Category Archives: Contract with the Reader

For Beginning Writers – Conflict Creates Story

03 Wednesday Jun 2020

Posted by in Action in Fiction, Beginning, Contract with the Reader, Creative Process/Craft, Starting a Novel, Technicalities

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Without conflict, there isn’t story. Conflict is when your characters are established and then bad things happen to them. The more bad things the better. Conflict drives action. Conflict molds characters. Simply having a character go about their routine isn’t action, isn’t story, and won’t generate conflict.

Write conflict into your story as early as you can. Write conflict into the first line if at all possible. Your reader will not be able to help but read the second sentence if there’s compelling conflict in the first.

Go re-read your favorite short stories or novels. Conflict is the engine. Sometimes it’s psychological and has physical results. Sometimes it’s physical and has psychological results. Regardless, the conflict is what drives the plot forward and alters the characters. And if the plot sags, conflict is what injects energy once again.

Solely for the Writer’s Use

26 Wednesday Feb 2020

Posted by in Contract with the Reader, Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer

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Earlier this week I was working on the second draft of a chapter of a manuscript. As I wrote I inserted bits right into the text [THAT LOOKED LIKE THIS. NOTES ABOUT THE DRAFT FOR RESEARCH OR FOR THE NEXT DRAFT].

This has been a long-standing habit for me in early drafts, but this time, as I did it, I had a realization. An aspect of the writing process crystalized for me, as it occasionally does.

Our tendency is to think early and often of the reader and to try to make a piece take shape as soon as possible, to take a form that will entice a reader. While noble, I think this is an error and a risk to the process.

The first three drafts of any piece of writing are strictly for the writer. Solely for the writer’s use. These early drafts teach the writer what the piece needs, what form it is to become, what elements need to be included––and what elements need to be excluded.

It is not until the fourth or fifth draft that the writer should begin to consider the contract with a reader. Not until this point, as these later drafts are created, is the piece starting to stand on its own. Only then is it capable of withstanding the scrutiny necessary to bring it before a reader. Only then does the writer understand it well enough to invite the reader to collaborate.

First Readers

28 Wednesday Aug 2019

Posted by in Contract with the Reader, Creative Process/Craft, Debut Novel, Writing Life

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As advance copies of The Confessions of Adam go out and are read, I’ve entered this strange new land. I’ve ceased to interact with the words on the page and am now listening to readers’ perspectives of the novel. Listening to the first members of my audience—my first readers—as they make the book their own.

This is a new skill. 

Like learning to talk about any major event in your life, it isn’t simply the vocabulary and the formation of concepts and constructs for thinking about it, but also learning what to say and what not to say and—in this case—slowly forming the language needed to comment while doing all I can to support the reader as they have their experience. 

I am humbled and amazed that a story I have written is functioning at a level that causes readers to think about relationships, motivations, and choices. I am learning, not what I have written, but all that what I have written can potentially mean. 

It is a strange new land. But like every stage of this adventure, it is proving to be a gift.

First Copies

17 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Contract with the Reader, Debut Novel, Role of the Writer, Writing Life

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At a conference last week my publisher had a book table and sold the first pre-release copies of my debut novel, The Confessions of Adam. About a dozen copies went home with readers from various locations across the US. 

It is surreal to think that at any given time a stranger somewhere could be reading your novel. I have moved the work from that silent and solitary place of daily writing, through months of maneuvering a manuscript toward publication, to this new and foreign stage of observing from afar unknown readers as they react to a book with my name on it.

I am reminded of the axiom ‘the story must stand on its own.’ I’m not sitting next to each reader giving them a synopsis of the novel or telling them how I came to write the story. They’ve never seen my name before. I’m an unknown. I’ve nothing to do with the reader’s experience. The book is now theirs to complete, to read and to imagine.

The story must stand on its own—while I write the next one.

What Were the Questions I Was Asking?

