From: “Back to Beijing,” scheduled for Hampshire Life soon.
Wang Yu is one of three physicians among the thirty students in my intermediate conversation class. She’s among the best English speakers in the group and everyone agrees she’s pretty enough to be an actress. She tells me she doesn’t want to be a physician any longer and is learning English “because I want to get into business.” My class at Beijing Foreign Studies University English Language center is full of people with similar aspirations. The current wisdom is that to get a good job in Beijing you need three things: ability to use a computer; a driver’s license; and a working knowledge of English. In Beijing now, courses for any of these three subjects are the hottest thing in town.
Wang Yu is from Shandong province, a mountainous area east of Beijing and on the coast. Given my previous experience in China (I taught there twice before in 1987 and 1994), I find it a bit surprising she has been released from her work unit there to pursue any studies which might change her career. On my last visit to Beijing, I witnessed several of my students, all middle school teachers from “remote regions,” attempt in vain to break their teaching contracts to take better paying and more interesting jobs. Perhaps it is more honest to say I watched while they tried in vain to find ways out of the desperate poverty of their countryside assignments, where some of them had classes of sixty to ninety students, classrooms with dirt floors, and irregular paychecks. With one exception that I know of, they are all once again in their original, state-assigned posts. Wang Yu, in fact, does not even have a particular field of business she wants to pursue-- “just so it doesn’t have anything to do with medicine,” she says. Whether she can succeed in making a new life for herself remains to be seen.
Getting into business has certainly captured the imagination of many of my students who, like Wang Yu, are very optimistic that in just a few years they will be living in gadget-filled apartments and driving their own cars. On my last two teaching trips to China, I encountered a constant underlying mood of cynicism and frustration. This time, I was impressed by the optimism in the air--optimism and nationalism both. (Hong Kong, you recall, had just the previous July been returned to Chinese sovereignty--in the catch phrase of the day, captured in a popular sing, “returned to the motherland.”) And it is easy now to find examples of the kind of success my students are, and will be striving for. . . .
From: “The New China”--
One of my students, a middle school teacher from an undeveloped and impoverished region of China, sat in the chair before me, ostensibly taking her final examination in my oral communications course, crying her eyes out. This was something of a disaster for her, not only because she supposed, somehow, that I would grade her harshly for this breach of decorum, but also because a lot of make-up was running down her cheeks and through her fingers, and she knew it. I had asked what I thought was the innocent question of where she was headed after graduation, and the result was this collapse. She had found a new job, she said, trying to compose herself, in Beijing, but her work unit in the countryside would not release her. She had been crying for days. She had worked so hard to find this new job and make a good impression and win out over the competition, and had celebrated her success with her friends, and now her old work unit slammed the door on this opportunity to improve her life and the life of her family. She was a Christian, she volunteered. She had prayed. She didn’t understand why God was doing this to her.
It was not the first time that spring that I had seen one of my students reduced to utter frustration, misery, anger, over their contracts with their home school districts, who had, after all, footed the bills for this two year teaching improvement program these middle school teachers had been a part of since 1992. In the “New China” of Beijing, there were opportunities for people who could speak, write, and translate English. Beijing Foreign Studies University, where I taught in the Second English Department (read: teacher training), was just a twisting hutong away from Baishiqiao (White Stone Bridge) Road, Beijing’s answer to Silicon Valley, and an easy bicycle ride from the Haidian district, home of Beijing’s most celebrated universities, Beijing University, and People’s University, among a number of other small and prestigious institutes--aeronautics, computer engineering, and nurse training just a few of the specialties. Almost all the Chinese faculty of English Dept. No. 2 were moonlighting, teaching English in “intensive training courses” of six or eight weeks, for area businesses. These jobs paid immensely better than their regular university positions. During my stay there, I was frequently offered chances for extra English teaching, and sometimes quite insistently, and had several offers to polish the English translations of Chinese documents. (The topics ranged from investment opportunities in Haikou to the benefits of a marvelous new fertilizer to reforms in banking policy.) Universities in outlying areas are also feeling the demand for providing English language teaching, and so the students in the program I was teaching in, with their English skills honed, were, not unreasonably, trying to cash in on the English learning craze.
