to make sure Fiona’s story (my secondary one) had its own arc, its own momentum, its own changes. (If you go looking for it, I’d say the big change for her happens slightly before her story starts—she learns her missing daughter might be in Paris—and yes, it’s okay for that change to be before page 1.) By design, her story is not as dramatic as Yale’s (my main storyline), and so I gave her much shorter chapters as well. I was terrified of her story just being “and then she wandered Paris some more” in each chapter, and had to fight hard against that pull.

And now… The Big Reveal!

Do you think a *reveal* can work in a short story, instead of a reversal / change / upheaval, either in a beginning or an ending?

I assume you mean a “reveal” in which we, the audience, learn things that everyone in the world of the story already knew. So rather than there being a change for the characters, there is only a change for the reader. (If there’s a reveal for the reader and a change for the characters—a la the ending of The Sixth Sense—that tends to work much better.)

Of course anything can work, but some things are a lot lot lot more difficult to pull off, and this is one of those things. Here are the reasons:

1. Assuming we’re supposed to have access to at least one character’s mind, why has that character not shared it with us and/or thought about it? It tends to push us out of the story, to break our implied contract with the narrative. This is true at the beginning but especially at the end, when we’ve been along for the whole ride already.

2. Since it’s not really a change within the world of the story, the characters aren’t going to act differently than they normally would. We’re just seeing a random day in the life, and we’re left wondering what the point is.

3. It can seem desperate and cheap. Since the reveal has no effect within storyland, the author must be aiming the reveal at us, the readers… and now we’re thinking about the relationship between author and reader, and how the author is trying to impress or manipulate us—rather than about the story itself. And unless you’re aiming for something super high-concept and Nabokovian, that’s not great.

For what it’s worth, I do think this kind of move works better (but not great) on film, a medium in which we’re fundamentally outsiders observing and trying to guess what’s going on, and we don’t have the expectation of knowing everything a character knows.

If you’re asking specifically about short stories, as opposed to novels, etc.—yes, you do have a bit more of a chance of this working, especially if you’re going for a non-narrative story (that is, one without a plot involving different moments in time, cause and effect, etc.). Here’s an example: Ramona Ausubel’s strange and hilarious story “You Can Find Love Now,” which is structured not as a linear series of events, but as an online dating profile. The reveal at the beginning of the story (this would be a spoiler if it weren’t SO close to the opening) is that the guy filling out the profile is a cyclops. And that’s really the only big hook at the beginning.

On the other hand, what IS a reversal from everything in the cyclops’s previous life is that today is the day he’s sitting down to fill out the dating form. Soooo, maybe I take it all back and there’s a reversal (not JUST a reveal) after all.

Which leads me to my challenge for this writer and/or anyone tempted to use a Big Reveal as a load-bearing wall: Can you think of a (narrative) story or novel you love in which the opening or closing rests entirely on a reveal and not on any kind of change for the characters? If you can’t, there’s your answer. If you can: Are you absolutely sure there’s no change within the world of the story? You’re positive that this day is like all other days, and only the reader is altered? Cool. Cool cool cool. Knock yourself out then. And please post below with the name of the story, because those ones are hard to come by.

And Happy New Year, Here’s a List of Stories!

There’s got to be some culture out there where it’s traditional for people to exchange lists of short stories for New Years, right??

For a class, I recently put together a list of some of my favorite short stories (or at least favorite stories to teach), so I’m sharing it below as a thank-you to paid subscribers (who help keep most of this content free for everyone and who are also good-looking!)…

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And a heads up here that this is a serious deep dive today. If you only subscribe for the Zillow content, don’t worry, more of that soon.

Tension (physicists, please forgive me) is basically when two things are pulling in opposite directions, in a way that can’t be sustained forever.

So, George really needs to put the hot lasagna dish down, but his daughter is using the table for her science fair project and if she moves it right now, it’ll upset the algae. They can’t stay in this limbo forever (or even for very long). Something has to give, and someone is going to be unhappy, and something is going to change.

Or, look at classic sustained romantic tension. These two people want to jump each other’s bones, and either they’ll finally sweep everything off the desk and go for it or one of them will break the other’s heart, but it’s probably not going to keep on going exactly like this till they’re both 95.

Another way to identify tension is to look for the “but” statements that you could make when talking about the story. George needs to put the lasagna down but Gracie’s terrarium is half-built on the table. Jason and Macy are wild about each other but they both fear rejection so they haven’t acted on it yet. Gatsby wants Daisy back but she’s married to another man. And so on.

In most circumstances, most writers will want tension throughout most of the piece. And we usually want tension to ratchet up, not taper off, as we build to the end of a story. But since we’re talking about beginnings, we can focus for now on the fact that tension in an opening scene or paragraph is a lot of what gets us into the story. We don’t know or care about these characters yet, we don’t owe the author a read, perhaps we’re standing in the bookstore still, uncertain what we’re going to buy—but if we’re presented with compelling tension, a scene we simply must read to the end of, it can carry us through until we do feel oriented, and invested, and committed.

We can break tension into categories, focusing especially on what happens in an opening.

Atmospheric Tension:

I’m not starting with the most dramatic one here, and that’s okay. These are the big background tensions that might not even happen “on the page” in the timeline of your story, but that create a generally tense or unstable atmosphere. Consider the musical Cabaret, in which all the love affairs and business dealings are the main action but behind it all it’s, you know, 1930 Germany. Or (lower stakes here) imagine a story set at a terrible workplace where everyone’s miserable and the AC doesn’t work.

In some cases atmospheric tension is chronic (meaning it’s there the whole time and it doesn’t really change) and in some cases it’s acute (meaning that while it’s still not the main focus, it arises suddenly or evolves; think of a lightning storm midway through a scary movie). One of my kids is extremely tuned in to background music on film, in a way that’s made me much more aware of it, and she’ll veto certain movies if the soundtrack is too tense throughout (chronic atmospheric tension) or be unhappy if it’s too intense in a certain scene (acute atmospheric tension).

Those elements do not need to change throughout the story, and they’re not the point of the story, but they destabilize everyone. It’s important to note, though, that this is not enough. A storm outside or a war in the background or tense music throughout a show is not enough to carry the narrative.

Here’s an example of atmospheric tension starting a novel. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is going to be about the house itself, of course, but the house never really changes—the characters are the main story—and yet we start with the house:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill house, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for 80 years and might for 80 more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Here’s another where nothing is particularly unusual, we’re just reminded that the world itself is a conflicted and fraught place (Ida Hattemer-Higgins’ tragically underread The History of History):

The oceans rose and the clouds washed over the sky; the tide of humanity came revolving in love and betrayal, in skyscrapers and ruins, through walls breached and children conjured, and soon it was the year 2002.

Chronic Character Tension:

This is very similar to atmospheric tension, but it’s about the tensions that exist, chronically, within a certain character. Hopefully all of our characters contain contradictions and tensions (because that’s what real people are like) but importantly, we can start out a whole novel on this note.

George Eliot does so in Middlemarch:

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

Jay McInerney does it in Bright Lights, Big City:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.

Dramatic (Diegetic) Tension:

We’ll get to that second word in a minute, but first the easy part. Dramatic tension is the most obvious kind, the tension felt by characters themselves (and therefore also by the reader, we’d hope). The lasagna pan and the brewing sexual storm above are both dramatic tension. In the most classic setup, two or more characters each want something, and not everyone can get what they want (as with George and his daughter). Or perhaps one or more person wants something but some other thing or force stands in the way (as with our would-be lovebirds and their shyness).

Dramatic tension can be about what’s going to happen next, but it can also be about what already happened in the past. Whatever book you’re in the middle of right now ask yourself: What would the main character really love to know right now, if they could have any answers in the world? Their questions might all be about the future (Will Jason ever make a move? Will my daughter move her damn terrarium?) or they might be about the past (Who killed the mayor? What happened to my grandmother back in Russia that she doesn’t want to talk about?) or they could be philosophical (Can free will exist if there’s an omnipotent God?) but that latter category might not be your greatest source of dramatic tension.

And as with atmospheric tension, we can have both chronic and acute cases. The chronic dramatic tension of Hamlet is that throughout the whole play, he’s trying to avenge his father’s death but can’t bring himself to do so. The acute tension in the bedroom scene is that he thinks Claudius is behind the curtain but it’s really Polonius.

Colson Whitehead begins The Intuitionist with acute dramatic tension:

It’s a new elevator, freshly pressed to the rails, and it’s not built to fall this fast.

Here’s Anne Tyler with much less dramatic opening from Breathing Lessons, but one that still holds dramatic tension:

Maggie and Ira Moran had to go to a funeral in Deer Lick, Pennsylvania.

(The implication here in the word “had” is that they are going to a funeral but of course they probably don’t want to be.)

And here’s Ha Jin’s Waiting, where we start with chronic dramatic tension:

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.

A relevant sidebar:

[Now featuring a correction to make things MORE complicated, wooo!]

Okay, a word on the word diegetic. Let’s go back for a minute to the movie soundtracks. You know how sometimes in a movie, the characters are either making or listening to the music, fully aware of it (whether logically or not) and it’s part of the story? Think of “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music, or Angela Chase dancing in her room to “Blister in the Sun” on My So-Called Life, or “Auld Lang Syne” playing at the party at the end of When Harry Met Sally. Those are examples of diegetic music. It’s experienced by both the audience and the characters.

Meanwhile, sometimes there’s music in a movie (the screeching strings as someone’s hand nears the handle of the basement door) that the characters absolutely cannot hear. It’s music that’s external to the world of the story, music that’s just between the film and the audience. We could call that non-diegetic music.

[A complication: In the first version of this post, I contrasted diegesis (which Aristotle used to talk about narrated stories, told stories) and mimesis (which is what we experience directly, just watching the action unfold). This is a clearer distinction onstage than in prose, but we could loosely think of it as “telling” vs. “showing.” What would make WAY more sense to me is to use “mimetic” to mean the stuff both we and the characters experience and “diegetic” to mean the breaking-the-fourth-wall stuff, but nope, film theory had to go and complicate Aristotle, so now we have three terms, and I kind of hate it. Aristotle was here first! But since there are probably more film theorists than Aristotle scholars in the world now, we’ll go with what they’ve decided.]

So if we take this out of the soundtrack world and into the world of tension, diegetic tension is tension that exists for the characters within the world of the story. And most of the time, narrative tension is diegetic.

What on earth would non-diegetic tension look like? I’m SO GLAD YOU ASKED!

Narrative (Non-Diegetic) Tension:

There are times when tension is about us putting ourselves in the place of the characters and wondering what will happen next; and then there’s tension that’s external to those characters, something they wouldn’t be aware of.

Here are some of those circumstances:

• The narrator (presumably either not a character, or else a character telling this from a later vantage point) promises something, some future event that the characters don’t know about. Think about the opening of the film American Beauty, in which the character Lester Burnham, narrating presumably from beyond the grave, says “In less than a year, I will be dead.” We are now watching in order to see that promise fulfilled.

That promise might be much more subtle. Consider the opening of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay:

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.

We’re going to spend a lot of time now with the childhood version of Sam Clay, but we’ve already been promised, by this narrator, that this strange little boy will one day be famous on the comic book convention scene; part of why we’re reading now is to figure out how he gets from point A to point B.

• The same thing might be accomplished because we have a prologue or an early chapter in which we see what the future holds. At the beginning of Breaking Bad, we see Walter White in front of a trailer full of meth in his underwear. Then we flash back and he’s a mild-mannered chemistry teacher. Again, we’re watching partly to get from A to B.

• We already know some or all of the story, from sources other than the narrator—for reasons ranging from the story being familiar to most readers/viewers already (Titanic, Oedipus Rex) to the title (How I Met Your Mother) to the paratext (meaning the cover and description of a book; imagine a book called HELLWORM with a cover feature a bloody rope and a blurb about this being “the most disturbing novel of the decade”; if the opening scene is of a mother taking her kids to the swimming pool on a lovely sunny day, you’re still going to feel a lot of tension.)

• There’s tension between the text and another text it’s riffing on (Demon Copperhead in relation to David Copperfield, James in relation to Huckleberry Finn). We keep reading because of the dramatic tension but also to see how it’s going to follow or subvert the original text.

• There’s an inherent structure to the text that a reader wants to see through to the end. This could range from a list structure (Imagine a story called “My First Five Husbands” that starts off with a summation of marriage #1, then #2, and so on) to a structure announced by the text itself (Marley tells Scrooge he’ll be visited by three more ghosts) to the expectations of a traditional, established story structure (If you’re reading an Agatha Christie novel, you’re waiting for Hercule Poirot to inevitably solve the case, despite this not being announced in the book itself).

  

• We, the reader, have unanswered questions that the characters do not have. Think of that Ha Jin example above. Most readers are going to have the same reaction to “Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife,” which is something along the lines of “How in the hell does that work?” This can be a very useful kind of tension at the beginning of something, but if you do too much it can interfere with orientation, and it can feel annoying and even desperate.

So Exactly How Many Tensions Do I Need and Where Do I Put Them, Precisely?

There is, of course, no formula (sorry). But start by reading for these tensions. Stop on page five of a new book and ask yourself how many “but” statements you could construct. How many of them are atmospheric? How many are related to character? How many are dramatic (diegetic) tensions? How many are narrative (non-diegetic) tensions? What unanswered questions do the characters have? What unanswered questions (in a good way) do you, the reader have?

We know that some books start off with a ton of tension right upfront (holy falling elevator!), and some get there much more slowly and/or subtly.

