Write On!: How to Write for Yourself

 Every blade of grass has a story to tell

— Darshan, “Animate My Anatomy”

Hey! I'm just taking some questions from the ol' email inbox. Ready? Set? To corrupt Montell Jordan, this is how we go.

How do you become a professional author?

Poverty is the secret weapon of the writer.

I’m not saying that being poor is a good thing, because it’s not. It sucks. (And I realize that I just contradicted the wisdom of Fiddler on the Roof, which is only slightly more sacrilegious than doubting the authenticity of the Bible. It’s okay. Let’s keep going.) And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t get paid well from your writing — thank G-d, there are ways to do it.

I’m saying, have a job that isn’t writing — at least, that isn’t writing what you deeply and passionately want to write, that comes straight out of your heart and keeps all that passion and fire and rawness and fragility intact.

Because if that’s what you want to write, it’s a good thing to tell yourself, I’m not doing this to make money.

And keep repeating it to yourself.

Repeat it when you don’t believe in yourself.

Repeat it when you don’t believe in your characters, and so instead of making decisions you open yourself up to them and let them take the story in whatever crazy way it wants to go.

Repeat it when you don’t even know what the characters want, so you kill one of them in a freak thunderstorm. (It’s ok! Do it! If your brain is telling you to — and this is in writing, not in real life, mind you — then there might be a reason. You can come back later, after you’re finished writing, and figure out the reason, and what it Means for the Rest of the Story. Or you’ll realize that maybe you needed to keep her alive for the rest of the story. Don’t worry! By that point, you’re already at the end, and you have a complete story written, so you can pretty much do whatever you want.) (Also, if you’re curious about where I got this idea from, skip to the end of this essay.)

Repeat it when there’s one really obvious way you could take this story — it’s your first day of school, you’re so nervous you don’t know what to do, you’re gonna get beat up and teased and eventually win the science fair, but really you just want to write about the cookies you stopped to grab at your grandma’s house on the way home.

There’s a power to writing that comes from its powerlessness. Even more so with poetry. Nobody reads anything these days, and especially nobody reads fictional stories or poems, so you don’t have to feel bound by them. You never have to be the poet who only writes rhymed poems about storms and pain — that is, unless you really want to be; the only one holding you there is you. Today it’s not raining and you’re the only person who caught sight of a rainbow before it disappeared. Why not write about that? Go for it. Nobody’s looking. And even if they are — well, hey, then you’ve got a reader.

We’re surrounded by stories. Literally — they’re everywhere. At one point, I remember asking David Levithan — my editor at Scholastic, who edits a crazy number of books and puts out one or two of his own every year — if he’s ever afraid of running out of ideas for stories. He said, I’m more afraid of having so many ideas for stories that some of the best ones fall through the cracks.

Every idea can make a good story. Just honor it and let it do its thing.

At what point in the writing process do you involve an agent or a publisher? Do you let them know as soon as you have a good idea, and get their… go-ahead? Their blessing? I don’t know what you’d call it. Or do you attempt to write a full, complete draft of whatever it is and then start shopping it around?

Okay, fine. Let’s talk publishing. EVEN THOUGH I just spent the past 400 words or so telling you why you shouldn’t think about that.

I’m going to first paraphrase Joshua Henkin, my writing professor, and say: as late as humanly possible. There’s a saying about too many cooks in the kitchen, and for most forms of storytelling, the exact number of “too many cooks” is 2.

It’s great to meet an agent or an editor. It’s double great if you want to show them what you’re working on, and it’s super double great if they actually ask and you offer. The thing to remember is: You’re still working on it. The sooner you show an agent, the sooner you open yourself up to them saying something like, “Hey, you know how you’re mostly writing a historical novel about the Second Temple, but with aliens? Maybe you want to lose the aliens.” And even if you say no, you’ve opened yourself up to the possibility that doing a story about the Bayis Sheni with aliens might not be the coolest thing ever. (Side note: this example might be the coolest thing ever. Can someone please write it?)

