Activity Report: A Midnight Q&A

Five Questions On Writing, Asked and Answered

Every now and then on my Instagram I take some writing questions and answer them in my Instagram stories. This week I had a few extra left over and thought they’d be a good to take over here, as some of them could use an answer longer than an Instagram slide. You can see the other answers over there on the highlights on my profile, if interested. Anyway, here are five questions.

Q: How do I interpret lots of very vague NOs from agents? E.g., “It’s good but not right for my list at this time?”

Rather than spend time trying to interpret it, it’s a good idea to remember that you’re looking to find an agent who is really excited to represent you. It’s what they’re all looking for. In my experience advising friends on this—I’ve had the same agent for over 20 years—I’d say there could be something wrong with the synopsis or the excerpt. And by wrong I mean, the synopsis may not convey the truly exciting aspects of the book so that when the agent picks up the excerpt, something that is hard for them to identify feels off. This is an extreme example but I’m thinking of an excerpt I read over a decade ago at a writer’s conference that had a synopsis that said it was about soldiers in Iraq, but the excerpt had the main character back home in America, and gradually you learned he was a veteran. Flashbacks took us to Iraq but the present time action was in Boston.

This isn’t the worst thing, but the problem is the reader—me—felt at first like I didn’t understand where we were or why. The synopsis should have someone thinking “absolutely” and if the expectation falls wide of the mark, then we have someone who is left with a vague regret as they pass on it, uncertain of why it didn’t quite work out.

So, check the synopsis, I say. See what can be done.

Q: I assigned How to Write an Autobiographical Novel to my memoir students this week. Any advice for them?

The essays in the collection were written over a period of about 20 years and then revised. I chose them from a group of 80 personal essays. Some of them, six of them, came from my files, essays that I’d left partially written and unfinished for years, mostly from ambivalence. So the advice I have from writing the collection would be to look at what you’ve left unfinished and why it might be unfinished; to recuperate work that you wrote perhaps before you were ready to write it, through revision and re-reporting; and to consider what you are pursuing by telling stories out of your life.

Something I thought a great deal about was the distinction between a personal essay and a memoir. I used these definitions, drawn in part from Vivian Gornick’s The Situation And The Story. The personal essay was the attempt to make sense of a topic using experiences and research, sometimes taken from life experience and sometimes not. The memoir was the attempt to understand the self in relationship to a time period or a topic generated out of experience. But what I also see now with the benefit of hindsight is that so often, I was writing about my own transformations in these essays. The times when I went from being one sort of person to another and how I was able to make sense of what happened. Sometimes the choice was mine; sometimes it was not.

Q: How to write when you have no actual ideas?

Well, this is often when I do the Bibliomancy exercise. But you can write about anything.

You could look around at your environment for something that everyone including you just accepts and ask, Why is that there? And just follow your curiosity and sustain yourself on a mix of determination, good humor and asking questions no one has thought to ask, of people no one has thought to question. A student of mine did this over a minor architectural detail in some buildings at the college, and soon found herself tapping a rich vein of architectural and cultural history as well as looking into how design shapes our experience of life, how institutions position themselves in relationship to history when they decorate, and even the science behind what excites us and why—why did the eye respond to this, in other words, and how? She went around to the different buildings, asked questions of the people who worked there, eventually ending up in front of librarians, archivists, custodial staff, a dean, the dean’s spouse who was an expert in decorative arts from the 17th century and so on. Each time someone couldn’t answer a question she just kept looking for an answer. She went way over word count, which I don’t usually like, but the essay was so much fun to read by the end and it was clear writing it changed her forever. I won’t be surprised if she becomes an art history major after this.

The wonderful Jane Hu did something like this with the Filet-O-Fish sandwich.

You may also have ideas, and they may just be hiding from you because you hid them because you’re afraid of your actual ideas, and so you tell yourself “wow here I am with no ideas, too bad I can’t write” while your ideas circle the perimeters of your consciousness, looking for a break in the wall. So you can make that break sometimes by giving yourself an assignment like the two previously mentioned here, or you could try a writing prompt like one from a former teacher, the poet Beatrix Gates, who had us think of someone we could no longer communicate with, due to death or separation, and to think of a question we have for them and then to answer it, in their point of view, in a letter to you.

Or you could turn a recurring fear of yours—that there’s someone in the woods watching you from hiding—into the narrator of a short story. Our fears have a voice, sometimes it is too loud and all our imagination goes there. This is one way to take it back.

Q: How do you find the “authority” to write about whatever you want?

This one is tricky. I would recommend typically asking yourself a few questions, as detailed at this essay of mine over at Vulture. I’d refer you to the previous question,

But more importantly: one way is to pretend it could never matter. That no one will ever see it. You just have some thoughts. I do this every day. I’m doing it right now. A student of mine just wrote a 250 page novel draft this year and the entire time the Google Doc I was checking on for her was titled Untitled Document. She had asked me if it should have a proper title. I said the novel should eventually but for now, if Untitled Document is working for you, don’t change a thing. And so we got to the end.

I like to go write someplace I’m not expected. To be somewhere and feel hidden or just out of the traffic of life. It could mean being anonymous at a cafe or on a train or in a hotel room visiting a city or a town where I don’t know anyone. When I do that, I feel powerful for the way I feel connected to the anonymous, released from being myself all the time. It’s fun, too.

Q: Your favorite and most treasured experience with someone you met via books/writing?

This idea that there’s a single favorite seems to me a fantasy of youth. Or of patriarchal romantic culture. It’s the myth of the bride or groom to be, that they are so special above all others. The story the favorite child tells themselves to nurse a blow. But also, I have a life so full of these experiences that to suggest there’s a favorite feels impossible. I didn’t want only one, you see. It’s not the only reason I became a writer, but it is among them. I remember going to the Bennington Summer Writers Conference in 1988, and standing in line for the keg behind Joy Williams, and thinking to myself, Oh my god, I’m behind Joy Williams in line for the keg! And I was having a great summer, going to some disco at the Ramada Inn with some of my classmates and my teacher, Mary Robison, to get drinks at night, and taking beers in backpacks on bicycles with friends out to the White River to find a rock and swim and have a beer, and going to readings, more than I ever thought possible. I was 20, 21, and about to start my senior year. I met an editor who changed my life, and some friends as well. Working with Mary changed my life also. But this is where it goes you see, in a life like this.

I was back at Bennington just last week to celebrate the life and work of Reginald Shepherd, a classmate from Iowa. Writers I knew from all parts of my life were there. *Abundance, I suppose we call it.

*The view of one of Bennington’s Guest Houses at night.

Oh, the talk I will give on E. M. Forster’s Maurice is in June now, June 18th.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee