While the moments were written by a child, they were written by a child who only had the basic terms and ideas to explain complex chemical reactions in his body. Since there was no fluff or posturing in these reactions and experiences, they hit true and real on the page. Shocking not because of what they say but because of how honest they are in their depictions. Even though, Carrol was a child when he wrote these reflections and moments of being high, he used a lot of the same techniques that help create a realistic picture and feeling of drugs in the reader’s mind. These techniques include figurative language, movement verbs and high energy nouns, action beats, presenting hallucinations as reality, person’s sense of self is obscured or transformed, incorporating slang, and specific descriptions:

Read more

Language and the misuse of it, the strangeness of it, the danger of its divides, and the love it can convey weaves through Tom Lin’s upcoming science fiction novel Babylon South Dakota. The novel focuses on a Chinese immigrant family who settles in South Dakota on a plot of land to build a home, farm, and business amid Government secret operations.

As contemporary publishing takes the shores, authors have become more deliberate and intentional with the formatting of their novels, including the dialogue. Dialogue that is formatted like code like How I Creak for You. Dialogue that is formatted like a script like Interior Chinatown. Dialogue like a text message exchange like in YOLO Juliet. In a The Walrus article, Maija Kappler proposes that authors forego quotation marks “to explore distances between readers and narrators and even to eliminate hierarchies.” In Cynan Jones’ The Dirt, John Freeman, former editor of Granta, first removed the quote marks of The Dirt to make the prose more abrupt or “more immediate, more with it,” according to a Guardian article. The same Guardian article goes on to state that the choice to remove the quotation marks is more about making a work and author standout as daring. Coming across stories with no quote marks may be “with it” for editors and authors, but as a reader, it can often be jarring or hard to follow if not set up correctly or signified right to the reader. When the rules of dialogue are broken, new ones need to be laid down.

Reading Babylon South Dakota, the initial effect of the lack of dialogue tags is an adjustment. The choice signals to us that this isn’t a typical novel, a typical story. The first few pages, the dialogue does not stand out. It blends in with the rest of the text around it so that the divide between what happens in the world, what happens inside the characters, and what happens in spoken word, is all the same. It’s all story. The dialogue flows with all the other narrative. As the story progresses on into the middle, the lack of quotation marks just becomes normal. While Lin breaks the quotation mark rule, he does make sure that the other rules of dialogue remain. For example, when a new character speaks, they often get their own paragraph. He also chooses to keep dialogue tags, dialogue action beats, and punctuation:

No! Mara cried. We have to bury her.

Don’t be silly, kid. I’m not letting a perfectly fine bird go to waste. He reached to grab the chicken back and to his surprise Mara jerked it out of his grasp in a swirl of feathers. Mara, he said, his voice hardening. Don’t be silly. If we bury her here the coyote will just come back and dig her up.

Mara hugged the hen closer. Then we’ll have to bury her somewhere else. (Tom Lin - Babylon South Dakota)

Deciding to keep these rules and designators, Lin is making it easier for his reader to follow along, subtly signaling that yes, he knows the rules of dialogue, and it was an intentional choice to break them. As we learn more about the family and narrative world, Lin signaling the epic nature of what takes place on the Hsiu farm, the lack of dialogue tags develops even further. They, or the lack of them, gives the story an epic, folktale, and mythic quality.

Lin and writers like him that decide to break familiar rules of writing, opens the doors to story for other writers. What can we do? What truly can’t we do? Removing quote marks does not stop a story but, in skilled cases, does the opposite. It takes away distractions on the page so that readers can move through the prose, staying close to the story and characters. It also forces writers to write in a way that is skilled and knowledgeable so that they don’t lose their readers. It’s impressive that Lin using this intentional abstraction does not lose the voices and emotional side of the dialogue and characters. In fact, in some places, the clearing away of the quotation brush allows these emotions to hit harder:

Saul reached over and turned his wife by her shoulder, pulled her back into the bed where they lay beside one another, looking at the splash of lamplight upon their ceiling. He took her hand and held it above their faces, inspecting it with mock gravitas. Why, he said, you haven’t aged a day.

But I have, Mei said, and so have you.

And then it descended upon him all at once, all twenty years of life under these new configurations of stars, all twenty years of pulling chrysanthemums from a land upon which no ancestor of his had ever walked. It was as though Rascal’s belligerent stubbornness in refusing old age had managed to halt time itself and only now, with the old mule at last dead, were the years again allowed to pass. (Tom Lin - Babylon South Dakota)

In Lin’s Babylon South Dakota, the lack of dialogue tags does not feel like a fun way of making his novel seem highbrow or literary but erases the distance between reader and story, like Kappler suggests. By making the dialogue no different than the exposition, narrative, and everything else, the novel reads as a mythic recounting of what happened to the Hsiu family. The choice can also be read as a way for Lin to eliminate or even create more friction, tension, and reflection on the hierarchies of speech, especially since the novel deals with Chinese immigrants. At times, even, the family interacts with white Americans and receive confusion in return even though they are speaking English. Lin also never really denotes when the family is speaking English or their native language. Sometimes he’ll mention it when it’s of import to the characters or scene, but it’s not seen as an important necessary note. For Lin’s work, instead of falling into the Guardian camp, Babylon South Dakota sleeps with The Walrus: “there’s no separation between a character’s experience of the world and the world itself.”

So, what is dialogue but the quote marks on a page? Dialogue is story and emotion. Dialogue is how the characters tell the story to each other. In Lin’s Babylon South Dakota, and other novels like it, say that when we strip away the quotation marks and rules of writing, we give the story freedom to be a story.

Interested in learning more about Lin’s book? I have a full review on it here:

Share

Writing Skins is a reader supported newsletter for readers of speculative fiction, nonfiction, and good books of all genres. Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where readers can find essays related to the art of writing.

Make readers feel your story by crafting its atmosphere in a multilayered way from the sentences and words to the micro tension of your piece. In this 90-minute class, you’ll learn what contributes to a story’s atmosphere by analyzing published short stories and practice crafting different levels of atmosphere using exercises and prompts.

Crafting Your Story’s Atmosphere will cover what atmosphere is, how to identify it in stories, and exercises to help writers determine their story’s atmosphere and how to enhance it using specific techniques like word choice, syntax, and micro tension.

Anyone who wants to register for the class can do so through Her Story’s website.

I’ll get into more of why these books and how they helped inform my writing, but first, BOOKS!

Nonfiction

1. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

2. Of Solids and Surds by Samuel R. Delany

3. About Writing by Samuel R. Delany

4. A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux

5. Spring Summer Asteroid Bird by Henry Lien

6. Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War by Harriet EH Earle

7. Happily: A Personal History-With Fairy Tales by Sabrina Orah Mark

8. Trauma in Contemporary Literature: Narrative and Representation edited by Marita Nadal

9. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction by Laurie Vickroy

10. Chase Darkness With Me by Billy Jensen

Poetry

1. Heaven Looks Like Us edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi

Fiction

1. The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany

2. Out of the Dead City/Captives of the Flame by Samuel R. Delany

3. Babel 17 by Samuel R. Delany

4. Atlantis: Three Novels by Samuel R. Delany

5. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

6. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany

7. Native Son by Richard Wright

8. The Outsider by Stephen King

9. The Best of World SF Volume 3 edited by Lavie Tidhar

10. Our Share of the Night by Mariana Enriquez

11. Legion by William Peter Blatty

12. The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, and William Hutson

13. Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

14. Revival by Stephen King

15. Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

16. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

17. A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

18. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

19. The Vegetarian by Han Kang

20. Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

21. Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley

22. The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

23. Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman

How I Designed My Reading List

I’ve already written a big post on what I worked on throughout my third term, but I wanted to share how I built the above list and what considerations I had in mind as I selected each book. I design each of my term’s reading lists based on what I am writing, what I am studying, and recommendations from my teacher and cohort. For my third term,

I wrote…

A horror thriller novel that deals with trauma, belief/faith, and truth seeking. The novel is about three women returning to a small Wyoming town in order to solve a string of murders that took place when they were teens. A lot of the books that helped inform my work around my thesis were novels in the same genre or style as mine. So, books like Dance Hall of the Dead, Revival, and stuff like that. I also read some nonfiction books on trauma and structure to help me think about the broader aspects of my novel.

A short story that doesn’t really fit into any one genre and is best described as general speculative fiction. The story follows a child as they recount a moment from when they were young and met someone who could do magic and the events that conspired after that event. I actually don’t think I read anything for this story because it just came out of me one week.

Several short essays and a longer critical paper. My short essays, for the most part, have been republished on here in the annotations’ section and were all reflections on craft from an assortment of books. My critical paper was on the structure of catharsis horror and trauma storytelling.

I studied…

Trauma storytelling and writing as well as general trauma theory.

Narrative structure and writing stories with multiple POVs that don’t switch until later in the novel.

Samuel R. Delany’s work.

Character voice.

I was recommended…

Books by people in my cohort and my teacher that ranged from nonfiction books that used interesting or unique styles.

Share

Writing Skins is a reader supported newsletter for readers of speculative fiction, nonfiction, and good books of all genres. Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where readers can find essays related to the art of writing.

Interested in more reading lists? Check out theses posts and find your next read:

Readers of fantasy with magic will go along with most anything if the magic system makes sense. V.E. Schwab creates a magic in a Darker Shade of Magic that costs blood, love, and intention. Some characters even say devotion. What is clear is that magic can corrupt and destroy in Darker Shade of Magic because magic in Schwab’s universe is alive.

