Posts by David Corbett
Religion remains a vital if not crucial aspect of most Americans’ lives. And yet a great many writers in this country disregard faith in developing their characters. Is this a sign of a significant cultural shift, deliberate disregard, or a missed opportunity?
I want to distinguish right off the bat between one’s faith and one’s religious denomination.
At this time of rising violence against Jews and Muslims, and the elevation in this country of a brand of Christianity that sanctions violence in the service of establishing a theocratic nation state, it may seem evasive or even cowardly not to address with specificity a character’s avowed creed. Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of religious group hatred have little to do with the specifics of any particular creed; they are simply one more iteration of otherizing as a way to scapegoat the targeted group.
And although writing about these kinds of religious clashes has obvious merit, and sadly seems never to diminish in relevance, it’s not what I’m hoping to address here.
Rather, focusing specifically on characterization in fiction, the issue is not so much the particular creed a character follows but the underlying questions that their faith seeks to address, and the answers it provides.
I think the status of religion as a third rail in fiction is largely premised on the possibility it will not be handled well—specifically, that writers will do a disservice to one group of readers or another by identifying a character’s sect.
Worse, it’s feared that the writer, consciously or unconsciously, will show favor to one denomination over another.
That’s not just a failure of technique. It’s a failure of imagination and empathy.
For all the adamance of his atheism, few writers depict the religious convictions of their characters as insightfully as did James Joyce. Notice how, in his short story, “Grace,” from Dubliners, he describes his main character, Tom Kernan:
[He] came of Protestant stock and, though he had been converted to the Catholic faith at the time of his marriage, he had not been in the pale of the Church for twenty years. He was fond, moreover, of giving side-thrusts at Catholicism.
The story concerns Mr Kernan’s drinking problem—he recently fell down a flight of stairs and bit off a piece of his tongue—for which his wife has solicited the aid of Mr Cunningham and several other of her husband’s friends, who have agreed to stage what would today be called an intervention. Here, it takes the form of an invitation to join them on religious retreat. Mrs Kernan, though skeptical, agrees to the plan:
After a quarter of a century of married life, she had very few illusions left. Religion for her was a habit and she suspected that a man of her husband’s age would not change greatly before death … However, Mr Cunningham was a capable man; and religion was religion. The scheme might do good and, at least, it could do no harm. Her beliefs were not extravagant. She believed steadily in the Sacred Heart as the most generally useful of all Catholic devotions and approved of the sacraments. Her faith was bounded by her kitchen but, if she was put to it, she could believe also in the banshee and in the Holy Ghost.
Finally, as the […]
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Before the widespread accessibility of film and TV, elaborate physical descriptions in books were prized, even though they seldom if ever dealt solely with the exterior.
Joseph Conrad’s ability to sketch a character’s soul by describing his gait, his posture, his clothing, his face—“of pasty complexion and melancholy ugliness” (from The Secret Agent)—continues to awe me every time I read a passage from one of his books.
Katherine Anne Porter described the interplay of inner life and outer appearance as deftly, subtly, and astutely as anyone ever has. Consider this from “Old Mortality:”
Miranda persisted through her childhood in believing, in spite of her smallness, thinness, her little snubby nose saddled with freckles, her speckled gray eyes and habitual tantrums, that by some miracle she would grow into a tall, cream-colored brunette, like cousin Isabel; she decided always to wear a trailing white satin gown. Maria, born sensible, had no such illusions. “We are going to take after Mamma’s family,” she said. “It’s no use, we are. We’ll never be beautiful, we’ll always have freckles. And you,” she told Miranda, “haven’t even a good disposition.”
In contrast, Elmore Leonard relies almost exclusively on action and dialogue for characterization; but readers embrace his books primarily to delight in his characters, whom they “see” despite the relative lack of detail.
Some writers deliberately omit or limit physical descriptions altogether, especially of protagonists, for they believe the lack of detail permits a better opportunity for engagement from the reader.
Physical considerations are hardly moot, but beyond giving the reader enough information to picture the character sufficiently—whether that’s accomplished directly through description or indirectly through action and dialogue—the crucial questions are:
Such considerations are far more important than hair color, waist measurement, and exact height.
Although there are a number of considerations to keep in mind when rendering a character’s physical nature—health, age, race, class—for purposes of this post I’m going to focus solely on deportment and fashion sense.
Balzac equated sloppy attire with moral suicide, while another Frenchman, fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier, remarked that badly dressed people are always the most interesting. Despite the disagreement, both are avowing the importance of what we wear.
