American fiction

What I’ve Learned from Giving Feedback on Writing

/ The Women of Letters / 2 Comments

So much of being a writer, or any artist, is about receiving feedback from others. One must have the humility to learn what is working and not working with one’s art. Perhaps your sound is not “in the mask” as an opera singer when you are going to a particular passage, or you have a character who is underdeveloped as a writer, or your lines are not in the right planes as a ballet dancer. Other people have eyes that you don’t have for yourself; therefore, it is imperative to understand how other people are perceiving your work.

There is the flip side, which is what one can learn by giving feedback. In seeing the flaws of others, one can learn things that do or don’t work in a piece. It is hard to make general rules out of these things, because critiquing each piece or work of art or performing artist is so individual and specific. However, these are some things I have learned as a writer over the years of giving feedback to my colleagues and peers, and this is by no means an exhaustive or complete summary

-Detail. Detail must serve the thrust of the story or the piece of writing. Too many extraneous details are the darlings that one has to kill, as per the proverbial writing adage. Are they helping build character or plot, setting the scene so the reader understands the world that the writer is building? Some writers want to include every bit of minutiae, and the reader who is giving feedback is probably crossing out large sections with their pen. This is a very common problem one sees in manuscripts, and it is understandable. Any writer wants to tell the reader about everything that is in their head and create that same richness on the page.

-Backstory. This is such a tricky one. The reader needs enough backstory to feel grounded and understand the context of characters. Novels, by nature of their longer form, allow for more backstory, but this is not to say that short stories don’t require this as well. One of the trickiest questions with backstory is placement, for the writer is in danger of an “information dump” where they spill all the information about a character or something from the past when only parts of it are relevant to the present action. Also quite challenging is how much should be told and how much should be shown; will pieces of the backstory be revealed as the novel or story unfolds, or will it be up to the reader to deduce what has happened? Not enough backstory makes a piece of writing seem superficial and too much in real time; too much makes the piece static. Conventions of writing have changed over the past couple of centuries, and nowadays, there is a favoring of not explaining all the information from the past.

-How much does the reader know about a particular context or group of people or type of person? A 20-something may not appreciate a historical novel and want the writer to use more current conventions or imagery, not understand why a woman had to get married by the time she was 20. Whereas a senior citizen who is reading a story by a Brooklyn hipster may not understand the reason for using the present tense and trendy vocabulary. This becomes even more serious when looking at matters of race and culture: many African-American (and other non-white) writers have lamented the fact that white critiquers do not understand the literary conventions which the writer is coming from and are stuck in Eurocentric notions of “good” writing. Also, for writers who have a foot in the door in cultures overseas and are writing about non-American culture, there is always the challenge of knowing how much to explain or define particular terms. Generally speaking, immediate, overt descriptions come across as clumsy–i.e., “she ate a gulab jamun, an Indian dessert of fried milk and flour balls soaked in a sugar syrup flavored with rose.” The issue of culture/ethnicity is highly charged, and up for much debate. There is a fine line between a reader’s insensitivity or ignorance and a BIPOC writer’s weak craft that needs to be corrected, and it can be very difficult to know where that line is.

-The “architecture” of a piece. This relates to plot and structure and how events and character development are unfolding. Maybe a story should begin two pages in from where it currently begins, or maybe on page 9, there is a great sentence that really sums up the theme of the story and should be put at the beginning. Do the events feel organic? Is there clear causation, because it may not be evident to us readers? Sometimes things have to be shuffled around for the story or novel to flow better. 

            From my own experience recently, feedback I got from my Bread Loaf workshop led by Charles Baxter made me realize that I had to stop rotating various points of view so quickly and stay in one point of view for a longer period. This led me to re-sequence the first few chapters, and now it flows much more smoothly. And conversely, a story I read last week did not clearly lay out the premise at the beginning, and so I encouraged the writer to choose a paragraph or line from several pages in to put at the beginning to make the story’s intentions clearer.

-Point of view. There are times when a manuscript is suffering because of the wrong choice of point of view. Or perhaps the point of view keeps shifting. is this writer really saying what they want to say through the point of view they have chosen, or are they being limited by it? One story I read recently abruptly shifted to a minor character’s point of view, when omniscience would have been a better choice to encompass the lead character as well as the supporting characters.

-Is this the right form or length? Sometimes a story is aching to become a novel, because there is so much richness in it and such a large time span that it needs the space. Sometimes a story should be cut, because there is too much extraneous detail, and it can say what it wants in a short space. And then there is also the situation where a story can be a story in its current version, but have different versions: a longer one, a shorter one, or eventually developed into a novel or novella! This was the case recently in a writing workshop, where a story was quite interesting as it was, but it felt like it could be an episode in a Bildungsroman about the lead character.

These are only a few of the myriad of things I have learned from writers’ workshops for over the years. Hopefully these musings will be of interest to other writers because it is all too easy to look at the polished work of renowned writers and admire what they have done, but we have to be aware of the steps in the process.