There’s no wrong formula to any of this, but here are two key things:

1. It’s really really hard to make a story work without at least some dramatic tension, things the characters are worrying and wondering about. Titanic can’t just be about us, the audience, waiting for the iceberg. So we have a love story and some nude modeling and Billy Zane being an idiot until that happens.

2. A lot of writers rely way too heavily on the very last kind of tension discussed above (questions the reader has that the character doesn’t), ignoring all these other boundless sources of intrigue and momentum. Why are you doing that? WHY? WHY?!?!?!?!?

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But What if Putting in Tension Feels Artificial and Corny?

It's perhaps ironic that the more intrinsic tension a piece runs on, the LESS authorially driven it feels. When we're writing about moments of static, relying on ambiance and detail and description and memory, we notice the hand of the author much more. (Because who's telling us these things? And why?) When the engines of tension and momentum are up and running, the story has an excuse for existing. It just IS, rather than being told. 

*A Footnote:

Here's my footnote about diegetic and non-diegetic music, a thing I haven’t found a word for. Okay, so in The Sound of Music, Fraulein Maria is strumming her guitar and the kids are singing. So far, so good. But then a full orchestra comes in to accompany them. On the one hand, they’re totally aware of the music going on (diegesis!) but on the other hand, they’d be really freaked out if they were in the middle of this field and suddenly there’s a horn section playing, so they obviously aren’t aware of the other accompaniments (non-diegesis!)… So it’s, like, half and half? Someone make it make sense!

Ask Away…

Last time I got some great questions about openings, ones I’ll answer next time. If you’re a paid subscriber, add your questions below!

Learn More Stuff!

Also, a reminder that my open-enrollment Short Story Toolkit class starts on Zoom on 11/12/24. You can watch it live or on recording, and I’ll talk about a zillion craft elements as they pertain specifically to the short story. Please join us!

“A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
- Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

Thanks, Graham Greene, this is a lovely sentiment, but writers could do better than to start stories arbitrarily. You were trying to screw other writers up, weren’t you? Graham was over there like “Also, stories don’t need characters. Or words, really. Please just phone it in, everyone else but me!”

This is going to be part 1 in a series on openings in fiction (something people were asking for after my series on endings)… And I’m really just going to spend this whole post refuting that quote, which, to be fair, I’ve taken completely out of context.

So… Where do we start a story?

Here’s where I’ll agree with Graham Greene: Stories do not come to the writer custom-packaged with a beginning and an ending. Sometimes it can feel like the beginning is baked in, because the writer’s first idea is the idea for an opening paragraph. Which must be the place the story starts, right?

And indeed, that could absolutely be the thing you sit down and write first. But the first thing you write is rarely the first thing readers need to read.

If your characters were real and lived real lives (or if they are real because you’re writing nonfiction), you would have infinite possible starting points. Not all of them created equal.

Consider the full arc of your story. Most likely*, there’s a major change and/or upheaval at or near the beginning, and a significant change/upheaval/reversal at or near the end. (Hamlet sees the ghost on the parapet. Wow! Things are extremely different now! [A lot of other stuff happens.] Hamlet dies, and so does nearly everyone else. Oof, that is a big change!) (After some preliminary but important stuff about the invitation to the ball, Cinderella gets a Fairy Godmother. Huge change! [Other things occur.] Here comes the prince to save her from her terrible family and they ride off as doves peck out her stepsisters’ eyes. Life is very different now!) Often—the cliché is true—this change has to do with someone setting out on a journey (literal or figurative), or with a stranger coming to town (literally or figuratively). But not always!

If we want to go Full Craft Wonk, we can call those big reversals “peripeteia,” which Aristotle defined in Poetics as "a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity.” Or we could just ignore that.

The question, then, is how close to that initial change to start things. Because ideally, the opening pages are showing us two very different things: What normal was, and also how things have changed.

*but no, of course, not always. Stories can be non-narrative, or cyclical, or be about stasis rather than change. Still, in any literary tradition and in any era, you’ll find that 99% of stories start right before something changes.

A Case Study

Let’s consider two versions of the same story: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and the MGM film adaptation The Wizard of Oz (1939).

The book first, of course.

Here’s the opening; I’ve cut some things here, but all this happens within the first two pages:

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cooking stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds …

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side…

Toto played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and loved him dearly. To-day, however, they were not playing. Uncle Henry sat upon the door-step and looked anxiously at the sky, which was even grayer than usual. Dorothy stood in the door with Toto in her arms, and looked at the sky too. Aunt Em was washing the dishes…

Suddenly Uncle Henry stood up.

"There's a cyclone coming, Em," he called to his wife; "I'll go look after the stock." Then he ran toward the sheds where the cows and horses were kept.

Aunt Em dropped her work and came to the door. One glance told her of the danger close at hand.

"Quick, Dorothy!" she screamed; "run for the cellar!"

So, within about four minutes of reading, we get to the tornado; very quickly thereafter, we’re in Oz. Meanwhile, Baum does manage to get across how dull and gray Kansas is. We learn in the parts I cut that Henry and Em never laugh. We learn that Dorothy is an orphan, and we learn about Toto (the real hero of the story, tbh). And then, before a nine-year-old can get sick of reading about Kansas, that normalcy is left behind.

In contrast, the movie:

We get twenty minutes (about a fifth of the movie) in black-and-white Kansas before we land in Technicolor Oz.

If we just had twenty minutes of establishing shots of Kansas looking dreary, there’s no way it would work. But do you remember what happens? We start with Dorothy and Toto running down the street, clearly in trouble. She gets home and tells everyone that Mrs. Gulch tried to hurt him. There’s a bunch of farm business, including Dorothy falling into the pig pen and Burt Lahr saving her. Then she sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” then Mrs. Gulch comes riding up on her bike with evil theme music, then she steals Toto, who jumps out of the basket. Then Dorothy and Toto run away and find Professor Marvel, who looks in his crystal ball and tells her to go home. She does, but here comes the twister, and she’s too late to get into the storm cellar. And then absolutely everything changes.

What we have here is a pretty fantastic chain of cause-and-effect, starting with an inciting incident (Toto’s in trouble) and leading all the way to the big change (wowww, we just killed a witch and everyone’s really short and we somehow invented color). We were able to spend so much time in normalcy (aka Kansas) because things were happening, things worth worrying about, events that caused other events.

An inciting incident is something that causes other things to happen but that is not the main, life-altering change that will set the whole story in motion. So Cinderella seeing the invitation to the ball is an inciting incident. But the Fairy Godmother showing up is the major reversal of fortune.

This is a different topic, but I’d also note that in the film version, Dorothy becomes partly responsible for her own fate. If she hadn’t dreamed of a faraway land and run away, none of this would have happened to her. In a moment of peripeteia that Aristotle would have loved, her first major reversal is when she accidentally gets exactly what she wished for.

Both of these openings work equally well.

(Less so the movie ending, which chalks the whole adventure up to a concussion.)

In both cases, we show what was and get to the new normal. Imagine the versions that wouldn’t work: Starting in Oz, so we have no sense of what Dorothy has left behind, or how strange this all is to her. Or spending such a short time in Kansas (two sentences of the book, or one minute of the movie) that it hardly registers. Or spending a long time in Kansas with nothing really important happening, maybe just Dorothy wandering the farm and thinking about chickens. Or spending half the story in Kansas, with interesting but not life-changing farm stuff happening, before we get to Oz.

So:

I’m going to be hugely reductive here, but there are four basic ways a narrative story could start.

1. An inciting incident leads to the first major change/reversal (Cinderella; the MGM Oz; in The Catcher in the Rye, we see Holden missing the football game and losing the fencing equipment and talking to his roommates (with all sorts of lurking crises) before he leaves school and sets out wandering.)

2. There’s no real inciting incident; the first thing to really happen is the major change/reversal (the Baum Oz; Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto starts when the lights go out and everyone at the party is taken hostage; in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor wakes up and finds he’s a giant bug in the very first sentence; in The Hobbit, we start when Bilbo’s Hobbit Hole is invaded by dwarves, and we see his normal life as it’s being messed up, before he sets out on his journey.)

3. The inciting incident has happened before the story starts, and the first thing we see is the reversal (in Hamlet, the murder and wedding have already happened and the first thing we see is the ghost on the parapet showing up to change Hamlet’s reality forever and set the story in motion)

4. Or we could start in medias res (in the middle of things) after the first major change and then back up. (Think of the opening of Toni Morrison’s Beloved—“124 was spiteful”—and the path we then retread to learn why. Or Marquez’s One Hundrd Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember the distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”) This move can feel quite gimicky, if you aren’t careful. And usually we’re only there in the middle of things for a moment before we zoom all the way back to before the first change occurred.

(And of course there are infinite variations. Think of Get Out, in which we slowly start to sense that things have changed horribly, but we’re not sure what’s actually going on until about halfway into the movie.)

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You can play along at home!

The next thing you read or watch, ask yourself:
- What was the first major reversal that completely changed these characters’ world?
- How close to the beginning did it come?
- Was it basically the first thing to happen, or was there an inciting incident that led up to this?
- What would the effect have been if we started later in the timeline? What about earlier?
- How did I come to understand what normal had been, before that change?
You’re going to find variety, not a formula.

Mistakes we can make:

Oh yes oh yes, there are traps.

• Walking the reader through a pretty normal day-in-the-life. Just because someone overslept and is now late for work does not make it an interesting day. Taking us on a tour of the town doesn’t work well, either. (In contrast, Taffy Brodeser-Ackner’s new novel Long Island Compromise takes us on a nifty town tour as this guy, having just been kidnapped, is driven through it with a hood over his head. That worked great.) Notably, this is something that works much better on film (because you’ve got montage, and music, and sexy people)… Don’t absorb that to the point that you think it’ll work on the page. It won’t.

• Thinking you have to start with a moment that is, itself, an organic beginning—like someone waking up in bed, or a plane touching down, or the first day of school. You can (Kafka did), but most of these openings are overdone (to the point that editors might roll their eyes if your story starts with someone waking up).

• Starting the story well after the major change has happened. Imagine if we started the story after Gregor Samsa had already been a bug for a week. And he’s just kind of… wandering around. Not as interesting!

• Forgetting to include any real change in the entire story. This is particularly a trap for short stories. If you can’t look at the story and tell us why, out of all the episodes in this person’s life, you’ve chosen this episode, this day or series of events, why should we care? It doesn’t need to be the most important moment of that life, but it should certainly be the time something significantly changed.

• Although this is a separate issue from where to start, the biggest issue I see in openings is wording/framing that doesn’t orient the reader. I wrote two whole posts about that, which you can read here.

What’s the game plan?

If you don’t know what your story is about yet, write until you do. If you do know what it’s about (because you’ve finished a draft or because you’ve thought about it a lot), let’s go. Ask yourself:

• What is the full arc of the story?

• What is the first major reversal, and what is the last major reversal?

• Why is this the episode or series of events that you’re choosing to show, out of someone’s whole life?

• How close to that first reversal do you want to begin? Are you interested in starting right there, or leading up to it with an inciting incident, or perhaps starting later (in medias res) and backing up to show us that reversal?

• How late could this story start and still make sense? How early could it start without boring us? (Related questions, focusing on your protagonist: What is the last moment everything is status quo for your character? How much runway do you need to give them so we see the full arc of their change?)

• How are you going to get across what normal was, so we understand how much things have changed? And how are you going to do that without walking us through a boring, static day?

• If you start with an inciting incident, how does it lead to the rest of the story through cause-and-effect? How does it cause the first big reversal?

• Regarding that inciting incident: Consider the trick of the minor change, the minor crisis, to get us into the action and show some normalcy before the major conflict. (Toto has been kidnapped!) Think of the 1994 movie Speed: there’s a crisis with an elevator, one that gets solved quickly, before there’s a bomb on the bus. And there’s a nice chain of cause-and-effect with the elevator thing leading to the bus thing.

What about envelopes and braids?

Okay, some novels follow multiple, braided threads (say, one story set in 1850, one in 2024, and one on a future moon colony). You need to think hard about the starting point of each of these timelines. You don’t get a free pass on the second and third ones just because the first started in an optimal place.

And some stories/novels/memoirs make wonderful use of an envelope structure (a story within a frame story). A character is, for instance, sitting down to hear a story, and the bulk of the book will be that story.  We will almost always return to this envelope narrative at the end. (Wuthering Heights works like this; Ethan Frome is an example of a story imagined by the narrator; A Separate Peace is a story remembered by the narrator.) Remember that this does not simplify things. You need a purpose for the envelope, a reason that you’re not just showing us the past directly, but through this filter. (After all, whatever is told as present day, or as the most recent, gets primacy of place; you’re suggesting that it’s the most important.) In other words, there needs to be a strong arc to the present story, even if it’s just a strong emotional/mental arc. And—as above—you now need to find two solid starting points: one for the envelope, and one for the main narrative.

We aren’t done beginning!

In a future post, I’ll talk about specific starting points, the rate of info revelation, and more. What are your questions about openings? If you’re a paid subscriber, please ask your questions in the comments and I’ll try to get to them next time!

1. as a reader and observer

2. as a reviser

3. (maybe, eventually) as a drafter*

(*We don’t get there on every element. If we did, first drafts would be final drafts.)

In other words: It’s hard to learn a lot about something (say, how to incorporate more interiority) and then go home and expect yourself to do all that stuff in the very next first draft you write. Rather, you want to read for it and watch for it over the next few weeks, becoming a connoisseur.

That’s what I’m going to talk about here. (Plus we’re going to learn a lot about physical descriptions of characters along the way.)