The fantasy genre often classifies magic into two categories, hard and soft magic systems. Soft magic systems resemble the force from Star Wars or are consider ‘hand-wavian’ where the reader may get some information about how it works but the source and cost may be a bit hidden, or the author doesn’t spend too much time explaining the magic to the reader.

Hard magic systems resemble that of the popular and classic Wheel of Time series. Schwab has designed a magic system in A Darker Shade of Magic that is structured, explained, and inextricably tied to the storyline of the book and the world. Kell is able to move between different Londons: Black London, White London, Red London, and Grey London. Each of these Londons has its own relationship to magic based on how the population of the city has used the magic.

Since magic is a living thing with its own will and desires, it can consume those who use it without restraint, draining the individual of their life force and blood—as what has happened in Black London, which is no more because the people greedily used magic until it burned the whole world and everyone in it to nothing. Each of the different Londons has suffered from the use or abuse of magic, except for Red London, where the people of the city use magic with respect and restraint that creates harmony between the world and magic life force. Schwab tells us all of this and shows us this as the main character, Kell, moves through worlds as an Antari, strongest of magicians in the worlds.

Worlds are not the only things changed by magic. To use one of the strongest forms of magic, blood magic, the caster must be Antari and use the magic hidden in blood. This results in the caster having to use blood commands that are a mixture of the caster’s own blood, speaking a specific magical language, and having the right intent or conviction. Since the caster must use their own blood, self-harm comes up a lot in the book. So much so, some readers found the book to be too hard to read. Schwab, however, wrote the magic to be an examination of the relationships to power/magic so does not dwell too much in Darker Shade of Magic on the acts the caster must do in order to call the magic out of their blood.

Authors of the best fantasy stories which have magic as part of their world tend to lay the rules of the magic systems out in clever ways through how the characters interact in the world, with their powers, and each other. In Darker Shade of Magic, we learn that there are fine elements that magic can control and work with (fire, water, air, earth, and bone) during a moment that the main character, Kell, is checking another person for their magical proficiency. During this scene, we learn that the easiest elements for magic to work on are water, air, and earth but that bone is the hardest. We are told this and shown it through Kell’s eyes and voice making the scene that is exposition heavy, lively and entertaining:

“Tell you what,” said Kell. “Choose one element. Move it from its notch—without touching it, of course—and I’ll bring you your dirt.”

Ned’s brow furrowed. He considered the options, then jabbed a finger at the water. “That one.”

At least he wasn’t fool enough to try for the bone, thought Kell. Air, earth, and water were the easiest to will—even Rhy, who showed no affinity whatsoever, could manage to rouse those. Fire was a bit trickier, but by far, the hardest piece to move was the bit of bone. And for good reason. Those who could move bones could move bodies. It was strong magic, even in Red London.” — (V.E. Schwab - A Darker Shade of Magic)

The distinctive magical system in A Darker Shade of Magic makes it so that as a reader follows along with the story they become increasingly more knowledgeable about the unique magic of the world. When a character is in trouble, the reader thinks of what they should do based on the magic they have at their disposal. The reader can also understand why a character does not do a certain magical act because the reader understands the stakes and costs. This understanding of costs within the world of Darker Shades of Magic paints a clear picture for the reader of what is at stake in the world and what is lost with each spell cast.

Share

Writing Skins is a reader supported newsletter for readers of speculative fiction, nonfiction, and good books of all genres. Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where readers can find essays related to the art of writing.

My two year MFA program is coming to an end! This fourth residency was the last I’ll be doing before presenting my thesis, defending it, and graduating. Here’s how it went in pictures!

Subscribe now

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling. Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where I examine a subject, piece of media, technique, or other related creative nonsense.

I am having a weird moment with flying. I am typically afraid of flying but the anxiety is always leading up to flying. Once I’m in the air and the anxiety meds have kicked in, I’m calm and just cruising. I do have to tell myself that I am on a train or a bus and whenever turbulence happens it’s just bumps on the road.

But I learned that when leaving from home, it’s best to leave really early in the morning so that I am not awake long enough to feel the anxiety before the flight. That’s what I did this time. I flew out of Seattle early in the morning and landed in Philly in the afternoon.

Leading up to flying, I did a lot of journaling about how I wanted this term to go. Even though this fourth term is considered my thesis term, I’ve been seeing the past six months as the start of my thesis year (incoming post on my blog coming soon). This term for me is all about prepping for after the end and setting myself up for opportunities after graduation. I spent the last term, prepping for the end—this term. So my creative thesis and nonfiction critical essay are all done.

Since my creative head space isn’t bogged down with the heavy work of crafting my thesis, I am carving out space each week to build toward using my MFA time to set me up for success after. With my MFA, I am hoping to land some teaching jobs, get into some residencies and fellowships, and secure some grants. I also have compiled a short story collection of my published and unpublished stories that I’m going to be submitting to agents this year.

I know it’s wild to say during such a dark time for art funding, education, and people of color that I am looking to secure the very little funds and positions we have in this country to further my stories and those of others. But I truly believe my stories matter even during the dark times because I write stories of the dark times, of characters surviving, of characters loving despite the chaos and destruction.

Before making my way up to Vermont, I spent a day in Philly with my friend Nicole from my cohort. I got to meet her lovely partner and equally lovely pets. We took a couple of walks around her neighborhood, Brewerytown, and hit up Fairmount Park. I was so close to the Rocky statute and didn’t even know it! I also got an amazing Italian hoagie—hoagie! what a word that conjures feelings of home—from a hole in the wall spot that awoke long dead East Coast tastebuds.

This was my first time in Philly in about 10 years and my first time spending time in Philly for over an hour. I used to spend so much time there as a kid with my family because New York City was too far away from where we lived in South Jersey, so if we wanted to go to a big city, Philly is where we went. As a kid, I loved how Philly felt old and historic but also rough and unforgiving. Killadelphia is what it was called on the news and by some family members for a long time when I was a child because of how many killings and shootings happened there during the late 90s and early 2000s.

Philly is one of those cities where I ask myself sometimes, could I live there? Spending time walking around the neighborhoods and seeing some the sights reminded me that as a kid, I did think about living there. I imagined stepping out onto cobblestone streets and always having the best access to food, life, and culture.

After a night in Philly, me and my friend met up with another friend and carpooled up to Vermont together. It was a long drive, about 6-7 hours with stops, but we talked the whole way up. We talked about how the third term went for each of us, writing pursuits after graduation, feelings on the upcoming term, life, love, and family.

I love my cohort and friends I’ve made in the program, but that being said I am a pretty solitary person. I have a maybe 4 or 5 friends and people in my life that I talk to on the regular and spend time. Yet, somehow with my cohort, no matter how many weeks or months its been since seeing and talking to each other, I’m able to flow easily into conversation with them. After the hours of talking in the car, however, once we got to campus, I was socially drained.

While I was excited to see people from my cohort I hadn’t seen or spoken to in months, I also had to admit to them that I was drained so my excitement wasn’t showing as big as it was. On the outside, I was reserved, direct, pointed, and exhausted. On the inside, I was buzzing.

Bennington College is hidden between rolling mountains, surrounding the campus on all sides in the distance. While it’s in the town of Bennington, it’s got its own little forested area, hidden away from the rest of the town. It’s an old campus that’s been an art school for decades. Shirley Jackson’s husband worked at the school as a teacher and one of the buildings is the inspiration (supposedly) for Hill House. Donna Tarth’s Secret History is based on the campus. And more writers than I care to list here have traversed the grounds as students or teachers.

To say that it’s alive with inspiration is an understatement.

Being back on campus, felt like going on an intensive writing retreat. I knew that for the next 10 days, I’d be doing more writing, learning, communicating, sharing, editing, and thinking in one condensed span of time that by the end I’d be different. My work would be different—or at least, that’s always my aim.

I had a plan for this residency of using it as a time to focus deeply on my novel and write as much as I could. My goal was to write 25,000-30,000 words, which may sound like a lot but last winter when I used the time to write the first draft of my novel, I wrote about 26,000 words.

No matter what I felt about the upcoming days or my intention, that first night back, all I wanted to do was unpack, eat dinner, and sleep. So that’s what I did. I talked to some 1st termers who were just starting the program and ate with some friends, but as soon as I was done with that, I crawled back to my dorm room to pass out so I could start my first day strong.

That first night or the night after, I got some joints from a friend in my cohort and went on a walk around campus. I love going on night walks but don’t do them a lot back home because I lost the wildness inside that made me feel more dangerous than the night in Olympia, but on campus, I feel relatively safe walking around at night. The biggest thing I needed to worry about were patches of ice and moose.

The walk about gave me a lot of time to think about my writing and my choice to focus so heavily on my novel. I know that it won’t be done and ready to query for another year or so. I know that it’s going to take me a lot of internal and external work to make right. I know it’s weird and strange and, as one of my workshop teachers Carter Sickels said, ambitious.

So why spend my precious time on campus working so hard on it? Why not work on something that would give me a quicker return, like editing up the last short story for my collection, searching for agents to pitch that collection to, applying to teaching jobs, submitting stories to magazines, reading magazines?

The answer I found in the dark. I was choosing that novel because of all those reasons above. It is strange and hard and ambitious and will take more focus and vulnerability than any other work I’ve done so far. There wouldn’t be another time where I would be surrounded by other writers, have access to the college campus, those mountains, the books at the library, and having my meals and cleaning taken care of.