And to get out of the “countryside.” The teachers in the program I was part of were almost universally from regions of China described by Beijingers as “remote,” meaning undeveloped and hard to get to. My students, for example, came from Helonjiang ( on the northeast Russian border), Inner Mongolia, mountain villages in Shandong, Xinjiang (China’s “wild west”), and Xaanxi, a northwest desert area. A typical classload for the middle school teachers of English from these regions is at least fifty students and can run as high as ninety. Almost by necessity, the typical teaching method is something called “grammar-translation” and little or no opportunity is given for the students to actually learn to speak the language--an absurdity the special training program was trying to address. Books are hard to come by in these impoverished areas, and the standard issue English language text is miserably out of date and includes chapters such as “How Karl Marx Learned Foreign Languages.” Making changes in the system, introducing new teaching methods, is made difficult by the fact that success is measured by a nation-wide test that of course makes no provision for being able to speak or write the language or adapt it to other contexts than that of filling in the exercise blanks. The students themselves have almost universally never even seen or met an English speaking person, have little prospect of travel, and are beset with the whole constellation of survival problems that accompany severe poverty. In other words, the teaching conditions in the home districts of the middle school teachers I met are as difficult as they get.
Beyond the teaching conditions themselves, many of my students just felt worn down by living in comparative poverty in the countryside. Pay for teachers is lower than for almost any other occupation, and even a “big city” Beijing college professor will make a salary of 350 Yuan a month--roughly $40 US--good money by countryside middle school teacher standards, where a more typical income is 270 Yuan, or about $30. (A pound of strawberries when I was there would cost 5 Yuan; a pound of tofu, 1 Yuan; a pound of peanuts 3 Yuan; a ready-cooked chicken from a street vendor, 25 Yuan; a taxi ride from downtown Beijing to Foreign Studies University can range from 35 Yuan to 50 Yuan). One of my students told me he lived with his family in a cottage with a dirt floor and no running water; the bathroom is a community latrine. Another said she lived with her husband and son, her parents, her brother and sister-in-law, in a house of three rooms. I visited such places on the outskirts of Beijing, where beds are a straw mat on a sheet of plywood and chickens will come scrounging if you don’t discourage them or keep the doors closed. Many such places are unheated in winter, or heated by little coal stoves with the smoke pumped out the window at eyebrow level. A two-burner propane stove is the kitchen; used water is pitched into the courtyard.
Students of mine from Helongjiang told me that workers in a saw mill there, one of the major industries in their district, had not been paid for five months; a student from Xaanxi said the same about another local factory; a teacher from southern Hebei said she had just received one month’s worth of the five months’ back pay that she was owed. Trains from some of the countryside areas are filled with what can be most kindly described as immigrants to the city, people bailing out of the “old China” in search of the new, but which might otherwise be described as refugees. Some of the peasants boarding the trains for the big cities are doing so illegally, of course, but more important, do not even have the money for food to sustain them along the way, and arrive in very desperate circumstances indeed. Students told me, too, that getting a ticket does not mean you are going to get anywhere after all, if you are one of these peasants. Unscrupulous conductors, they say, collect their tickets, then kick the peasants off for having no tickets, and then resell the tickets at inflated prices just down the line. My students called this “gangster capitalism.” . . .
From Nuts and Bolts: Fiction Craft
Introduction--
Little can be done to make the complex process of writing a story--let alone a novel--simple. Yet it has also become clear to me through years of teaching writing workshops and reading the stories of people who think they might like to write or have something important to get off their chests, that questions about the details of craft frequently, and unnecessarily, interfere more than they should with getting that story told. All I am trying to do in the little work that follows is to lay out the fundamentals of fiction writing craft--display the nuts and bolts and the tools commonly used to assemble them.