But first, a sidebar on…

The Formula Fallacy

Every time I post (or teach IRL) about something like endings or interiority or dialogue, always trying to show students the full array of what’s possible, I get a question along the lines of “But wait, you didn’t tell us what order to do this all in, and how much of exactly each thing to do, and in what ratio!”

It’s an absolutely relatable question, but I want to free you from this way of thinking. Writing is not a field where you’re ever going to find some golden ratio (“First one line of action, then two lines of backstory, then no more than forty words on stakes, then…”) and any writing book that purports to hand you this is selling you a formula for formulaic writing. If that’s what you want to do (for instance, if you’re writing a sitcom pilot and want to adhere to very specific industry standards) then great! But if you want to write something that could only have been written by you, please ignore all that noise.

Reading like a writer is going to help disabuse you of this notion fast, because you’re going to see SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS that different brilliant authors handle the same issue.

Let’s Raid the Target Office Supply Aisle

Okay, here’s how we play.

Decide the issue you’re fixating on. For today, let’s pick something kind of simple like physical descriptions of character. (“Simple,” I said, not “easy.” This is something I personally struggled with for a long time.)

Imagine that I’m sitting at my computer, freaking out because people have told me that I need to do more to describe my characters physically, but every time I try it sounds like a police bulletin. Instead of bashing my head through my laptop screen, I’m going to pick five books off my shelf, brilliant books that I’ve already read and that don’t have much in common with each other. And I’m going to get my highlighters ready.

Let’s do it! Together! Right now!

I’m going to read through the first few pages (or some random spot) to highlight every word that informs me in any way about a character’s physicality.

Example 1:

This is from Gina Frangello’s short story “Slut Lullabies”:

For accessibility reasons, I don’t want to hide all my text in photos, so I’m going to “highlight” this same thing below by bolding it. (Hey Substack, please give us colors!!)

Alex’s older brother, George, was hot for Sera, but this was of little consequence since he was a prematurely balding, stoop-spined twenty-two-year-old, who worked at their father’s dry cleaners fifty hours per week, lived above the store, and had skin the color of flour-coated dough. If you yelled to him, “Hey, dude, where’d you put the beer?” he would reply in a Spock-like voice, “I believe it is in the vehicle.” He was weird, and while marginally sexy in a dark, mortician kind of way, definitely not Sera’s type.

I’m noticing the way the physical details are part of a direct characterization (i.e., when we’re told what someone is like in general, not just noticing what they’re like in scene), and that they’re interspersed with details about personality. I’m also noticing that this is all introduced under the topic of whether he’s attractive to Sera, so that’s our excuse for spending time on his looks; this isn’t just a random description for the reader’s sake, but a logical topic of conversation.

Example 2:

Here’s a passage from close to the beginning of Toni Morrison’s Sula. (Shadrack has woken up in a mental institution.)

But the yell had brought a male nurse.

"Private? We're not going to have any trouble today, are we? Are we, Private?"

Shadrack looked up at a balding man dressed in a green-cotton jacket and trousers. His hair was parted low on the right side so that some twenty or thirty yellow hairs could discreetly cover the nakedness of his head.

"Come on. Pick up that spoon. Pick it up, Private. Nobody is going to feed you forever."

Sweat slid from Shadrack's armpits down his sides. He could not bear to see his hands grow again and he was frightened of the voice in the apple-green suit.

Here, in contrast to the above, I notice that we’re meeting this character in scene, and seeing him along with Shadrack. It helps that Shadrack is seeing this man for the first time. I also notice that in contrast to our first example, here the description is interspersed in the action—and what we glean about this man’s character (what his ridiculous combover says about him, for instance) is all stuff we have to surmise. (In other words, indirect characterization.)

Example 3:

Here’s one from very early on in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations:

"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch.

"Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!" A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

This one is fascinating. We have Dickens’s skill at litany and repetition, for one thing. And a masterful use of the oft-verboten passive voice! And the rhythm here allows him to describe this man for longer than we might otherwise find interesting. But I’m also interested in how he doesn’t ever describe the man himself—not his face or skin or hair—only his clothes, and his demeanor, and what Pip assumes has happened to him. I also notice that Dickens gives it to us all in one chunk.

Example 4:

Here’s an early passage from Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club:

Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to a beauty training school in the Mission district and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking. Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz. My mother dragged me off to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair.

…

The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off these soggy clumps to make my hair even again. "Peter Pan is very popular these days," the instructor assured my mother. I now had hair the length of a boy's, with straight­across bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows. I liked the haircut and it made me actually look forward to my future fame.

Here, Tan has accomplished the trick of the first-person narrator finding an excuse to describe herself (without, you know, happing to look in a mirror and for some reason assessing herself from head to toe). When there’s a change in someone’s appearance, that gives us an organic excuse to describe it. Plus, so many other things are happening in this passage! Stuff about mother-daughter psychodrama, and assimilation, and race, and ambition, and and and. This does not come off as a passage of physical description, and yet that’s one thing it is.

But wait, there’s more!

Maybe you’ll decide you need two colors of highlighters. Maybe you’re interested in the balance between physical description and more general description of a character’s place in the world.

And so you’d do something like this to the opening pages of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit:

Among many other things, I notice here how Tolkien stops the story midstream and tells us that he’s giving us valuable information that he knows we don’t have. I also notice how he alternates behavior and physicality.

Maybe I want a third color, to point out action. Maybe I want a fourth one, for backstory.

And then I figure out the formula, right?

No. Stawwwwwp.

What you’re doing here is adding to your own toolkit. These five examples were all very different from each other. And you can borrow/steal any of these moves, or they might open you up to doing something completely different.

At the very least, you can see that:

1) There’s no one specific way to do it.

2) All these writers managed the same awkward thing (“Hey, by the way, here’s what my imaginary people look like!”) and maybe it even felt awkward as they were writing, but it doesn’t feel awkward at all when we’re reading.

3) The specific choices you make on this (or any) craft issue are what we mean when we talk about an author’s “style.”

Here’s your homework:

Try this out with whatever craft issue is stymying or intriguing you. Maybe it’s the balance between backstory and scene. Maybe you’ve been told that you need to establish your settings better, so you want to highlight every word that reminds us where we are in space. Maybe you want to see how different authors break up dialogue with physical gesture or other text.

Use your office supplies! Use your glitter pens! Put unicorn stickers in the margins to mark the spots where an author transitions seamlessly into a memory! You know you want to.

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Just a thank-you:

Someone who became a paid subscriber recently sent me a note saying she did it because she knows not everyone can and she wants to help keep my newsletter going. I appreciate this so much; I want to keep the vast majority of my content free and accessible to everyone, and paid subscriptions allow me to devote enough time to keep these posts coming.

I’ve also realized that maybe I’m writing a craft book, in slow motion. If it becomes a real book, I’ll thank you all in the acknowledgements. (I mean, not by name—that would be ridiculous—but as a group. Because you’re amazing.)

I’ve been comparing the layers of interiority to layer cake, so here’s a picture of Dobos torta, a Hungarian cake that is very good but probably takes a year of your life to make at home.

Okay, moving on.

I’m going to run through two very different examples here (one from Edward P. Jones and one from Alice Munro), to answer the two most common questions I hear about interiority: 1) How do you weave interiority into action without sounding awkward? and 2) What if you have a character who’s repressed/dim/not very reflective? And just for fun, both of these examples are from stories that start in train stations. Why not.

As a quick reminder, here are the layers we were talking about:

How do I weave this stuff in?

There are writers who come at us with giant chunks of interiority (think Proust) and ones who weave it in like a fine thread. If you pulled ten books off your shelf you’d find ten different ratios of action to interiority—but here’s an example of someone doing it really subtly.

This is from the story “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” which you can find in Edward P. Jones’s 1992 collection Lost in the City. It’s not the very beginning of the story, but close to it. A mother is waiting for the subway with her three children.

(Before I point it out, try to look for what is happening inside someone’s head versus outside.)

“How do the lights know when the train is comin?” he asked his mother.

This was a new question. “I don’t know,” she said. “Avis, stop kicking like that.” The girl continued to kick out at something imaginary in front of her and Marvella tugged at her arm until the girl stopped.

Most of what we have here is reportage—what Marvella, our point-of-view character sees and notices and does—but with “this was a new question” we also have what she’s thinking. In fact, those five questions sound very much like her internal monologue. But then we’re right back into the action.

A few sentences later, after Marvella has explained the lights:

Marvin seemed satisfied with the answer. He studied the lights and as he did they began to blink. The boy was nine. My son the engineer, his mother thought.

The word “seemed” situates us fully in Marvella’s head. (If Jones wrote “Marvin was satisfied with the answer,” but then didn’t go into Marvin’s point of view, this would be the kind of POV slip-up I discussed in Part 1. Edward P. Jones would NEVER. Then we get some reportage (“he studied the lights”) and then we get this lovely, straightforward, workmanlike exposition: “The boy was nine.” Isn’t it amazing how you can just do that? You can just come out and TELL us stuff. You really can! Even when we’re in the point of view of someone who wouldn’t really be thinking that stuff in the moment. And then, in the final sentence, we get tagged thought (something I warned against in excess in Part 1, but that works beautifully in small, subtle doses). And notice how he does it without quotes or italics, both of which would be distracting.

Then we’re back into the action again:

On the other side of Avis stood Marcus, her second son. Marvella noted out of the corner of her eye that he was yapping away, as usual, and at first Marvella thought he was talking to Avis or having another conversation with himself. “Everybody else is borin,” he said to her the first time she asked why he talked to himself. He was now seven. Long before the train came into view, it sent ahead a roar, which always made Marvella look left and right to make certain her children were safe and close. And when she turned away from the coming train, she saw that Marcus had been talking to the man with the dreadlocks.

I mean, don’t you want to read the rest of this story now??

Notice here how we don’t lose the setting or the action (in fact, the action moves very quickly, with a train bearing down and stranger danger) but we do get these moments of interiority. We hear first what Marvella “noted” and “thought”—her literal (tagged) impressions of the moment—and we also get memory and association. We’re hearing what’s “usual,” and what she “always” does to check for the trains, plus this very brief memory (look how short!) of when Marcus was younger.

I’m also fascinated by the way Jones situates us so fully in her vision and hearing (“the corner of her eye,” “yapping,” “into view,” “a roar,” “look left and right,”) that it feels like we’re turning right with her to see, suddenly, this startling thing.

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What about a non-introspective character?

What if your character is deeply un-self-aware, or unwilling to share their thoughts? And that’s kind of the point? You don’t just want a void there on the page, because surely your character is thinking something. (I talked in Part 1 about Empty Head Syndrome, and it’s not a great thing.)

Here’s the beginning of Alice Munro’s short story “Amundsen,” which you can read in its entirety right here in the New Yorker. In fact, later today you really should, because near the end of the story there’s a STUNNING moment in which the narrator doesn’t allow herself to process something directly but we still know what she’s thinking, and I refuse to spoil it here.

This is how the story starts:

On the bench outside the station, I sat and waited. The station had been open when the train arrived, but now it was locked. Another woman sat at the end of the bench, holding between her knees a string bag full of parcels wrapped in oiled paper. Meat—raw meat. I could smell it.

Across the tracks was the electric train, empty, waiting.

Here we mostly have reportage. We get what she’s doing (sitting and waiting) where she is/what’s happening, what she can see and what she can smell. She does not, thank God, take us through all five senses like someone completing a fifth grade creative writing assignment—but the visuals and the smell are plenty and suggest, furthermore, both the sound of the place (quiet) and the feel of it (cold).

These are short, sparse sentences. In their simplicity, they feel repressed—quite intentionally. This is not a narrator who’s going to invite us in and make herself vulnerable to us.

No other passengers showed up, and after a while the stationmaster stuck his head out the station window and called, “San.” At first I thought he was calling a man’s name, Sam.

Here we’re getting just a tiny bit deeper into interiority because we’re getting some analysis of her own impressions: She got it wrong, then she figured it out.

And another man wearing some kind of official outfit did come around the end of the building. He crossed the tracks and boarded the electric car. The woman with the parcels stood up and followed him, so I did the same.

This is a tiny, subtle shift, but in the word “so” we’re now getting into reasoning—an explanation of why the narrator does what she does.

There was a burst of shouting from across the street, and the doors of a dark-shingled flat-roofed building opened, letting loose several men, who were jamming caps on their heads and banging lunch buckets against their thighs. By the noise they were making, you’d have thought the car was going to run away from them at any minute. But when they settled on board nothing happened.

Since we were just talking about sound: Notice how the silence (which she hasn’t even needed to mention) is shattered here by all this noise.

”You’d have thought” is an interesting move. We’re getting into that layer of projection into the future (imagining what might happen next) but the “you” simultaneously holds us at a distance (she’s not making this deeply about her) and implicates us.

The car sat while they counted one another and worked out who was missing and told the driver that he couldn’t go yet. Then somebody remembered that the missing man hadn’t been around all day. The car started, though I couldn’t tell if the driver had been listening to any of this, or cared.

More reportage here, but also the narrator is wondering about things beyond the obvious.

The men got off at a sawmill in the bush—it wouldn’t have been more than ten minutes’ walk—and shortly after that the lake came into view, covered with snow.

And here, again (with “it wouldn’t have been more than ten minutes”) a subtle sense that the narrator is thinking about things beyond the immediate present.

A long, white, wooden building in front of it. The woman readjusted her packages and stood up, and I followed. The driver again called “San,” and the doors opened. A couple of women were waiting to get on. They greeted the woman with the meat, and she said that it was a raw day.

All avoided looking at me as I climbed down behind the meat woman.

