Letter to an MFA - Part 2

Part 2 of Letter to an MFA by Josh Henkin.

A Practical Guide

    MFA students often complain that their professors are better at saying what’s wrong with their stories than at telling them how to make their stories right  This goes with the territory, I’m afraid; if there were a blueprint for how to be a great fiction writer, there would be more of them out there.  That said, a first step is avoiding the common traps. Don’t write stories where the occasion for the telling is unclear; don’t write stories that are principally about watching; don’t write victim stories; don’t set out to make a point.

   But I think the writing teacher can do better than that.  Here, then, are some practical guidelines.

   First, how do you start a story?  Most writers struggle between knowing too much at the beginning of a story and knowing too little.  If you know too much, your story can’t surprise you.  You straitjacket your characters in a preordained plot, and you end up with what a friend of mine calls “Lipton-Cup-A-Story.”  On the other hand, if you know too little, you end up writing a lot of pretty sentences about mountains and sunsets that don’t go anywhere.  What I try to do is write about situations where conflict seems likely even if I don’t know what that conflict will be.  Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, Thanksgiving dinners, family reunions:  these are all ripe for exploring, and they all answer the Passover question.  A writing professor of mine once said that there are only two kinds of stories in the world, Stranger Comes to Town and Person Goes on a Trip.  Which is really just one kind of story, since Stranger Comes to Town is simply Person Goes on a Trip from a different point of view.

    Second, if you’re stuck, open up your story.  Add another character.  Odd numbers are good.  Two’s company, three’s a crowd, as roommates (and lovers) will tell you.  Sometimes it’s simply a matter of moving your characters somewhere else.  A student of mine recently wrote a story about an elderly woman who invites her three children to her Brooklyn brownstone to discuss how she will divide her possessions once she has died.  Now, this is a perfectly good situation for a story—good enough for Shakespeare in King Lear, and for Jane Smiley a few hundred years later.  It’s all in the execution, of course, and my student’s execution was good—at least initially, but as the pages passed, the story started to repeat itself.  There was plenty of tension among the characters, but it all got laid out at the beginning and there was nowhere for the story to go.  This was so, in part, because the story consisted of one long scene in which all the characters were seated at the dining room table.

   

But what if, I suggested, two of the characters left the table and went outside to smoke?  What would get said in the presence of some people that wouldn’t get said in the presence of others?  By dividing the characters into different physical space, the writer invites confession, betrayal, the concealing and revealing of secrets.  And secrets are essential in fiction.  In fact, the discrepancy between what characters know is often the engine that drives a story forward.

   

Third, I tell my students to go through their stories and see how much of the important action takes place in the here and now and how much of it takes place in flashback.  All too often, the great majority of action is taking place in flashback.  Ask a writer to write about something that’s happening now and she panics, but ask her to write about something that happened two years ago, and she has no problem.  This is another way of being conflict-averse:  you set the conflict before the story starts.   Much of the flashback I see in student work could just as easily take place in the here and now, and if enough of it can’t, then perhaps the writer hasn’t found the occasion for the telling and the story should really be set earlier.  Flashback, after all, is supposed to illuminate the here and now, not the other way around.

   Fourth, when I sit down to write I always ask myself the following questions:  Who’s my protagonist and who’s my antagonist?  What does my protagonist want?  What does he think he wants (this is not necessarily the same thing as what he actually wants), and how is he setting out to achieve those wants?  What these questions are concerned with is desire, which is the lifeblood of fiction.  This is really the problem with a lot of watching stories.  The only desire the character has is to be left alone:  to be allowed to continue to watch.  I’m often reminded of Nathaniel Hale’s words:  “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” That’s what we need in fiction—not patriotism per se, but the feeling that our characters would die for something.  Because if our characters themselves aren’t passionate, we can’t expect our readers to be passionate about them.

Comments

[Michael]

A useful and interesting article. Thanks.

[Jozef Imrich]

I do read your every post. And each is practical in each and every way. No one shares colurful and useful examples as much as you do and with gusto too ;-)

Much appreciated!