So You Want to Write

by Marge Piercy

  Sometimes in a short story the setting is merely sketched. It is a kitchen in a railroad flat in Chicago. We are given a few choice details—the El roars past at eye level, the waterbugs are climbing the wall by the sink—but that’s about it. In other stories, the setting is far more important, at least some aspect of it. If a protagonist is cold or hot and that matters to the story, make the reader shiver or sweat. It is hot in the first paragraph, it is hot on page 2, it is hot on page 3, and so forth. You keep the heat on with details, not with labeling. The asphalt is sticky underfoot. The leaves on the elm are drooping. A dog lies stretched long and lean to the earth of the yard to extract what coolness it can. Sweat runs down your protagonist’s back and pools at the belt of her shorts. Her hair feels lank and limp. Her glasses keep sliding down her nose. A drop of sweat gets into her eye and stings. The back collar of her camp shirt is clammy against her neck. The more sharply you observe, the better and the more convincing your details will be to the reader.

  If there is a storm going on in the story, make it continue, make it increase or lessen, make it bang on the events of the story. Do not forget once the events in your story move forward and your characters are in conflict that you still need whatever setting you gave them to go on doing whatever it is doing: burning, blowing, snowing. Think of the use of snow in James Joyce’s “The Dead,” “silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamp-light,” all through the story, until the very last sentence, “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

  Be sure when you pick a setting that it is appropriate. On-site research never hurts. I once set a story in a part of France with which I am not familiar. I had a landscape painter fall in love with the area. My surprise and my chagrin were neck in neck when I visited and discovered the area has all the charm of Gary, Indiana or the Meadowlands of New Jersey as viewed from the turnpike. Fortunately I was only in third draft, and I moved my story to a more appropriate landscape.

  When you are told to write about what you know, it doesn’t mean you cannot write about death if you haven’t died yet, or childbirth if you have never bred, or murder if you have never committed it. Surely you have imagined doing so, unless you are far more saintly than I am. We all find in ourselves myriad characters and we know ourselves to be capable of far more than we have had the opportunity or the necessity of living out. It means do your research. Combine empathy with imagination and observation. Make real and believable characters, see first-hand what you can, read up on the rest. You are not writing a guidebook or a how-to manual. You want your details to work to create verisimilitude. Often a few well-chosen details are better than pages of humdrum description. But they have to be accurate and telling details. They should persuade us that you know what you are writing about, that those little factoids are accurate, and they have set the mood of the story, its ambience.

  When you begin, you need to let us know where we are and who is acting or talking; we need to have a clear sense in whose viewpoint we are operating. We need a sense of the era—right now, one hundred years in the future or in the past, ten thousand years ago or last year, in the 60s or in the 80s or in the 20s. We need to know whether we’re in Center City Detroit or in Rio or in Dakar. We have to know whether we’re among Neanderthals or giant grasshoppers or soccer moms. Surprising us at the end of the story that these characters were giant grasshoppers raising their young is not a great idea.

  Finally, there are no rules for writing short stories. You learn best by reading lots and lots of them and asking yourself as you go through each one, what makes this story interesting? Why do I care about the protagonist? How do the diction and the narrative style add or detract from the flow of the story? Do I believe in these characters and their problems? Why or why not? Do I believe in the ending? Does it satisfy me?

  Exercise:

  Think of a family story that you remember from your childhood. First write it as you understood it as a child. Then tell the same story as you understand it as an adult—with sexuality, if involved, or financial aspects and the motivation of the relevant characters. Which story do you find more interesting? Can you tell the story from the child’s point of view but indicate by indirection and what the other characters do, say and don’t say, what is really happening as you see it from your adult understanding?

  Exercise:

  Go out and sit in a public place. Eavesdrop. People watch. When something you hear or see intrigues you, write a story about what you imagine that conversation or that little vignette you observed came from and led to. People the scene with a character or two of your invention and create a scenario of your own.

  Exercise:

  Take a long narrative with which you are familiar such as The Odyssey or Don Quixote and fashion a short story from one of the adventures of the protagonist. Perhaps you want to change the viewpoint. It is a different story from Circe’s standpoint.