I was choosing that novel because all of those other projects didn’t have me writing. They weren’t challenging me to be, as I set as my intention at the beginning of the program, to be unrecognizable on the page. I walked around campus that firstish night and thought how I wanted to always choose writing again and again and again.

I want to wake up for writing, go to bed dreaming of writing, talk about writing without talking about writing, dance around writing, pull writing in and lock it up, devour writing like a double cheese burger with onions and mushrooms and endless fries. I want to burst with, for, and toward writing.

And my novel feels like that more than any other project—except for a secret treat project that I started writing a couple months ago and will spend time writing after I finish my current book project.

In order to live and eat and sniff writing like I wanted to during residency, I set a pretty rigid schedule. I was committed to choosing my novel each day. I would only go to things that would help me write my novel and inspire me. So if I wasn’t in a required workshop, I was writing or editing my novel. Each day, I’d check the schedule of classes, lectures, and readings and decide if any would be helpful for what I was working on. If I thought it would, I’d go. If not, I’d find a spot to write.

In the mornings, I’d wake up at 5 AM to get ready for the day, so I could meet with a couple friends and write in the common area of the building for a couple of hours before the day got started. Then I’d head to breakfast for a quick bite and catch up with friends before either going to a class or working on my novel in someway.

Some days, I’d write with other writers in another common area. But many days, I’d go to the library and do research or write alone in some empty classroom.

For the novel, I wanted to use the resources at the library to help me paint my world and understand the characters better to get a sense of their voices. I read a lot of books and set for hours trying to hear my character’s speak and see my world clearer. This resulted in pages of notes and adding new books to my reading list for the year.

On rare days when I knew my creative well needed to get re-upped, I’d go with friends on a walk, adventure into town, or grab a drink at a cafe or bar. One day me and a few other friends went to an old historic cemetery where Robert Frost is buried.

The cemetery was one of the more beautiful ones I’ve been too. It’s on top of a hill with the Green Mountains in the distance. The tombstones were mostly hand carved stone. I saw gravestones I have never seen before. There was one that was a giant stone and one was a mausoleum built into a hill.

The church overlooking the graveyard was one the oldest in the state, too. If not, the oldest!

During the evenings, I set aside time to edit my work of the day and prepare for the next day of writing. I’d often do this while watching some show or movie that inspired me and my project. I watched Susperia, Breaking Bad, and The Devil All the Time. So I was in a drug, religion, and magic headspace.

If I finished up with editing work early, I’d spend the evening watching a reading and or hanging out with friends. One evening, a fellow cohort member set up a party in a secret room where we played beer pong, danced, talked, and had a little party for the cohort. We also did cohort readings in the lecture hall and in a common room building with a fire.

We’ve been doing cohort readings since the beginning. It’s been amazing to be able to hear how people in my cohort have been developing over the terms and enhancing their craft.

There was even one night of tired bar hopping that turned into jublient karaoke singing. I sang TATU’s ‘All The Things She Said.’ And then I learned that it’s having a moment or had a moment because of Heated Rivalry. Haven’t seen the show. I just love the song and think it’s a great karaoke jam.

Writing, reading, editing, and partying wasn’t all I did on campus, I also went to a few classes and my workshops. All the classes I went to happened to revolve around perspective and structure, particularly repetition. My novel has a unique structure and I’m attempting to write very strong deep voices and a story that sprouts from character and feels almost too wild to be real but too real to not be true.

A lecture that helped me and rocked many of us on campus was one delivered by Moriel Rothman-Zecher called ‘Writing the Ineffable Through the Specific of Our Bodies’.

The lecture was my favorite one so far on campus. It was about bodies and spirituality and holiness and yes also shit and blowjob and boogers. There was also a group sing of Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley. It was a beautiful lecture, an emotional experience, and an inspiring speech.

If I could somehow dare to distill the lecture down to a craft technique or advice, it would be: write all human acts that are often viewed as perverse, dark, or repulsive as sacred and a blessing because we all our lives are miracles.

At the end of the 10 long exhausting days, I had learned a lot, wrote a lot, talked even more, and edited work that I was proud of. For my workshop where students in the program share work and get critiqued in a classroom setting on the work, I shared the opening pages to one of the POVs of my novel. They were a set of pages that I found to be very rough and not at all what I was hoping to write for that character.

Typically, in this situation, I would submit something to the workshop that was more polished. Something I had a firm hold on, but since this is my last workshop before graduating, I decided to do something different. I submitted this rough piece for critique. I believed that I knew what was wrong with it and what people would say about it.

None of what I believed was true. The piece was well received and moments that for me rang false to the character created clear images of her in readers’ minds. The writing was praised as being skilled and that it made readers trust me as an author. There were critiques, of course, on whether or not I was telling information to the reader at the right time or allowing the character to slow down and explain things.

But for the most part, the piece sat well with the class!

Later when talking with another cohort member and someone in my workshop, I told her about my feelings about the section I shared. She told me to trust myself and not what other people say. I know my characters and story, so if something seems off to me, then it probably is. When I met with my teacher for the term, Emily Nemens, and talked with her about who my character is and how I think where I started her story is not the right area, she agreed.

All of this feedback came at a great time as I finished writing one POV of the novel and started writing the next. Instead of making me write fast, however, it made me write more deliberate and thoughtful. My aim was 25,000 words, and I wrote less than 15,000 words, but the words I wrote felt good and right. It felt like my characters were speaking to me the way I wanted them to, the way I need them to in order to build and tell this story.

My residency focus was a success. If not in word count, than in building a good relationship with my story and characters.

As the days came to an end, a snow storm blew in. This has been a pretty typical experience of Bennington around this time of year. For the past several winter residencies, snow storms have blown in either at the beginning or end or both.

While the snow in Bennington is beautiful and dreamy—there were a couple of writing by the fire while the snow fell sessions—it did cause a bit of an anxiety to rise among many people as we packed up to leave. Last winter, I flew out of Albany that is just a couple of hours away from Bennington and had a long delayed flight that turned out to be the last one before the airport shut down to all incoming and out going flights.

Since I was flying from Philly, I had to make the drive back down from Vermont to Pennsylvania. The roads looked worse than they were and we were able to make it back to Philly with enough time to spare for me to grab a Philly cheesestake before my flight back home.

Flying gives me a lot of anxiety, but I was soaring on anxiety meds, cheesestakes, and the post-residency high. In that airport watching the snow drizzle come down while they loaded the plane, I could see how I wanted my last term to go. I sketched out a few intentions in my notebook that amount to this guiding idea:

Yeah, this is my thesis term and I should be focusing on that, but that work falls into this intention. I have to finish writing my novel that is going to be my thesis in order to submit out next year to agents. But I also want to use my degree to start looking at landing a writing teaching job somewhere, submitting out my short story collection, and breaking into more creative nonfiction criticism.

I loved all my time at residency, but coming home after days away and sleeping in an old colonial dorm room felt so good. It took my cat about a day to realize that I was real and actually home. Once he did, he stayed close to my side for days after.

He will always be my favorite writing buddy.

There is one more residency I have left. My graduation residency! I’ll do what I have been doing for that one and take pictures to chart my experience for those who want to see my experience from afar. I’ll try to be better and more intentional about snapping pictures while on campus but I get so caught up, I often forget about my phone.

Tell Me What You Thought of the Post

If you haven’t read about my previous residencies, here are the photo essays for each: 1st residency road trip, 2nd residency, and 3rd residency. I’ve also been writing more detailed reports of my MFA experience over on my author website: Bennington Writing Seminars Residency Experience, My First MFA Year, and First Half of My Thesis Year.

Atlantis Model: 1924 charts the journey of a young Black man as he moves from North Carolina to New York in the 1920s in Samuel R. Delany’s imaginative and experimental novella from his collection Atlantis.

Subscribe now

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling. Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where readers can find essays around the writing craft.

I’ve written about Delany a little before on this newsletter (Jewels of Aptor and Babel 17). While I am a fan of Delany’s writing and deeply grateful for the work he’s published that has pushed Black narratives and Black queer narratives further, I sometimes can find his stories a bit too theoretical and philosophical.

In my early writing years, I loved this style of writing that was less about people and the events of their lives that shaped them, but was more about the idea. But as I’ve written and read more, these types of stories often feel overly dense and obfuscatory for no reason other than in service of a writer’s big cool idea.

And for me as a reader, that is pretty boring.

Despite how boring those stories are to me, I do sometimes find the ideas being explored thought provoking, like that in Delany’s Atlantis Model: 1924.

Atlantis Model: 1924 is a short novella, maybe even novelette, in the collection Atlantis that opens with a quote from Robert Hayden’s poem Middle Passage on the West Atlantic slave trade:

Then the novel falls into the story of Sam—not to be confused with the author—as he makes his way from South Carolina to Harlem during the 1920s at the beginning of the Great Migration when many Black people made the journey from the South to northern states in order to escape harsh bigotry and find better lives.

One of the opening scenes places Sam on a segregated train car for the journey to New York and ends around a conversation on Black identity about who gets to name Black folk and what it means for a Black person to identify themselves by their own means. Various scenes throughout the novel deal with topics of race, Prohibition, queerness, and community. All of those topics and themes are interesting (though at times boring to read), but the most interesting aspect of the novel is not what it is written about but how it is written.

The novel is written in a stylized format that splits the text into columns and asides that create a different story than the main one about Sam. It took a few times encountering the structure to get into the style. At first, I struggled with how to read the story and what part was the one that logically followed before the break in structure. By the end of the story, I did it by what felt right.