The doors banged together, and the train started back.

We’re back to simple reportage now, and it works. And again, its sparseness, it suggests a repression of emotion. This particular part reads a lot like Hemingway.

Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some small, untidy evergreens, rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling. And the building, with its deliberate rows of windows and its glassed-in porches at either end. Everything austere and northerly, black-and-white under the high dome of clouds. So still, so immense an enchantment.

While this is really just description of place, notice how many metaphors we have (air like ice, sleepy bears), plus conjecture (“as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling”), plus judgment calls (“brittle-looking,” “austere and northerly,” “so immense an enchantment”).

But the birch bark not white after all, as you got closer. Grayish yellow, grayish blue, gray.

Again with the “you.” She’s simultaneously giving us her impressions and drawing us in and erasing herself.

“Where you heading?” the meat woman called to me. “Visiting hours are over at three.”

“I’m not a visitor,” I said. “I’m the new teacher.”

“Well, they won’t let you in the front door, anyway,” the woman said with some satisfaction. “You better come along with me. Don’t you have a suitcase?”

“The stationmaster said he’d bring it later.”

“The way you were just standing there—looked like you were lost.”

I said that I had stopped because it was so beautiful.

“Some might think so. ’Less they were too sick or too busy.”

And here, the interiority falls away. The dialogue plows on, and we don’t need to stop after every line for emotional interpretation.

Also interesting to note where and how she breaks up the dialogue with paraphrasing (“I said that I had stopped…”). An obvious (and often helpful) move would be to paraphrase the small talk and put only the most interesting and personal line as direct dialogue. Munro has essentially done the opposite—which manages to draw special attention to that line, but also feels like a protective move from the narrator (as we aren’t allowed to hear the most personal dialogue directly). Munro is a master at breaking narrative “rules” to great effect. It’s not even fair, how good she is.

Nothing more was said until we entered the kitchen, at the far end of the building. I did not get a chance to look around me, because attention was drawn to my boots.

“You better get those off before they track the floor.”

I wrestled off the boots—there was no chair to sit down on—and set them on the mat where the woman had put hers.

Twice here we get (indirectly phrased) things the narrator wants to do, but can’t. She can’t look around, and she can’t sit down on a chair. So we’re going beyond reportage, into what isn’t: what she imagines, what she’s looking for. And of course, not being able to do what she wants sets the tone in many ways for the rest of the story.

“Pick them up and bring them with you. I don’t know where they’ll be putting you. You better keep your coat on, too. There’s no heating in the cloakroom.”

No heat, no light, except what came through a little window I could not reach. It was like being punished at school. Sent to the cloakroom. Yes. The same smell of winter clothing that never really dried out, of boots soaked through to dirty socks, unwashed feet.

And here we get memory. It’s not a specific memory, and it doesn’t go on for very long. A lesser writer would be tempted to shoehorn in a whole scene of memory here, but Munro does just enough to convince us that this character has a past, and a real life. And yet it’s not a life we’re invited to view in full detail. This narrator is simply not going to open up to us, or to anyone. But moves like this keep her from feeling two-dimensional, fake, invented for the purposes of the story.

I climbed up on the bench but still could not see out. On the shelf where caps and scarves were thrown, I found a bag with some figs and dates in it. Somebody must have stolen them and stashed them here to take home. All of a sudden, I was hungry. Nothing to eat since morning, except for a dry cheese sandwich on the Ontario Northland. I considered the ethics of stealing from a thief. But the figs would catch in my teeth and betray me.

I got myself down just in time. Somebody was entering the cloakroom.

Here we get projection into the future—what she wants to do, and what will happen if she does it.

You could read the whole rest of the story this way, with an eye just for what goes on in the narrator’s mind. And I hope you will.

That’s all on interiority for now, but if you’re a paid subscriber, please ask me your interiority questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them—and maybe I’ll find one that needs a longer answer and merits a future post.

I tend to picture interiority in strata, with the deepest kinds of thought near the bottom. To help us out, here is a picture of what my kid and her friends call “gayke”:

Let’s break these down.

Reportage

Simple reportage is where we’re in a character’s head and point of view (we’ve probably been there for a while) and we’re just relaying what happened. So, for instance:

A mouse ran across the floor and scuttled under the armoire.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, and you’re going to have a lot of sentences (maybe even the majority of your sentences) that just tell us what’s going on. Note that there’s still a hint of the character here, if only in the word choices. “Scuttle” and “armoire” are not words everyone would use. They aren’t, for instance, the words your average frat bro would use. So we’re maybe learning a little bit here about our point-of-view character, or at least our narrator. But we aren’t going terribly deep.

(A note that if we were in the first person throughout the story, we’d have no doubt that we were in one character’s point of view. And everything I say here applies to first-person stories as well. But in the third person, there’s a little more danger of readers losing track of whose head we’re in when we just report the events.)

Sensory input, without further commentary

Here we have more than just the relaying of events; we have sensory perceptions, well-rooted in point of view. So, for instance:

She tracked the mouse as it scuttled across the floor and under the armoire. The room filled with screams, and with the smell of burning toast. Below it all, she could feel the rumble of the passing train.

If you wrote this kind of paragraph in a high school writing class, your teacher would put a checkmark in the margin and write something like “Great sensory details!” And again, there’s nothing wrong with sentences like these. But we have miles to go before we sleep.

Internal physical reaction, without commentary

I don’t necessarily mean internal as in “under the skin,” but rather that we’re feeling the physical reaction from the inside, along with the character. Here we get into the body, as well as inside the mind—and so the reader is invited a little farther into that point of view. For instance:

She tracked the mouse as it scuttled under the armoire. Adrenaline flooded her legs. She wiped her sweaty palms on her khakis.

We can infer a lot about how the character is feeling right now, and that can be useful.

Okay, here’s the problem:

This is where many writers stop. Ever since 1993 when a well-meaning uncle heard, at Thanksgiving dinner, that this person wanted to be a writer and said “Well, I’ll give you a little advice, then: Show, don’t tell,” the poor writer has assumed that all emotion must be conveyed on the sly. And perhaps the writer absorbed the same lessons from TV and movies, where all we really get (unless we’re blessed with a voiceover) is the events themselves and Jon Hamm’s face doing a reaction shot.

To stop at this level is to miss out on so much of what fiction can do, and the advantages that the page has over the screen. (And since it’s unlikely that Jon Hamm is going to come to my house to perform your book for me, you can use all the help you can get.)

Reportage or sensory input with commentary and/or interpretation

We’re still witnessing the events through the narrator or POV character’s eyes, but now we get commentary on those events, as well. Like so:

A mouse scuttled across the floor and under the armoire. Georgia panicked, her hands turning to clay. She’d always hated mice. She tried not to scream, but instead started whimpering.

Here the narrator is coming right out and telling us about the character’s panic, their motivation and intention, and the context. The figurative language (“hands turning to clay”) is also a form of commentary—presumably coming from Georgia herself, even in the third person.

Internal monologue in reaction to events in scene

These would be the actual words the POV character would think, or a paraphrasing of their thoughts:

There, in the corner, oh my God, it was a mouse. She hated them, she hated them, their little wiry tales. She wondered if she could leap onto the table. They carry disease! Who wouldn’t be afraid? She tried not to scream, but instead started whimpering.

I’ve left that last line in there just to show that we can come in and out of the internal monologue; you don’t have to get stuck there for the whole story.

Memory / projection into the future / association / tangent

So far, all of our reactions have stayed pretty much in the room, in the present scene. But that’s not the way the mind really works. In real life, we’re sensing and reacting to the world around us, but we’re also thinking constantly of the past, the present, the future, and the random.

First, let’s go into the past:

Raised in a spotless household, she had only ever seen one other mouse on the loose indoors. Rats were something else—rats she’d seen on the subway tracks, fat and slow—but most of the mice Georgia had seen were on television and in her college biology lab. This mouse wasn’t cute, like those. It was somehow worse than a rat, being smaller and more helpless.

Now, into the future:

Georgia wondered what would happen if she plunged out of the window. Would it be worse to break her ankle, or to stay in the room with the mouse?

Now, into association:

They reminded her, always, of slick little gameshow hosts. Those beady eyes. If you looked close enough, you might see an oily combover.

Now, how about a nice tangent:

The ancient Japanese believed that mice were messengers from the gods. Georgia had read this somewhere, somewhere pretty reliable. What kind of message could a mouse possibly send, though? “Your house isn’t clean enough”? In this case, the gods seemed to want her to panic, to embarrass herself in front of the detectives.

Note that any of these could come through in the internal monologue (i.e., as the thing the character is thinking in that moment) or they could come through in the narration, unrelated to internal monologue, (e.g., “Georgia’s earliest memory of mice was…” when she doesn’t seem to be thinking it in scene).

Self-reflection, or narrative reflection, on psychology or emotion

We’re getting really deep now. We’re down toward the bottom layers of that gayke.

A character might be reflecting on this from their own point of view:

Perhaps it was because her father’s fury had taught her to fear sudden motion that she flinched at even the smallest and most helpless of scurrying creatures. She considered this, and tried to control her breath.

Or the narration might do this, perhaps on a level the character wouldn’t be privy to:

There were few people in the world more afraid of mice as Georgia was. There was a girl in Burma who would pass out at the mere thought of them. But Georgia, trained by her father’s fury to fear any sudden motion, was certainly in the top one percent.

Subconscious

The only thing deeper-down than the meta-thought above would be the subconscious, the psychological stuff the character doesn’t even understand about herself. Of course this could be done through pages of delicate hinting (the character is always dreaming about trains going into tunnels, for instance), but for the sake of expedience, here’s a blatant example in which the narration just tells us stuff:

Georgia would not admit to herself the real cause of her disgust: She, too, was a scampering, desperate thing. She, too, could be so easily trapped and pinned.

Or, let’s go with a much more profound example than I have energy to make up right now. Here’s Aleksandar Hemon in the essay collection The Book of My Lives:

The more we knew about [the war], the less we wanted to know. The structure of our lives relied on the routine continuation of what we stubbornly perceived as normalcy. Hence, convinced that we were merely trying to live a normal life, we embarked upon a passionate pursuit of hedonistic oblivion.

In this case, despite the fact that he’s writing about himself and what he was oblivious to at the time, he’s able to access the subconscious through the lens of retrospect.

So what do we do with all this?

I’m not saying that the bottom layers of the cake are inherently better than the top layers of the cake. (It would be a heady kind of book that only gave us deep psychology and never told us that the mouse ran across the floor.) But the farther down we go in those layers, the better we know a character’s mind.

You want to make sure you’re getting to all those layers. And of course you aren’t committing to just doing one thing at a time. Here’s a mashup of all the above. And I’m not going in rainbow gayke order, particularly, but you’ll notice that I do start with the literal and physical and move into the psychological.

A mouse scuttled under the armoire. Georgia hated them, she hated them, their little wiry tales. She tried not to scream, but instead started whimpering, wiped her sweaty palms on her khakis. They carry disease! Who wouldn’t be afraid? Raised in a spotless household, she had only ever seen one other mouse on the loose indoors. Rats were something else—rats she’d seen on the subway tracks, fat and slow—but the mice Georgia had seen were mostly on television and in her college biology lab. Those, like this one, had reminded her of slick little gameshow hosts. Those beady eyes. If you looked close enough, you might see an oily combover. Perhaps it was because her father’s fury had taught her to fear sudden motion that she flinched at even the smallest and most helpless of scurrying creatures. She considered this, and tried to control her breath. But she would not admit to herself the real cause of her disgust: She, too, was a scampering, desperate thing. She, too, could be so easily trapped and pinned. She’d read somewhere that the ancient Japanese believed mice were messengers from the gods. In this case, the gods seemed to want her to panic, to embarrass herself in front of the detectives.

That would not be a final draft for me, but we’d be starting to get somewhere interesting.

And think how much would be lost if we just stayed up in that top layer of cake—if we thought we had no more options than this:

A mouse scurried across the floor. Georgia felt her pulse throbbing in her veins. There was a lump in her throat. She looked around the room helplessly. “I don’t like mice,” she said.

That’s all for now… I’ll do a Part 3 (hey, here it is!) soon, covering one more tricky issue (switching points of view midstream) and giving some examples of interiority done very well.

Meanwhile, after the paywall, I’m going to break down, in detail, one more example of deep interiority.

Let’s look at this passage from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. This is a fantastic example of “stream of consciousness,” and we should take a moment here to note that “stream of consciousness” does not mean a) the act of writing down everything that

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What could be worse than this zebra-and-lilac masterpiece? Fiction that doesn’t take us inside a character’s head, or does so super awkwardly, or accidentally breaks its own rules of point of view, or resorts to clichés when representing thought or memory.

If you’re writing fiction or memoir, here are eight mistakes you might be making (and how not to):

The Empty Head

(Very little interiority at all)

Here’s what it looks like:

Georgia filled Michael’s glass. “Here you go,” she said.

He scooped potatoes onto his plate. “They’re cold again,” he said, and he grabbed the remote off the table and turned on the news. There was an election going on in Canada.

Georgia said, “I know nothing about Canadian politics.”

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

Well, nothing, necessarily, in a section this short. But notice how we’re in no one’s head. Over many paragraphs and pages of this, we’re not going to feel like we know these characters at all. On rare occasion this works for a while—think of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” which keeps this up for the three-page duration of the story—and if you want to try a truly objective point of view for longer, knock yourself out. But do it intentionally. Most of the time when I see this in student work, the student is not aware that for the whole piece, or for pages at a time, they’re not letting us in on anyone’s thoughts.