  13

  Titles

  Titles are the first thing a reader encounters in a short story, while looking through the table of contents of a magazine or a review or anthology. A title is what the prospective buyer sees when browsing titles in a bookstore or a library. A catchy title is important to an author because often that is all a reader retains from a book review, whether favorable or unfavorable. Weeks or months later when that reader is browsing thousands of titles in a book store or desperately looking for something to read to get through a layover in an airport, she’ll think, Oh, I’ve heard of that one. A title is name recognition.

  Think, would you, when picking up a magazine, turn to a story with the title “Summer Encounter” or one called, “Daddy and the Hammerhead Shark?” Your title is a handle, an introduction to your story or book as well as an advertisement for it. Read me, I sound interesting, I sound intriguing.

  Titles that are too bland or that sound just like a slew of other titles are a mistake. Time And Time Again. Once Upon A Time. From Time To Time. But a clever twist on a bland phrase can be intriguing. Once Upon A Mattress was a Broadway musical based on the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea.” Like anti-histamines, reading a book entitled Transformations should probably be avoided before operating heavy machinery. If you are not writing historical fiction, avoid archaic sounding titles: Time’s Winged Chariot; The Wretched of The Earth.

  Your title might come from the Bible, The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton; Dogs of Babel, Carolyn Parkhurst; or Bartlett’s Quotations, or from another piece of literature quoted. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway’s title, is from the last lines of a poem by Donne. Seek not for whom the bell tolls / it tolls for thee. Or Salinger’s Catcher in The Rye, an intentional misquotation from the Robert Burns song “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye:” If a body catch a body / need a body cry?

  Sometimes a title is fairly literal and a description of the book’s subject: Of Cats and Men by Nina de Gramont. Sister Age, M.F. K. Fisher. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. The War of The End of The World by Mario Vargas Llosa; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love In A Time of Cholera; Laurie Colwyn, A Big Storm Knocked It Over; Doris Betts, The Sharp Teeth of Love; Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison.

  Sometimes a title is catchy with a hint of surprise: Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes At The Last Minute, or Susan Lang’s Small Rocks Rising; Joanna Russ’s On Strike Against God. Edward Hoagland, The Courage of Turtles; The Famished Road by Ben Okri; James Tiptree, Jr., Up The Walls of The World: Elizabeth Inness-Brown, Burning Marguerite; “The Crystal Crypt” by Philip Dick; The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Albee; The Beet Queen, by Louise Erdrich; Amnesia Moon, by Jonathan Lethem; The Hundred Per Cent Black Steinway Grand, by Laurel Speer; My Year Of Meats, Ruth Ozeki; Interpreter Of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri; Hand In My Bra, Joan Leo: Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson.

  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers is an outlandish hyperbolic boast. You want the idea to catch i
n your reader’s brain like a burr so that she remembers the title and her curiosity is aroused.

  Sometimes a title is a pun or close to one: Bee Season (about spelling bees and kaballah and its mystical association with the chanting of letters) by Myla Goldberg. The War At Home (about domestic violence in the family of a World War II veteran) by Nora Eisenberg.

  Sometimes a title attracts attention because it is much longer than titles generally are: I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean And Impressive, by Zora Neale Hurston; Samuel R. Delaney, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand; Ursula Leguin, Buffalo Gals And Other Animal Presences; Deena Metzger’s short story called “The Woman Who Slept with Men To Take the War Out of Them;” Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines Of Dr. Hoffman; Three Elements Of Random Tea Parties, Felicia Lemus. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe. How about Arthur Kopit’s absurd farce, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You In The Closet And I’m Feelin’ So Sad.

  A title might make a pop or cultural reference or allude to a famous person or subject: Manuel Puig’s Betrayed By Rita Hayworth ; Suzanne Ruta’s Stalin In The Bronx; William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive; Oscar Hijuelos’s, The Mambo Kings Play Songs Of Love; Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Lion by Donna Andrews. Or a title might seem a paradox: Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking; Jose Saramago’s The Stone Raft.

