Riddle Fence
This Fall, I joined Riddle Fence as the Creative Non-Fiction Editor. Since then, I’ve been sifting through hundreds of submissions, searching for gold. A few people have asked what exactly I want to publish so here are some suggestions.
True beginnings
This is the fourth and final part in a series on beginnings. This one is all about non-fiction.
In general, the guidelines of fiction apply to non-fiction as well. Aim for context and curiosity. Write with clarity and sharp specifics. Take care with grammar, diction, and syntax. Don’t bore or confuse the reader. Except it is much much easier to write plodding non-fiction. So you have to work a little harder to find a compelling opening.
How to lose a reader
This is the third in a series on Openers.
In the first post, I harped on about the importance of clarity. The opposite is confusion. If you confuse your reader at the jump, they are likely to close the book, turn off the e-reader, or reject the manuscript. So let’s look at what not to do.
And then they woke up…
This is the second in a series on opening lines. If you haven’t read it, here’s the first post. One of the most common things I tell my clients and authors I mentor is this: your opening is a red herring. This guideline applies to fiction and non-fiction equally.
To begin with…
A few weeks before The Boat People hit shelves, I served as a reader for the CBC’s annual short fiction contest. This meant I was reading hundreds of anonymous submissions while hunch-backed on the couch.
Search Party
When I help emerging authors with their manuscripts — or revise my own wonky drafts — one of the main issues I notice is a lack of conflict. If the hero is too comfortable and has nothing to lose, the story is boring. This is true of non-fiction too. Send out a search party, I joke with clients (and myself). Find the conflict and strong-arm it back into the narrative. A pre-requisite of conflict is stakes. What does the character have to lose? There are three types…
Copy. Write.
Ten years ago a guy broke into our house and stole my laptop which contained all my short stories plus research and early scenes from a project that would eventually become The Boat People. I wasn’t backing anything up at the time (I know) so it was a blow.
But that was nothing compared to the dread and rage I feel in the dystopian present where a cylon is hoovering up our literary souls in order to teach itself how to shit formulaic turds.
Aliens
Earlier this year, I read a historical fiction about a young brown girl in a British boarding school. The perspective was close third person. The inner life of the protagonist was central to the story. In the opening chapter, the character wakes up, looks at herself in the mirror, and dwells on disparaging thoughts about how “swarthy” and “dusky” and “dingy” her skin is, how different she is from the other girls at school. And then she continues to have these othering thoughts about herself, obsessing over whether or not she is a “true Briton.” I have been a brown person in all-white spaces (hi, rural Newfoundland!) and I’m a sucker for stories set in Victorian England. I should be the ideal reader for this book. Instead, I felt alienated. Whose gaze is that in the mirror? It’s not the gaze of a brown character. It’s the gaze of the white author. A white author who perhaps - let’s be generous - tried their level best to get into the skin of brown character and failed.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat
Grain Magazine is celebrating its 50th birthday and I was the prose guest editor for the upcoming anniversary issue. I sifted through a couple hundred fiction and non-fiction submissions and selected just over a dozen for publication. (Pro tip: sometimes these special issues are larger than usual and more pages = more acceptances.) One thing I noticed, even in the strongest pieces, was repetition. Over and over and over again. (See what I did there?)
The best
Speaking of highschool…
This winter, I juried the Youth Short Story Category, which is part of the Amazon First Novel Award. And then last month, the celebratory bash - expertly thrown by the team at The Walrus - was held at the top of the Globe & Mail building in Toronto. It’s gorgeous up there - wide open space, huge windows, a massive terrace with a view of downtown, long bar, the works. The six teen finalists were present but you know what? I was almost more thrilled for their gobsmacked, camera-happy parents.
In defence of cliches
Hear me out. You’re drafting and deep in the zone, trying to get as much down as possible before the trap door opens to eject you, and in the rush to get to the end of the idea/ scene/ story/ passage/ novel, you write a can of worms, a sea full of fish, a wicked stepmother. Cliches, yes. But not trite or lazy. Not yet. At the moment they are shortcuts.
Math lesson
I was telling Tom about a story that began with too many characters. “This needs to get pared back,” I said. “Yeah, yeah, there can be twenty people milling around the Loblaws when the axe-wielding clowns storm in, but only two or three get names. All the others have to fade into the background or it’s overload.”
Take the wheel
In my 20s, I took up pottery. The classes were held in a shed, at the bottom of a blousy garden, where three of us students hunched over our wheels while our instructor walked around in an old pair of dungarees and chatted about the raccoons who were terrorizing her household.
Pottery is a physical act; you have to put your whole body into the effort if you’re going to keep the clay centered. More often than not, we novices found the clay controlled us, spinning itself in unexpected ways. A bowl stubbornly flattening into a plate. A vase becoming a mug. A mug shrinking to a pinch bowl.
This ain’t National Geographic
There is a moment in V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night when the first person protagonist declares: “Even now I do not wish to translate that word, kottiya. Must we explain each humiliation to be believed?” (pg. 113)
It’s a powerful moment in a powerful scene, but even out of context, the line is important for what it can teach us.
Dissection
In grade eleven biology, my lab partner and I dissected a frog. We cut it open and stuck pins in all the organs, and in studying close up the frog’s anatomy, we gained a better understanding of our own. In any story there’s the narrative readers passively imbibe. But underneath that narrative all the tools of craft are working together to bring the story to life. On Saturday I led a workshop where a room of writers dissected a story by O. Henry/ Giller-winner Souvankham Thammavongsa. Have a read (or a listen) to Good-looking and then come back to read our results.
Thou shalt have no commandments
The stubborn ram in my nature bristles whenever I hear directives like must or can’t or don’t or need.
Exclamation points
There’s an old Seinfeld episode where Elaine is dating one of her authors (ah, the 90s). She comes home to find he’s making dinner and asks if there are any phone messages (ah, the 90s), then takes umbrage when she sees he hasn’t added an exclamation point to the happy news about a friend’s new baby.
Tell me without telling me
The other day I put on a coat I hadn’t worn in several months, put my hand in the pocket, and pulled out a scrunched up poop bag.
How to revise your novel (part 5)
The last several posts have tackled the most common issues that plague manuscripts - beginnings, endings, dialogue, characters, pacing, conflict, flashback, interiority and action, and that old cliche: show vs. tell. To conclude, I’m going to offer some more general advice.