Even those who claim to pay no mind to how they dress are making a social statement, however halfhearted it might be. We dress for other people—or not, ignoring what others think, which amounts to pretty much the same thing.
Beyond the issue of shabby versus neat, comfy versus haute couture, questions worth considering include:
These questions should not prompt quick-and-easy answers but scenes. Put another person […]
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On one of my initial panels as a first-time novelist, when asked what authors inspired me in my writing, I replied, “I was probably influenced as much by Steve Earle and Steely Dan as anybody I read.”
I stand by that.
I started my creative life as an accompanist for two superb women vocalists on the coffee-house circuit (billing myself as “The World’s Most Adequate Guitarist”), and then joined a bar band and toured the Midwest, performing in such famed musical Meccas as Kokomo, Indiana; Ypsilanti, Michigan; and Lima, Ohio. (Best compliment I ever got: “Who’s the guy who sings like a chick, he’s really good.”)
Music has always had a profound effect on me (my paternal grandfather was a music teacher). My first obsession was folk music, and I was particularly fond of revival stalwarts like Judy Collins, Tom Paxton, Odetta, Pete Seeger, and Dave Van Ronk.
It was from them, especially the traditionalists, that I gained an appreciation for the story song, especially old ballads such as “Pretty Polly,” “Barbara Allen,” and “John Riley.”
But the songs I came to love most deeply were written by the musicians themselves, which made them more personal. And looking back, I can see that I learned a number of writing lessons from those efforts.
Granted, in general songs bear a greater resemblance to poetry than narrative, and they have the twin advantages of rhyme and music to bring their messages home. What I’ll be talking about here are songs that do indeed tell a story with the familiar beginning-middle-end structure.
NOTE: If you’re unacquainted with the songs I mention below, I’ve provided links to their Youtube videos.
Tom Paxton: “My Son John”
This Tom Paxton original from 1966 really affected me, possibly more than the traditional ballads, because of its relevance to the Vietnam War and my own close relationship with my father:
My son, John, was a good boy, and good to me
When we had hard times, well, he stood by me
We were in work and out of work and on the go
If he had complaints, I never heard a-one
He would pitch in and help me like a full-grown man
My son, John. John, my son
My son, John, went to college and he made his way
Had to earn every penny, but he paid his way
He worked summers and holidays and through the year
And it was no easy struggle that he won
But he laughed at the ones who thought he had it hard
My son, John. John, my son
My son, John, got his uniform and went away
With a band playing marches, he was sent away
And he wrote me a letter when he had the time
He was losing his buddies one by one
And I prayed and tried not to read between the lines
My son, John. John, my son
My son, John, came home yesterday, he’s here to stay
Not a word to his father have I heard him say
He seems glad to be home, but I can’t be sure
When I asked him what he’d seen and done
He went up to his […]
“Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity.” —Coco Chanel
One of my favorite bits by the comedian Steven Wright went something like this: “The other day I … Wait. That wasn’t me.”
Sure, it’s a gag, but it makes you wonder: Outside the realm of brainwashing, demon possession, or sci-fi/horror films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, can we have memories or thoughts or impressions that aren’t our own?
Of course we can–we do it all the time. We regurgitate untested information, we accept opinions of people we trust without wondering if maybe they’re mistaken, we reflexively follow the example and accept the advice of people we respect, we join cults, we adhere to the guidance of our guru, we defer to the teachings of our religious tradition, we surrender our will to the Lord (“Let go, let God”), et cetera.
Once we begin to focus on how much of our mental and emotional life seemingly comes to us secondhand, the question becomes not so much if we can have thoughts and memories and impressions that are not our own, but how can we be sure that any decision we make is based on reflections that can genuinely be attributed to our own mind?
Some Background
In his wonderful writing guide Story Trumps Structure, Steven James focuses not on plot per se but on the struggles of the main characters, and he separates them into three main “struggle threads:”
Of these three, the one most of my students have difficulties grasping is the character’s Internal Struggle.
The external struggle is defined by the “real world” goal the main character seeks to achieve in the story—rescue the miners, solve the crime, find the way home. Interpersonal struggles involve the key relationships the main character hopes to solidify—or dissolve. Sometimes the interpersonal and external struggles are the same—for example, in love stories, where the ultimate goal is to seal the deal with the loved one.
But what exactly do we mean by internal struggles?