But: Doubt. In one word, doubt is why you shouldn’t show your story to publishers, or agents, or anyone except for helpful and supportive friends — and even if you do that, make them swear up and down, no bli neder involved, you DEMAND the neder, that they won’t say anything critical — until your story is finished, and edited, and you’d feel comfortable having it published exactly the way it looks at this moment.

As a side note, the literary industry is in a perpetual time- and money crunch, and editors and agents are looking more and more frequently to take manuscripts that require the bare minimum of editing. The more you can make it sound like a finished book — the closer it is to a finished book — the more likely they are to take it seriously.

Where did you get the idea for the freak thunderstorm?

Lolita. Which I never wanted to read, because the idea was gross, then needed to read, because Vladmir Nabokov basically taught himself English so he could do his own translations, and is one of the best writers this language has. It’s in the first few pages, and known as the shortest death in literature: “‘My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.”

Write On!: But How Do You Make a Plot?

Hey, welcome back to the writing space. If you have writing questions, send them to me! It’s just my first name at gmail.

First lesson today: Always show up. I wrote 700 words of a different story, decided it was too depressing, decided to stuff it under my bed alongside those clothes that are almost-dirty, but still clean enough to maybe wear again some day. I wasn’t going to write anything. I didn’t have time, didn’t have another idea, was still pretty buried in my old idea. (Maybe you’ll see some traces of it in this one.)

So I dove in. This is a question I’ve been dying to address, but kept getting distracted by things like Aristotle (who is worth his own column) and Joseph Campbell (ditto) and the Torah (um, probably worth more than one column).

How do you develop a plot?

When I enrolled in a master’s program for creative writing, I assumed it would be all about answering this question. Two years, twelve classes, you’d figure that, of the three primary elements of story (plot, setting, characters), this one would happen first, right? WRONGEST.

That’s not to say we didn’t talk about it. But we didn’t talk about it enough. Of all the elements of writing, plot seems to come hardest to most writers I know. Plot is a monster. Characters, we have inspiration for all over the place. We know characters, we breathe characters, most of us are characters, of a sort, from Tom Wolfe’s rock-star white leisure suits to Virginia Woolf’s breathless romance and incomprehensibly sad suicide. And setting — we love settings; we love places; from writer’s nooks to exploring new places to the Narnias and Hundred Acre Woods of our mind.

But plot? Plot’s the nightmare of nightmares. Once you have these kinetic characters, this perfect place, what are they gonna do there?

Here’s why, in my opinion: Plot has to make sense. Not only that, it’s taking all the things that don’t make sense about your story — why does the detective have a limp? what’s in the nanny’s closet? — and it forces them to make sense. It’s the cowboy riding through a field of rebellious teenage cows, trying to wrap a lasso around every last neck. It is the most left-brained part of a right-brained activity, the part that collects all the random stuff we’ve sprinkled throughout a story. And it’s the part most readers nitpick the most about. If you’re a reasonably good storyteller, people will find very little to complain about objectively in terms of your characters — maybe they don’t like them? maybe they did something stupid?

But in terms of plot grievances, you hear it all the time: “That ending sucked!” “I didn’t understand what was going on!” “Those middle 200 pages completely lost me!” And probably for good reason.

EVERYTHING has a plot. Poems have plots. What’s the definition of a story, as opposed to an anecdote or a joke or a drunken/sleepy story (because we all know those aren’t real stories, they don’t make sense, and most of them don’t even get finished being told)? A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The main character starts in one place, physically and mentally and spiritually, and gets the chance to change — they might take it, they might not, but that decision gives a story its story-ness. We want our characters to be bigger than they are.

When Shirley Jackson wrote “The Lottery,” she didn’t write about the Lottery in the abstract — she wrote a story of the day it was taking place. She described a typical Lottery that wasn’t typical at all, and the things that were normal taught us what the Lottery was, and the moments that weren’t typical also taught us what the Lottery was. The turning point of that story — the moment you realize who won the Lottery, and what winning the Lottery means — is both completely surprising and completely unsurprising. It makes a horrible sense; it feeds a feeling we’ve had since the first lines of the story.

