On the "single stark element" that's with you all along in your narrative, something that "underpins the whole thing," Charlie Jane Anders says today:
"I have a feeling my stuff errs on the side of 'deceptively complicated.' I write things that have a million things whizzing around, but they boil down to one or two simple ideas. Or at least, I hope that there’s one or two main ideas when you look past all the fancy whizzbangery on the surface, or else you are left with just a mickle of a muddle. Right?
* * *
But if something is deceptively complex, how do you keep it from becoming just straight-up overcomplicated and messy? I wish there was a magic bullet – but I think part of it is that if you want to be able to strip away all the layers of complexity and find something stark underneath it all – a single stark element – then that needs to be there the whole time. You have to have one idea that you keep coming back that underpins the whole thing."
— Charlie Jane Anders, "The Difference Between Deceptively Simple and Deceptively Complex," Buttondown, January 10, 2024
Her book on writing:
What is it useful for me — or for us — to say?
You have a standpoint. You're positioned. Think about your standpoint and do the most useful thing for you, based on who you are. Sometimes that's individual. Sometimes it's collective.
But what makes it serious?
Be your theme simple, complex, or somewhere in the middle like "deceptively complex," what makes it serious?
Sometimes you have to write it to find out and let the reader decide.
An affirmation: My essay theme "may seem silly" and "probably is silly, which is a shame, considering that I’ve got this whole essay about it now." ("This is What Makes Us Girls: On the Lana-Del-Rey-to-Red-Scare Pipeline." Jude Doyle (on Ghost). 11 Jan 2024.)
Do journalism
Library research may not be enough. You may have to pick up the phone.
Ask lots of questions
Ask questions, e.g.,:
- "What words would you use to describe the most important values held by people in your culture?"
- "Who taught you those values? Why are they important to you?"
And so on.
Those two questions, and a few more, are from "50 Possible Questions to Open Israeli-Palestinian Dialogues," Kenneth Cloke, Mediate.com, January 26, 2024
Ask one big question
"The personal essay can be about almost anything," Aimee Liu writes, but is "rooted in a central question." The writer writes themself into the frame as the person who is raising the question, a recognition that is central to what makes it a personal essay. It doesn't matter so much if the question is answered. The personal essay "doesn’t necessarily seek to make sense out of life experiences; rather, these essays tend to let go of that sense-making impulse to do something else, like nose around a bit in the wondering, uncertain space that lies between experience and the need to explain or organize it in a logical manner."
This is from "Picture Your Structure" in her Legacy & Lore (Substack, February 16, 2024):
"Like a memorist, an essayist always writes two essays simultaneously, overlapped as transparencies, one exploring what Vivian Gornick calls the situation, the other what she terms the story. Poet Richard Hugo talks about a piece’s 'triggering subject' and its generated, or real, subject. Phillip Lopate describes the 'double perspective' that an essayist needs, the ability to both dramatize and to reflect. I’ve always talked to my writing students about the narrow subject and the larger subject."
Know the answer to 'did they or didn't they'?
"Fitzgerald had to know whether Gatsby died in that pool in the end. If he wasn’t sure, he wasn’t sure which story he was telling..." — George Saunders, "De Maupassant, Part Three," Story Club, April 4, 2024
'Yes' and 'no' can contain multitudes of possibilities
These little words are clear-cut on the surface, but depending on context, they can mean different things.
Based on Jackie Duden, "The Word No Shapes Us," May 9, 2024: A no can be a form of protection (e.g., when you tell someone to stop for your good or for theirs), a statement of values (e.g., when you say what you won't permit and try to teach it to others), a longing (e.g., when you tell yourself you can't have something), or an expression of hope (because it's not for now, but it might be for later).
There's no one model to explain all of human psychology
Paul Tournier explained in The Violence Within that there are “schools of scientific psychology” that “set up a doctrinaire model into which they attempt to fit the whole of human behaviour in terms of a few relatively simple mechanisms — projection and introjection, identification and differentiation, unconscious repression and liberation of complexes, drives and resistances…” While these may contain insights that are “true and valuable,” Tournier says that when we give too much weight to them (exactly “in the very fact of their being elevated into systems”) we risk “the infinite diversity of life and of the mind,” and we may forget that “the essential problems are not about mechanisms, but about values, not about functions but about the person, problems which cannot ever be reduced to an inventory of functions. Literary psychology cannot be learnt—it is too rich, too varied, too subtle, because it never allows itself to be reduced to any sort of model. It may be looked at as one might contemplate a big bunch of wild flowers…the bouquet as a whole does not deliver up the secret of its harmonious unity.”
Paul Tournier. The Violence Within. Translated by Edwin Hudson, 1978. New York: Harper & Row, 1982, (originally Violence et Puissance, 1977) pp. 64–65.