I break down internal struggles into three main types, defined by the underlying need at issue:
Even a casual glimpse at these various longings should indicate that they are by no means mutually exclusive, but rather influence and affect each other. The one I’m going to focus on is:
Authenticity: It’s More than a Quality, it’s an Enigma!
What does it mean to be “true to oneself?”
Sometimes we recognize authenticity when we see it. One of my favorite music acts is the mother and son duo Madisen Ward and the Mama Bear. This isn’t the processed cheese that so often passes for music these days. This is two people singing their hearts out for the sheer joy of it.
But much of the time, what we think of as authenticity can seem hopelessly muddled.
Maybe a definition will help. I’ll defer to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
What is it to be oneself, at one with oneself, or truly representing one’s self? The multiplicity of puzzles that arise in conjunction with the conception of authenticity connects with metaphysical, epistemological, and moral issues… On the […]
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Permit me a moment of apostasy.
I realize it might seem perverse to pursue this topic in light of Jim Dempsey’s far more sanguine post from just this past Tuesday (“How Books Can Change Lives”), but for some time, I’ve had the uneasy feeling that the merits of storytelling have been oversold. The use of the mercantile metaphor is deliberate. In any ever-increasing number of realms, the “craft of narrative” is being used to justify the unjustifiable—the dishonest, the trivial, the crass, the sanctimonious, the unnecessary, and all manner of other dubious ends.
Tell the story has become the hallmark of the hustle. Give the folks a convincing, compelling tale and they’re yours, facts be damned.
We’re even told that facts are meaningless outside a narrative—an approach that turns scientific theory into a kind of fable.
A particularly compelling example of this appeared in an article from late last year in the open access journal Natural Sciences. The article was titled, “Pseudo-embryology and personhood: How embryological pseudoscience helps structure the American abortion debate.” It opens with this:
Scientists have identified more than one possible point at which an individual life, personhood, with its own identity, and defined in various ways, begins. There is no consensus among biologists as to when an independent human life begins. Those people who invoke the scientific community to justify the idea that fertilization is the unequivocal moment of independent identity for the human embryo are expressing mythological and political ideas, not contemporary scientific facts. These mythologies have deep and powerful roots, and they are hard to leave behind. We often look back on how eugenics distorted American politics a century ago, how women were being sterilized in the name of science, and we congratulate ourselves, thinking that such distortions could not happen again. They have.
Though quite technical, the piece is highly instructive on how embryology does not fit neatly into the stories various camps want to tell about when “life begins”—conception? The quickening? Birth? (Interesting aside: in many traditions, soul and breath are the same word, implying the newborn does not acquire a soul until it draws its first independent breath. And since reading this article, I encountered still another account of when a newborn acquires personhood, this one from Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann. He recounts that among the Osage Indians, a child is not considered a person until he or she is given a name, which symbolically includes him or her in the social fabric of the tribe.)
The point: stories that masquerade as scientific truth (or any truth) betray the motives of the teller—to persuade without the messy, complicated, often inexplicable evidence that an honest inquiry requires.
It’s not just swindlers and ideologues peddling narrative snake oil, of course. Some genuine heavyweights have opined on the matter.
Camus famously remarked, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” And Tim O’Brien, whose “How to Tell a True War Story” should be required reading for anyone who intends to put words on a page, defined the purpose of fiction as “getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.”
Back in June, 2019 (four years ago—Holy Moly, where did the time […]
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In her collection of 1990 lectures titled, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison discusses in great detail how some White authors, from Edgar Allen Poe to Kingsley Amis, have used their imaginative powers in depicting “the other,” and how those who’ve done so well have gone about their business.
Specifically, this passage stood out for me:
As a reader (before becoming a writer) I read as I had been taught to do. But books revealed themselves rather differently to me as a writer. In that capacity I have to place enormous trust in my ability to imagine others and my willingness to project consciously into the danger zones such others may represent for me. I am drawn to the way all writers do this: the way Homer renders a heart-eating cyclops so that our hearts are wrenched with pity; the way Dostoyevsky compels intimacy with Svidrigailov and Prince Myshkin. I am in awe of Faulkner’s Benjy, James’s Maisie, Flaubert’s Emma, Melville’s Pip, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—each of us can extend the list.
I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from—and in what disables the foray, for purposes of fiction, into corners of the consciousness held off and away from the reach of the writer’s imagination. My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming.