In my experience, there are six types of fiction writers who are particularly prone to this kind of neglect: current or former journalists, who’ve been taught not to speculate what people are thinking; lawyers (same thing—objection! speculation, your honor!); scientists (often trained in literal, technical writing); current/former screenwriters or playwrights, who are used to having to get everything across through action and dialogue; the poor souls who took “show, don’t tell” to mean you can only write action and dialogue; and people who watch a lot of movies but don’t really read, so what they’re writing is basically a screenplay.

Other writers are tempted, when writing a character who lacks self-awareness, or isn’t fully aware of their own motivations, to give them no thoughts at all. The thing is, no one’s head is just empty. That character could be thinking of other things, or she could be deluding herself, but she’s certainly thinking something.

Failure to Stop for Gas

(Not enough interiority in crucial scenes)

Here’s what it looks like:

Georgia saw a knife on the ground. She picked it up. She could feel her cheeks grow hot. She walked slowly to the bathroom door, listening to the end of Michael’s shower. The knife was heavy in her hand. He opened the door, and she struck, plunging the blade into [okay, that’s enough]

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

We’re clearly in Georgia’s point of view—she’s the one seeing the knife, feeling her cheeks, listening to the shower—but in this crucial, pivotal moment, we’re getting absolutely none of her thoughts. What’s the point of being in someone’s head if we don’t even know what they’re thinking?

There are the writers who are perfectly comfortable writing interiority but who panic in moments of high drama. You might fall into Empty Head Syndrome, as above, imagining that Georgia would have no thoughts in the heat of the moment. Or you might feel like you want this scene to go fast, because it would happen fast in real life.

Generally speaking, inches on the page equals importance in the story (with notable exceptions, like the death in To the Lighthouse), and a corollary to that is that the more important or unusual someone’s actions are, the more we want them to stop and think about what they’re doing. So for example: If Georgia simply picks up a knife to cut an apple, I don’t need to know about why, and whether she’s done this before, and how she feels in the moment, etc. If Georgia’s going to stab her husband, though, I definitely need to know those things.

And no, this will not slow your scene down. Just like stopping for gas before you get on the highway will not delay your arrival time as much as running out of said gas would. You know what’s really going to slow this scene down? When I abandon your book because I can’t understand anyone’s motivations.

The Slack Clothesline

(Too much interiority in the wrong scenes)

Here’s what it looks like:

Georgia passed the old bank, its paint chipping. Everything in this town was falling apart. [Two more paragraphs on her thoughts about the town.] She passed the grocery store and saw her old friend Renee wheeling her cart out. Renee was a good friend, someone she trusted. [Two more paragraphs about Renee.] She circled back to her own block. If she was going to kill Michael for the insurance money, she’d need to do it soon. [Five paragraphs about her feelings on this.] She walked into the door. There he sat.

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

Take away the interiority, and what kind of scene do we have? A woman walks through town and comes home. That’s not exactly a scene of great tension and momentum.

Think of a slack clothesline. You can hang a couple of things on it, but pretty soon it’s sagging so much that everything’s on the ground. The tauter the clothesline, the more you can hang on it. In other words: A scene where someone’s about to stab someone else is a great place to hang your interiority. A scene in which someone just walks around town is not great for that (and in fact maybe doesn’t deserve to be a scene at all).

The Gas/Clothesline Combo

(Reeling back and forth between scenes of all action and scenes of all interiority)

Here’s what it looks like:

[The knife scene, followed by the walking around town scene, followed by a car chase with no interiority, followed by a scene in which Georgia sits on a bench and recalls her childhood.]

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

All the stuff that was wrong with the two scenes above, but in rapid succession!

Action and interiority do not belong in separate scenes, just like in real life you don’t mindlessly do important things and then sit still for a long time to think about your life. Rather, you decide at the messy birthday party that you want a divorce. You drive too fast because you’re upset and you hit a garbage can. You remember your fifth grade Spanish teacher as you assault the town judge. (Really, you should get control of yourself. You sound like a mess.)

Action springs from thought, and thought springs from action. We can’t silo them.

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Gazing Out The Window Syndrome

(Awkwardly halting the scene for interiority)

Here’s what it looks like:

Forgetting the pot scrubber in her hand, Georgia settled her gaze out the window on the towering oak in the yard. That oak, she remembered, had been there since she moved in. The memory came flooding back to her: October, 1973, the wind blowing from the southeast, the day warm. Michael had slowed the old Datsun at the curb, saying “Look at the snow, Georgia!”…[and then we go on like this for five pages]…The door slammed, and Georgia was suddenly jolted out of her memory, which for some reason had happened in complete chronological order, with remarkably accurate detail. “Michael!” she cried.

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

This is an extreme version of the slack clothesline, but with an elaborate memory thrown into the mix. To be clear, you absolutely could go on and on for pages about someone’s memories and thoughts—but pretending that tons of memories are coming to them in real time is unrealistic, and everything reads slower if only because you’ve slowed down the actual scene; instead of just enjoying the 1973 Datsun, part of my brain is registering that we’ve been standing there at the sink a really long time.

You are absolutely allowed to just tell us stuff—within or outside of a scene—without pretending the character is thinking it in real time.

The Cardiopulmonary Trap

(Relying on breathing and heart rate to suggest thought)

Here’s what it looks like:

Michael walked through the door. He was still alive! Georgia felt her heart in her throat. Her pulse throbbed in her veins. She let out a breath she hadn’t even known she was holding.

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

We got into cliché really fast there, in part because there are only so many ways you can describe a cardiopulmonary response to stress. And while physical reaction is of course relevant and often useful, this is not a full substitute for actual thought. If you’re going to do this, use original language. Maybe pick a different part of the body! Georgia’s left ear could be throbbing, why not. And don’t let it replace any effort at interiority.

Over-Tagging Thought

(Constantly telling us that thoughts are thoughts)

Here’s what it looks like:

Georgia watched him lurch toward her. “I can’t believe he’s still alive!” Georgia thought to herself. “Wow,” she marveled inside of her brain, “there’s a lot of blood!”

Here’s what’s wrong it it:

It’s definitely sometimes relevant to state that someone is thinking something (Georgia wondered if she had a mop) but most of the time you don’t need to. You definitely don’t need to put thoughts in quotation marks or italics, moves that will likely read as dated and clunky.

How about this instead:
Georgia watched him lurch toward her. How could he still be alive? There was so much blood!

That’s not a masterpiece, but it works, and we don’t have any doubt that we’re in Georgia’s mind. (This move, if you’re interested, is called “free indirect discourse.”)

The Point of View Slip-Up

I honestly don’t know how to help writers with this one if they don’t already get what’s wrong with it.

Here’s what it looks like:

Georgia [whose head we’ve been in for the whole story] wondered if ladybugs were really all female. They couldn’t be, obviously. What if all these beetles were actually male? The thought was unsettling. Her blue eyes sparkled in the sunlight. She turned toward the house.

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

She can see her own eyeballs? Really? Neat trick!

Shallow Interiority

This is the one I see tripping up the most writers, even really capable ones. It’s important enough, and complicated enough, that I’m going to give it its own post next week. And then, probably in another post, I’m going to give you some examples of interiority done extremely well.

If you want to see that (and a picture of cake!) make sure you’re subscribed. (And if you’re enjoying this newsletter and can swing it, you could upgrade to a paid subscription and I’ll love you forever.)

(Update: Here’s the promised Part 2!)

Before we go any further, I have to get this out of my system:

Okay, apologies, moving on.

This is a slender book (128 pages), and an easy read. Most of you would likely read it in one or two sittings. The reason it took me so long (two months, yikes) is that I left the book in a hotel room and had to order a new copy, and it took a long time to arrive. Or at least I thought I’d left it in the hotel. A few days after the new one arrived, I found the old one in an obscure backpack pocket. (A hazard of slim books, I guess.) So now I have two of these.

I want to mention first that this is the most impressed I’ve been, so far, with the publisher’s presentation of a translated work. First of all, Interlink World Fiction has put the translators’ names on the cover—something becoming more common these days, but still too rare. And then there’s both a preface about the context and importance of the book and a historical introduction that manages to explain Yemen in a way that perfectly frames the book but also helped me understand the background to the ongoing civil war there better than any news article I’ve read. (Did you know that the US is currently launching airstrikes at Yemen? It doesn’t feel like that’s getting a lot of media attention.)

Published in 1984, the novel is set in 1948. A nameless first-person protagonist, a young teenage boy, is taken hostage to ensure his father’s loyalty to the Imam. As the historical note explains, this was a common practice—and Dammaj himself apparently once visited a cousin who was being held at the same castle where the narrator is originally taken.

The hostage is transferred to the governor’s palace to become a “duwaydar,” a well-treated servant whose most onerous task is rubbing the governor’s feet. His roommate, the slightly older “handsome duwaydar,” services many of the palace’s women in various late-night visits. How voluntary these duties are is never fully spelled out, perhaps because what’s voluntary, and how much freedom or power the two duwaydars have, is always in question and in flux. (The modern reader will of course come down on the side of these relationships being entirely nonconsensual, but that does not seem the clear intention of the book. The narrator, at least, does not dwell on this aspect as particularly alarming.)

The protagonist’s duties include sending messages between Sharifa Hafsa—the governor’s beautiful sister—and a fatuous poet in the court of the Imam. The hostage and the Sharifa are mutually infatuated, although when one party has the option to shackle the other, the relationship is fairly doomed. I love a novel that asks more questions than it answers, and this one asks disturbingly complicated questions about servitude and free will. I feel like if I spent a week writing a graduate-level paper, I could figure out some of what it’s saying there, but since I’m not in grad school anymore I’m content to just let the story unsettle me.

I noted recently that I was encountering a lot of translated novels that were much more reliant on summary and exposition than on scene. This one bucked the trend, and felt more familiar and comfortable to me in its framing and pacing—but also had a confident hand with the passage of time, letting long periods elapse very quickly.

Both the author and his father were politicians; his father was a revolutionary against the Imam Yahya, and became a governor after the 1962 revolution, while the author himself served in parliament, as a governor, and as the ambassador to Kuwait. (He died at the age of 57 in 2000.) Meanwhile his son, Hamdan Dammag, is apparently a computer scientist and a novelist and an editor and works in human rights. I mean, I did make a salad yesterday in addition to thinking about writing, so same-same.

I’m leaving Asia behind for a minute (well, probably almost a year) and… I’m very excited about this… starting in on some African books. The African fiction I’ve read has been primarily from Nigeria and South Africa, and almost all of it was originally written in English. I’m going to fix that.

My first book (and I really hope some of you will read along with me) is from Egypt: The Open Door by Latifa Al-Zayyat, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, published by Hoopoe. This one is from 1960, and was written in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, unusual for the time. It’s about a girl’s political and sexual coming-of-age in the 1940s and ‘50s; the critic Ferial Ghazoul has called it “a great anticolonialist work in a feminist key.”

I tried wherever possible to find novels translated from African languages rather than the languages of colonizers, but this is sometimes an unfortunately a tall order. Not only would the book need to have achieved its original publication (in some regions, difficult for books not written in English or French) but it would then need to have found translation and publication in English. To give you a sense of it: The Swahili story collection I’ve chosen, published in 2023 by Two Lines Press, is the first collection of Swahili stories in English translation. The first. And that’s Swahili, a major language spoken in several countries. Out of eleven books, I found seven from indigenous languages (I’m counting Arabic for Egypt and Sudan here) and four from French and Italian.

Here’s the area I’m covering this time, although of course national boundaries are not always relevant. Green is what I've already read, and purple is what I’ve planned.

When I circle back around the world (it’ll be a year or two) I’ll get to Africa again and hit some of the western parts.

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And (drum roll) here are all the books:

Sudan: Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette

Eritrea: The Conscript by Gebreyesus Hallu, translated from the Tigrinya by Ghirmai Negash

Somalia: Little Mother by Cristina Ali Farah, translated from the Italian by Alessandra di Maio

Kenya: Wizard of the Crow, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, translated from the Gīkūyū by the author

Tanzania/Kenya: No Edges: Swahili Stories (a story anthology), translated from the Swahili by several translators

Uganda: White Teeth by Okot p’Bitek, translated from the Acoli by the author

Democratic Republic of Congo: Mr. Fix-It by Richard Ali A Matu, translated from the Lingala by Bienvenu and Sara Sene

Republic of the Congo: The Stone Breakers by Emmanuel Dongala, translated from the French by Sarah Hanaburgh

Madagascar: Beyond the Rice Fields by Naivo, translated from the French by Allison M. Charette

Mauritius: Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman

I’m aiming to get through all of them in 2024, although we’ll see how many I end up misplacing around the country. Join me, please! Especially if you haven’t explored very much of Africa in your reading.

Here’s a picture of the main gathering room:

At the very back of this photo, above the left of the two orange chairs, there’s a pot in the window.

The story is that there was originally no glass in the windows. When they finally decided to add glass, Frank (he told me I could call him that) was not happy with the idea that this pot would have to move. Because it was already in the perfect spot. So he made the glass guys install the window around the pot, so it could stay right there, jutting out less than an inch into the outdoors.

It’s impossible to see something like this and not look for the metaphor. There must be one! And he was a genius, so it must be some profound lesson about what we’re supposed to do to make good art!

I thought for a second that the lesson here might be “You don’t actually have to kill your darlings,” but really… this is a ridiculous solution and now the window has to have a seam up it. The weather has banged up that shelf over the years. Let’s not pretend this is the most elegant of results.