Some of the asides were related to New York City history and culture. And sometimes the structure reminded me of the city’s structure and popular architecture of New York—of towers and bridges and spaces between buildings. In a few spots, the split in narrative read like footnotes or author commentary on the city.

The story itself was inspired by a story Delany heard from his father about getting to New York as a young Black man and being disappointed that there weren’t any sky scrapers he could see. Supposedly, Delany’s father remarked that New York was no better than where he came from.

It was no Atlantis. No magical fantastical island city ripped out of the future.

The whole story, though following Sam, read more like it was following the idea of what a city like New York meant to the Black people from the south who sought the city out as a refuge. Two major conversations, for me, marked the book’s themes and were the most thought provoking. One happened during the middle of the book while Sam was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. Sam encountered a man who told him of an Atlantis that was a safe, heavenly place and only accessible by certain magical people—read: queer. The other happens at the end of the book and is a conversation in identifying as a Black person. What is better, allowing the world to label you or labeling yourself?

Each conversation revolves around place and how it relates to identity. Each conversation returns to that opening poem by Hayden quoted. Each asking the same question without asking it.

Who are we in relation to where we come from?

One of the characters in Atlantis Model: 1924, rejects the idea of being labeled colored, African, or anything tied to the idea of where a Black person has come from or what the color of their skin means to who they are in the gaze of other people. Instead, he will identify himself by everything that he comes into contact with and touches him, whether that be people, places, or works of art.

At times throughout the story, the New York of the narrative is recreated as the magical city that can recreate a person’s identity, rewrite their past story into something magical and new. The story wrestles with the idea of a past unrooted to the land that people connect it to. Africa. Atlantis. All lands real but made fantastical by history. African Americans. A people real but made fantastical and othered by the cruel history inflicted on them.

There were some moments of excitement and interest while reading Atlantis Model: 1924, but a lot of it felt like more a mental exercise and less like a story that I wanted to really get into, but that could also have been because I primarily read the story at night after long days creatively taxing my brain.

If you haven’t read any Delany, despite what I say about the denseness of his prose, he is a great writer and one everyone should read. He’s like a Black gay horny Le Guin with mind numbing/blowing stories that blend science fiction with fantasy and tackles topics like queerness, race, language, and monogamy in many of his works.

Thanks for reading! If you’ve read Atlantis or Atlantis Model: 1924, I would really like to know your thoughts. Besides reading, how has life been for you? I am coming up on my self-imposed deadline for finishing the second draft of my novel and really considering crawling into a cave from now until after I finish the novel.

If you don’t hear from me for a few days or weeks, you’ll know why.

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.

Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where subscribers and me go through a subject, piece of media, or technique together.

Subscribe now

Whether in stories, movies, games, or real life, arguing is a high tension and high stakes moment for everyone involved. It doesn’t matter if the people involved in the argument are yelling about the last slice of pizza or about the end of the world.

When in an argument, we find ourselves gripped by every beat.

The question and subject of this article is how do we use these gripping moments to deliver information, story progress, and motivation while not sapping all of the energy from the argument.

Using this high stakes moment as a way to keep the story and stakes alive isn’t something that the average writer can do. It’s something that takes skill and practice.

I’ll give you the tools and information that you need to do this while providing you with exercises to help you practice and develop the skill. In order for all of this information to stick, though, you’ll need to continue doing this well after reading this article.

You’ll need to be doing these exercises until the tools become second nature to you. That is how you will know that you have moved forward with your craft.

This may take days, weeks, months, or even years to settle in, but that is the time penalty we all must accept when learning something new.

Example

Let’s first start off by examining a well-done argument in the wild. The example I’m going to use is from Lovecraft Country.

Don’t worry if you haven’t seen it or haven’t gotten to this episode yet. There won’t be any spoilers in this example.

If you’d like to watch the scene that I’ll be talking about, I’ve embedded it below.

In the video, the two characters (Ruby and Christina) fight over one of the character’s (Ruby’s) motivations behind doing a very questionable act. A common argument subject.

What the writers of Lovecraft Country did exquisitely was have one of the characters come in extremely hot and mighty, giving the readers what they believe to be is a justifiable reason behind the character’s actions but it’s a lie that the other character sees through and reveals.

The writers use descriptive wording at the very opening of the argument to pull the audience in and ground them.

It’s a pretty hard thing to turn away from and not listen to.

But then, that’s sort of what the other character does in her response to the question of, “Do you care?”, adding to the tension and conflict of the argument.

Christina let’s Ruby continue on until Ruby delivers a whooping insult that wins the audience over to her side after she does something that leads the audience to question her motivations and loyalties.

Only until after the audience is given what seems to be a really good, although questionable, reason for doing something that seems so wrong, does the other character finally say more than a couple words.

Like what happens in many arguments, Christina rebuffs what Ruby says and offers another reason for why she did what she did. The thing about this reason is that it hurts and is awful but aligns more with the character of Ruby and how she has acted throughout the whole show.

We the audience can tell that this is really the reason behind Ruby’s actions.

Ruby is taken aback by the statement and the scene ends there, but the argument does not. Scenes and minutes later, we finally are given the conclusion through another argument between Ruby and her sister where she repeats the words that Christina told her were her real reasons for acting the way she did.

Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

Above, we examined a scene and learned how other writers handled their arguments within their stories. We could, of course, just stop there and mimic what the writers of Lovercraft Country did.

But this article is for people who truly want to master and learn their craft, so below we’ll go over more techniques that you can use and play with within your own stories.

Use the Setting

Depending on what type of story you’re telling, your characters will be having an argument in a space of some sort, whether physical or not. Make sure that the space that the argument is happening in makes sense for the argument, so that it quietly heightens the tension of the scene.

Use Time

Like in Lovecraft Country, the argument that happens between Ruby and Christina doesn’t just take place over the course of that scene but has ramifications and consequences that reverbrate through the story. When writing your argument, decide when you’ll give the conclusion for the argument and how long the argument will last.

Subtext

What are the characters within your scene avoiding saying? What are their inner motivations, secrets, and desires during this argument? If one of the characters in your argument is using this time to manipulate the character into doing something they want, make them go about whispering their intentions to the other character through what they say and don’t say.

Sentences and Rhetoric

Zooming in closer to the bricks of our stories — the words and sentences — use sentence length and word choice to control the pacing and emotion of the reader throughout the argument. Using the example given above, Ruby could have simply said that a boy was brutally murdered, but instead she goes through each step of his mutilation in a very straightforward and descriptive way, making it impossible to turn away and not pay attention.

Use Character Relationships

An argument between two exes will have different stakes and power struggles then an argument between a child and a parent. Knowing how your characters are related and what their histories are will help you in understanding what each would say to the other to get what they want out of the argument. And I mean really know your characters. Truly examine them and their histories, shared and personal.

Use Reader Emotion

It may be tempting for some to put their arguments at the beginning of their story or to introduce characters, but at that point, readers don’t know enough to care about why there is an argument taking place to actually be engaged in it. Arguments are best up saved for moments when the reader knows the characters and believes they’ll know the outcome of the argument (this leaves room for you to pull a reversal or a big reveal that makes the reader fall out of their seats).

Make it Matter

I am sure you have experienced that moment where you’re reading or watching an argument and you realize that none of what the characters are saying actually has any baring on plot, world, problem, or character. This usually happens when the writer is simply writing an argument between two people and the statements begin to sound and feel redundant. Yes, of course, the reader knows that your character hates that their husband is cheating on them with the pool boy, but tell the reader something that turns everything on its head and has real ramifications and emotions like that the pool boy is actually the husband’s estranged son and they haven’t been having an affair but trying to work at building a relationship together.

Actions Speak Louder

Not every rebuttal can and should be done with words. Have your characters show how they feel through what they do or don’t do during the scene. For example, in the scene from Lovecraft Country, Christina’s character received every bit of information and emotion that Ruby gave. She didn’t look away or roll her eyes, even though she states that she doesn’t care about what happened to the boy we see through her actions that she does, however, care about Ruby.

Keep Exposition Brief

Some writers have the need to stop and start their arguments. They will stop them to drop a paragraph of exposition that they think will ground the reader in the scene. They’ll stop to explain the inner workings of the characters to help their readers understand where each character is coming from. The problem with this is that the writers should be letting their dialogue and argument do all of those things so that they don’t have to stop the tension and pace of the argument to do it. One or two lines packed with emotion spread throughout your argument will do just great.

Are you a fiction writer with a tried and true way of writing your characters arguing, share it below! And for all of us who are readers, what are some of your favorite arguments in fiction?

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading! This is a republished post from my Medium which I am slowly shuttering and making all posts available for free to read on here.

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.

Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where subscribers and me go through a subject, piece of media, or technique together.

Subscribe now

Philosophical science fiction has been around since the first science fiction story, which is considered to be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Some critics and readers believe that all science fiction is philosophical because it deals with thought experiments, whether it’s like Shelley’s novel about the ramifications of playing God or Samuel R. Delany’s works, which deal with a wide range of philosophical topics.

The philosophy in Delany’s Babel-17 is a linguistic one based around the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that asserts what language you speak determines how you think or how your brain perceives the world:

“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages…the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.” (Benjamin Lee Whorf)

Whorf’s hypothesis has long been laughed out due to the face that he believed how Hopi used time in their language meant they didn’t understand time or perceived it in a different way. Hopi speakers do understand time in various ways. This hasn’t stopped linguists from wondering and believing that while, Whorf was wrong, language does have an impact in our culture.