I could stop there and we’d have plenty to discuss. What impresses me in this passage is its generosity in recognizing that writers have always written about “the other,” some masterfully, and her belief that this goes beyond observation or even empathy but into the imaginative act of becoming the character. (Note: she doesn’t say “being;” the attempt is always an approach, never fully realized, but without faith in the imagination it can’t be attempted at all.)
Don’t get me wrong—Morrison is perfectly full-throated in her identification of those writers whose conjuring of what she refers to as Africanism represents more an attempt to solidify their defense of Whiteness than a legitimate attempt to understand their Black characters—let alone become them.
Fans of Hemingway in particular may come away from her analysis of To Have and Have Not and The Garden of Eden with something akin to scorched eyeballs. That said, she adds:
An author is not personally accountable for the acts of his fictive creatures, but he is responsible for them. And there is no evidence I know of to persuade me that Hemingway shared Harry’s views [i.e., Harry Morgan, the protagonist of To Have and Have Not.] In point of fact there is strong evidence to suggest the opposite.
What stands out, for me, is Morrison’s recognition that certain White writers actually succeeded in their efforts to portray the […]
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Therese stepping in for a moment to offer a hearty congratulations to David Corbett on publication day for his latest novel, THE TRUTH AGAINST THE WORLD! If you missed David’s Take 5 interview about the book, please click HERE to read all about it. Congratulations, David!
Right around three years ago, the debate as to whether to capitalize “black” and “white” as ethnic-racial-cultural descriptions was circulating among a variety of sources, including the American Psychological Association (which had long argued for the capitalization of both), the Atlantic and Washington Post (which now decided to agree with the APA guidelines), and the Associated Press (which recommend lower case ‘w’ for white but capitalization of Black in its style guide).
One of the more frequently referenced arguments for not using a capital “w” for White was that it suggested the racial chauvinism of White Supremacy—who but White Supremacists actively identify as White in a racial sense and thus insist on capitalizing “white?”
But this reflexive rejection of “white” in a racial sense skated past a subtler, more compelling point. Up until the middle of the last century, most White people didn’t think of themselves as members of a racial group. We were “individuals” in the Enlightenment sense of distinct human agents.
There’s an inherent sense of privilege in that—by being White, I somehow magically rise above the tawdry business of racial designation. That’s for “those” people. And so you’re still in the implicit, unconscious trap of seeing Whiteness as a cultural escalator taking you upward to the racial mezzanine.
This issue hit home with particular force as I was working my way through various drafts of my latest novel, The Truth Against the World, which comes out today.
I’ve written about this previously here at Writer Unboxed, specifically of how I was warned off by an agent not to use a Black-Cambodian woman as a major character given the #ownvoices movement in publishing. (I had also made her gay, which proved no less problematic.)
So I had to ask myself: Who am I allowed to write about other than, as the old Ink Spots song puts it, we three: my echo, my shadow, and me?
I was raised a White Catholic male in suburban Columbus, Ohio. Though I had my share of family drama, boyhood fistfights, hopeless crushes and so on, I’ve never found those personal experiences compelling enough to generate the prolonged interest and focus a novel requires. (Stories, sure, but that’s another issue.) So in my newfound attempt to try to root my book in something “above me but as I am,” to paraphrase [read: butcher] Wallace Stevens, the part of my past that suggested something larger and more interesting than mere me resided in that conspicuous word: Catholic.
By my late teens I’d already shrugged off my faith, like a coat unsuited to the weather. What remained resided in the peculiar nature of the Catholicism that had pervaded my childhood: Irish Catholicism.
Now, in the genetic sense I personally can attest confidently to being only a quarter Irish.
The four Corbett brothers emigrated from County Cork in 1850, the youngest of whom was my great-great-grandfather. He married […]
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Last month’s post on book bans opened with a quote from historian Thomas Zimmer, which I’ll repeat here for reference:
There is indeed something going on in America, and it does make a lot of people…really uncomfortable. We are in the midst of a profound renegotiation of speech norms and of who gets to define them. And that can be a messy process at times. But it’s not “cancel culture.” From a democratic perspective, it is necessary, and it is progress.
I believe this is an accurate statement of where we are culturally, and that one of the most apparent arenas undergoing renegotiation is publishing. One specific example of that is the increasing role of sensitivity readers, especially in YA fiction, though the practice is extending to adult fiction, film, and TV.
The major impetus behind the implementation of sensitivity readers was publishing’s recognition of the obvious fact that it was overwhelmingly white—and that white writers, in the wake of the social justice movement that emerged in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, wanted to address that imbalance by writing across racial and ethnic lines.
