However you found your way here, welcome! I’m Emily, and I write letters about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our place in it.
Thinking about how the Malaysian film Abang Adik—released to much acclaim! and which I wrote about here—worked the death penalty into its plot made me reconsider how to write a piece of short fiction I've been trying to complete.
For a long time, based on an exchange with someone I knew a long time ago, I wanted to write a short story that was, vaguely, about how someone could be so good in one way, and bad in another, and who got to see they were bad or good, and what that said about human relationships. I also had the idea that I would bring the death penalty to the story somehow, since I had reported on it myself as a journalist and could bring some perspective to bear.
But I didn’t start the story until an image came into my head one day, triggered by a completely unrelated childhood memory. As it continued to radiate in my head, I wrote it down and suddenly, I had a beginning, and then my first scene—but then I didn’t know where to go from there.
That has generally been my problem writing short fiction. I’ve written what I think to be several promising beginnings but they don’t have any middle or ends. For a while I just sort of accepted that I couldn’t do ‘Plot’, so fiction wasn’t for me. But that was because I was thinking about plot as this big idea that had to be scaffolded from the start, and then filled in, even if I were to fiddle around later with the chronology and shape of the story.
But I’ve been going back to George Saunders again lately, who is unreservedly one of my favorite writers, of both fiction and nonfiction. I haven’t actually read his novels, but I love his short stories (the Tenth of December collection especially) and also his essay collection The Braindead Megaphone (the title piece is a must-read in our times). I’m also now reading him—and all fiction, truth be told—through the lens of his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and his newsletter Story Club, which present a series of lessons on how to read and write short stories, particularly inspired by what he has gleaned from the Russian masters such as Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol—since, as he points out, “They weren’t as found of interviews and craft talks and process-related discussions as we are.”
In these lessons, Saunders offers a less pressured, lower-stakes way out. He talks about writing line by line, feeling out what happens in a story by continuous tinkering, one sentence after another. It’s a process of discovery, not something planned ahead, so you don’t need to have a “Plot” to begin with. There is so much liberation in this, and it already makes me (just a little bit) less afraid to face the blank page. Here’s an excerpt of this idea from his book:
“Early in a story, I’ll have a few discrete blocks (blobs? swaths?) of loose, sloppy text. As I revise, those blocks will start to… get better. […] As the blocks start to fall into order, the resulting feeling of causation starts to mean something (if a man puts his fist through a wall, then joins a street protest, that’s one story; if he comes home from a street protest and puts his fist through the wall, that’s another) and starts to suggest what the story might want to be “about” (although part of this process is to shake off that feeling as much as possible and keep returning to that P/N [Positive/Negative] meter, trusting that those big thematic decisions are going to be made, naturally, by way of the thousands of accreting micro-decisions at the line level). […] When I first found this method, it felt so freeing. I didn’t have to worry, didn’t have to decide, I just had to be there as I read my story fresh each time, watching that meter, willing to (playfully) make changes at the line level, knowing that if I was wrong, I’d get a chance to change it back on the next read.”
The kernel of this idea is also captured in this video:
As I wrote in my letter on Abang Adik, a couple of plot points in the film felt a little forced to me. I could well be completely off the mark, of course, but it felt like the storytellers wanted to end the film in a particular way (for someone to be on death row), and so it felt like they had to reverse-engineer the narrative to make it happen, which required two twists in the story. The first didn’t feel too convincing to me, and the second felt overdone coming on its heels. I can think of other paths the plot could have taken—but would they have elicited such strong emotions? I don’t know. Maybe this was what felt most right for this story in the end. In fiction, there are so many possibilities. How does one decide?!
Anyway, I say this not to critique the film—I loved it and was very moved by it—but because it feels like a reminder to myself to not try to reverse-engineer this short story I’m working on. Maybe there is no need for a murder, and no one has to be on death row. Maybe the themes I thought I wanted to explore may even morph into something else. I suppose it should be possible to bring the same level of drama and tension to a lesser transgression, if one were writing specifically enough, empathetically enough?
p.s. I have not suddenly decided to become a fiction writer 😆 As I mentioned in a previous letter, I just want to do this to help me loosen up—and I also want to prove to myself that I can at least finish one short story!
How we see the world & tell its stories
A reporter’s tale of self-sabotage by Natasha Rodriguez in Writerland—a newsletter all writers should honestly subscribe to!
I have moments when this whole situation pops into my head and I get so, so embarrassed. I always wonder, what if? What if I had been able to write a version of this story? What if people liked it? What if it led to more opportunities at the paper? Where would I be now if I hadn’t messed things up? The stakes are so high when you are young and inexperienced and trying to make it in journalism.
There’s no use in having all this regret inside you, especially when you were dealing with depression. But I did build a bridge to something that I really wanted, and then I burnt it all down because I wasn’t ready to show others that I wasn’t a perfect reporter, that I kept running into bumps in the road, that I was a woman who didn’t feel comfortable.
To write about yourself, write about other people—and other lessons from Prince Harry’s (and Andre Agassi’s) ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer:
He asked why I’d organized my memoir around other people, rather than myself. I told him that was the kind of memoir I admired. There’s so much power to be gained, and honesty to be achieved, from taking an ostensibly navel-gazing genre and turning the gaze outward. Frank McCourt had a lot of feelings about his brutal Irish childhood, but he kept most of them to himself, focussing instead on his Dad, his Mam, his beloved siblings, the neighbors down the lane.
“I am a part of all that I have met.” It might’ve been that first night, or another, but at some point I shared that line from Tennyson, and Andre loved it.
In the same vein of looking outside oneself, even when talking about oneself… I feel like braided essays, which seem to have become quite popular, can feel contrived and self-conscious when not done so well. When done well, you don’t even think of it as a braided essay—because isn’t writing itself always about finding connections between things, sometimes unlikely things? This piece by Nicole Walker argues for what a braided essay could be at its best, and why it might be necessary:
Is braided form a broken form? Perhaps. If so, perhaps it is the form that best represents a broken self and a broken world. But there is also something reparative about the braided essay. The way one dips into one section of research, looking for that one right word to express the personal brokenness. As you stitch an essay together, you stitch yourself into the world. The world, stitched by you, is made more whole. I think it’s incumbent upon us to make a case for what we believe. I also think it’s incumbent upon us to check our beliefs against a prismatic understanding of facts. Humility and curiosity come from the same place. “How does the world work?” and “Who am I?” are two sides of the same coin. The personal story asks the reader to hear you say, Isn’t this what it’s like to be human? The research-based story says, See how being human is like being everything else in the world? Strange and wondrous. Wild and mutable. The job of the creative nonfiction writer is to say, Here I am world, and here is the world, and out of this oxymoronic writing, we are here to make each other.
Until the next,
E.