-
Honesty in Writing Fiction
Is honesty a concern in writing fiction?
Most people would probably say no. It’s supposed to all be made up. Out of your head. Figments of imagination. If it’s not, then it’s not fiction–it’s nonfiction.
Beginning writers often write about real events that happened to them–and defend themselves when told it’s not plausible by saying, “But that really happened to me!”
So what do we mean when we say we want honesty in fiction?
Well, often what has happened is that the writer has set up a character to be a certain sort of person–honest, villainous, seductive, dogmatic, whatever their defining trait is–and then the writer has those characters do something that readers literally describe as “out of character”. The honest person may lie. The villainous character may rescue a homeless kitten. The seductive character may get to the edge with a seductee and upon finding out she’s married, turn virtuous and say no to sleeping with her.
Often when the reader gets taken out of the story by someone acting “out of character”, it’s because they writer didn’t draw the character as a fully rounded complex individual. I like to write characters where a reader may have no idea what the character might do next–they’re interesting, but often dangerous, just as an unpredictable person might be in “real life”.
Flat characters are actually hard to write about in an interesting way. They may have only one defining trait, and therefore their path is fixed. The honest character will always tell the truth no matter what the consequences. The villainous character would always lie even when there’s no clear benefit to doing so.
Whatever world you create–whether your characters live in the middle of Mississippi or on the edges of the galaxy–readers often want writers to follow the rules the writers create. If a writer builds a world where the atmosphere is unbreathable–until the main character steps foot on it and needs to survive without his spacesuit, which the writer had fail upon atmospheric entry to heighten the dramatic tension–the writer better have a good explanation why that character stays alive that makes sense in the world the writer has created–beyond simply that the writer wants him to survive.
One of the most effective techniques to create dramatic tension around what a character may or may not do is foreshadowing–dropping small hints about how the honest guy is only honest about one aspect of his life but not about another. Another is immediate flashbacking following the character’s uncharacteristic action–where the reader sees what the character did when it was a kid faced with the same type of choice–what did the character do then? Is that character going to make the same choice, or a different one? Why?
Robertson Davies, one of Canada’s leading authors of the twentieth century, once said, “Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground, not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.” If a writer’s world follows certain rules, the writer must be honest with the reader as to why the roles are there–and why they get broken. If a character is rounded, complex and human–those rules can be bent a bit– if and only if the writer is sure to point out how said bend serves the story and is not as “out of character” as the reader suspects.
-
Why Do You Write What You Write?
I’ve struggled with this question now for almost twenty years.
When I wrote fiction in my first stint in graduate school, I took only one fiction workshop class. The stories I wrote there reflected a few preoccupations I had at the time that continue in my writing today–an affinity for love triangles, characters with southern accents, watching the results of a single action as it unfolded across time.
But they were pretty typical for juvenilia, often not-so-loosely based on people I knew and drawn from some of my own circumstances: one story I remember was a what-if of what might have happened if I had not reconciled with my longtime boyfriend, and another was taken almost literally from life from an incident when I was in high school of me trying to defend a kid from being bullied–and how I wished it had turned out. But–a most important distinction–they had happy endings.
Not so with the fiction that spilled out of me after my youngest child was born. Still Waters was so dark and desperate that I scared myself putting it on the page. I really wondered what had happened to me, that I was writing something that could not end happily–ever. I tried. Having Wendy go back to Ray seemed like a soul-death for her, but having her leave Ray for Judd resulted in something even worse–signing up for what could have been hell on earth.
All my fiction has been that way ever since. Very dark moods, gritty plots, morally gray or actively wretched characters. The truly miserable thing is that I couldn’t stand to read such stories written by someone else. I tried reading some books in my freelance career that were classed as Southern Gothic and wound up throwing them against the wall–literally in at least one case. I enjoyed uplifting stories and nonfiction, where I could learn something.
Where did all of this darkness come from?
It was a long time before I faced down the answer. I remembered all the tales my relatives had told of their hardscrabble lives. Every cheating song that played on country radio the summer of 1983 when we didn’t have the money to replace the lightning-struck television and listened to the radio all day, every day. Every divorce among my cousins. Every untimely, early death in my community from drunk-driving teenagers, suicidal housewives, or gun-toting men.
Desperation and sorrow was my birthright and my history. But even through it all, we–my family, myself, my characters–endured. Imperfect solutions to problems stemming from dark secrets–that was my “stuff”.
So I don’t apologize for it anymore. It’s just life. it ends, continues, begins, endures. The cushiest, most stress-free life you can imagine–it still ends. We all have to die. We’re all equal at the edge of the River Styx. I write about people who live because they’re afraid of what happens when they die.
What do you write about?
-
Numbers Update
Total queries sent–48
Presses that sent explicit rejections–20
Presses that have ghosted me–9
Presses where it’s still being considered–19
Presses to still send to–10
Oof.