The results were, shall we say, mixed. White authors were taken to task for patronizing, stereotypical, or harmful representations of minorities or for resorting to racial tropes in their work.
In September 2015, author Corinne Duyvis created the hashtag #OwnVoices as a way to recommend books on Twitter that featured authors who shared the diverse identity of their main characters. At the same time, publishers and agents began subtly (or not so subtly) discouraging white writers from “straying from their lane” in writing about protagonists or even secondary characters outside their personal realm of “lived experience.”
The sensitivity reader emerged as a possible solution to the problem of authors needing input into the lives of members of diverse communities different from their own race, ethnicity, gender identity, faith, and so on. This was done to help prevent any more representations deemed “problematic,” a euphemism that rather quickly became a new term of art.
The Term “Sensitivity” Itself is “Problematic”
In a Writer’s Digest article titled, “The Problem with Sensitivity Readers Isn’t What You Think It Is”), author Anna Hecker remarked:
“Sensitivity” … is a loaded word if there ever was one. It suggests thin skins and easily bruised emotions—a potentially dangerous combination if one perceives these readers as the gatekeepers to publication (which, it should be pointed out, they are generally not).
No wonder the censorship watchdogs are wringing their hands. The term “sensitivity reader” may be triggering to the very people who loathe the term “triggering.”
Consequently, some have chosen to use the terms “authenticity readers” or “diversity readers” instead.
There. Solved it.
If only.
For a distinctly contrarian view, we can turn to author Larry Correia, self-described “Writer, Merchant of Death (retired), Firearms Instructor, Accountant.”
A Sensitivity Reader is usually some expert on Intersectional Feminism or Cismale Gendernormative Fascism or some other made up goofiness who a publisher brings in to look for anything “problematic” in a manuscript. And since basically everything is problematic to somebody they won’t be happy until they suck all the joy out of the universe. It […]
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One of the more helpful remarks I’ve read recently in the ever-escalating rhetoric of the culture wars came from historian Thomas Zimmerman:
There is indeed something going on in America, and it does make a lot of people…really uncomfortable. We are in the midst of a profound renegotiation of speech norms and of who gets to define them. And that can be a messy process at times. But it’s not “cancel culture.” From a democratic perspective, it is necessary, and it is progress.
Professor Zimmerman made those remarks in a two-part substack series: Part I: On “Cancel Culture” and Part II: The “Free Speech Crisis” Is Not a Crisis. It Is Progress.
In those essays, he argues that much of the criticism focused on student pushback against speakers and material they deem objectionable largely comes from those invested in the (white male) status quo.
And however disagreeable student actions may be, they are not attempts to use government power to deprive anyone of their free speech rights, which definitely is occurring in multiple locales across the country (more on that below).
Nevertheless, the turmoil generated at Stanford Law School recently, when students heckled and jeered a conservative jurist into silence—only to have a campus administrator, in an attempt to restore order, also attack the speaker and side with the students—has brought the issue of a “free speech crisis” back into the national spotlight. (Unsurprisingly, the situation was far more nuanced than one might be led to believe given the hair-on-fire reactions, as recently reported by Vimar Patel, higher education reporter for the New York Times.)
Heckling, jeering, and outrage are hardly the only examples of the “messiness” Professor Zimmerman is referring to in the quote I cited above. All too often the benign-sounding “negotiation of speech terms” translates into,
Over the next few months I intend to explore multiple ways that speech norms are being “negotiated”—especially as they affect writers of fiction, including:
Each of these reflect the efforts of a certain group or groups to establish—and enforce—guidelines for what can be said or written, by whom, and how.
Put differently, they seek to determine who deserves protection from what is being said or written, by whom, and/or how? At its worst, this becomes: “My moral superiority means I not only don’t need to listen to you, I have the right to silence you.”
All of them are restrictive rather than expansive—i.e., they seek to constrain rather than add to what can be read or expressed. It may seem odd to think of book banning as an attempt to negotiate anything, but the other examples I’ve given also reflect attempts by a relative minority to restrict what can be expressed in accordance with its own moral sensibility.
Everyone in this effort claims to have a laudable purpose in mind: the protection of a group they consider vulnerable (children, families, trauma victims, minorities) from demeaning, shaming, or immoral content; from unpleasant emotions or experiences; or even from discomfort or distress.
As Zimmerman implies, however, given the cultural shift that’s taking place, avoiding distress or discomfort is not just misguided, it’s impossible.