If there is nothing really mechanical about writing a story, there are “mechanics” nevertheless, ways to present dialogue, elements of a good description, ways to think about pacing, characterization or deepening the drama of a story, among other things. No one likes to hear it, but even grammar matters--and it matters a lot! A unique artistic vision is often translated into an individual style, and style is a matter of grammar made new and made individual. A character’s perceptual peculiarities or habits, too, are often communicated by well-considered ways of presenting the flow of information in his or her mind, and in the last analysis it is grammar that communicates this. Nuts and Bolts is not going to be a grammatical treatise, by any means, but touches on grammatical problems that seem to me common these days, the kind that editors lose patience with so quickly. I also touch on questions of grammar when they are related to style, personal perception, and artistic vision.
As humans, we have to learn almost everything. Even those things that supposedly “come naturally” can be improved by a little study and a little practice. And as instinctive as story-telling may be, it is also true that even observant and curious readers are immensely frustrated at their attempts at story-writing by their ignorance of the technical details which, in good stories, go unnoticed, as they should. In my experience as a teacher, I have found I usually have to edit a story in some detail before I can even begin to read it for its contents, to release its pleasures and insights. No editor who is selecting and publishing stories, of course--and I have been a fiction editor, too--would ever be so patient and that first or second run-on sentence or breach of dialogue form might be the only excuse he or she needs to slide your story into the return envelope with the standard “thanks but no thanks” rejection slip.
The editor, like any curious reader, wants to forget about the words on the page and experience the imaginative world of the story, to be drawn into the writer’s dream, or adventure, or celebration, or exploration. Free of static. The writers who can identify and then eliminate or avoid the sources of static in their work are at least on their way to getting an audience, and possibly also some feedback that will help to enlarge their personal vision and turn their stories into serious explorations that will be read with pleasure, and possibly even gratitude.
Technical details do matter. Stupid as it may sound, even neatness matters to most editors. There is a rhetoric to a tattered manuscript with coffee cup rings on the corners or rust marks from an antique paper clip or broken edges and thumbprints that many editors find insulting. The appearance of the manuscript says it has been to fifty editors already, or that the writer cares so little about the story that he hasn’t even bothered to eliminate this basic level of noise. Especially now, in the age of word processing and computers, when it is so comparatively easy to print out a fresh copy, a ragged and beat-up manuscript is one for the file drawer. Sending it out is self-defeating.
The creative process itself, of course, is not neat, and no one should expect it to be. A manuscript that has been through rewrite and revision and rethinking and re-evaluation should look, on the writer’s desk, as if it had gone through a war or a bargain basement sale. Revision, as we’ll discuss later, is absolutely vital to the creative process. Leaps of insight are wild and wonderful and sometimes occur inconveniently in the middle of a paragraph on some other development and have to be scribbled in the margin or on some handy scrap of paper; when such insights occur in the shower, then you can only trust to the powers of your own memory--and the water stains on the manuscript from your dripping hair, which an editor would find distracting, you can enjoy as part of the secret and personal history of the story’s evolution. You may even get tossed out of bed a by a new idea, by some insight into how a creative problem can be solved at last--the creative process can upset everything! The point is that reader and editor want to experience the story directly, not to be made conscious (except in the case of “metafiction,” or some inquiries of specialized scholarship) of the writer’s shaping and deciding, shouts of joy, or cursing and fussing. Usually, nothing we finally get the courage to put in the mail is so finished that we can’t think of some improvements before we seal the envelope--one last word to change, one more paragraph to eliminate, one more line of dialogue to insert--but it doesn’t help the story’s chances at all to land on an editor’s desk appearing to be still “under construction,” or as if it had been manhandled by a dozen editors already.
Stories are written by individuals and frequently focus on characters we regard as unique also, in important respects. Nevertheless, the stories of beginning writers, with gratifying exceptions, frequently have common traits, and frequently these are the consequence of not knowing how to deal with some basic technical problems. Often, for example, a beginner’s story has little or no dialogue. “I didn’t know how to handle it, so I left it out,” I’ve heard students say. “I tried some, but it was all flat, so I eliminated it,” I’ve also heard. As every reader knows, solutions exist for these problems.