I’m not depressed. I’m not mad. But I’m sidling up next to being resigned to the book’s eventual fate.
It’s not been without its supporters. One press was kind enough to say that they enjoyed it–but they had a full slate of books already. One press noted they are waiting on a final decision from their executive director.
At least I know I tried. And I will keep trying until I run out of ideas.
-
Professional Jealousy
I had kind of a bad week the week before last as far as how I felt about my writing. One author in a writers’ group I am in posted the story behind her book deal. I am trying to be charitable and think that she was just posting encouragement. She talked about how long she had been writing in her spare time and how she’d always wanted to write a book, and she got laid off at her job. She decided to take the plunge and try to do a book on a volunteer passion project of hers.
She consulted with another person in this writers’ group, and together they crafted a nonfiction book proposal. Within a month, she had a literary agent. Within six months, she sold the book at auction for a six-figure advance to a Big Five publisher. She hasn’t even written the book yet; she asked for encouragement going forward.
I am trying so hard to be joyful for her and not think of myself.
But it’s so hard to.
I have been kicking Hurricane Baby around for almost twenty years. I got an agent fairly rapidly, and I tried the big New York presses first. No dice. Now I have refined it several times over and am trying to work with the small presses. So far the query letter got some hits, but I’ve collected polite rejections after that. I still have about twenty possibilities for it, but I’m starting to think that maybe it’s just not going to happen for me–a feeling that reading this story intensified.
But as Anne Lamott says, I am comparing my insides to someone else’s outsides. It probably wasn’t as easy as it seems for this person. On social media, you only see the end result. In this blog, I’m trying to counter the myth of the “overnight success” by being transparent about what this process is like. I believe in telling all like it is. And right now, it’s uncomfortable to sit with the idea that Hurricane Baby might never be all I want it to be.
But all I can do for myself is press forward. And press forward I will. It was hard to pick myself back up and send the book off to yet another press this week. But I did it. And I will wait and see what happens with it. Wish me well. And I will take heart in the fact that I have my own tribe cheering me on, here and elsewhere.
Persist. That the word of the month for me. I hope it can be yours as well.
-
Time Off
Taking a vacation to regroup this week. Will write next week on a perennial pitfall for writers: professional jealousy. Stay tuned!
-
Watch Out!
I already addressed in a couple of posts about how writers can get victimized monetarily by publishing companies that charge fees for any number of services they offer their authors–and my one exception to paying presses was the fee that presses may ask for when they run contests for manuscripts once or twice a year.
But new reporting has come out that some presses are charging ALL submitters with fees, and that these certain publishers are owned by known bad actors in the indie publishing world. Read the full article here:
I’m transparent enough to admit that I sent Hurricane Baby to two of these publishers. I’m out about $50 to people who may not have even been interested in publishing anyone, much less me. One publisher on this list I withdrew from very early in my querying process after reading a Writers Beware post from Victoria Strauss, an invaluable member of the literary community who researches and collates publishing scams and the scammers that run them.
The other I withdrew my book from after reading this article.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I looked at reputable organizations to find these publishers–various literary magazines maintain databases of small presses. and these trusted publications never had anything indicating that these presses were in any way suspicious. We’re on our own, folks.
Just goes to show that some people will do anything to make a buck. And others will be silent about these bad actors and are therefore complicit in their schemes.
The takeaway? Research, research, research. Make sure you know something about who you are sending your work to. Check them in Google. Scan for their names on Twitter and other social media. Give their website a detailed look–one way I weed out publishers is if I have never heard of any of their authors. If a place gives you bad vibes for any reason, don’t submit there.
The only way we can choke out these people is to decline to be a part of their income stream in order to make our point–that it’s wrong to take advantage of people.
-
Confession Time
I am not keeping up with some of my resolutions.
I am not reading very much, and I’m not working on my fiction project, either.
I have just been so tired when I finish work, so I want to do something mindless after work instead of concentrating on reading and writing. I think some of it is a lack of motivation due to the bad weather we’ve had. The forecast is promising to get warmer and warmer as we go throughout February though, so I am looking forward to an improvement on that front.
I think some of the lack of motivation of particularly writing on my fiction project is that I’m still getting rejections on Hurricane Baby with pretty consistent regularity. I went back and checked on a lot of my submissions from September, and many of those are rejections (I think) because I never heard any response back. Many of them say no response after three months is a negative response. :(. So.
That makes 20 rejections thus far.
I’ve not given up hope on Hurricane Baby–I have yet another email ready to go out on February 15 to yet another press. I still have 14 total I plan to send to. But a lack of response to it has dampened my enthusiasm to work on another manuscript.
But (and this is a mindset I am learning to embrace) the sunset of tomorrow is not the end of the world–it’s barely the beginning.
What do I mean by that?