In a study done in the late aughts on an Aboriginal language, Murrinhpatha, researchers found that speakers of the language process moments faster than other languages because they use one word to convey not just what happened but who did it. Since the culture that speaks Murrinhpatha is one based largely on community, conveying a message that captures the whole community is important to the way they speak and see the world.

Another way to think about this theory and the implications of language on thought, consider someone who grew up learning how to speak American English will have different thought patterns than someone who grew up speaking Canadian English or French or Chinese. Language influences thought, which in Babel-17’s case, leads to action. Throughout the book, many examples are given of how impactful and far-reaching living in a world where this hypothesis is true. One includes a character explaining that using one language would take people minutes to convey a meaning and hours in another language to convey the same meaning.

Babel-17 in the novel is a lost or galactic type language that most people in the novel don’t speak except for a warring race that uses the language in combat to cause harm. A poet and captain in the novel, Rydra Wong, sees the language of Babel-17 as something more than a violence. Wong sees it as the way into changing how people think about each other, the world, stretching understanding to new heights.

Delany’s characters use the philosophy and language of the novel to fight against oppression and pain in a way that puts language and the way we think at the crux of the problem in relating to one another. For example, there is a character in the novel, The Butcher, a character who once spoke Babel-17 but no longer remembers and does not use personal pronouns like ‘I’, ‘you’, and ‘we’. Wong, The Butcher’s captain, reminds The Butcher of who ‘I’ is and who ‘you’ are, creating an exchange that leads to one of self-discovery and vulnerability done in a poetic style where ‘you’ is ‘I’ and ‘me’ is ‘you’:

“‘Don’t you see, sometimes you want to say things, and you’re missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That’s how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn’t exist.’… [The Butcher] grunted once again. ‘But now you are not quite so alone. I teach you to understand the others, a little. You’re not stupid, and you learn fast…You like me.’ … ‘If you ever rob another bank, you will give me all the money.” Rydra laughed. ‘Why, thank you.’”

What the novel and theory makes readers think, is how does gender play out in cultures that speak Tagalog, Finnish, and Mandarin or other languages that use gender neutrality? What are the ramifications of learning and speaking only one language? Are we limiting ourselves in how we can think by not exploring different linguistic frameworks? According to Delany’s Babel-17, yes. Not only are we missing out on the ability to think in new and barrier-breaking ways by only speaking one language, but we’re also not gaining access to language we could use to describe ourselves and understand the world.

Many non-gendered languages do still use gendered terms like father, daughter, wife, husband, that stick closely to the binary. If we dig further into languages connected to Indigenous cultures more, than the understanding of gender is a bit more freeing and the ideas of self and other are less strict.

Without a doubt, language has an impact on people. We can trace the impact of a society, its people, and its way of life to the colonization impacts on the world. French meet Danish and wars break out but so do new forms of agricultural, architecture, and changes in ways of communication. I feel like I am just talking out of my ass without stats and data and historical factors, but to get that I’d need like several more months to hammer into the research already done and the stuff I’d want to do.

Share Writing Skins

But I think in the US only 22% of people speak a language other than English, locking us in to a specific way of thinking and seeing the world that has become distinctly American. We are limiting ourselves to knowing only one way to communicate, destroying all others as confusing, off-putting, and hard to understand. When maybe that is just the dominance inherent in the English language. The same type that has gone on to colonize and bring apocalypses to worlds upon worlds. Maybe our resistance is because of the way we talk and how it’s shaped our mental understanding of the world around us.

Delany’s story in the end is about colonization and languages. A dead poetic language that is hard to learn and known by few, Babel-17, is under attack and if Rydra Wong and her crew win, then the language will be destroyed. There are no winners or victors in Babel-17 just people acting in the only way they know how.

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.

Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where subscribers and me go through a subject, piece of media, or technique together.

Subscribe now

Rivers Solomon’s 2019 fantasy novel, The Deep, is a community story about Black community history that builds off and develops the story from the Afrofuturist song “The Deep” by the hip hop group Clipping. Both stories are focused on telling the story of descendants of African enslaved people thrown overboard slave ships who evolved to live in the waters and deeps of the oceans. While each features similar elements, Solomon’s novel deepens and expands on the story in the song. When setting out to tell a story of such suffering, horror, and trauma, Solomon and Clipping put the act of remembering at the heart of the story. Memory and remembrance are deeply interconnected to the healing of trauma and important in reconciling the pain it causes. As Solomon’s novel brilliantly illustrates: trauma doesn’t just exist in the present or the past but in both breaking binds of time.

In the critical analysis book Trauma in Contemporary Literature edited by Marita Nadal and Monica Calvo, critic Jean Laplanche states that trauma is made of two parts but it’s the second part that makes trauma, trauma: “Trauma consists of two moments: the trauma … and the memory of it, must be reinvested in a second moment, and then it becomes traumatic … it is the internal reviviscence of this memory that becomes traumatic.” The Deep takes this idea even further by having the culture of the wajinru (the underwater dwelling descendants of drowned enslaved people) impart the powerful memory of how they came to be onto just one person, The Historian, who’s trusted with remembering the horrific act of people being thrown overboard from ships when they were sick, pregnant, an inconvenience.

Yetu is the Historian charged with keeping all the traumatic memories of the wajinru and holding a once-a-year remembrance where she leads the merpeople in a dance ceremony that reminds the people of their history and where they came from through living out the pain:

“The History was her power, and it ignited her…She would be their savior…‘Remember’ Yetu ordered…Yetu gave them a script, but they knew the words. It lived in their cartilage and their organs, as coded into them as the shape of the webbed appendages on their front fins or the bulbousness of their eyes. She only need remind them. That was all remembering was…In general, Yetu didn’t tell the Remembrance. She made her people experience it as it happened in the minds of various wajinru who lived it. At the start, however, she preferred to give them some guidance. It made the transition of memories much more efficient when they had context…She’d discovered the History on her own, through out-of-order scraps and pieces. Slivers slicing through her. Yetu twisted and tensed as pain overwhelmed her. That was something she should be over by now, after all this time, the physicality of it. But she felt her whole body go rigid and then snap. Her body was full of other bodies.”

Yetu tries to remove the trauma and pain by leaving her people, by taking away the initial memory, believing that by leaving she’d remove the trauma. But she learns that you can’t remove trauma. Trauma is there always once she starts the memory dance, she’s opened a door to the past. Whether or not the wajinru remember the specifics of the initial trauma doesn’t stop their suffering. The forced removal that Yetu does creates even more trauma, severs the wajinru from their past. Yetu’s job was to remind them of their past and bring them out of it, but she left before that final healing stage.

Without her, the wajinru cannot break out of the trauma trance and relive the pain and sorrow in their bodies over and over, driving them hysteric. With their disconnection to their history and the story of how they came to be, the wajinru become chaos unable to process the traumatic memories. The memories of trauma are forever traumatic without the story that connects them to a place of healing. The memories alone are like reliving the trauma on repeat in a spiral of pain without an end, “Trauma has become the dystopia of the spirit…” Michael S. Roth wrote in Trauma in Contemporary Literature. And a dystopia is what Yetu creates by leaving.

Yetu, and the Historians before her, exist to make sure the wajinru don’t have to remember the pain of the past. They know how troubling and traumatic the memories are. But the responsibility and impact (both physical and mental) on the Historians often leads to turmoil for both the wajinru and humans. The wajinru have a psychological connection to the ocean and can cause tidal waves and oceanic storms when they experience these memories without guidance or the right guidance. The wajinru in their crisis without direction or a guide to healing and through the pain create a tidal wave, drowning people.

You can’t heal what you don’t remember and that is what pains Yetu. While she remembers the pain always, her community, the culture so deeply rooted in community doesn’t understand the pain of her everyday life. It’s what drives her to leave. She leaves thinking the pain is too much, that her taking the memories and leaving her people that they would be able to make their way out of the trauma, but they are only memories of the trauma without the connection to the initial event. It’’s like when a person has suffered a trauma but only parts of them remember. Like hearing the sound of a bike chain and trembling or not knowing why certain songs cause panic attacks. These aren’t examples from the book, but from real life.

Remembering the trauma, in Solomon’s novella is the only way the wajinru are able to survive and Yetu plays a vital, if not burdensome, role in this remembrance by holding all the actual memories or initial moments and only sharing them occasionally with her community.

In The Deep, readers see how important remembering trauma in the right way is and that the right way isn’t alone but in community and with the guidance and truth of history and the vulnerability of collective emotional release. There is no trauma without the memory and without the memory trauma cannot be healed. Yetu, in the end, becomes another abuser by taking away the context for the wajinru to process their pain. She causes more pain in an attempt to flee from it. Solomon does not give a happy ending to The Deep because there is no happy ending to healing just the work.

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.

Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where subscribers and me go through a subject, piece of media, or technique together.

Subscribe now

Diana Rahim’s short story A Minor Kalahari opens the speculative fiction short story collection, The Best of World SF Volume 3 edited by Lavie Tidhar. It is climate fiction, which is an island between the lands of science fiction and realist fiction, set in a land where no vegetation has grown in decades, long enough for people to forget about the green of trees and grass or remember them only as if in a story and not as something they themselves have experienced.

A man, Mr. Tan, wakes up to find a watermelon growing in his front yard. People marvel at it, ask to take care of it, and the counsel in the neighborhood requests for its ownership. No one owns the watermelon in A Minor Kalahari, but most characters mourn it when one day it turns up smashed.

