Are you taking enough risk?
Hi, friends.
How are you? I am slogging my way through September, this semester. It’s no secret that I have been frustrated with teaching for a while now. Lately, I’ve been reflecting on why this is. And finally, it occurred to me. I am bored. So. Very. Bored. In my younger years, I job-hopped a lot. A year here, a year there, trying different lives on. So, it was a bit of a relief to finally find something that I liked doing for more than a year. (Wasn’t this what adulting was about? Finding your little slice of contentment?) If I had a challenging semester, it would be over soon enough. For a long while, that change enough. But now that’s no longer true. I need a bigger change. And if I’m honest, really honest, I’ve gotten a little tired of working on this novel. I’ve been at work on it for too long. It’s time to be done with both of these things so that I can see what other challenges await.
So, let me ask you: are you taking enough risk in your writing life? In your life life?
Story.
Earlier in the year, I read Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here earlier in the year. It’s a novel about a senator who has a very troubling family secret he doesn’t want his constituents to find out about… his children spontaneously combust when they get upset. Everything else about the book is realism. It’s just this one little problem…
So, this week’s story is a Kevin Wilson Story. Get Lost. It also deals with folks who are a little bored with life and create a game of hide and seek to spice things up.
Craft tidbits.
As Wilson does so much in his work, in this story, he takes the fantasy—what if we all just disappeared—and sees it to the end. Structurally, it begins with the collective group of boys and then splinters into their separate adventures as they hide.
On Friday at school, we were all vibrating, so nervous for what came next. We barely listened in class because what did it matter? We wouldn’t be around to turn in the homework that would be due on Monday. During lunch, we couldn’t really speak in any detail about our plans, lest we break the rules of the game. We just talked about what it might be like when we returned to the regular world.
The ease with which Wilson writes perhaps doesn’t make the story appear all that risky. Wilson is careful to give each of the boys their own personality, (Jeff who can’t think function without running water, Eddie who wants to finally get around to reading Proust so that his dad will think more of him) while also giving them a sense of unity in regard to the game. One of the tricks Wilson consistently pulls off in his writing is creating humor. There are laugh out loud moments.
[Carmichael] vowed to stay for two months at the most, which he hoped would be enough to outlast his friends, and then, even if it meant humiliation, he would break the rules and return home, ready for his senior year, then college. Maybe, he thought, this might make a good essay for college applications.
Each of the boys is found in their own ways, except for Allen. He never comes back. Was that the intention from the beginning? Perhaps. The other boys don’t know. In fact, they come to realize they don’t know as much about Allen as they thought. The not knowing fills them with guilt that they carry around for twenty years or more.
We stopped hanging out. We stopped talking to each other. We stopped looking at each other when we passed in the hallways. Every day, we prayed that Allen would be found or would return.
I’m slowly reading Benjamin Percy’s craft book Thrill Me. The title comes from what Percy says was the best advice he’s ever received about writing. At the end of a workshop with the late, great Barry Hannah, Percy asked for any last parting wisdom. “Yes,” Hannah said. “Thrill me.”
Isn’t that what we want as readers? As writers? For the words to grab us and leave us lightheaded? Something we think about days and weeks and months afterwards.
Thrill me. It’s so simple. And yet—
I just finished reading a book that was pretty boring. It was an idea book. And yes, it was an interesting idea. It drew me in initially. But the novel never moved beyond the premise. (Which it talked about ad nauseam) I caution my first time writers about writing with an agenda. This novel was a great example of how it often leads to preaching instead of plot. Funny enough, the main character had also grown bored of her life and yet, the changes she made weren’t satisfying. They weren’t really changes, just a new address to keep making the same mistakes.
Back to Mr. Hannah and risk. Some years back, I downloaded a recording of Barry Hannah talking to Larry Brown and Brad Watson. They were on a porch somewhere in Mississippi in the late 90s talking about the state of arts and letters. Not very far in, Hannah says:
It seems to me there are too many novels out right now that are merely adequate.
He argues that a great many novels taking up precious shelf space should’ve really been short stories.
I don’t see very many novels that need to have been written… I think there are a lot of them that are adequate. They’re between covers and they look like novels. There’s not much wrong with them. They just don’t stir you. [The novel] is dying of competence.
Yikes. This bit of conversation is something that grabbed me way back when, and something that I’ve come back to again and again. Initially I latched onto that phrase, The novel is dying of competence but let’s go back to the idea of being stirred.
But isn’t that true? The songs, and movies, and books that move us are things that are different, that rise beyond the cacophony of sameness. The vacations and meals and friendships that stick with us are the ones that are unexpected and not the ones that unfold predictably. Isn’t that the point of all of it - to shake us out of complacency?
Sparks.
How can you take more risk? Is there a story you are afraid to tell? What keeps you playing it safe? How can you add more play to your writing? Is it by adding some oddness (like flammable children)? Is it by playing with a more complicated structure? (Here’s another Wilson story structured as an index.) Could you make an entire story from dialogue? From questions?
Is your novel really a short story? Is your memoir an essay?
Maybe it isn’t the work itself where you need to take risk, but in getting work out the door. Maybe it is time to submit to more prestigious outlets. Maybe it’s time to take the next step by applying for grants or residencies. Maybe you’ve been putting off querying. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to shelve something you’ve been meh about and start an entirely new project. Take a minute and make a list. What is the next step for you?
Other tidbits.
Here’s the link to the Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, Brad Watson porch talk.
Do you have a little book of weird fiction in progress? Dorothy, a publishing project is open for submissions until October 15.
Submissions now open: Kenyon is looking for pieces on Work or Climate through Sept. 30, Nashville Review is also open the month of September. Whitefish Review is looking for pieces for a theme on Vortex through Sept. 30. There are lots of other mags that opened this month and will be open for a good long while. So get your darlings ready.
Ok scribblers. It’s time to take some risk. On the page, in real life. There is no telling what magic can come from it. Onward~
Marsha