16 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by in Contract with the Reader, Creative Process/Craft, Debut Novel, Role of the Writer

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Earlier this month I asked myself why I wrote my debut novel, The Confessions of Adam (Bold Vision Books, 2019). I realized that I’d thought quite a bit about the ‘themes’ of the novel – the guiding concerns of the work – but I’d never written them down.
So I did. Here’s the list.
Central concerns/questions that drove me to write The Confessions of Adam:
What actually happened in Eden and after? I was drawn into the Hebrew narrative. I was a reader first.
How does personal memory work? Is even the most trustworthy of memories trustworthy?
How might Adam have defended himself – long after the events of Eden?
Why is this narrative so unexplored fictionally in this form?
So what are some answers that I came to while writing?
Here you go:
Reading the narrative of Genesis 2-4 was the greatest driver to writing it. If I hadn’t found it compelling as a reader I could never have written the story. There is also a creative event that happens quite early in the writing of something like this. You come to believe what you’re writing. Of course you know it’s fiction, but you come to believe that whatever happened, the telling you’ve settled on is closest to the unknowable facts.
Our memories (what and how we recall events) is a complex calculus. Our memories are shaped by our biases and reshaped each time we revisit them. Like putty, we pull at certain aspects of our memories and repress others. All memories are flawed and not to be trusted blindly. All memories need interrogation.
We know there is the defense, the reaction, that pops up in the moments immediately following a failure. There is also the entirely separate series of defenses that are riddled out in the weeks, months, and years following the event(s) in question. These short and long-term defenses are arrived at very differently. I wanted to look at these side-by-side with Adam.
The primary reason is because it is so familiar and hard to get at. A passable construct has to be put in place in order to peel back all the familiarity and gaze afresh on these events. And putting together such a construct isn’t easy.
What questions will my readers have after they finish the novel?
Those are the more interesting questions.

My Fixation With Flash Fiction

02 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by in Contract with the Reader, Role of the Writer

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It all started last November at 2nd and Charles, a bookstore in Hagerstown, Maryland. It was there, that my friend Al Clingan handed me a book he’d discovered just moments before – 420 Characters by Lou Beach. I finished reading it today. I’ve dipped into it once every few days for six months, like some sort of fictional candy dish.
Several years ago I read MicroFiction, the anthology edited by Jerome Stern. I remember being attracted to but not hooked by the form. But Beach’s book has caught me, shaped my current writing project, and caused me to lift my snout and root out other important flash fiction collections. Here is the flash in my reading stack (thanks to recommendations from Sarah Manguso): Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon, Novels in Three Lines by Felix Feneon, and The Voice Imitator by Thomas Bernhard.
What is it about this form? Is it the simple, concrete, tight prose that the form demands? Is it the pent up energy, the speed at which the fuse burns and the way it leaves you to imagine so very much of the result?
And yet, for these same reasons, it is an uphill climb to write. The cutting and shaping that one must be willing to inflict on one’s prose requires new depths of heart and concentration. The collaboration with your future reader is taken to new intimacies as well, as you trust them to slow down, care for each word, and thoughtfully conjure all that you’ve left outside the frame. And then there is the ordering of the pieces. I’ve got nothing. You will want to do what I’ve done – ask your poet friends. They know that drill.

Reader’s Group

06 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by in Contract with the Reader, Reading as a Writer

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I’d never been to a reader’s group. The last Saturday evening in August – I imagined folding chairs and a clamshell of store-bought cookies. Bottles of water, maybe some coffee.
I was wrong.
There was food and drink. Really good food and drink. A wide variety of delights – homemade and homegrown, savory and sweet. (I shouldn’t have eaten dinner before I went.) And the seating was permanent, complete with throw pillows and end tables.

In writer’s groups/workshops, we approach the work we’re discussing in an effort to make it better at doing whatever it is trying to do. We strive to support the work according to the author’s intent. Our focus is on production, not consumption. We’re in design and construction. We might talk about a potential reader response, but we’re focused on the process and mechanics of creating good writing. It is a technical conversation. This is the world I know.

Then I went to the reader’s group. Immediately they began to personalize the book we were discussing. These readers were educated, successful in their careers, and sure of their perspectives. They talked about how the book related to their own experience and about the author’s effort – whether it rung true based on what they’d seen and lived. Sometimes they talked about the book and sometimes the book was simply a starting point to talk about larger issues or personal concerns. They sought to apply the book to their worldview and determine if there were any previously unseen rocks they needed to kick over due to having read it.