Plot is driven by character. This is a big one. My professor, Josh Henkin, says that if you really know your protagonist, you’ll never have to stop and think, what happens next? This never actually happens, partly because we aren’t perfect, but also partly because we aren’t really in the character’s head space. We’re creating people. And people always find something to do. They always keep moving.

Plan ahead. Yes, you hate outlining. We all hate this. Outlining robs our story of its soul. When we tell a story naturally, the writer’s head is in the same place that the reader’s is — we’re learning about the characters, we’re diving deeper into the story. And this is good. Sometimes I’ll startle myself by throwing a major surprise into the story as I’m writing it — in Never Mind the Goldbergs, I knew that Moish was secretly filming a movie everywhere he went, but I didn’t know that he would return to Los Angeles and go straight to the movie’s premiere. It made sense within the context of the story (if you haven’t read it, it did! I assure you!), but it wasn’t something I’d prepared for.

Here’s what I do: on the last page of whatever I’m writing (short story, novel, haiku) I keep a running of what I think should happen next. In the scene, in the chapter, in the book. It’s never set in stone, and often changes — as I get closer to a Big Event, I’ll add in new little things that need to happen before and after it, and when something big changes, I feel totally free to change or trash other things.

Basically: keep a map. But remember that your destination will change.

Any time you open a door, make sure you close it. It doesn’t have to be a big deal every time. Sometimes the biggest buildups lead to the smallest payoffs — Netflix series have become experts at this, where 9 episodes’ worth of hints will lead to a really good one-liner between two characters. The important thing is, you close it. Keep track of these things. (An outline, ahem, works wonders.) Not only will they make your story feel more professional, it’ll feel more satisfying, too.

Less is more. This isn’t a plot tool so much as it is a tool for everything you write. I’m hyper. I try to leap from idea to idea, to get as much in as possible. DON’T. One of the best things about writing, and there are a lot, is that you have control of the reader’s mind. When you play a song, you have the reader’s ears. When you make a movie, you control the reader’s eyes and ears. Words are the least and the greatest of all powers: you can tell a story that lasts a moment and make it last an hour of the reader’s life, make them think about the same thing twenty different ways, take them inside the mind of two warring characters.

There are so many ways for this to go wrong. But there are also many, many ways to do it write — and do it different than anybody’s ever done.

Our minds are yours. Now go and do something with them.

Stubby Teeth: a new short story

My story Stubby Teeth was just published in Barzakh Magazine. I'm honored to be in its pages.

So the story is a response to something my

professor Josh Henkin told our class when I was a cocky first-semester grad student at Brooklyn College. He said (and I'm paraphrasing, and he said it better) that it's impossible to write a story from the point of view of an inanimate object, a pet, or a small child, because stories are based on characters being able to act on their own, and a good story is all about your characters taking agency.

Well, I was young and eager and full of chutzpah. I was also a young father, underslept and full of conviction that not only did babies have agency, they were running my whole damn life. I went home and, right away, started writing this story.

I hope you like it.

Stubby Teeth

His mother was gone, and she had never been gone before. And now he was in a very big room with a very big woman who was not his mother, and several toys, and a smattering of other kids, and no mother. The walls were white. There were no windows, and no mother. He screamed.

The scream lasted several minutes, until he had run completely out of breath. He rubbed his stubby teeth together while he gathered the oxygen for more.

A pair of woman’s hands—long fingers, chubby knuckles—sandwiched him, his back and his stomach. They rubbed and rubbed, and though he tried to squirm out of their tractor-beam pull and fight the rhythmic alternation of palms and fingertips, those large hands with their pod-like palms, steady and insistent, and their confident beat lulled him into complacency. Just why was he agitated, again? He no longer remembered.

The woman spoke to him, slow and warm. Gradually, he realized that she wasn’t trying to communicate a specific meaning or directive, as his mother did when she spoke, but rather to give a sort of human background noise, like music during his mother’s yoga or television when he was supposed to not talk to her, a meaningless string of syllables as she guided him to an area of the room with one thick oceanic carpet, on top of which sat a gaggle, a small herd, of other humans, small humans.

Read the rest

(Barzakh's cover by Mali Fischer.)