Then I thought maybe the lesson was “Do kill your darlings, even if you’re Frank Lloyd Wright.” But I really do admire how he stuck to his guns. The man knew what he wanted, and he wanted that pot there. He was right. Mostly.

Then I realized it’s this: “You want the pot exactly there? Then move the damn wall.” You built the room, and it was perfect. You put the pot in the perfect spot. Now you want to add glass. You can’t have all three things.

In architecture it’s hard to literally move the wall. In writing, it sucks, but it’s possible. You really care about this character saying this one thing in this one moment, but it doesn’t fit? Maybe you need to tear down your scene and rebuild it around that moment. We love to hang onto the architecture of a novel when it no longer suits the story. Because it was a done deal, and it sort of worked at one point, and it would be so much work to de-intact an intact thing.

But yeah, maybe that opening scene that started it all is just not your opening scene anymore. Maybe the ending you worked toward for years is not your ending. Maybe you’ve built your room to the wrong dimensions.

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This is what we mean by revision. True revision has more to do with the wrecking ball than with the red pen.

Don’t leave your pot sitting there with its ass out to the wind.

Anyway, here’s an Arizona sunset to cheer things up:

Experience, plus recent essays like Beth Nguyen’s “Unsilencing the Writing Workshop,”* have convinced me that the classic mid-20th-century model is profoundly unhelpful for many students. But then what if, for other students, it’s the perfect thing? After all, when your work goes out into the world you don’t get to explain it. Or what if it’s the perfect thing one week, and the next week you just really want to get three specific big-picture questions answered about your poem? Or what if one student needs gentle encouragement and the next wants to be pounded into the sidewalk with criticism? What if one writer just really needs to hammer out the rules of their speculative universe with some friendly readers?

So here’s what I’ve been doing, the past few years, in writing workshops from MFA to beginner to Bread Loaf:

I’ve made an a la carte menu of all the elements I’ve seen in successful workshops, and I let students choose their own adventure.

The menu provides some structure, a road map for how the hour or two will go. It also invites the student to think critically about the kind of feedback they need and want. And most importantly, it gives them full control over the format.

(A note here: I know “menu” and “a la carte” are different things in much of the civilized world—but I’m American, and we use “entree” to mean “main course,” and we mostly just stab our food with pocket knives.)

Here’s what I give my students, along with our syllabus:

The Menu

Obviously, doing ALL of these would result in a 12-hour marathon workshop. You’ll only have time for a few “courses.”

My default workshop mode is 1, 4, 6, 10, 14 (if there’s time), 15, 16. If you choose “default” in my workshop, this is what you’ll get (with 1, 15, and 16 taking very little time).

A few other combos that would work well:
4, 5, 7, 11, 12
4, 9
12
4, 8, 16

In just about all of these, there’s the option for the author to be an active participant, an occasional participant, or a silent note-taker. 

These do not have to come in numerical order, but some make more sense early and some later.

None of these is an essential element, but I do strongly suggest that you allow room for positive feedback and don’t opt only for constructive criticism.

1)    The author frames the pages

Examples:
How the pages came to be
Where they are in the process
How new these pages are
“This used be in third person, and I just put it in first.”
“For workshop, I omitted five pages in which we learn a lot more about the forest.”
“What I’m trying to do with this scene is explore Glen’s backstory but also keep the present stakes going.”

Notes:
Blanket apologies, though, are silly and a waste of time. We’ve all seen rough drafts before.

The workshop leader or class might take this opportunity to ask the author any clarifying questions (e.g., “Can you pronounce the town name for us?” “Is this part of something longer?”)

2)    Some or all of the work is read aloud

Examples:
The author reads an entire poem aloud
The instructor reads one page of a short story aloud
Students take turns reading paragraphs aloud
The author casts students in roles for reading a screenplay

Notes:
This can be especially useful for those focusing on language, those newer to writing, and those working on something meant to be read aloud (e.g., a play).

If there are words or names that might be difficult for some peers to pronounce, you might prepare readers with pronunciations, or choose your reader carefully.

3)   “Pointing”

This is when workshoppers offer phrases or details or moments that they remember from the piece, or ones that resonated with them, without offering commentary.

They might refer to the pages, or go by memory. Of course the implication is that these were things people liked, but they don’t have to be big things.

Examples:
“The forest floor looking like a web of veins.”
“His heart was a polished stone.”
“His yellow hat with the blue stain.”

4)    Workshoppers talk about what is working well, being as specific as possible

Examples:
“I love this description of mushrooms on page 5.”
“You got the physical details of place in there without stopping the story to describe the room.”
“I laughed so hard when…”
“The language is so richly textured. I was noticing the varied sentence structures on page 4…”
“I am fully invested in whether Glen finds this flute.”

5)    The author asks one big question of the group, and the group discusses at some length

Examples:
Is my balance of backstory and present story working?
Do you feel you know Glen deeply enough?
Does the diary thing work at all?
Am I getting the stakes across?
As a woman, do I pull off writing with a male voice?
Is the timeline of the investigation clear?
Are the rules of this world clear?

Note:
“Is this any good?” and “Should I keep going?” are not super useful or answerable questions.

6)    The workshop leader asks a clarifying question of the group, and the group discusses

Quite often, my question to the group will be about orientation or the timeline or the rules of this world; in other words, I’m making sure we’re all on the same page in our understanding of the story’s basics.

Examples:
“What do we understand about the rules of the flute goblins?”
“Let’s work together to chart out the timeline of this scene.”
“Let’s list everything we know about Glen, from these pages.”
“What is at stake for this character within this scene, and what’s at stake for him more broadly?”

Notes:
The author might be silent for this round, or might participate.

This can be especially useful for a more complicated piece, and if you choose to sit back and take notes, it can be a chance for you to see how well you’ve gotten your vision across. (We’ll likely ask you to confirm our reading, though.)

7)    The group asks NEUTRAL questions of the author

Examples:
“How do you see backstory and story present working together here?”
“How do you want us to feel about the flute goblins?”
“How do you see the use of Scottish dialect in this piece?”
“What do you want us to care about most in this scene?”
“Have you considered writing this in the 1^st person?”
“What would happen if you started with Glen finding the flute in the woods?”

Note:
“Why did you make the ending so abrupt and confusing?” is not a neutral question. “Tell us how you landed on your ending” is.

8)    Workshoppers offer ideas for further scenes and plot points (rather than ideas for revision)

Examples:
“You could give the milkmaid her own chapter! I’d love to know how she feels about Glen.”
“I’d hope to see some real mystery develop here. One of these goblins could show up dead.”
“You could make great use of Scandinavian mythology!”

Note:
This is obviously best when a project is in an early drafting stage.

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9)    Free-for-all discussion; workshoppers may raise any issues on their mind

Examples:
“I know we were just talking about the setting, but can we talk about these verbs?”
“I have so many ideas for how you could expand this world.”
“I’m really lost on page 6.”
“I know everyone else is confused about how much spinach the goblins eat, but I loved that part.”

Note:
This can be fun but also chaotic, and the most vocal people tend to hold the floor. The writer might remain silent, or might pop in to respond to some things.

10) “Headlines”

Workshoppers give “headlines” for concerns they want to discuss; the workshop leader collects these, and calls on people for elaboration in an order that makes sense. These headlines should be topic headings, not value statements.

Examples:
“Character relations”
“Ending”
“Pacing”
“Dialogue”
“Believability”
“Goblin lore”

Notes:
“I was really confused by what this guy wanted” is a value statement. “Motivation” is a headline.

The writer might remain silent, or might pop in to respond to some things.

11) Workshoppers ask permission to offer suggestions

Examples:
“I have a suggestion about point of view. Would you like to hear it?”
“Would you be interested in hearing my ideas about the opening?”
“I have a concern about the character relations. Would you be open to hearing it?”

12) The author asks multiple questions of the workshop, leading the discussion

Examples:
“What did you all think of the opening?”
“What did you feel was at stake here?”
“Did the characters feel real?”

Note:
This might take up the bulk of workshop time, or this might happen just at the end, as the author has stray questions that need answering.

13) The page-by-page workshop

The group works through the piece one page at a time from beginning to end, addressing issues as they come up, almost entirely in order. For poetry, of course, this would be a line-by-line workshop.

Examples:
“This is an example of the clarity issues I was talking about on page 2.”
“Here we meet the father for the first time, and I’m not sure I get a clear picture of him.”
“You’re using the word ‘nonplussed’ here to mean its opposite. It actually means bothered.”
“This is my favorite part! I love that the goblins are so into flower arranging!”

14) Close editing

The instructor leads the class through a close editing of one paragraph of prose (weighing things word for word, the way one might in a poetry workshop).

Examples:

“So we’re looking at the line He mused upon the fact that he hadn’t exactly expected to find a Kmart so deep in the forest, and definitely not one that was so brightly lit with the illumination of fluorescent lights. We were talking about wordiness earlier, and I wonder if we have any candidates here for words to cut or ways to make this sentence more compact.”

“Our next line is There were so many things on the shelves. Jessica, I’m going to put you on the spot as the author. Can we brainstorm some of the objects Glen might notice? Let’s see if we can expand this sentence a little and get some specificity.”

Notes:
When I do this, I’ll actually bring up your paragraph on a screen and we’ll edit—but these are of course only suggested edits! This tends to work best when the author is an active participant, but even so we might end up with a group-think paragraph. You’re not obliged to keep any changes we make.

I always start by reading the paragraph in question aloud, and end by doing a before-and-after reading of the paragraph we’ve focused on. It’s fun, I promise!

15)   The author reenters the discussion at the end

The author summarizes what they’ve heard, asking stray questions, explaining things that people had wondered about. This is of course especially useful if the author has stayed quiet, but the summarizing can be useful in any context. The author might talk about ideas they’ve had during the workshop, or their plans for revision.

16) The workshop leader summarizes the feedback and gives suggestions for next steps

Alternatively, this might happen in a separate conference.

17) Something else

If there’s a way you want to be workshopped and it’s not on this list, let’s make it happen! Please talk to me about it ahead of class, though.

*So much of the work and thinking of dismantling the traditional “silenced” workshop has been done by BIPOC and LGBTQ writers and instructors who have been ill-served by a classroom replication of societal silencing and sidelining. Matthew Salesses and Felicia Rose Chavez have written key books on the subject. Additionally, the American choreographer Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Theory has migrated into the writing world, to great effect; #7 and #11 are from her practice.

I’d love your thoughts! Is there anything major that I’ve missed? Or do you just have any horrible workshop experiences you’d like to share?

For paid subscribers, I’ve put all of the above into a nicely-formatted, downloadable PDF below the paywall. Feel absolutely free to use or share this menu, but I’d love credit and/or blame, please.

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But! But but but! It’s absolutely possible to go too far.

A subscriber sent in the following question:

I sometimes find it challenging to introduce orienting facts in first person or close third*.

…In my opening paragraph, I have a sentence "She let the door to the locker room slam shut" and am torn on whether to specify that it's the varsity basketball locker room, since the character herself thinks of it as the locker room. I guess the trick is to include the orienting clues without breaking the illusion of the character perspective?

*close third = it’s third person, but we only see, sense, know, think what the point of view character does.

While this writer pretty much answers her own question here, there’s a lot to discuss.

What can go wrong

First, let’s talk about orienting details that break the realism of your point of view.

The character wouldn’t be thinking, in the moment, about:

The way they look

Let’s have fun with some really bad writing:

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The doctor’s face grew blurry as my eyes filled with tears. I brushed my auburn hair out of my blue eyes. “He’s really gone?” I asked, woefully.

There are several layers of cringe here, but one of them—perhaps the cringiest—is the shoehorning in of hair and eye color at a moment when that’s the last thing this character would be thinking about.

The historical context

Dylan looked up at the 1873 edifice, built by architect Hawley G. Parkins right after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and wondered if Marissa was still at her desk.

Unless Dylan is running one of those architecture boat tours, this isn’t terribly believable.

Her heels clacked on the wooden sidewalk.

If we're in an era when the sidewalks are made of wood, then they aren’t “wooden sidewalks,” anymore than today’s sidewalks are “concrete sidewalks.” They’re just sidewalks.

Other stuff they already know

Maybe it’s what someone is thinking about:

He walked down the hallway, musing about how this high school had been founded in1962 by the Jesuits, and how it had gone coed only three years ago.

Or maybe it’s the terminology they use:

She sent out an All Points Bulletin (APB) asking everyone to look for a white Ford Focus with Louisiana plates.

Who is being this awkward with the terminology? The cop? Or the author? Clearly the author, trying to communicate with the reader, but then what is the author doing in this story?

My Babcia set down a plate of pierogis, which are boiled dumplings often filled with potato or cheese, and asked how my day was.

Similar to the above, but with the added fraught awkwardness of glossing cultural references as if for an outsider—when that’s not the vibe of the rest of the piece.

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How can we fix it?

Make up a reason for them to think about it

Let’s fix the hair color example above.

I brushed my hair out of my face. I’d dyed it a deep and unnatural auburn the night before, in the hotel bathroom, thinking that my stepfather would appreciate seeing me less haggard than I felt. It seemed so frivolous now; I should have been here instead, sleeping beside his bed.

(A note: Writers use mirrors for this work far too often. A line like “I gazed in the mirror and noticed how tired I looked. I brushed my auburn hair from my blue eyes…” feels awkward and forced. If you’re determined to use a mirror, it has to feel like it’s there for a reason other than telling us what someone looks like. So you might go with “In the bathroom mirror, I ran a damp paper towel under my eyes to fix the smeared mascara. The lady at the makeup counter had been right; black mascara with blue eyes was too much. I’ve never been good at receiving sound advice.” Even so… if you can avoid the mirror, you probably should, just because it’s so overused.)

