Catherine Brady teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco and is the author of three short story collections, including Curled in the Bed of Love, winner of the 2002 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and The Mechanics of Falling, winner of the 2010 Northern California Book Award for Fiction. What better position from which to write a book about the craft of writing? Her Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction is just out – and is definitely going on my tbr pile! Enjoy her post, and her terrific book. – Meg
I will argue with my last breath for the use of the series comma. I cross myself whenever I so much as mention Anton Chekhov. I tilt toward despair when a book reviewer lavishly praises a novel and then quotes a passage that contains sloppy errors in verb tense. (I am totally OK with Tom Clancy and Nora Roberts doing what they do; I only object to chicken being dressed as lamb.) My list of words that book reviewers should be banned from using includes, but is not limited to, powerful, provocative, masterpiece, lyrical, original. I want to know why the only writers who openly declare their aim to write the Great American Novel are men, and why no one has ever proposed the obvious explanation for this anxiety about being . . . the biggest. All right, I’ll admit it. I’m a book geek.
And I’m not alone. Writers are to readers as computer nerds are to folks who happily show off what their IPhones can do. Only slightly more fanatical in their love. My new book, Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction, is about reading as a writer, which means being just that tiny bit more fascinated by how a novel or story is made—without sacrificing every devout reader’s willyalookit that amazement at a beautiful sentence, a captivating character, a well-designed plot. I’ve taught creative writing for eighteen years (possibly more—I can’t add), and it turns out to be the perfect job for a book geek. You get paid not only to read good novels and stories (for at least part of your sixty-hour work week) but also to crawl all over the books you admire with people who belong to the same church—students.
I’ll start by confessing that I walked into the first meeting of my first graduate writing class shaking in my boots, armed with twenty pages of notes about the novel we were discussing. These notes turned out to be no help at all when a student asked me, “Why can’t I use cliché?” In the workshop, if I tossed out the old adage, “show, don’t tell,” students had the wherewithal to say, “Chekhov does it, so why can’t I?” (Smart human beings, but also wicked ones.) Once I was willing to ask why can’t I? along with my students, we could investigate some of the supposedly self-evident rules for writing fiction. For “show, don’t tell,” I substituted this: you can’t tell what’s at stake in a story, but you can often, and in infinitely varied combinations, combine showing with telling to heighten dramatic tension. To learn their craft, my students needed principles flexible enough to cover the rich variety of writers’ practices, including their own wing-and-a-prayer strategies as they tried to make fictional creatures live and breathe.
Experience taught me that in a creative writing class our first priority is to get inside story logic—to think metaphorically, elusively, and ambiguously. When I couldn’t find craft theory that addressed this or homed in on the specific craft issues my students faced, I would write handouts, and each semester add another little nugget or quotation I’d found. My students felt the love, but I blizzarded them with so many handouts that they complained they couldn’t keep up or keep track. So I started staple-binding the handouts into mini-books for each class.
Because we need to come at literary analysis from imaginative angles that will break down conventional ways of dissecting what we read (whether it’s someone’s manuscript or Toni Morrison’s Jazz), I would think about games we might play in class. For a first meeting of a class on the craft of the short story, I handed out colored markers and had students color code images in Chekhov’s short story “Heartache.” Luckily for me, no one threw down her marker and demanded a graduate education in return for the tuition she was paying. My students were willing to give it a shot, provided I could demonstrate to them that there was a payoff. Then I got this idea that we might get a better, literal look at how images are inter-related in a work of fiction if we tried to organize them in a Venn diagram (also from elementary school; it involves putting numbers into sets and then seeing which overlap, such as numbers that belong to the set of odd numbers and to multiples of 3). Then in a class on style I tried old-fashioned sentence diagramming, and my students were converted instantaneously and became beasts for grammar; they wanted to be able to talk about the sentence structure that was emerging in full architectural splendor in their diagrams. (If only the universe were as beautifully ordered as syntax.) Repeatedly, I’ve found that visual diagrams of various kinds can help us break out of the rut of shopworn explanations for how fiction works.
As the handouts and sentence diagrams and Venn diagrams began to pile up, I started to say, you know, I ought to write a book about craft. But I’ll let you in on a secret: writers spend at least 60 percent of their time building castles in the air, this cool idea for a book or that one merely idle speculation. A few years ago, just before I went to the conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), an editor at Palgrave Macmillan emailed me to ask if I had a craft book in the works. Hell yes, a writer will always blow smoke about the book she’s planning. So we met for about an hour at the conference, and when the smoke cleared, I discovered that this editor was taking me at face value, and that we’d agreed I would submit a book proposal. So I more or less got backed into writing this book. (Not a first for me.)
When I started writing the book, I was afraid that I might not be able to carry it off: Could I really translate the spur-of-the moment, possibly unorthodox ideas I’d been sharing with my students—and refining thanks to their curiosity and their challenges—into actual prose that made sense? I wondered if it would be satisfying to write craft analysis; it could just be a dreary detour from writing fiction, which has always been such joy for me. It turned out that writing this book meant living with books that I loved. In writing each chapter, I drew on examples from novels and stories (I am BIG on being concrete), and as I wrote I made new discoveries about books I thought I’d already covered in every possible way in my classes. I struggled, mightily, to do justice to the writers whose work I was citing; I would arrive at some deeper understanding only to realize that a great work of literature always holds out more hidden pleasures for a reader.
I suspect that readers can always intuit whether the writer was actually having fun when she wrote a book, so I’m relieved and happy to report that writing this book was a blast. I got to write a whole chapter on sentences. – Catherine