It might instead be better to accustom ourselves to the unpleasant—to value […]
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This post is a bookend to the post I did last month where I interviewed Damyanti Biswas. She discussed how she had to learn how to change her narrative approach from the one she learned reading and writing books in the predominant style of her homeland, India, and instead learn such “Western” techniques as three-act structure.
Like Damyanti, Jen Wei Ting was a student of mine several years ago in a Litreactor class, and she impressed me immediately with her command of craft and her insightful writing. But as Wei Ting discusses in an article she wrote for Catapult magazine titled, “Unlearning the Colonial Gaze in Southeastern Art,” her writing journey has taken somewhat of the reverse trajectory as Damyanti’s.
Wei Ting is a writer, novelist and screenwriter from Singapore who lives and thinks in multiple languages including Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Her work has been published and/or supported by The Economist, Time Magazine, Tin House, Bread Loaf, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Singapore’s National Arts Council, South Korea’s Toji Cultural Foundation and more. Prior to attending the MFA program in fiction at Brooklyn College, where she is a Madelon Leventhal Rand ’64 Foundation Fellow and Brooklyn College Scholar, she worked across Asia as a portfolio manager. Her writing centres on women, language and contemporary Asia.
To learn more about Wei Ting and her writing, you can visit her website or follow her on Twitter/Instagram @intewig
In her Catapult article, Wei Ting discussed how she once thought ‘good’ literature was distinguished by what appeared on school syllabi, best seller lists, and glowing reviews—especially if the publication had New York, London, or Paris in the name.
“Growing up in Singapore in the 1990s under the instruction of British schoolteachers, I came to associate literary excellence with the psychological realism of Victorian novels and the minimalist prose of postmodern classics that defined my literary education. ‘Good’ literature seemed to be the exclusive preserve of Anglo-American authors, works woven with rich biblical imagery and themes. Someone like me, born into an ancestor-worshiping, proverb-spouting Chinese family, would always be an outsider to the literary establishment.
“When Tan Hwee Hwee became one of the first Singaporean writers to sign with a major publishing house in the UK, the Christian themes and Oxford jokes in her novel merely reinforced the impression that the only way for a Singaporean novelist to get published internationally was to mimic the colonizer’s ways.”
But something changed as Wei Ting began studying literature with the intention of writing her own stories:
“As a young literature student, I was drawn to Chinese, and later Japanese and Korean literature, whose stories felt closer to me, their characters’ dilemmas more resonant, especially in how they confronted western modernity and the perceived backwardness of their own culture. But as I began rethinking what I had previously thought of as ‘good’ storytelling or ‘good’ art, I began to see whiteness everywhere—not merely in terms of skin color or race, but as a kind of cultural imperialism, the dominance of one form of storytelling or art over all others.”
With all of that in mind, I invited Wei Ting to be interviewed for Writer Unboxed so we could discuss her ideas more fully with the specific intent of addressing […]
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How does an author of “literary crime” fiction make the transition to a straight-up crime thriller? I put that question and more to today’s guest, Damyanti Biswas.
Damyanti’s Indian debut literary crime novel You Beneath Your Skin was an Amazon bestseller, and it was optioned for the screen by Endemol Shine. Her second novel, The Blue Bar, was published in January 2023 via Thomas & Mercer. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, described it as an “exceptional crime thriller,” adding:
“Meticulous local color matches sensitive characterizations, including of brave Mumbai police who try to overcome the deadly hazards of the corrupt system they have to work in. This searing portrait of marginalized people struggling for survival is unforgettable.”
Damyanti’s work has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Ambit, Pembroke Review, and Griffith Review among many others in the US, UK, and Australia. She also serves as an editor for The Forge literary magazine.
I first encountered Damyanti (we’ve yet to meet in person) in one of my Litreactor classrooms, where her considerable talent was immediately obvious.
Your first novel, You Beneath Your Skin, was a beautiful novel that had a crime-murder element but focused primarily on the sociological complexity of present-day India and the psychological nuances of its characters. What prompted you to decide to write a straight-up crime-thriller? Not only that, it’s the first in a series — how challenging or exciting of a change is that?
I stumbled into writing You Beneath Your Skin. In my consciousness it began as a literary novel, because I began my writing life as a literary short story writer.