  The title might suggest a body of myth or legend. The Mists Of Avalon is Marion Zimmer Bradley’s take on the King Arthur stories. The Red Tent is Anita Diamont’s exploration of the story of Dinah.

  A title might feature a place as in Michael Chabon’s Mysteries Of Pittsburgh; or The Far Euphrates, by Aryeh Lev Stollman; A Werewolf Problem In Central Russia, stories by Victor Pelerin; Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming In Cuban.

  Some titles take a common or ordinary phrase and use it in a surprising way: Nina Berberova, The Italics Are Mine. See Under Love, David Grossman. One of Simone De Beauvoir’s late memoirs is called in English All Said and Done. Abby Hoffman’s memoir was titled Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture. Doris Lessing has a short story “One Off the Short List.” Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way The Crow Flies, Billie Letts’s Shoot The Moon, and James Hynes’s short story collection Publish And Perish, all illustrate common phrases or variations on them, as does To Say Nothing Of The Dog, by Connie Willis.

  A title can be both literal and metaphorical: Virginia Woolf ’s To The Lighthouse; American Blood, John Nichols; Helen Dunmore, Talking To The Dead; Crocodile Soup by Julia Darling; The Mammoth Cheese, Sheri Holman; The Fifth Book of Peace, Maxine Hong Kingston; Women With Big Eyes, Angela Mastretta; Shadow Theater, Fiona Cheong.

  Now to reality: I always title my poetry books, and I get involved early on in the process of cover design. But with my novels, five times out of six, I will come in with one title and the publisher or sales department or editor will insist on renaming the book. Half the time, they ask me for endless suggestions and then take something completely different someone on staff suggested. Sometimes a publisher will come up with a better title than the author’s—Lev Raphael’s novel The German Money was called Fieldwork In The Land of Grief before we suggested a change and Theodore Roszak’s The Devil And Daniel Silverman was The Cold Front—sometimes not. I hated the title The Longings of Women, but titling is a marketing decision and, depending upon your contract, your opinion may hold little weight with the publisher. It was originally called Boxes of Comfort and Pain. Vida was called A Common Act of War. Three Women was called The Price of The Body. Still, you do the best you can both to attract attention in the pile and—in the best of all possible worlds—to supply the title that the marketing department will fall in love with. So you give a title that you consider a strong one and then it is out of your hands. I keep lists of my rejected titles. I have recycled some of them for another book and occasionally one will turn into a poem. Sometimes, if you publish in Great Britain, you will find that the same title will not go in both places. He, She and It was so titled in the U.S., but in Great Britain and Australia, it was called Body of Glass. There was something unseemly or obscene to the British ear in the American title, so it had to be changed. It’s been very confusing.

  There are fashions in titles as there are in hairstyles and body art. A few years ago, titles had to be two words, no more, no less, to please some editors. Some writers fancy one word titles: Cherry Muhahji’s Her; Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (we don’t count “a” or “the”); Nicola Barker, Behindlings. Joyce Carol Oates’s Them. But two or three word titles are far more common.

  Titles of poems, books, and stories cannot be copyrighted. How many things over the years have been called Bedtime Story? In the year Ira published Going Public, there were two other novels with the same title, one reviewed in the same issue of Publishers Weekly. A title I gave a collection of poems, Available Light, I learned had been used a number of times before and after my volume. It’s probably better to go with a fresh title, but if the one you have chosen has been used before, unless it is currently in print or in stores, don’t let that worry you—unless it’s a famous title like A Christmas Carol or Gone With The Wind.

  Titles are handles, ads, come-hithers, and the best titles give the impression of being catchy and inevitable at once. You will undoubtedly revise your titles as seriously as you revise your prose; and you will probably have to take your title through many revisions before you get one that satisfies you and your publisher. The important thing to remember is that your title is a critical decision. You take it lightly at your peril. Give it the thought it deserves.