The return and subsequent destruction of the watermelon reminds Mr. Tan of other things that have come and gone besides just the vegetation: his family, decorum in the neighborhood, appreciation of life without rule or explanation. There’s even hints of Mr. Tan’s family and past, which at first read like they have died the same way the trees and plants have, but throughout the story it seems ever more like they are alive but, in another area, cut off from Mr. Tan due to some past indiscretion he has yet to apologize for.

The story doesn’t provide any explanation to many of its curiosities. By the end, however, there is still a sense of satisfaction and completion even though the reader never learns where the watermelon came from, who smashes it, or what will happen with the seeds after, even though several characters including Mr. Tan take them.

Rahim can create this sense of satisfaction through rendering the experience of the characters in the story in actions and emotions. The reader gets to see multiple sides of the watermelon, creating a full view of interpretations and reactions to the watermelon’s appearance.

We see a child experience the vibrant green of healthy life and then the same child going through the process of mourning what was lost, not in grief, but wonder at what is inside of the watermelon, “To a child who was yet to understand the world he lived in, the sight of the fruit cracked open was a marvel. He screamed with joy and plunged his little hands into the fibrous red flesh.” (A Minor Kalahari) The reader’s satisfaction, instead of being based in answers and rational is anchored in feeling.

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.

Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where subscribers and me go through a subject, piece of media, or technique together.

Share

How I Built My Third Term Reading List

Unlike how I built my first and second term reading lists, for my third term, I allowed myself some freedom not to stick to the list I built a year before this term when I first entered the program. That list is more of a guide if I find myself lacking of a next good book to inform my writing.

Which I never am.

Since the third term is the start to my final year, my thesis year, where I’ll be tasked during my next term to submit 100 some odd pages of fiction and 20 so odd pages of nonfiction, I wanted to read in a way that would help me write the novel I’m drafting and the critical paper I’m writing.

The novel is a horror thriller and the critical paper is an analysis of the cathartic horror plot structure and its affects on the reader. So, I’ve got a lot of horror books on the list and am trying to really embody certain elements of the genre more than I already have to make the story really grab readers and find its audience when I query and hopefully sell it.

So my list is built of horror books recommended to me, stories that caught my attention, books my teacher recommended, and books my cohort was reading.

I also try and focus on one particular author each term. This term it’s Samuel R. Delany. Reading through some of Delany’s books that I’ve read before and some I haven’t has been an interesting stretch for me. Some books of his, I am pulled in by. Others find me yawning waiting for something more interesting to happen. He’s still a favorite writer because his skill is undeniable.

My MFA Fiction Reading List

1. The Varieties of Religious Experience

2. Heaven Looks Like Us

3. The Jewels of Aptor

4. Native Son

5. The Outsider

6. Out of the Dead City

7. World Science Fiction: Collection of International SciFi

8. Babel 17

9. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

10. Our Share of the Night

11. Spring Summer Asteroid Bird

12. Of Solids and Surds

13. Legion

14. The Deep

15. A Girl’s Story

16. Sorrowland

17. About Writing by Delany

18. Dhalgren

19. Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War

20. Revival

21. Victorian Psycho

22. Happily

23. The God of the Woods

24. Atlantis: Three Novels by Delany

25. Trauma and Contemporary Literature

26. A Head Full of Ghosts

27. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Literature

Most Impactful Books

One of the most influential books this third term on my writing has been Richard Wright’s Native Son. I read the book for the first time over the summer and the narrative coincidence and flow of the novel, so confident and ruthless and unrelenting inspired me to focus more on my character’s and writing scenes and moments that are truly natural to the reader no matter how wild they may seem.

The books on trauma on my list (Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War by Harriet E. H. Earle, Trauma in Contemporary Literature: Narrative and Representation edited by Marita Nadal, Mónica Calvo, and Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction by Laurie Vickroy) have helped me think about my stories and readers in new ways that have helped me write emotions and reactions for my characters better.

What have you been reading and studying the past few months?

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.

Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where subscribers and me go through a subject, piece of media, or technique together.

Subscribe now

Heaven Looks Like Us is a Palestinian poetry collection edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi. It, like described in the introduction by the editors, is not an anthology or collection in the sense that they have gathered the best poetry by the best known or most talented Palestinian poets. Instead, the collection is an archive of poems by Palestinian people alive, dead, good, bad, poets, parents, and more. The collection features a range of poems in different styles and languages (a few of the poems are in Arabic or translated from Arabic), but a few structures or poetic uses came up multiple times throughout the collection in poems from different writers. The one that stood out to me was the use of concrete poetry techniques in several of the poems.

Concrete poetry, similar to other forms of spatial prosody poems (poetry that uses the physical space of how the words are arranged on the page) like pattern poetry, figure poems, and calligrammes, are poems where the placement of words is done to reflect the theme or topic or a specific symbol related to the poem. This form of poetry is aimed at challenging the reader to connect the relationship between the shape and the poem, the structure and the words or language on the page. Edward Hirsch’s A Poet’s Glossary defines concrete poetry as poems that “foreground the visual configuration (how a poem looks) and pushes the pictorial boundaries of poetry.” Another definition in the book given by Augusto de Campos calls concrete poetry the “tension of things-words in space time.”

The use of the concrete poetry form across poems in Heaven Looks Like Us at first made me think of falling bombs. For so many Palestinians, if not all Palestinians, war and attack is what life has looked like for the past few decades if not all of their lives for people born after 1948. It’s recently been put on display on a massive scale with the help of social media and independent journalism over the last 646 days. The image of powerful and destructive forces falling from above is a pattern that is recognizable and deeply meaningful, so it made sense to me that they appeared throughout the collection. Like in Sarona Abuaker’s “my dear, don’t be afraid, it’s nothing, it will pass”

Reading about concrete poetry and pattern poetry and how its uses have been implemented specifically to give a poem a deeper connection to the theme makes me wonder if the choice among writers in the collection to call on concrete poetry was deliberate or symbolic or instinctual or not thought about at all. Did it just feel right? Concrete poetry forces the reader to be an active reader; challenges them to look past the words and deeper, opening the reader up to witnessing, which is another theme that comes up in the collection. A call to witness. A remembrance of witnessing. A plea for continued witness.

-George Abraham’s the ghosts of the dead sea are rising

Eugene Gomringer called these types of poems constellations due to how they were arranged like constellations on the page. I found this to be a beautiful idea but in context with this collection and its subject matter of loss, death, and genocide I can only see a constellation of war and bombs, of white phosphorous falling from the sky and blanketing the land in death clouds.

But then I think about the title of the collection: Heaven Looks Like Us. And what is heaven but a constellation of souls. The poetry collection has a lot of those: souls. Each poem conjuring something outside just the poem, poet, and time but reaching, often across decades and centuries, calling to colonizers and genociders and long done wrongs and close-held moments of joy, love, and connection.

As an exercise for this annotation, I tried my hand at writing a concrete poem and writing a reflection quickly after:

While writing that poem on the previous page, I found myself more active in the writing and more open to letting the present physical moment steer where I went like breaking a line during a lot of noise, writing in a certain typographical style to mimic the blinking exit sign, and considering more stuff in the present moment. I wondered sometimes while reading poems from the collection how many people had bombs falling, had to move due to a warning, had to dodge bullets? How many people writing their poems ran the way their words did across the land? Now I realize that the concrete form in the collection could also represent movement and forced marches. It can represent diaspora. It can represent the scattered parts of bodies, stories, and memories. It can also represent the ways severe trauma can tear us asunder.

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.

Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where subscribers and me go through a subject, piece of media, or technique together.

Subscribe now

I first read Samuel R. Delany’s novella The Jewels of Aptor in 2016 or 2015 because I had decided to be a speculative fiction author and was reading through the greats I hadn’t read based off the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award list. I was excited to read a Black writer after reading through writers like Heinlein, Gibson, Bradbury, and Asimov. While all of those writers are great and knocked my socks off with their control of story and language and pacing, they all wrote very white, straight stories that often were small minded and derogatory. In my mind, I was expecting something new and different in a loud and bombastic way in Delany’s prose and ideas. I had heard so much about how experimental Dhalgren is and how wild Hog is, but I was a baby writer and wanted to start out with the basics of Delany, which came in a three novella collection A, B, C: Three Short Novels (The Jewels of Aptor, The Ballad of Beta-2, They Fly at Çiron).

What I ended up reading in the book was something closer to Ursula K Le Guin’s quiet masterful use of language, character, and storytelling. Telling a story in a clear and philosophical way that, unlike Le Guin, didn’t bore me. I was intrigued and drawn in when I first read The Jewels of Aptor and as the story progressed and revealed a world (where at the time) it was unlike anything I had ever read. It was inspiring the way Delany is able to step away from his story and not let (at least in this book) his own skill and talent get in the way of the story. I barely saw him as the author in the pages and when I read through his craft book, About Writing, I was even more surprised to find out that the person wrote this clear scene of a man being whipped was a deeply skilled and thoughtful writer:

There are many ways this retelling of a character’s whipping could have been written. Some authors would have leaned into a visceral and disturbing descriptions of this moment. Some authors would have chosen to deploy their control of language by doing the most with the prose. Delany did what he often does and used his control of language to describe a horrific event without being horrific because that’s not what this moment calls for.