By the time feedback made me realize that I was in fact writing a crime novel complete with dead bodies and investigators, it was too late to make it a straight-up genre offering. My publishers called it a thriller, but in reality You Beneath Your Skin is more of a book club fiction about the periphery of crime: a whydunit rather than a whodunit.
With The Blue Bar, I wanted to challenge myself into writing a genre crime thriller—the ability to create pace and suspense intrigued me. Both my agent and my editor have taught me a lot about these aspects. I’ve also ended up learning much more about plot, and about the beats of Western storytelling in the 3-act and 5-act structures. This is very different from storytelling in Asia, which tends to be low on conflict, and is focused on introduction, development, twist/climax, and conclusion—the introduction and development tends to be much longer than in a typical Western novel.
When approaching The Blue Bar, I wanted to write a whodunit without sacrificing the whydunit aspects. To me, characters are the bedrock of any story, and their desire the jet fuel that propels it. In crime thrillers, the desires of the protagonist and antagonist come into violent conflict but in some stories I’ve read, the twists feel forced, the setting generic, the characters forgettable. The Blue Bar was my attempt at writing the kind of procedural or whodunit I like to read: with nuanced, memorable characters, a specific, atmospheric setting, and a plot that is surprising yet inevitable. Readers might judge if I’ve succeeded, but that was the goal.
I’d written The Blue Bar as […]
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In the never-ending quest for snappy repartee in our fiction, we often overlook the ways in which our own personal exchanges with friends and family members provide us with creative language we can use (i.e., steal) for our stories.
Using idioms to freshen up dialogue is hardly a revolutionary idea. But many idioms have become so commonly and widely used they amount to clichés: Look what the cat dragged in. Better get cracking. Gotta keep the wolf from the door. [If you’re looking for a source for such expressions, trite and not so trite, check out this idiom dictionary.]
The problem with some of our personal sayings is that they are so dependent on a unique context connected to our own experience that they’ll likely require at least some explanation for the reader to understand what’s being said (let alone why). And as we all know, explanation can be deadly.
That said, this problem isn’t insurmountable—you just need to select the expressions that require the least explanation—or come up with your own. Just as you and others have created these expressions from experience, so too can your characters.
As an example, in my most recent novel two friends have created a game where they make up names for dwarves who “didn’t make the cut” for Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves: Salty. Slimy. Punchy. Stuck. (My wife and I now, whenever we find ourselves using some particularly vivid adjective, will typically remark, “There’s another one that didn’t make it.”)
As the idea for this post began matriculating in my mind, I began to pay more attention to all the little sayings my wife, my friends, my family and mere acquaintances bandy about in the course of any given day. It dawned on me that maybe I was overlooking a rich source of material staring me in the face.
The fact that these expressions are rooted in day-to-day experience with someone else means that, if we’re going to try to create such expressions from scratch, we’ll have to imagine deeply such a quotidian existence for our characters. That can be laborious—all the more reason to pilfer from one’s own life.
With that in mind, I thought I’d run off some of the expressions I wrote down as they either came up in conversation or arose in memory.
Marital Maxims
I doubt any of you who are married or in a long-term relationship don’t have buzzwords, witticisms, or other expressions developed in your life together. Given these catch phrases likely developed in unique situations, you will likely have to recreate such a situation between your characters to make the expression work.
Some examples:
Penguin Fight!
Said when my wife and I disagree on something not terribly serious, but we can’t reach an accord. One or the other will announce, “Penguin Fight!” and we will approach each other face-to-face, our arms pressed close to our sides—to mimic fins—and raucously slap each other’s arms. Any tension that might have arisen magically vanishes.
Hashtag: Goals
Said when one of us expresses an intent to finally get to an unpleasant task put off for too long. (Me: “I guess I’ll go out and clean the gutters before it rains again.” She: “Hashtag: Goals.”)
It’s in the vows
Said when one of us agrees to do […]
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I’ve often shared here at Writer Unboxed one of my favorite quotes from Saul Bellow: “Writers are readers inspired to emulation.”
A corollary to this, and something I often say during my classes, is that the best teachers you will find concerning your writing are the writers who’ve inspired you. You can learn any number of techniques from writing guides, but seeing them in operation in the context of a work you admire is really the best way to let the lesson sink in.
I was reminded of all this recently as I devoured Jess Walter’s latest, The Angel of Rome. The short stories in this collection are all delightful in a way that does, indeed, inspire, and I thought I’d share some of the things that made me put the book aside for just a second to make a note.