Find a higher perch

Maybe in general, you don’t actually want to be quite as stuck in your character’s head, and in the moment, as you are.

Maybe there’s the distance of retrospect:

My heels clacked on the sidewalk. The sidewalks were all made of wood back then, something I don’t think about much these days except when I remember that summer in New York.

Or maybe the narrator is telling the story as if to an outsider:

The thing you have to understand about the varsity basketball locker room is that until last year, it was literally a janitor’s closet.

Or maybe there’s a narrator high up above it all, able to fill us in on context at will.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…

I wrote that one just now, on the fly. It’s good, right?

Employ the stealth gloss

You can find infinite ways to fill us in on things through context clues.

“These ones are filled with sauerkraut,” she said, “but I boiled them too long.” I didn’t mind; I love a gooey pierogi.

There was a statue of the Virgin Mary at the end of the hall, by the vending machine—a statue the boys used to molest in various sacrilegious ways, until three years back when there were finally real girls to bother.

She let the locker room door slam shut. It smelled like feet and mold and general varsity basketball sweat in here. She was jealous of the swim team locker room, which at least smelled a little bit like chlorine.

Make your POV character more of an outsider

If there’s a ton that you need to get across about this world, it’s hard if your POV character already knows it really well. Hence Dorothy Gale and Nick Caraway and Alice and Luke Skywalker and Gulliver and Harry Potter and Cady Heron and The Little Prince and and and…

Use another character

It could be an outsider character—someone for your POV character to explain things to—or it could be someone who does the explaining or commenting. This can be particularly useful in letting us see a point of view character physically from the outside.

Rufus showed him around the science wing. “It used to smell worse,” he said, “before the girls came.” Rufus explained that his brother was a senior three years ago, when the school first went coed, and that he’d been one of the kids to protest by tying neckties onto the St. Ignatius of Loyola statue out front.

Or:

The time traveler looked at her in confusion. “The walkways are made of wood?”
”Yes,” she said. “What else would they be made of? Pierogis?”

Okay, that was not my finest. But you get the point.

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A more serious example

Okay, enough with the pierogis! After the paywall, I’ll break down a passage from The Great Believers in which I used several of the methods above (and several I haven’t mentioned yet) to get information across about a POV character.

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The thing is: One of the hardest feats for a writer is to orient the reader (using only words and punctuation!) to the world and context and circumstances of the story. And yet if you aren’t reading a lot of student work, or a lot of lit mag submissions, you likely have no idea that it’s hard at all. Because everything you read (presumably, published work) orients you to the situation in what feels like an effortless way. If you’re reading a published book and you’re lost, it’s quite likely your own fault; you haven’t paid sufficient attention, or you misread something. If an editor is reading something unpublished and is lost, they’ll assume (probably correctly) that it’s the fault of the manuscript; and they’ll toss it aside.

It’s the quickest of dealbreakers—why would I keep reading what I don’t even understand?—and yet it’s the number one issue I see in promising student work, in submissions for classes or contests, in stories languishing in various rejection piles.

So what’s going wrong? Usually, it’s one of the following four problems:

I can picture it, so I assume you can picture it.

I once received a student story in which people were hanging out in pods of some kind, in what was maybe a lab of some kind, in some kind of indeterminate space. (I only share examples from student work with permission, except in this one case, because this student, no matter what advice I gave him, would send me point-by-point rebuttals and was exceedingly rude in every possible way.) When I asked the writer where these characters were, he told me, as if I were incredibly dense, that it should be obvious that they were in outer space. Because on page seven, they are looking at the stars. I pointed out that people can also see the stars from planet earth. He continued to think I must just be a really bad reader.

Usually the writer isn’t this obstinate, but it can take an outside reader to point out that you haven’t explained everything you think you’ve explained. And we aren’t mind readers.

I’m intentionally going to disorient you, because it works well in film.

I give you two people in a car, having a fight about their marriage. You assume they’re alone in the car. Then a couple of pages in, I zoom out and whoa, they’ve actually been in the backseat of a cop car this whole time!

You’ve seen this a million times in movies. I show you something, then we shift the frame and you see the full picture and haha, you’ve been tricked, how fun. It can work on screen, even if 90% of the time it’s still really annoying. But it works because despite that frame shifting, we’re still fundamentally oriented. We’ve been anchored the whole time in the visual and auditory world; we’re not doing that work ourselves. But the written word is different: Minus the literal physical picture and the soundtrack and the actors’ faces, all we have is confusion, plus the sense that you think you’re reallllly clever. Not a great combination.

Plus: In fiction, we’re meant to have access to characters’ thoughts, not just look at them. And those two people in the cop car? They knew they were in the cop car, that whole time. It never left their minds. So why is that information being kept from us?

I’ll fill you in, but really really slowly.

This is different from the above, and more in line with the first problem—because the author often doesn’t realize the reader doesn’t have the full picture.

So, on page 2 I tell you that Amelia is sitting alone, thinking about hiking in the woods. Then on page 4 I mention that Amelia has red hair. You’d pictured black hair, so now you have to re-picture it all. Then on page 8 I mention that Amelia is 7 years old. What?? You had no idea. Then on page 10 I mention that she wags her tail. Oh. Okay… Then I mention that she’s on a rug in the Oval Office.

This is not fun. You’ve put all this effort into meeting the story halfway, into painting the mental pictures that will make it come alive, only to be told, repeatedly, to throw away that work and start again. And is anything gained in the process?

I’m going to be mysterious and cryptic and vague, and this will make you mad with desire to read more.

No, it will not. I promise, it will not.

There’s a difference between intriguing mystery and annoying mystery.

Intriguing mystery is where I see something I don’t fully understand, but I’m assured that I’ll soon figure out what’s going on—e.g., our story opens with a man standing on a street corner in the rain, crying, holding a dictionary. I have no idea why yet, but I’m intrigued. And I know what to picture. I’m oriented.

Annoying mystery is more like our story opens with a Nanoplantus devouring a Pumperlater in the flotilla of Gorgon 6, which of course was dissolving into candles of desire because the eight ball was dead. Or it might look like Janet staring out a window, remembering the day it all happened, that fateful day when Olaf discovered the secret, and if only she’d found him before the thing happened, it might have turned out differently.

In both cases: I have no idea what to picture. My questions aren’t along the lines of Ooh, what happens next? but more What the hell is going on here? Who are these people? Why should I care? In other words, we’re intrigued—enticed into reading more—when we have enough to orient us, enough to look at, so that we’re 95% grounded and only maybe 5% lost.

How do we fix it?

Of course, the problem is that you want to get your story going quickly; you don’t want to give us the whole Wikipedia entry on your world first.

But do note that it’s actually possible to gracefully start your story or novel with the lay of the land. Consider the elegant and sure-handed opening of Richard Russo’s Empire Falls:

Compared to the Whiting mansion in town, the house Charles Beaumont Whiting built a decade after his return to Maine was modest. By every other standard of Empire Falls, where most single-family homes cost well under seventy-five thousand dollars, his was palatial, with five bedrooms, five full baths, and a detached artist's studio. C. B. Whiting had spent several formative years in old Mexico, and the house he built, appearances be damned, was a mission-style hacienda. He even had the bricks specially textured and painted tan to resemble adobe. A damn-fool house to build in central Maine, people said, though they didn't say it to him.

But quite often, a skillful writer will instead choose to fold information into action. Details of context might be inferred, or stated outright, or some combination of the two, but they feel secondary to the action (even as they’re doing a lot of heavy lifting).

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Let’s look at the opening of T. C. Boyle’s novel The Women. I’ve bolded the phrases that give us contextual and orienting information.

I didn’t know much about automobiles* at the time—still don’t*, for that matter—but it was an automobile that took me* to Taliesin* in the fall of 1932*, through a country alternately fortified with trees and rolled out like a carpet to the back wall of its barns, hayricks and farmhouses*, through towns with names like Black Earth, Mazomanie and Coon Rock*, where no one in living memory had ever seen a Japanese face*.

• This must be a while back; automobiles are new, and still being called “automobiles”; and our narrator is a little out of his element. (Note: I’m saying “his” because it does turn out to be a male narrator, although technically we don’t know that yet.)

• “Still don’t” is doing a lot of work here; time has passed, perhaps quite a lot of time, and we’re looking back on this through the lens of retrospect.

• “Me” implies that he’s alone.

• Taliesin might just be a name to you, or you might know that it was Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wisconsin house and studio. You’re fine if you don’t know this, though, because we have so much other orienting information

• It’s the fall of 1932! Look how you can just come right out and say it!

• We can see the country here; it’s rural, it’s beautiful, it’s sparsely populated.

• These towns might mean something to you, or they might just be evocative names.

• Our narrator is Japanese, or of Japanese heritage, and I’m already pretty worried about him.

Now let’s look at the opening of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. This time I’ve bolded stuff, but I’m not going to spell out what everything indicates (you’ve got it, you’re smart); but do note here that some of these details are logistics, and some are more about cultural context.

The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o'clock. Two days before the event was to take place he tacked a note on the door of his little yellow house:

At 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 18th of February, 1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me. I loved you all.
(signed) Robert Smith,
Ins. agent

Mr. Smith didn't draw as big a crowd as Lindbergh had four years earlier—not more than forty or fifty people showed up—because it was already eleven o'clock in the morning, on the very Wednesday he had chosen for his flight, before anybody read the note. At that time of day, during the middle of the week, word-of-mouth news just lumbered along. Children were in school; men were at work; and most of the women were fastening their corsets and getting ready to go see what tails or entrails the butcher might be giving away.

Keep going…

You can do this with any book on your shelf. Pull out five books right now (seriously!) and look for how the author is orienting you. Maybe even attack the pages with a highlighter, marking up every orienting phrase. If you write fantasy or sci-fi, make sure some of those books are in the mix. If you write memoir, look at memoirs.

You’ll find some authors who give you the whole lay of the land, others who fill you in on the fly, others who start with action and then zoom back to tell you about the world. But they’re all doing that work, one way or another.

Also note that most of them are filling us in on a need-to-know basis. In other words: In that Boyle passage above, he is not yet telling us about Frank Lloyd Wright (we don’t need that info yet), but he is filling us in on the Wisconsin countryside, because that’s where the action currently is. He’s not getting ahead of himself, but he’s also not leaving us behind. We tend to do the same when we tell a story socially. “…and then my uncle—well, the thing you need to know about my uncle is that he’s seven feet tall—my uncle walks into the room, and…”

(Update: I got some great questions about this post, and made a Part 2.)

Also…

A reminder that if you’re here because you’re a writer, I’m teaching a six-session online novel class this fall, one you can watch live or as recordings.

Sign up or read more here:

https://www.storystudiochicago.org/classes/classes/the-novelists-toolkit-six-lessons-on-craft-structure-and-tenacity-with-rebecca-makkai/

(Update from the future: The live class has passed, but this link will take you to the on-demand version!)

That’s honest to God what he said. I’m a decaf drinker too (I have the resting pulse of a chipmunk), and what I do, conditioned as a woman, is I order my coffee, making very sure to say “decaf”—and then, when my order is done, I go, “I remembered to say decaf, right?” Even thought I know damn well that I did. And then, once the coffee is on the counter, I say, “And this is decaf?” I know I could be more assertive, but it works.

I use Decaf Man in writing classes as an example of voice—and what voice can convey about character.

What Exactly Do You Mean By Voice?

We might use “voice” to mean narrative voice, especially when there’s a first-person narrator, or a third-person narrator with a lot of personality. Or we might be talking about the ways individual characters speak. Or we might mean commonalities of narrative voice across and author’s work.

That last one is tricky; some authors choose to sound the same from book to book, or just do sound the same, involuntarily or unconsciously. Others find a new narrative voice for each project, one that serves that particular story. Personally, I tend towards the latter—but I’m sure I do always still sound somewhat like myself. In any case, I don’t think this is anything to sweat or overthink, and I’m always flummoxed by new writers earnestly worrying about “finding their voice.” It’s like worrying about picking out what accent you’re going to speak in for your social interactions. I don’t know, just… talk?

But right now I’m talking about the first two meanings of “voice,” and particularly about the ways you might make different choices for different characters, so they don’t all sound exactly the same, and exactly like the narrator, and exactly like the author.

Factors for Differentiating Voice

You might look back at a first draft to discover that all of the characters sound pretty much like you. And that’s fine. But one of your rounds of revisions can involve making solid choices about who is going to talk in certain ways, and then going back through to make it true.

Here are some factors to consider:

Formality

Does a character say “maybe,” or “perhaps”? “Hey,” or “I beg your pardon”? “Can’t” or “cannot”? Do they speak in complete or incomplete sentences (“Are you alright?” versus “You okay?”)? Does a character use slang? (And if so, is it pretty standard-issue and unconscious, or performative?)

Length of sentence

Some people ramble. Some get to the point. Some sound like the lovechild of Hemingway and Tarzan. Some people shoot out incredibly long and complex but grammatically correct sentences. Some leave a never-ending trail of incomplete ones.

Emphasis (italics, repetition)

Without overdoing it, you might have a character talk like this, and they might get really excited about things.

Or they might repeat things for emphasis, just for emphasis, which could be nicely and subtly—subtly!—telling of character. In real life, people repeat themselves quite a lot—and this can be redundant and deathly on the page. But used just for one character, and/or used as a sharp tool, it can be incredibly effective. Consider Hemingway’s Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?

