by Robin Black
“A real nut,” I said, but he only shrugged.
And what I understood, then, is that my story isn’t as fluky as I have always believed. Agents aren’t all looking for one thing. They are human beings, after all. So there are agents out there—and I’m not saying it’s the majority—who aren’t, first and foremost, looking for authors who can mimic a professional tone and sound like business-people. Instead, they may be looking for that ever elusive quality: voice. Or personality. There are agents who don’t expect writers to sound 100% balanced all the time—or ever; agents who may very well be bored to death by the dozens of “by the book” queries they receive every month.
So my advice, when it comes to query letters, is: Be yourself. Let a process of natural selection work itself out. Being neurotic, tentative, and entirely unprofessional got me the agent who was right—for me. One who doesn’t mind a little craziness along the way. One who may even welcome that. There are surely agents who would have deleted that first loopy email that I sent, barely read—and that would have been a very good thing for us both.
Line Edits I
Juliette then asked Sara about the house that the families were hoping to buy.
Juliette then asked her about the house that the families were hoping to buy.
Juliette asked about the house the families were hoping to buy.
Juliette asked about the house the families hoped to buy.
She asked about the house the families hoped to buy.
Juliette asked about the house they hoped to buy.
Juliette asked about the house. “What’s the place like?”
“What’s the house like?” Juliette asked.
“What’s the house like?” she asked.
“What’s the house like?”
Living in the Present
When I sent the last story for my collection to my agent, he soon called with his approval. I was thrilled. Hooray!! The manuscript is complete! But within minutes my joy was marred by an unshakable sense that there was still something wrong. “You know, I think I should throw the story into present tense,” I said before we ended the call. “I think it makes sense for this one.”
It was a concession of sorts for me. Not so long before, I had claimed to despise present tense—a fairly common claim. For many people present tense is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of thing, almost as though it were some kind of isolated element, distinct from the integrated whole of the story—a bit like cilantro.
I would have loved the salsa, except it had cilantro in it. That makes some sense.
It was a terrific story except I hate present tense. That one, not so much.
One of my newest crusades is to convince the world that there are no bad craft elements, only poor uses of them. In other words, cilantro may always taste like cilantro, but present tense need not carry the same flavor every time.
The Case Against Present Tense
Having asked some of the haters why they hate, I’ve often heard words like “stilted” and “robotic.” (And in fact have used them myself.) People hear a sameness in the tone of present tense stories. That tone comes from a particular sentence structure that can sound like detached, dispassionate reportage. Samantha walks to the window. She raises the shade. She stands there and stares outside for a time. It’s a style that can evoke stage directions. It’s been used to great effect in some second person stories to mimic the form of instruction manuals. (See Lorrie Moore’s “How To Be An Other Woman.”) But when there’s no inherent reason in a story for the rigidity of sentence after sentence with that same basic structure, it can have the impact of making otherwise disparate stories begin to sound alike.
I suspect that many of the people who have tired of that particular tone, and claim to hate all fiction in present tense, have also read a lot of present tense stories without even registering that they have.
As she walks to the window, Samantha trips over a ball of yarn, so at first she reaches for the shade’s cord only to steady herself. But then, after a moment, she pulls on it purposefully. Free from further worries about what treacherous objects might be strewn on the floor, she stands there for a time and stares outside.
I’ll admit, I’ve added a lot here, but in a sense that’s the point. I think of these additional clauses and details as softening agents, meant not only to convey the scene, as any such passages are, but also to minimize awareness of my choice of tense. The sentence structure is varied, no longer beginning with the subject followed by a verb, which helps, but perhaps less obviously, Samantha’s actions are now connected by something other than the fact that she did them all. She trips while walking to the window and she holds onto the cord because she tripped. Timing and causation come into play, and, subtle though those elements are, they provide a gravitational pull away from a consciousness of the tense in which it’s all being told. In other words, a present tense story need not always register as a present tense story.
But why bother at all? Even if you can keep present tense from sounding stilted, are there positive reasons to choose it?
The Case for Present Tense
To go back to the story that I redrafted in 2009, my decision to shift tenses in that instance was based on the fact that my central, point of view character—Jeremy—was chronically befuddled. The point of view in that story is close, and there was a way in which telling it as though it had all happened some time back, as though it were settled history, seemed at odds with his bewilderment. I had a hunch that putting it into present tense would dovetail well with the sense I wanted to create that he never knew what might happen next. People often talk about the “immediacy” of present tense, a term that is generally used to describe the reader’s relationship to the story. But tense can also have its basis in the level and type of knowledge you want your point of view character to have.
For example, as soon as a first person narrator begins to tell a story in past tense, questions arise about the length of time that has elapsed between the events of the story and its telling. What does the narrator know, as she recounts, that she didn’t know when those events were unfolding? Why is the narrator choosing to tell this story “now”? All of these questions can lead to the right kind of complexity for a story, but sometimes they just get in the way. A first person story told in present tense is a strange conceit, almost as though the narrator were both acting and recounting her actions at once, but, when well-executed, it cuts out the need to account for all the circumstances surrounding the retrospective narrator.