Over the years, I’ve read several different Delany books, watched his lectures, read his nonfiction, and listened to him muse problematically about contemporary queer culture. For a long time, he and specifically his book The Jewels of Aptor was why I wrote the way I did, why I wrote my first novella that went on to get published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and get nominated for best novelette for the Ignyte Award alongside writers I admire and respect. In re-reading the book now almost 10 years later, I am searching for the mechanics in the magic.

When I first read the book, I could not for the life of me ‘get it’ at first. And then it sorta hit me at some point in the novel and I not only got it, but I was in. Fully in. The story snuck up on me. Delany’s skill wasn’t in your face like Bradbury’s or flamboyant like Heinlein’s or over my head like Le Guin’s. It was clean and clear and approachable, if not at times boring or too aimed at the audience of white scifi guys like in his novel Out of the Dead City. But the clearness of the prose and the clear storytelling that comes through in his writing feels like he’s allowing his characters to lead the story.

He, like many great writers, doesn’t allow the strings of his writing to show. The characters in the science fantasy novella do not feel like they are acting out on someone’s page or stage. It reads like I am watching through a magical glass these characters as they go about this wonderfully mysterious adventure of fantastical creatures, magic, and islands locked in time. I think it comes down to instead of asking oneself as the author how would I describe or write this moment but how would this character—this person describe this moment in their life.

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.

Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where subscribers and me go through a subject, piece of media, or technique together.

Subscribe now

The Outsider is an example of how many horror stories, if not all horror stories, start with an initial trauma that reverberates through the whole story or acts as a driver for the story. Without this initial traumatic event, a horror story wouldn’t be able to happen.

The opening to King’s novel, like most of his stories, opens in a typical horror way:

1. Severe traumatic event is one of the first scenes, either the actual event or the discovery of the event. (The Outsider is the discovery of the event.)

2. A vulnerable person or population is at the hands of violence. (The Outsider has the initial traumatic event happen to a child.)

Some horror stories hide or bury this initial traumatic event for a later reveal in the story or as a mystery that needs to be solved, like in the case of many haunted house stories, where the reader isn’t shown the traumatic event until later in the story (examples: We Are Still Here and Toni Morrison’s Beloved). King’s The Outsider is not a haunted house story—unless you consider stories related to possession haunted house stories, which arguably they are: the haunted house in those cases being a body, a soul. The Outsider is a sort of monster story about a creature that is compared to the boogieman and other children-eating monsters of other cultures who can become a person in all ways, sharing memories, vision, knowledge, and appearance. This creature survives off grief and to feed, this particular monster horrifically murders and rapes children, framing a person within a small community in order to spend time feeding off the grief and sadness caused in the aftermath. This mechanic of the monster creates a necessity, almost, to start the story at a place of severe trauma to showcase the impact of the story’s core storyline and theme of digging to the truth of trauma, no matter how messy or nonsensical the causes and moments and facts are.

The opening to the novel isn’t done in the most typical fashion for a monster novel. King uses testimony, detective notes, and eyewitness accounts to introduce his initial trauma event. King only gives glimpses, snap shots of the actual trauma and instead slowly reveals the details (over and over and over) of what happened to the child and then shows the readers all the other heinous things that the creature has done and the impact of trauma it has left behind to feast on, living near graveyards, places of deep traumatic connection to communities, and watching as the person it impersonated is ostracized from the community and punished for its crimes.

The Outsider wouldn’t have worked if say the story didn’t have that initial traumatic event. There wouldn’t be an arrest, a trail, a hunt, or a reason to go after the monster so vehemently. And while some horror genres’ initial traumatic event, like in Eldritch horrors where the traumatic event might be something otherworldly or based in the natural world like a rift opening up into another dimension of unspeakable horror (see Event Horizon). Without this initial event, the horror story has no engine, no heart.

This is a requirement of most horror stories, but only good ones are able to use that traumatic event in a way that isn’t trauma porn or shock value. And only great horror stories can use that traumatic event and the horrific moments that follow as a way to showcase a journey to healing.

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.

Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where subscribers and me go through a subject, piece of media, or technique together.

Share

This third residency marks the halfway point in my MFA journey (I’ve been doing a full write up of my experience studying for my masters in fiction on my blog if you want to read and follow along). I am only in a two year program and studying one genre, fiction, so this time next year, I’ll have graduated.

That is a thought that rocked me for a good part of my time on campus connecting with my cohort, meeting my teachers, going to classes, attending workshop, and exploring the area and myself. I’m almost done with this whole made experience of studying something as untangible as story, as story creation.

Each residency, I try to change something about how I approach the 10 days on campus. My first residency, I spent time going to classes, readings, events, and getting to know my cohort. I also did a solo cross country road trip. My second residency earlier this year was all about generating words and writing. It helped me write 25,000 words on my novel over the course of those 10 days.

This third residency was more about instinct and intention, using both to steer me along to where I should go. I searched out the heat in me and in my environment. Sometimes that meant chasing storms, looking for what I thought was an owl and finding a dove, advocating for writers during workshop instead of advocating for my ideas of what their story should be, skipping or blowing off events so that I can spend deep intimate time with my cohort, my community.

Each day, I set a new intention that would guide me throughout the day when I wanted to figure out what to do. It helped me stay alive during the times I needed it and rest when I knew I should. One of my cohort members, Jay, asked a couple of us to rank our residency experiences. Which of the three was the best.

At the time, I said the first residency because it was all so new and exciting and strange. Then I listed the third residency as my second and the second residency as my third because that one just felt so lonely.

Now thinking back on this past residency, I think maybe this one was my favorite. While the first one was all new, this one felt like a different me showing up to campus and residency. I got to know and spent time with people I hadn’t hung out with and it was great! Beer pong shit talking was something I didn’t know I missed and doing it with other writers was perfect.

There were cohort readings that each term held for the their term throughout the residency and my cohort did theirs in the lecture hall, Tishman, where we will be reading our final thesis manuscripts in front of an audience of our teachers and peers.

After the readings, I sorta hosted a dating profile critique/workshop session where people came up and we built their profiles or helped them figure out what to say. I went first and had the cohort help me organize and find good pictures and update some of my bio.

A very drunk bartender at the college sent us on a wild goose hunt for Shirley Jackson’s taxidermied cats at the local Bennington library in town…Turns out it was actually just a sculpture of one of Shirley Jackson’s cats that was found on her property and now lives in the library.

If one thing really stands out for me about this third residency is the night walks I did with people. Sometimes we’d head off in a group, one-on-one, or gather people as we walked. The cornerstone of these walks was steering clear of the five questions we always ask and get asked while at residency:

1. What term are you in?

2. What genre do you write?

3. Who’s your teacher?

4. Where are you from?

5. What are you working on?

Each residency, I tolerate these repeat questions less and less and really strived this residency to not ask these questions unless I was truly curious about the person’s answers. Instead, I tried asking intimate questions that helped me learn who the person was before and who they are today. These questions included:

• How do you decide to have sex or get intimate with a person?

• When was the last time you made a big life changing shift?

• What’s your ideal aftercare practice?

• Have you ever been divorced?

• How did you learn about sex from your parents?

• Do you have kids?

• What was your first enjoyable sexual experience?

Asking these questions and answering them honestly myself helped me grow closer to my cohort and, I think, helped individuals grow closer and get to know each other in ways they wouldn’t normally.

It also led to more deep talks and people opening up to me outside of these late night talks. And that led to some wonderful unzipping of fears and worries and traumas to the messy stuff inside.

While the fireflies this residency weren’t as powerful as last June, the birds stood out to me way more! They were all over and sing songy throughout the day. I even went on a mistaken owl seek that turned out to be a mourning dove instead.

I finally downloaded the Merlin app while on campus and used it to help me identify the birds around me. Some of my favorite that I either heard and/or saw were:

• European Starling

• Mourning Dove

• Song Sparrow

• Northern Mockingbird

• House Finch

• Tufted Titmouse

• American Goldfinch

I didn’t just wander and talk and fool around while at residency, but I went to several classes and lectures to learn very important writerly things like:

And while the title is comical, this was my favorite lecture held by Hugh Ryan one of the nonfiction faculty members. It was aimed at nonfiction writers but the lessons and ideas shared could fit any format of writing. The main idea behind what essayist can learn from drag queens is the art of embodying your work so that it stops being a story and becomes a narrative performance aware of its audience and the emotional impact of a story told well.

It was a fucking amazing talk that featured examples of writing techniques done during lip synch challenges and battles on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

I’m half way through my masters. A year ago I just started and was scared as shit, wondering if I could do this and create work that was worthy of what I was sacrificing for it: money, time, anxiety, focus. Through being pushed and pushing, I feel like I have and will continue doing so as long as I don’t settle for the writer I was before.

She was good, but the one I want to come out of the program a year from now will be better. Undeniability great is what I am shooting for, but a damn fine storyteller will also do.

Leave a comment

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.

Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where subscribers and me go through a subject, piece of media, or technique together.

Subscribe now

Should I have picked up and read Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God in January amid the flurry of 30 or so executive orders and the people being herded up, kidnapped, disappeared, beaten, murdered, and the deep rooting all-encompassing dread?

Yes. I think so.

I think Future Home of the Living God (just like Parable of the Sower and Talents, like Fahrenheit 451, like Paris is Burning, like …) is helping me find a way to write about this current moment in the way I need to within my work. Because I am a writer who finds it important not to hide the world within their work. Or try to create a story that is an escape from the world. I want to write roadmaps, stories that are plans, that are cathartic by doing the hard work.