Hearing readers discuss writing was like being on the inside, in the back room, behind the closed door. It was imagining, for a couple of hours, what it would be like to be only a reader – the joy of consuming writing. And it was thinking about my own work and how it might fare in such a setting. It was to sit with those who might be my readers someday. And listen.
I plan to go back to the reader’s group.
Please don’t tell them that I’m a mole.

Simon Says Avoid Teleology

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by in Contract with the Reader, Qualities of Good Fiction, Role of the Writer

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In the preface to his book Jerusalem, Simon Sebag Montefiore states, “I have tried to avoid teleology – writing history as if every event were inevitable.”
My second novel-in-progress deals with the life of a historic character. Under the form that I’ve given it, it is essentially historical fiction. Montefiore’s callout was an epiphany for me. It is precisely the concern I’ve been struggling with – ensuring that at no point in my story does the narrative seem to anticipate a particular outcome or be aware, even subconsciously, of what comes next.
Isn’t this the concern of every writer of fiction? The story must not seem canned. It must not seem preconceived. The story must seem to be unfolding organically, containing nothing preset – nothing engineered.
This is difficult. It is difficult because we writers of fiction become convinced. We become very, very sure of the plot of our story (even (especially?) when it’s not based on history). And while we build our story toward the plot turn that we’ve conceived, the rules of good character demand that we not create androids but that we allow characters to appear to walk of their own free will toward the cliff.
To know the ending is a curse, but it’s the price the story-teller pays to occupy his office.

Alignment, Not Agreement

15 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by in Contract with the Reader, Joyce Cary, Qualities of Good Fiction, Role of the Writer

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What are we trying to do as writers of story, especially long-form story? I recently read an interview Joyce Cary gave to The Paris Review in 1954*. Here is a bit of what he said in that interview.

“I don’t care for philosophers in books. They are always bores. A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.”

This is the entire point of fiction. As soon as a story begins to tell the reader what they should think – beyond expecting them to accept the story that is being told – the story becomes a treatise.
Of course we must allow characters to speak and even say things that demand us to consider our beliefs. But the craft concern is for the writer not to step onto the page. We must never sense that we are reading the author’s perspective or thoughts. Characters will say things, but we shouldn’t feel, as readers, that we are being expected to accept such things as statements of argument for a cause.

Our goal as writers of fiction is not intellectual truth. Our goal is to write emotional truth. We are not seeking agreement with our reader, we are seeking something else. We are seeking alignment. We are seeking a mutual recognition of the truth that is driven out of the human experience – good, bad, or somewhere in-between. Let the philosophers, lobbyists, and activists do their work and let’s do ours.
Let’s tell stories that throw light on the condition of the human heart.

* http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5071/the-art-of-fiction-no-7-joyce-cary

A Creator of Wants

18 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by in Contract with the Reader, Qualities of Good Fiction

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Fiction is unique among the story-telling arts. Fiction offers no visual images. Unlike film, photography, stage, or oral interpretation, fiction provides only the still and silent words. In all these other forms the audience is passive. The story goes on in front of and external to the viewer.
But with fiction, the story is rendered in the private and silent meeting between the maker of the words and the mind of the reader. If the reader dozes off, the story stops. The story is completed by the reader. When there is no reader the story lies dormant and unfulfilled – unrealized in every sense. The reader brings the necessary action and imaginative power to make the story real. All the writer can provide are the needed words in their precise order.

So, the goal is clear. Do not try to ensure the reader’s knowledge by telling and showing them everything that you think they need to know. This is failure. This is forgetting the reader altogether. Know that at the height of your powers you are a creator of wants. Make the reader want. That is all. See to it that not everything is given but that it is deeply and longingly wanted.
It is what is left out, and the desire this omission stirs in your reader that will lend the story its power.

Note: This post is again the result of a conversation with Ben H. Winters, at LePeeps, 10 March 2016.