  Exercise:

  This is fun because it’s pure conjecture: no work to do, no writing involved. Like our first exercise in the chapter on Beginnings in which we asked you to come up with a beginning with no end, in this exercise the object is to come up with a title with no book, that is, a title so intriguing that it would make someone reach for it before any other in a library or book store. There are writers who claim to have started a project with a great title, the way poets are lured into writing a poem after encountering a simple phrase. Sometimes you’ll hear an intriguing snippet of conversation and just know it would make a good title. Marge’s memoir Sleeping With Cats was titled in this way. Try it in the car or on a walk. Bounce weird titles off your friends. You never know. You may come up with a keeper.

  14

  Writing Humor: Learning Survival Techniques

  Why are a lot of fat kids funny? Because they have to be. Not funny in their physicality but in their wit, their use of language, their ability to mimic or to milk humor from a situation. Their ability to attack before being attacked. To control the situation, to provide the subject of comedy before they become the subject.

  There might be natural comedians among high school quarterbacks. There might be a runway model who does the comedy club circuit on weekends. But most funny people begin by perceiving themselves as losers, physical outcasts, social misfits. Of course, perception is key here. You don’t have to look like Quasimodo to feel like a hunchback. Having a parent who is ashamed of you and treats you like an outcast is quite enough. “She’s quick,” you might describe the kid from the violent home; quick to defend herself; quick to get out of harm’s way; or quick-witted: quick to make her father laugh before he grows restive and sends her across the room with the back of his hand. Ditto the lunchroom clown who sticks a straw up his nose before the conversation turns to the dodge ball that smacked him in the face in gym class. Or the heartbroken single woman at a dinner party who tells hilarious stories about her last disastrous date so all the married couples at the table won’t show their pity for her. Humor is serious stuff. Humor is survival. Humor often finds it roots in pain.

  Every newspaper in the country has a humor column that addresses the foibles of families and the annoyances of daily life: of pets, of kids, of computers and in-laws and guests who overstay their welcome. It’s fun, it puts us at ease, when we identify. This is what went wrong
in my house/life/family, how about yours? But there has always been a deeper need of the humor writer, to reveal false gods, to question what society commonly accepts as normal, righteous, perfect, beautiful; or decries as immoral, stupid, worthless. Comedy can be a writer’s effort to tell a painful story by pointing out its absurdity, to expose a society’s hypocrisy, to illustrate a situation too dangerous to discuss openly. The master (also read: teacher, boss, clergyman, parent, commanding officer, etc.) thinks he’s smart but he’s not. I am as smart as everyone else but they see me as stupid. The slave might feel this way; so might the immigrant, or the servant, the child or the secretary. Something is wrong here, things are not what they seem (or, things are not what everyone says they are). Or, everyone is making a great fuss over nothing. Comedy is trying often to evoke more than laughter.

  But not everyone can make us laugh. I have a friend who is a talented and successful oil painter. He can paint a bowl of fruit that can bring tears to your eyes. But to hear this guy begin a joke is like entering an elevator that stops at every floor. You stare at your feet, at the walls; you steal a furtive glance at the woman next to you, who is also attempting to tolerate the wait. This friend can take five minutes to a tell a knock-knock joke. He has no timing, no sense of language, no feel for character, or what information is simply pointless to include. The laughs he gets are due to the embarrassment of his listeners.

  There are no inherently funny subjects. There have been very funny books written about war (Catch 22) and sexual obsession (Portnoy’s Complaint); about painful divorce (Heartburn) and impoverished serfs (Dead Souls) and overdosing drugs (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.) A Sunday newspaper column about our exasperating problems with computers can be amusing if written by Dave Barry and harrowing if it details the consequences of identity theft. There is humor in any situation. It’s all in the writing. Can you gain enough distance from the subject to see the foolishness in it? Joseph Heller served in World War II but it took him years to fully capture the absurdity of war in Catch 22, the story of a sane man attempting to prove he’s crazy in order to get out of combat, only to discover that everyone in charge is insane. Can you get beyond your own embarrassment in order to name and exaggerate the details? In Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth goes into hilarious detail to describe the scene of Alex Portnoy locking himself in the bathroom to masturbate. Are you too worried about hurting your family to find the universal insanity in their foibles? Are you so angry with fundamentalists that you can’t envision the potential for humor when someone with enlightened scientific views trades ideas with someone who believes in the literal interpretation of the Bible?