Great Story Ideas
Each of these stories concerns unique but eminently human situations. A sampling:
A young woman who inherits her mother’s beauty is never told who her biological father is, and when she ultimately learns the truth, the lesson runs deeper than she could have imagined (“Mr. Voice”).
A high school science teacher confronts science denialism in the form of a student whose mother is stunningly attractive (“Magnificent Desolation”).
A young woman suffering from cancer reconnects with her wild, reckless, irresponsible ex in a last-ditch effort to escape the prison of pain and fear her disease has imposed on her (“Drafting”).
A young man studying Latin at the Vatican in Rome under false premises—he lied about his command of the language and his interest in the priesthood to please his mother—stumbles onto a film set and meets the person who will change his life (“The Angel of Rome”).
A young gay man, having to deal with his demented father—a womanizing drinker, smoker, and hell-raiser—finds an unlikely solution to his problem at a converted motel in upstate Idaho (“Town & Country”).
A young woman with a troubled past meets a famous actor at a party in Bend, Oregon, and educates him on what it means to be a “normal” person (“Famous Actor”).
Two climate scientists vying for the same teaching job at a Mississippi college befriend a young, mixed-race gay man struggling with his identity, and together they confront their horrors–the dying planet, the difficulty of being true to oneself, and why the latter matters even if the first proves true (“The Way the World Ends”).
As you can imagine, these thumbnails barely do justice to the stories themselves, but the twists and surprising revelations in each of them cannot be disclosed with greater specificity without ruining the reading experience for those of you who decide to pick up the book (which I, of course, highly recommend).
In particular, Walter is devoutly loving in his portrayal of even the most unpleasant characters–but how he does that would consume another whole post. So instead, allow me to move on to:
Bold Openings
Several of the stories begin in ways that can’t help but make you want to keep reading. Examples:
Mother was a stunner.
She was so beautiful men would stop mid-step on the street to watch her go by. When I was little, I would see them out of the corner of my eye […]
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“Our real self is not entirely inside of us.” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It’s a truism of our peculiar art that we are obliged, as much as possible, to make every element of a story—every chapter, every section, every scene, every paragraph, every sentence, every word—serve multiple purposes, while at the same time making that effort as invisible as possible.
One area where this is especially true is description of setting. Although our first effort at describing our story world may likely resemble straightforward reportage, in our revisions we would be wise to ask: In whose mind’s eye exactly is this scene unfolding? What does her account of the scene tell us about her?
Description in fiction cannot be separated from point of view, even in its most objective, omniscient variations. (A common misconception concerning omniscient point of view is that it lacks a narrative perspective; not true—that perspective is revealed through the omniscient narrator’s voice.)
This link between description and point of view means that physical details never merely convey information about the exterior world; they also cannot help but tell us something about the perspective—psychological, moral, emotional—forming the impressions being recounted.
This point got driven home for me recently when I picked up Exteriors by our most recent Nobel Laureate, Annie Ernaux. The book was prompted by her move from a series of provincial towns steeped in history to a new modern city “suddenly sprung up from nowhere.”
She felt “seized with a feeling of strangeness…continually hovering in some no man’s land halfway between the earth and the sky. My gaze resembled the glass surfaces of office towers, reflecting no one, just the high-rise towers and the clouds.”
As she emerged from this “state of schizophrenia,” she became increasingly absorbed in her new surroundings. “And so this journal of exteriors was born…a series of snapshots reflecting the daily routine of a community.”
The analogy to photography wasn’t casual: “I have done my best not to explain or express the emotion that triggered each text. On the contrary, I have sought to describe reality as though through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and the opacity of the lives I encountered.”
But then comes the inescapable admission: “In actual fact, I realize that I have put a lot of myself into these texts, far more than originally planned.”
To which I can’t help but reply: How could she not?
A photographer’s image doesn’t simply spring up before her camera’s lens. She selects it. Often the photographs she ends up sharing are the one or two kept from dozens even hundreds of others that failed to capture that ineffable quality, “the mystery and the opacity,” of her subjects.
In the text of Exteriors, Ms. Ernaux makes this point in two different places.
In the first, she remarks, “I realize that I am forever combing reality for literature.”
The second comes at the end of one of her “snapshots:”
Saint-Lazare Station, on a Saturday: a couple are waiting in line for a taxi. She looks lost and leans on him for support. He keeps repeating: “You’ll see when I’m dead.” Then: “I want to be burned, you know; I want to be burned from head to toe. I don’t want to go into that thing. It’s horrible, that thing.” He […]
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