Future Home of the Living God is not cathartic. It is not a novel with a happy ending or a release. It is a novel that captures that particular fantastic moment in that fictional world in a way that isn’t too far from the reality of our world.

“And all the while as the light slants lower and lower, bathing us in a gorgeous smoldering glow, my heart slowly cracks. The deep orange gold of the sun is pure nostalgia. An antique radiance already shed itself upon this beautiful life we share.” (Future Home of the Living God pg. 61)

The novel, which is strange and dark, centers on a woman who is pregnant during a time in a possible future where evolution is reversing and pregnant people are being rounded up, tortured, mutilated, and turned into birthing farms in a mad attempt to change or stop what is happening. It’s a harrowing novel that is at times nauseating to read, but it shows how easily dread and hopelessness can and often does coexist with normalcy:

“My parents share a bottle of wine and don’t notice that I drink lemonade instead or that I cannot finish my pancakes. They wave at neighbors, trot to the fence to chat…We make plans to stay, to run, to hide, to live normally. We decide to stay vigilant, then argue about whether vigilance is a strategy.” (pg. 61)

In many passages throughout the book, Erdrich holds the dread, zooms in on it. Makes it something that is recognizable and unignorable. It’s why it took me over a week to finish because I would stop after lines and passages such as the one, I’m weeding through in this essay and have to go back and re-read it or even more excruciating, I had to put the book down and experience it without running away. Good prose has a way of doing that, recreating this intimate looking that forces us to see over the fence we, society, capitalism, imperialism, and fear have nailed in around us.

“I grow heavy, rooted in my lawn chair. Everything I say and everything my parents say, the drift of friends…and the squirrels launching themselves without fear…all of this is terminal.” (pg. 61)

For many writers, they tend to see dread and horror as the same thing. To achieve one you need the other. But in the most dreadful scenes in the novel, there is no “horror” present. The monster isn’t a large blood thirsty monster, but regular people doing terrible things with smiles on because it’s what they are supposed to do. And that is scarier than any fanged beast. Dread is that beating heart before the terror or horror. In Future Home of the Living God, there is always something more horrible around the next page and even the moments like the one I’ve pulled excerpts from where the character is among family and friends even feel sickening and dreadful.

Erdrich did an interview about the novel in the December 2017 issue of Lightspeed Magazine and explored a little about why she wrote this novel when she did and how it was a response to the world and feelings of dread around her: “2001-2002 was apocalyptic…Then of course 9/11 and the gathering of transparently false intelligence in order to invade Iraq…So I was sickened and furious when George W. Bush signed the global gag rule, which condemned women around the world to bear children whether or not they were physically capable. I started the book then because I couldn’t deal with the world in any other way. I finished it this year for the same reason.”

What have you been reading this year so far?

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.

Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where subscribers and me go through a subject, piece of media, or technique together.

Subscribe now

I once dated a person who both wanted to be seen by me and also could not stand being seen, observed, looked upon, perceived in entirety no matter how false that perception was. They would ask for me to see them and then found themselves deeply uncomfortable and assaulted by the idea that there is something to see inside of them that they don’t see or can’t see or won’t allow themselves to see. An unraveling of the person we thought we were and the life we believed we’d lead.

Over the course of the eight or nine months that we were together, I watched as their life shattered from a distance.

“He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.” (Fahrenheit 451 pg. 9)

In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury leans on an idea of the power of an intimate gaze to reverse and unravel a character and a world. You thought you were this, but really you’re this and you needed someone else to see it for you to realize it.

Fahrenheit 451 is a novel about future firemen who come to burn your books and your house and sometimes you if you are found reading or in possession of books. The main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman who starts off the story very happy (“It was a pleasure to burn.” Is the first line of the novel) until a few pages into his supposed happy existence a young girl looks at him, sees him and he’s changed in that instance: “He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail…as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact.” Shortly after this encounter, Montag reads a book and succumbs to delirious knowing.

What surprised me about reading Fahrenheit was that it is not a book that gets Montag to read or break from his worldly order, it is the gaze of the teen, Clarisse McClellan, that changes everything for him. Montag in fact has a book and has had a book for quite some time hidden away in his home but he’s never wanted to read it or confront his life and the world until that honest look. I think that’s what surprised me also about the person I once dated who feared being seen. The elements of their life that would soon change were already changing before I got involved with them and would be there when I was no longer in their life, but it was fine until an intimate gaze “captured and held them intact.”

Intimacy is the spark that ignites and eventually consumes Montag in Fahrenheit. He was finally seen and in that unashamed almost easy intimate gaze he can now not unsee himself and the world around him. The Montag before the shadow of a gaze is now awake and can see the world around him—not for what it is but how it is because that’s what intimacy in Bradbury stories gives us: a glimpse into how it is.

“Montage looked at these men whose faces were sunburnt by a thousand real and ten thousand imaginary fires, whose work flushed their cheeks and fevered their eyes. These men who looked steadily into their platinum igniter flames as they lit their eternally burning black pipes. They and their charcoal hair and soot-colored brows and bluish-ash-smeared cheeks where they had shaven close; but their heritage showed.”

The government gaze is the other dominating gaze of the novel. It’s the one that overshadows the novel and the more important intimate gaze shared between characters. In a way, the gaze of the government is a looming specter that exists inside the characters in order to tell them how the government wants things to be and believes they should feel. And it is this gaze by the end of the novel that is shown to be a lie during a broadcasted chase scene after Montag has murdered people and gone on the run. When the government can’t find Montag, they frame someone else and send a mechanical hound after the person and broadcast the attack saying that they have captured Montag while Montag watches his faked death on TV.

But while Montag watches the scene, Bradbury creates another intimate gaze almost as penetrating as the first that Montag experienced earlier in the novel. This gaze is shared between him and the other miscreants of society who have each memorized or bastardized major works of the Western canon that they now carry around inside their heads and those men are the only ones who truly see and know each other for who they are: the stories they tell and hold.

I just spent the last several months reading A LOT of Ray Bradbury and watching his interviews and lectures and thinking about his prose and life so I would love to talk to anyone about him. Do you read Bradbury? What do you think about his prose style and writing?

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.

Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where subscribers and me go through a subject, piece of media, or technique together.

Subscribe now

Morrison is not a thoughtless writer. She isn’t careless. She makes choices in the moment while writing that builds on an idea or theme, but usually a theory on writing or people she has. And while many times later in interviews she might not remember the scene or moment, but she knows why it was important to do it that way.

Sometimes these choices are hard to understand but powerful on the page. As a writer of darker work and sometimes dark moments, I always take notice when an author as skilled as Morrison is at rendering tenderness chooses to put on the skin of a terrible person in a terrible time like in Beloved where the first reenactment or portrayal of Sethe killing her baby and trying to kill her children is shown through the eyes of racist whites and slave catchers.

Read more

Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.

Craft Chat is the writing craft section of the newsletter where subscribers and me go through a subject, piece of media, or technique together.

Subscribe now

All of It is filled with tension and terror from the idea (a murderous other worldly entity dressed like a clown kills people, mostly children, in a small town to feed off the fear and anger) to the structure (a story told in bending flashbacks where hundreds of pages can pass but the story itself won’t move anywhere but backwards) and to the character development (the characters’ pasts are hidden from them but are slowly revealed to the reader as the character remembers it).

But the tenson that does most of the heavy lifting is in King’s sentences.

A couple years back, I came across the term micro tension which I believed at the time had to do with the micro elements in fiction that build tension, like the words we use and the sentence structure and word placement, punctuation, and other forms like footnotes and interludes. When I read the definition even now, I have the same feeling and belief of micro tension. Micro tension is defined as the tension in the incremental moments of a scene, which for me translates to the tension that happens in the sentences.

In the scene excerpted above from It, King uses micro tension to propel the reader through the passage because he holds off on telling you what is happening, and you don’t know what the next sentence will hold. And it goes on in that scene for several pages. Never letting up and creating a heart pounding scene. He does it again and again throughout the book without it getting old (though it does get exhausting).

“He whirled around, now pressing his back and his splayed hands against the door. He could feel sweat, oily and hot, running down his forehead. The calliope music had gotten louder yet. It drifted and echoed down the spiral staircase…It screamed like wind and water, and in his mind’s eye Stan saw a county fair at the end of autumn, wind and rain blowing up a deserted midway, pennons flapping, tents bulging, falling over, wheeling away like canvas bats.” (It)

The introduction of circus music during this scene where a child appears to be afraid creates the micro tension and builds to the big tension of the story and moment in the book. Words like ‘screamed’ ‘deserted’ ‘bats’ create a distance between what we normally associate with circuses (happiness and joy and cheer) with something terrifying and slightly off, adding to the micro tension. And instead of saying outright that there is creepy music playing, King strings it out.

In this section of the book as in many others, a child is seeing a creature that by all reason shouldn’t exist and feels absolutely terrified. King puts us into the child’s untied shoes to experience the flight and fight the child must do to survive.

“As it flew at him, swooping down, its black, horribly alive eyes fixed on him, Mike cut sharply right. The bird missed him—barely. The dusty smell of its wings was overpowering, unbearable.

Now he was running parallel to the fallen smokestack, its tiles blurring by. He could see where it ended. If he could reach the end and buttonhook to the left, get inside, he might be sage. He thought the bird was too big to squeeze inside. He came very close to not making it.” (It)

See how slow the approach is, how short some of the sentences are, how quickly the words run as the child flees. And the feelings aren’t described in that section because they are shown through how the child runs. We are totally present in the tension of the moment through the micro tension King employs.