Punctuation

Some of my students recently noted that Mrs. Croft in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent” has only one line of dialogue that doesn’t end with either an exclamation point or a question mark. That might be irritating elsewhere, but it’s perfect for that particular character. Example: “Sit down, boy!” She slapped the space beside her.

Tics

We all do have them. Think of your teachers and professors, and what you used to do to imitate them. I had a wonderful professor in grad school who would end just about every sentence with a drawn out “Noooo?” I dated a guy in college who needed to find three examples for everything. I never told him he did this, because it was too much fun to wait and see if he’d do it. He always did it.

Politeness

Decaf Man did not have this going for him. Some of us do.

Swearing / crassness

Not all people swear, and not all people swear in the same way. I’ve gone through my own manuscripts before deciding who’s liberal with an F-bomb, who expresses disbelief with “Jesus,” who says “your sorry ass,” who swears creatively, who comes out with an old-fashioned “damnit.” The latter is something I don’t think I’ve ever said myself, which means it’s not what would instinctively come out as I write; but it’s exactly right for a certain character.

Do note that a little bit of swearing goes a long way on the page; if you get anywhere close to the amount of swearing that some real people do, you’ll read like a seventeen-year old who just discovered you were allowed to be edgy in Creative Writing class.

Figurative language

Some people speak literally, some use stock or cliché similes (“It hit me like a ton of bricks”), some are constantly seeing and expressing connections between unlike things, some use figurative language that seems a part of their dialect and/or worldview (George, in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men: Well, you keep away from her, cause she’s a rattrap if I ever seen one)… I’m delighted to discover that someone wrote a whole scholarly article on An Analysis of the Metaphorical Speech of H. Ross Perot.

Ornamentation

Some people accentuate their speech with descriptive adjectives, with poetic description, with lovely words. Make sure that this is a character choice, though, and not a matter of you, the author, constantly trying to pretty up your language.

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Signature words

Certain words might only belong to one character. I do NOT mean a catchphrase (like Little Orphan Annie’s “Leapin’ lizards!”) but a subtle word with resonances. In my novel The Hundred-Year House, I realized in a late revision that I had the word “poor” everywhere… a subconscious inclusion, but fitting for a novel that was in many ways about class. I went back through and took it out for all but one character, and then let that character say it even more often. It was sentences like “I don’t know what that poor girl was thinking” or “and think of poor Jennifer, out there with that husband.” Those are absolutely not examples from my book, because I’m not going to go hunting for them right now, but that was the gist of it.

Hesitation or directness

Some people get right to the point; others beat around the bush. There’s a huge difference between “Can we expect you at the party?” and“So, are you—will you be at the party, do you think?” and “Are you, like, coming to the party?”

Too much hedging and hesitation, and it becomes painful to read. But when there’s none, especially when you’ve given a character a lengthy monologue, it’s no longer believable as human speech.

Clarity

Some people are able to express themselves clearly and easily. Others might speak elliptically, or have trouble saying what they mean. Consider the difference between “I heard that there’s a plan for an improved highway connecting Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan” and “I saw this thing where they’re going to build a road. Like, between Wisconsin.”

Grammar

Grammar and syntax can be affected by education level, region, racial context, class, fluency, and intention. To what extent does a character have a mastery of the grammar of those around them, and to what extent do they care to match it?

Also, note that many of us write a lot more properly than we speak. (I would never write “a whole nother” (except right now), but I say it all the time.) If a character constantly speaks with perfect grammar, that is an authorial choice—and depending on the character, it might not be a believable one.

Vocabulary

Similar to the above… There’s the question of how many SAT-level words a character might use, but you can also consider regionalisms and life experience. Consider the difference between a character who talks about going to the “john” versus one who’s headed to the “potty” or the “crapper” or the “restroom” or the “little girl’s room” or the “powder room” or the “latrine.” Having an American character talk about “queuing up” might suggest either time spent abroad or pretension, or both. When your character says “anyhoo,” it tells us a whole lot.

Humor

Even in a comic novel or story, it’s a mistake to make all the characters funny, and to make them all funny in the same way; it becomes quickly clear that it’s just the author’s own sense of humor coming through. Pick who is funny, and in what way they’re funny: sarcasm, striking figurative language, off-color comments, brutal honesty, silliness, puns (please don’t), flights of fancy, mockery…

Accents

(And I’m including not just regional and foreign accents but also speech impediments, unusual pronunciation mannerisms, drunkenly slurred speech, etc. here too.)

This one is tricky, which is why I’m putting it last. You want the reader to hear the voice as you do, but transcribing an accent phonetically onto the page can be at best distracting and at worst offensive.

Phonetic spellings often reek of the 19^th century, and can evoke the racism of books in which phonetic spelling suggests a connection with illiteracy. (Think of books in which the word “was” is spelled “wuz” only for the Black characters. There is literally no other way to pronounce that word. So what on earth does that spelling accomplish? Or think of the antisemitic portrait of The Great Gatsby’s Meyer Wolfsheim and his “gonnegtions.”)

It’s not that you can never spell a word differently to show the way someone pronounces it. I’ve represented a German accent by put a character’s W’s as V’s (“vhat do you mean?” etc.), but then found it so annoying when there were too many in close proximity that I bent over backwards to give her words without W’s. It felt like a strange improv game.

What’s just as effective in most cases is to rely instead on syntax. Consider a southern waitress asking “Y’all fixin’ a eat sumpn?” versus “Hungry, darling?” or, perhaps, “Hungry, darlin’?” The latter two are far less distracting but still evoke her accent.

You might suggest the accent of someone newer to English through syntax as well; your character might say things like “It wonders me” or “We find three dog.” (Do research the mistakes a speaker of a specific language would make in English. YouTube can be a great source for this kind of eavesdropping.)

A child might say “Have fun at Texas!”; a small child might say “I pick you up,” meaning the opposite, or “Mommy go store” (but certainly might say “breafakst” or “pasghetti” as well). My nephew at age 3, was tried to tell me that his guinea pig, Squeaky (pronounced Ee-ee) had died; what he said was “No mo Ee-ee. Ee-ee uppy hi Jesus!” If I were putting that in a book, I’d render it exactly as I did here.

Do note that as with “darlin,’” above, I think it’s significantly less distracting to use commonly accepted casual spellings like ‘cuz, gonna, kinda, anyways—the ones you might type in an email.

After the pay wall, as a thank-you (OMG thank you!) to the paid subscribers who help justify the time I spend on this newsletter, you’ll find the game I have my students do as an exercise voice. I love it because it’s appropriate for both the most beginner and the most advanced writers…

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Here are six ways to name your characters, only one of which might result in a lawsuit, plus several ways not to, and a common question answered.

1: Flip at Random

The obvious. Phone books, yearbooks, baby name books, et cetera. But the key here is that you’re waiting for the name that’s just slightly weird, the name that comes alive and suggests a certain kind of person.

I was flummoxed for years by a character in my second novel (the one you haven’t read) whom I’d named Steve. Really that was half the problem. Steve is a great name, but it wasn’t a name that carried a ton of weight for me. In a moment of burn-it-all-down, I decided I’d start by changing his name. I was at the library, and I started scanning the shelves for great author names. Nothing worked, but then I saw this big glass case that was labeled “Case 1,” and I decided the guy’s name would be Case. It suggested someone preppy, someone maybe kind of empty, someone who grew up in an atmosphere in which that would not be considered a strange name. Then I suddenly had his whole character and knew everything that would happen to him, including getting attacked by bees.

2: Keep Track of Great Names

Just always have a page going in your notebook or in your notes app. Years ago, I wrote down the name “Željko” out of the end credits of a Simpsons episode, and then a few years later I wrote a whole short story called “The Disappearance of Miranda Željko.” I would link to it here, but the online journal that published it since closed down, so it doesn’t exist anymore except (I hope to God) somewhere in my email attachments.

3: Freak Out Someone You Don’t Know

I’ve never done this, but somebody needs to. Go on Facebook. Click through to a friend of a friend of a friend—or, better yet, find a random person who attended a literary event within the past year, because this is way more fun if you pick a reader. Maybe someone around the same age, from around the same place, as the people you’re writing about. Now pick all the names you need off that one person’s friend list. And then imagine their absolute confusion and descent into solipsism when they find your novel and discover that literally everyone in it has the same name as a person they know.

4: Auction Off Naming Rights

This is what I did (sort of) with my latest novel. It was Amazon Prime day in the summer of 2019, and I wanted to do something to support independent bookstores instead… So I offered on Twitter that if you ordered my previous book from an indie bookstore*, and showed me the receipt, I’d name a character after you.

Here was the original tweet:

I ended up with about 20 names, and they were SUCH good names. (I should note that I only did this because it was a book about looking back on high school, and I knew I’d need a ton of very-minor-character names anyway, and they could be just about any kind of name. You really can’t do this if you’re writing a book about 18th century France and then you have to incorporate someone named Jayden Goldberg-Chow.)

Anyway, I promised that these characters would be super minor, but then a couple of times, things got out of hand and the characters grew and grew. I had to get back in touch with a couple of people (Hi, Beth Docherty!) to check if it was cool to still attach their name to a much more prominent character.

I’ve also seen people do this for charity (i.e., to support a silent auction for a literary organization, an author will auction off naming rights to a character or a restaurant or a street). You could also try to work this in reverse; tell people that if they don’t pay you money, you’ll put their full name right into your novel.

5: The Magical Baby Name Tracker

There’s this amazing linguist named Laura Wattenberg whose book The Baby Name Wizard was my bible when I was name-hunting for my own kids. She doesn’t just give you the meaning (half those meanings in baby name books are made up anyway, I swear; not every single name can mean “precious gift from God”), but actually analyzes why names get popular, which names are about the peak, what names will sound really dated in forty years.

Her original website has shut down, but she’s replicated its famous baby name tracker on her new one, Namerology.com, and while I apologize for all the time you’re about to lose messing around there, it’s SO useful. You’re able to track the popularity of any name over time, find kindred names, see discussion boards about individual names… Honestly, you might never eat or use the bathroom again.

6: Give Us Something At Least Slightly Memorable

If you’re not writing in serial like Charles Dickens, you don’t need to make every name something like Barnacle Fishblubber just so we’ll remember it when we pick up the next section three months later. But there should at least be some there there, something to hold onto. This can be a little harder for male names, or at least for males of the generation before everyone was named Sandopher or Wilder or Colt. So you might go for a last name (I’m on board with a guy everyone calls Green or Walsh or Moskowitz); or for a double name (James Avery, or John Michael), even outside of the American South; or a nickname, explained or unexplained (Chef, Peanut, Jacko, Fred-Ex); or a name from a culture distinct from most of the characters you’re writing about (Dragomir! I dare you!)…

Things not to do:

• Don’t let any names be too similar. Don’t give us a Luke and a Lucas. You also don’t need a Dave and a Dan. We’re not gonna keep track of that shit. You might not even want a June and a Rose. Yes, they start with different letters, but they telegraph the same generation, the same feel, the same allusion to nature…

• You’re not Nathaniel Hawthorne, and you’re not writing to please your tenth-grade English teacher—so you don’t need your names to mean things, unless you want to suggest that the character’s parents chose the name for the meaning. We don’t need Goodman Merriwether, and we don’t need Loki Damon, and we don’t need Barbie Vandervander (which doesn’t actually mean what it sounds like, but we all know what you’re getting at).

• Don’t steal a name from a random book spine without first Googling the person. I found the name Jake Austen on a book and used it in The Great Believers because… I mean, it’s a great name. Then after publication I learned that I know the guy’s brother, which was a little awkward.

• Honestly, don’t use any name without Googling it first. In the original draft of a short story, I named a Romanian musician “Zamfir”; my husband fortunately cracked up and explained that anyone even slightly older than me would instantly think of this guy:

  

  I very much dodged the pan flute bullet there.

• Don’t use names from a culture you don’t know well without running the names by someone who does know that culture well. If you name two brothers Paco and Francisco, people who know Spanish are going to laugh at you, or at least be deeply confused. Your helpful friend can also keep you from naming a character something bizarrely old-fashioned, or can get you beyond the most obvious choices. (In my experience, fully 90% of Hungarian men in English-language books are unnecessarily named László, maybe because it’s easy to pronounce.)

A Question:

Do I have to get permission from someone before using their name in a book?

Well… It depends on whether a) you know the person, and b) you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, and c) whether they’re famous.

Keeping in mind that I’m not a lawyer:

If they’re famous, they’re fair game for fiction or nonfiction. Behold this novel that Lydia Millet once wrote:

If you happen to use the name of a non-famous person you don’t know, you’re also absolutely fine. Otherwise, any time someone named a character Sarah Johnson, they could get sued by anyone on the planet named Sarah Johnson. Fortunately, that’s not. the case.

If you know the person and give other true, identifying characteristics (their place of work, their address) and especially if it’s an unflattering portrayal, you’d probably better check with your lawyer first.

Similarly, if you’re writing memoir and giving real names of non-famous people, your lawyer or your press’s lawyer will likely want to get clearance first.

But say there’s a name you’re obsessed with. For instance: I keep passing a storefront for an interior decorator named Soledad Zitzewitz. I cannot get this name out of my head. It’s amazing. If I used it, I wouldn’t want to make her an interior decorator from outside Chicago. But I could make her a doctor from Florida, especially since I’ve never met her.

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*What was that footnote about?

Speaking of indie bookstores…

Chicago’s absolutely wonderful Exile in Bookville is suffering this weekend because the city has been sold to Nascar and no one can enter their building. They’re losing one of their busiest weekends of sales…

Online orders are open, though, and you really should treat yourself to something wonderful, in my opinion.