My youngest daughter leaves home for college in August of this year. I have resolved to wait until then to get back into the fiction writing. She will have moved on to her new life at college, and I will have more time during the week to devote to writing, what with the end of going to her school activities and such. And I may need to immerse myself into something new to take my focus off of missing her.
I do plan to continue the blog with updates on Hurricane Baby (especially the play coming up this spring!) and my querying journey. I also plan to write a few craft essays to post here as well. So I’m going to still be writing here, on my other blog projects, etc. I’ve been at this too long to give up altogether.
But the time just may not be right at this particular second. That’s okay. Later is fine. Totally fine. I will keep reading, living, experiencing. That can only enrich my fiction–when the time is right for me to take it back up.
I hope you can stick with me on the journey. Thanks to all who read and write and encourage us writers in our dreams.
-
Playing with ChatGPT
So I decided to be one with the cool kids and see how well ChatGPT worked. I had it do several blog posts “in the style of Julie Liddell Whitehead”.
I was not expecting much, and that’s what I got.
It produces clean copy. But it’s very airy copy. No substance, all glitz. i asked it to write a blog post “about the book Hurricane Baby”. It gave it a glowing review that–oddly enough–sounded a lot like reviews handed out for books on Amazon. No specifics, no details, just airy copy how what a wonderful book it was! (I also got a lot of discussion about all the places that had interviewed me about the book and all the accolades it had won) Pretty good for a book that hasn’t been published yet. 🙂
Apparently it’s been trained to sound authoritative by using a lot of words. I tried getting paragraphs in the style of some other authors (like John Grisham and Anne Lamott) and got much the same results. It would not be hard to imagine it being written by a real person, as long as that person’s last writing class had been Business Communication in college. As far as imitating other authors, it didn’t have much of a range beyond a few big names.
I think what will always distinguish great writing from just good writing is specificity: details. quirky characters who sound like actual people, a sense of place. If you want boilerplate language, I think ChatGPT may can deliver that error-free. But the sense that an actual person is behind the writing? That’s up to us, the writers, to keep our writing fresh and exciting–and real.
-
Writing Is Hard
Not to sound all fuddy-duddy and get-off-my-lawn-ish, but I don’t think some people understand how hard writing is.
You have to do so many things well to write well.
You have to be able to research your topic. You have to know how to research your topic. You have to be committed to researching your topic, despite all the challenges that may be thrown at you. You can research by reading books, talking to people knowledgeable about the topic, doing internet searches, poring over primary sources and records. And each research method has its own skill set to master before it can be effective.
Gone are the days of the copy pencil and paper and two-finger typing on a manual typewriter. Soon the qwerty keyboard may be on its way out the door as well. Adapting to the speeded-up pace of publishing is a must. Adapting to technology is a must. Adapting to your physical environment is a must, whether you work in a dedicated space in your home, or a coffeeshop, or a busy office environment. Writing is a physical act, not for the fainthearted.
You have to be able to recall, synthesize, and highlight information that is important to the reader’s understanding. A plain recitation of the facts is NOT writing. Beguiling, seducing, and entertaining the reader is what writing is all about. Sometimes it feels like you have to trick your reader into understanding what you want to get across; other times you have to trick yourself into believing that anyone cares. The writer’s job is to make them care, even if they aren’t interested.
It’s lonely–writing as a group activity is almost never good writing. It’s isolating–often the writer needs time and space to just think about the work, rather than talking about it to someone or bombarding their consciousness with noise. It’s often excruciating–when the perfect word or turn of phrase is just out of reach of the writer’s mind. It’s alienating–the writer has to believe in themselves when others wonder when the writer is going to give up this obsession and get a job.
But if you show up and do the work, magic can happen. That’s the writer’s payoff–not money, not fame, not bestseller status. The magic of a craft practiced well is the best payoff there is.
-
Read-Thru
So I didn’t post last night, because I was doing something kind of nerve-wracking.
I sat down and read Hurricane Baby again, all the way through, from start to finish.
It was so gratifying. because the stories held up to scrutiny.
I had wondered if when I read it again, I would discover lots of problems. Continuity problems, poor story construction, tone-deaf dialogue–I was prepared for the worst: that I would see that it really wasn’t in my best interest to publish it.
That’s not what I saw reading it.
Are there places that could be better? Probably. One place in particular I thought I might need to add a scene that is referenced early on but not played out.
Typos? Yep. But not nearly as many as I was afraid of.
But the stories still felt true. I’m sure if someone picks it up, it will need to undergo some revisions. But the stories are there: meaningful, impactful, and oh so human.
That was a good feeling. I wish i could bottle it for when I find myself doubting my skills and talent. Hurricane Baby might not be Great Literature, with capital G and capital L.
But it’s good. And right know, that knowledge is enough.
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Julie Liddell Whitehead 