In Defense of the Novel in Stories: Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop

/ The Women of Letters / 1 Comment

An agent recently turned down my manuscript as she wasn’t a fan of the novel in stories. My manuscript is not really a novel in stories, but a collection of long stories and novellas that are linked through place, à la Olive Kitteridge. And frankly, I am not really a fan of the novel in stories, nor do I read so many story collections either; I prefer through-composed novels and have always wanted to be a novelist. However, her comment really got me thinking about this form. I recently read Willa Cather’s brilliant Death Comes for the Archbishop, a book I have always wanted to read as Cather is one of my favorite authors. I also really happened to like Olive Kitteridge, which to me created its own unique world, à la Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, a close-knit community with quirky characters and their own histories. So is the novel in stories worth a second look?

I had expected Death Comes for the Archbishop to be a true novel, as that is what it is generally billed as. Cather is renowned as a novelist, though she has written quite a few stories such as the famous “Paul’s Case” that many youngsters read in high school. And indeed, there are some features of the book that are indicative of it being a novel: we can see the character arcs, especially that of Father Jean Marie Latour, whose lifespan is covered through the book up until his death. There is also skillfully placed back story about Latour’s life, and also the history of his friendship with his fellow missionary, Father Joseph Vaillant. The lives of the two men constantly come together and intertwine and then separate as they travel throughout the Southwest and elsewhere in order to minister to their flock, so to speak. The book takes place in New Mexico, which is not yet a state but a territory, and it is still largely out of contact with the American government. It is still the land of the Mexicans and Native Americans, and we see these cultures and their histories and tensions woven throughout the novel. But why is it a novel in stories?

Death Comes for the Archbishop is broken into nine sections, preceded by a prologue each of the sections contains several chapters. Each section could, arguably, be read on its own, it stands on its own. New characters are introduced in each section, and some of them do not reappear elsewhere. There is a very frequent use of the story within a story technique, which allows us to get a deeper portrait of the people and cultures in the region that existed before Father Latour arrived. One could say the book is really a series of vignettes that are connected through the fathers. In order to present the diversity of the different areas and regions to which Father Latour ministers, Cather has provided us snapshots of these places. We get to know the key characters of each area, who is most important, the key stories and histories of place, and Father Latour’s impressions. Given that the novel is based on/modeled after the story of two priests, Father Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Father Joseph Projectus Machebeuf and their time spent as clergy in the Southwest, we can see that Cather wants to give the reader glimpses into the different places and events in their lives. It is almost as though she is fleshing out a diary and transforming it into fiction.

What is most spectacular about the novel is Cather’s descriptions of landscapes and settings. There are lines that are simply breathtaking, such as, “The full moon, hidden by veils of cloud, through a pale phosphorescent luminousness over the heavens, and the towers of the church stood up black against this silvery fleece,” or, “These cloud formations seemed to be always there, however hot and blue the sky flat terraces, ledges of vapour; sometimes they were dome-shaped, or fantastic, like the tops of silvery pagodas…” Notice the juxtapositions of religious imagery with landscape in these two examples, though most often, the descriptions are simply that of nature.

Of course, there is the issue of Cather writing about Native Americans and Mexicans as a white woman. In my opinion, Cather does so with great dignity and respect given the time period. We cannot expect her to conform to 21st-century discourse about race and culture. Remember, this is not a book about Cather’s sensibilities; everything we see in the book is filtered through the lens of the French missionaries, so naturally, that will inherently have a European bias. However, Cather is careful to show the complexities of the social interactions between the French missionaries and the Native Americans and the Mexicans. Father Latour finds much to admire in the various native populations, is good friends with quite a few of the Mexicans. What is more problematic is simply the issue of missionaries and conversion. What we see through the novel as 21st century readers, especially those of us who are colonials by heritage, is how fundamentally disturbing the idea of converting people to Christianity is. This is coupled with politics and power, and it is a deep part of American history that we do not learn much about. There is much discussion, and rightly so, about Blacks and slavery. But we also need to discuss America’s Spanish and French colonial history, as that shaped much of the West and South as well as parts of the Midwest.

Cather is not proselytizing by any means. Rather, she is giving us a portrait of a man who was on a mission, a man of deep Catholic faith, and his struggles and travails as a cleric in a large territory. It is a rather odd choice of subject and protagonist for an author who wrote such strong female characters who were very often the protagonists, and was open to immigrants of many different cultures. In The Song of the Lark (my favorite book of all time), Cather writes with great affection and respect for the Mexicans who affirm and support Thea Kronborg’s musical gifts. One of the strengths of Willa Cather is that she was able to write about so many different kinds of people in so many places and do it so convincingly. Perhaps it was her deep well of empathy allowed her to do so, for in all of her books, we feel that she really cared about her characters and wanted to share their stories with us. Never sentimental (Cather hated sentimentality), she is one who writes from the heart and with great heart.

In any case, Death Comes for the Archbishop is a stunning gem that gives us a glimpse into another place and time. It may take a little while to get into the book. But once in it, the book transports us into another magical world that we may have never known, or have forgotten.