Many beginning writers are also surprised to learn that their stories have problems with “point of view,” and may not know in fact (though it all seems quite natural to them as readers) what “point of view” is. Sometimes the lapses in point of view prove fatal to the way a story can be told--vital information can’t be introduced--but far more often some simple adjustments can preserve the story’s integrity and provide all the information necessary for the reader to appreciate the character’s choices or the story’s turn of events. These are the kinds of things discussed in the pages ahead.
The main reason for my undertaking this little book is that, as a teacher, while I have seen numerous texts that explicate fiction and teach us how to read with intelligence, about how stories mean, I have had great difficulty finding a text that is really a practical guide, perhaps even a supplement to other texts, to story writing itself. Many texts popular in writing courses take the fundamentals for granted and move onto juicier topics too quickly, or are, in my estimation anyway, what I would call “soft-headed,” that is, they suggest you can write great stories by kissing trees or meditating on the beach or joining a writer’s group with your particular sexual/political/spiritual orientation. These things may indeed unlock psychological doors or provide the sensory reality or the visionary push to drive you toward more profound utterance--and hooray for whatever works!--but if you are inspired and know little about craft, you may fill a notebook with some self-gratifying raving, and still never create a shapely, and reader-involving story. At the worst you may turn out some self-indulgent junk, therapeutic writing which deserves an audience of one--yourself. If you are lucky, on the other hand, you may create a document that engages others through its sheer exuberance. But then: what do you do for an encore?
There is another tier of writing texts which stress, in fact, a kind of formula approach for one kind of story. One of these, perhaps the most famous, is even based on a kind of 1950s psychoanalytic, pop-sociological approach that doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of contemporary relevance. Another stresses what is essentially movie-maker ideas of plotting which really do not translate well into fiction that hopes to take us out of TV-land where every woman is glamorous and cunning and every man has a gun within grasp. Boom babba boom. Bang bang bang. Not that there aren’t things to be learned from these books. I have tried many of them in my classes or summer workshops, and many readers will come away from them with a sharpened sense of what a story is. What has always worked better, however, is just to have students read stories, lots of stories, good stories and bad, and pay attention to how writers achieve their effects, keep us interested, give voice to their characters, arouse our emotions, create coherent worlds.
If you are a very, very beginning writer, however, you may not know what to look for in a story that will be most useful to you. It’s one of the arguments for peer criticism and workshops in general that writers at comparatively the same level of development will notice what they can, and need to notice, about story construction. And what accomplished writers do well is to keep the architecture and the technicalities and the strategies of making a winning story hidden. They do this precisely so you will not be aware of a story being made, but enjoy the story itself.
As someone who attempts to write good stories myself, I have no interest in destroying the mystery--as if I could!--or the magic of a good and powerful story. But I do want to try in this book to put first things first. It makes little difference, I think, if you do your meditating on the sands of Bali or in the car as you commute to the slave that pays the bills. But if you can’t write a decent sentence or pace a story so that everything seems surprising, and then inevitable, or construct dialogue that reveals and engages, then the fruits of those meditations, the stories you worked so hard to evolve, are going to remain trapped in the compound of your own mind by the barbed wire of technical incompetence. Let’s pull those wires down.
Chapter 1. Characteristics of the Beginning Story--
Chances are that you have written a story or two already, maybe even several. As a terrible pool player, I know that practice does not always make perfect, if, like me, you practice the same mistakes over and over again. I assume that, at my age, as a hunt and pick typist, I am never going to be able to knock out more than five pages an hour--too many ingrained bad habits. For the same reasons, writing stories is not necessarily going to pay off as practice unless you are a particularly good self-critic and can capitalize on what you are doing well, and weed out the bad habits. One can, of course, be too harsh as a self-critic, and we’ll discuss this in some detail later. It’s also for this reason that workshopping stories can be a harmful experience if equal attention isn’t given to the successes of an effort to create a story as well as the flaws. Many stories by beginning writers share common traits, however, and I think it has proved useful to take a look at what those are as a stepping stone to moving on to more complex and rewarding fictions.
. . .