thoughts on fiction

I often eat lunch at the Social Science Library café because you can get a hot meal there for £4 or less. I sit alone on one of the long tables and eat while reading New Yorker stuff on my phone. A couple of weeks ago I was scrolling through Fiction and read this piece called Writing Teacher by John Edgar Wideman. It's about a black professor of fiction at a university who has a white student writing a short story about the struggles of a single black mother. It was pretty boring, to be honest, and I kind of started skimming. But one aspect of this otherwise uninteresting story was the way the main character thinks about fiction –– as if it's alive and has its own agency, or a knot that you have to untangle.

My student’s story stuck like most people’s because there’s no place for it to go. Except to explore the sadness of wanting things not to be the way they indisputably are. A story begins with an author’s desire to write it. Starts with a person the author happens to be.

[...]

So let’s look closer. Together, Teresa. I believe we both care. Look right here, page 3, where your young woman’s infuriated by a smug, smart-ass emergency-room clerk who assumes that the female in front of him, because she is young and colored, won’t own health insurance to pay a doctor to sew up a bloody gash in her daughter’s head. Why not have your young woman kill him and turn your story into that story. 

Show not tell. Don’t bother telling me or telling a young woman you are on her side and wish to help. She doesn’t need that kind of help. She’s quite as capable as you are of dealing with an obnoxious clerk. Your story depicts her as stuck much deeper. She needs more than words, your story says. So maybe chopping off the clerk’s head a way out. A way out of the story and out of yourself, too. Risk letting her do what you would never do. Then maybe the young woman will speak for herself, not you. Speak with action not words. Break free, break bad outside the story’s boundaries.

This was really interesting to me. It kind of shows that, to really write fiction, you can't just make something up and plan out the plot, the character development. You can't write a neat little flowchart like an an essay. To really make your story alive, you can only write and see where the fiction takes you. You're in dialogue with your character. Your story has to really change them––there has to be a reason to tell it.

Based on this, I guess this main character would write fiction by creating a character, a truly real person, and then putting them in a situation. Just the initial situation. Then write your way out of it.

That's really fascinating to me because I'm a big planner, obviously, I love to plan my life and make sure I always know what direction I'm going in. Like I've described before, I used to outline the plots of my stories. But something I worried about was that my characters and plots were all just cardboard: existing on a superficial level, doing things but with no real soul or personality. I wondered how I could develop three-dimensional characters.

My biggest issue was trying to make my work deep: putting in different themes and motifs so that people analysing my work in the future will write essay upon essay about me. That's always what I've wanted with my writing, even this blog, which I started because I was reading Yiyun Li's To Speak is to Blunder and she mentioned reading Katherine Mansfield's diaries and I was like, "I want a proper diary so that people in the future can use it as aids to write my biography/analyse my work. So that when I'm dead my publisher will capitalise on it by editing my entries into a neat little book and print it in hardcover." Anyway, so I tried to write based on feeling. I would pick a theme, like "loneliness" or "alienation" or "disconnection from reality" or "fear of the future" –– all things I feel acutely –– and try to run with it, but nothing ever really came of it. But wasn't the point of fiction to write the truth?? Here I was with my emotional truths and I had zero inspiration, could think of no story other than a girl sitting on a swing with her head leaning against the chain.

But fiction should be more organic. You need to let it breathe. Some of my favorite work has been to just write and then figure out what it's about. I played around with words and wrote a poem about physicality. I messed around in Chinese and wrote a poem about grief. I started to describe the taste of watermelon and ended up with a piece about diaspora. (WOW I just checked and not to brag but it has the most views out of all the pieces in Industry's Food issue.... although half of those were probably just me) (The formatting was not me I'm pretentious but not THAT pretentious.) All of these are non-fiction, technically... I mean, they're kind of in that weird zone with poetry where it's based on fiction but for the sake of imagery and emotion, the truth has been adjusted. I just need to try to apply it to fiction.

I guess that's why a lot of fiction is semi-autobiographical.

I also just read this Jenny Zhang interview and I love, love, love Jenny but for some reason I couldn't focus properly on reading it. I actually had to force myself to read it. The whole time I wanted to close the tab. Strange. Maybe it's the design or something.