Present tense can also be useful when you are going to have a great deal of “back story” to manage. It’s not impossible to distinguish the past from the more distant past, we have an entire tense designed to do just that. But there are times when it is just simpler and clearer to have the “front story” in present tense and the “back story” in past. If nothing else, it saves a lot of fiddling around with past perfect which while obviously worth doing sometimes, at other times seems to muddy as much as it elucidates.
The truth is that present tense is no more or less constricting than past. It has its purposes and its limitations. And, as with so many other writing elements, the choice of tense for a story has more to do with the best way to tell that particular story than with whether in the abstract one prefers one form of storytelling over another.
Which isn’t a bit like cilantro at all. Speaking as someone who loves cilantro.
If Only! The Imaginative Wealth
of What Didn’t Take Place
There is a connection between regret and fiction writing—even beyond the obvious possibility that one might regret ever having started to write fiction.
Regret is among a very few emotions that cannot exist without an accompanying narrative. I wish I had gone on that trip because…I then would have met the love of my life; I then wouldn’t have set the house on fire; I then would have seen Paris before I died, which would have made dying more bearable for me. All regret carries within it a particular kind o
f story, one in which the rules of causality and chance are suspended—generally in favor of a happy ending. We who know that we cannot know what any future moment might bring convince ourselves that we can know what would have happened in the past…if only. Regret makes confident storytellers of us all.
It also makes us fans of bold action—retrospectively, anyway. Social scientists and psychologists are agreed that people are more likely to regret what they have not done than what they have done. Since that concept of ‘doing’ and ‘not doing’ is a slippery one—when you don’t go on the trip you do stay home—I take this to mean that people tend to feel regret when they perceive that they have failed to do something more often than when they perceive that they have actively done the wrong thing. It’s the missed opportunity that feels poignant. The road not taken. The challenge to which we do not rise. The one who got away. These are the regrets that engender most of the poignant, private literature of what might have been.
Inaction, it turns out, is a strangely rich source for the imagination, a fact that I have found to be of help when I am struggling with a story that has taken on a moribund, fruitless quality—as happens all too often. My narrative, once brimming with life and promise, has died—sometimes quite suddenly. There are many reasons for this, but one of the biggest impediments to reviving such work is too great a focus on what has happened in the story up to that point, as opposed to what has not.
As regret narratives so well demonstrate, what characters failed to do may actually be a more productive resource for imaginative thinking than what they did. More and more, when I hit that still and frightening place in my work, instead of pushing forward as I used to try to do, continuing from where I last wrote, I go back, convinced that I will find a missed opportunity in the text, gloriously brimming with might have beens. I look for lines like: I thought of telling him what had happened the night before, but decided against it. Or, I could have run after her and pleaded my case, but instead, I went back inside. Or, She stared at the phone for a very long while, but never picked it up. I hunt for the points of inaction that my characters might themselves later regret, those decisions that might inspire in them the rich fictions of which we are all such gifted authors when we are sorry to have chosen the safer, less active of two possible paths.
There are of course those fictional beings whose inaction is a defining, essential quality, but more often, in my work, the failure of a character to act is the result of my authorial hesitation, my reluctance to move into plot complications, and not a result of my character’s temperament. There can be a certain satisfaction in keeping early drafts relatively simple. The lure of completion alone is enough to guarantee the appeal of a plot that seems to move easily along. When I write, I have something like a heat sensor that can detect potential complexity, the difficult exchanges, the entanglements that might arise; and against all interests of the story, my first instinct is often to avoid such sparks and fires, tamping and tamping—until one day I sit down at the computer to find a narrative that has taken on a deathly, immobile quality.
Some time ago, during such a moribund period with my novel, I went back through the pages, and sure enough discovered a moment at which my central character chooses inaction over a more complicated course: “I thought of going over to Alison’s house and seeing if I could help, but decided against it.” I changed her mind, had her march across her property and into her neighbor’s home, and that simple walk from one house to another led to a scene that opened the book up for me. The relationship between my narrator and her neighbor took on a new kind of intimacy—a difficult one, a messier one. My narrator had to face limitations in her own ability to empathize. She had to see the other woman in a new light.
The pressure I had initially avoided by keeping them apart, performed the trick of clarifying character and therefore determining actions, as pressure so often does.
Many years ago, a friend of mine showed me her MFA thesis-in-progress, a collection of stories. She knew that a number seemed to lose their energy and their focus along the way, and she wanted my advice. I discovered that in more than a few, when the going between two characters got tough, one of them would get into a car and drive away. “I wanted to avoid a fight.” “I couldn’t stand listening anymore.” My friend had done what I so often do, choosing the path of least resistance for her characters, shying away from the difficult scene—difficult for her fictional creations, and difficult for her.
And that difficulty isn’t limited to crafting thorny conversation between characters. I have gone back into stories and realized that I stopped someone from taking a trip only because I semi-consciously realized that I would have had to do research on the destination. Authorial laziness is not a particularly fertile creative vein, whatever form it takes.
In real life, we don’t get to return to our twenties and step onto the airplane we were afraid to fly; or audition for the play that excited and scared us; or ask the beauty to dinner; or take the job in Boston, despite logistical concerns. What’s done is done and all we can do is tell ourselves the intuitively well-crafted stories of what might have been.
But in fiction, what has been done can be undone and what hasn’t been done can be done—and very often should be. No limitations. No excuses. And no regrets.
No Fool Like a Bold Fool
Somewhere between a million and a billion years ago, when I was a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence College, I took a fiction writing workshop with the extraordinary Allan Gurganus. Allan set us to writing a story a week for the full year, an experience for which I’ve been grateful ever since, chiefly because it taught me not to be overly precious with myself about every word I jot down. There’s just no way to produce at that rate and maintain the illusion that everything you write is very good.
We had many different sorts of prompts, different parameters for each assignment. I don’t remember the exact prompt that led me to write a story about a nineteenth-century sheep farmer who took in a beautiful stranger, who, if memory serves, either baked him a loaf of bread or spun his copious wool into yarn, but I do remember the beautiful stranger’s name: Genevieve.
I remember her name with a cringe—and will remember it that way all my days—because at a certain point, as she stood in his doorway, wrapped in her too-thin cloak, facing out toward the dark, snowy night, he spoke the immortal words: “You needn’t leave, Genevieve.”
(Read it out loud, if you are missing the point.)
Sadly, I didn’t catch it before making my copies and distributing them to the class. Inevitably, my classmates did. I don’t think any serious or lengthy teasing went on, but it was enough that a couple of people repeated the phrase with dramatic emphasis, and perhaps a few laughed. Maybe more than a few. I was mortified. I am still mortified. The thought of that sing-song rhyme still makes me cringe.
You needn’t leave, Genevieve.
Did I mention that this was more than thirty years ago?
I assure you that in those three decades plus I have done a lot worse than write an inadvertent, inopportune rhyme. Yet this particular gaffe has a special power over me. And I think I know why that is.
One of the great virtues of Allan’s class with its many imaginative prompts and oh-so-frequent assignments was that we were all forced out of our respective comfort zones. I was not then (though I might now be) inclined to write about nineteenth-century sheep farmers—or, maybe more to the point, about the origins of a Great Love. (I still struggle with that.) I am certain that going into workshop that day I not only felt all the usual worries about being “shot down” for lousy writing, I also felt the particular worry of someone who has tried something entirely new. And so, in the way of these things, feeling foolish about the rhyme became feeling foolish about the story which became feeling foolish about writing which became feeling foolish about ever having thought I could write, which was really just feeling like a fool.
There are reasons comfort zones are called what they are. But there are
also excellent reasons to step out of them.
I’m aware that many of the people who read my fiction now do so with certain expectations. They think of me as writing a specific kind of story, usually big on what people call “interiority,” not so high on high drama. I’m also aware that so-called realist short stories, in general, not just mine, are also often read with set expectations, particularly about their endings, which, to put it very crudely, include a kind of upward turn, an opening up of hope complete with a physical representation of optimism, the ray of sunshine just brushing the top of the glistening wheat field, pointing the way toward a brighter future…
Or anyway, whatever the merit of that gross generalization in the larger literature, when I was working on my collection of stories I felt myself in danger of writing too much and too automatically to that expectation. The “final lilt” as I thought of it. My loyalty to these endings seemed to me to be dishonest if my work was to reflect the human condition. I knew a family then who had been crushed by multiple tragedies all at once, and I knew that for them—as for many other inhabitants of this earth—there was no upward lilt to come, no moment of redemptive understanding. I decided that as an artist, I had an obligation to try to make art that took that possibility into account. Art that didn’t braid itself to hope quite so tightly as my stories had done up until that point. Yes, those works had dealt with tragic situations more often than not, but they hadn’t revealed the chasm of pure, unwavering tragedy that runs alongside all our lives. And so I set myself the challenge of writing a short story that was a complete bummer. But still a story. But still a bummer. But still good.
The result was the title story of my collection If I loved you, I would you tell you this—first published in the Southern Review as “A Fence Between Our Homes.” And it is definitely a bummer. It is also, decidedly, not to everybody’s taste. I spoke with more than one publisher about my collection before signing with the one I have, and while the editor who ultimately took the book told me that that story was what sold her on me, someone else who was interested in the collection added the caveat that the same story would have to be cut. “It’s just too much. Too over the top. I’m sure you understand.”