Get specific
"Show, don't tell"? Maybe, but don't oversate it. After all, George Saunders says, "something told specifically enough...becomes showing." The show-don't-tell distinction breaks down. It's really about specific-not-vague. Being "specific" doesn't mean the writer judges or states. Instead, the writer suggests but gives so many details that the reader can complete the idea in their own mind. Such "showing" makes us feel "as if we’re learning/seeing/experiencing something. Something new appears in the textual reality. And there’s a quality of openness, of unfolding discovery - a non-static quality. We 'buy into' that little morsel of fictive reality."
(See: George Saunders, Show? Tell?, Office Hours, August 8, 2024)
Be willing to use a controversial word
While sometimes your goal is to tone down a controversy and build bridges, sometimes you want to truth-tell and provoke thought with your vocabulary choice.
Facilitate good conversations
"Before starting an activity, ask yourself what's most essential. This insight helps you know what can be cut if needed or expanded upon. Engaging participants in reflective debriefs can open new avenues for conversation and deepen the learning experience. For example, asking participants what they felt during an activity, what they noticed, and how it relates to their work can turn a simple exercise into a profound discussion."
Douglas Ferguson, President of Voltage Control, LinkedIn, August 2024
Technology exists to solve a problem
"...if you took a 1988 Toyota Hylux and dropped it into another historical period – the Peloponnesian War, the Islamic Golden Age, the Mongol Empire, the Aztec Empire – it wouldn’t really change much. Sure, they probably wouldn’t be able to turn on the damned thing and you’d be limited to one tank of gas, but if you gave a demonstration of its capabilities, I still don’t think that many of the recipients of that demonstration would be interested in taking it. Even if you explained all of the steps needed to make the required materials, the one technological artifact that you’re discussing implies a whole world and I don’t think that these inhabitants of other cognitive and social worlds would be interesting in moving wholesale into the one that you’re demonstrating.
That’s because technology exists to solve a problem, so – similar to how you write a character in a work of fiction – the question becomes one of want and need. What problem do you want and need to solve?"
— Cameron Summers, What is Technology? (Contraslop, Part 1), Broken Hands, June 19, 2024
Summers adds that a technology may be "brought in to do one thing, and then it achieves something else as a side effect because it can extend its function in an interesting and novel way."
People have feelings about what they do
"I can’t think of a way for a character — fictional or otherwise — to pull off a convincing redemption story without experiencing and expressing true remorse ... feeling remorse is a valuable and cathartic experience that empowers change. Whether personal responsibility is an illusion or not, feeling responsible and taking action to change our behavior, is a powerful thing."
— Steven Toews, How to Write a Convincing Redemption Story, The Writing Cooperative, Feb 8, 2024
More fiction tips
'The 10 Best Writing Tips I’ve Ever Heard: A Weird Circular Guest Post by Alex Kingsley.' August 2, 2024
People can reflect on their arguments
To reduce fights, reflect on:
- "Why the conflict happened"
- "How the conflict should have been handled"
- "How conflicts should generally be dealt with"
- "How people should generally respond to conflicts in their relationship"
- "Why this kind of response makes sense"
- "What would be most helpful for dealing with future conflicts"
"6 simple questions that reduce relationship fights — from a psychologist." Mark Travers. Forbes. April 18, 2024.
People can be open to possible worlds that do not exactly mirror their current lives
"...white people want their sci-fi and fantasy media to remain just as exclusionary as their real lives...the vast majority of white Americans live, socialize, matriculate, shop, and worship segregated among themselves."
— Rod T. Faulkner, The Basic Reason White People Hate Black Representation In Onscreen Sci-Fi And Fantasy, Medium, March 3, 2024
The importance of representation
Even when "the term 'trans' didn't yet exist; in the best cases, they used 'transsexuals,'..." (Portero, p. 51), one may have been thinking in a trans way:
"I had already internalized trans fatalism and convinced myself that a life of loneliness awaited me. I was sure that I'd be trapped in a closet for a long time, pursuing relations with men and with women to reinforce my lie and end up alone, tormented by what could never be. The very few stories of women like me that I had seen and read always ended that same way. Even the all-powerful emcee in Cabaret spends the entire movie without a name and winds up in front of an audience filled with Nazis as a drumroll accompanies a firing squad."
— Alana S. Portero, Bad Habit, originally published as La mala costumbre, 2023, translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem, 2024. HarperVia, 2024. p. 81.
Also: "Everything that had to do with my identity, when I was rehearsing possibilities of explaining it, sounded like a confession, of a crime or some unforgivable sin. Having grown up with the language of guilt disseminated from every corner as the only way to refer to trans lives was disheartening." (Portero, p. 100)
If you have representation in literature, not only do you have basic terms to describe what you are (e.g., trans), but you can loosen assumptions of eternal loneliness and original sin tied to simply being who you are.
People can imagine a version of themselves with different opinions and reactions
"Sometimes you’re in the middle of an experience. You don’t really understand this experience, it’s intense, it’s really overwhelming. One option is to write about it autobiographically, or in autobiographical fiction. There’s a character like you, they’re having the same experiences, you can alter the narrative, and that’s one way to work through it. I think, had my life gone a little bit differently, that’s what I would be doing. ... Then the restraint, the constraint, is not to impose my own experience on the thing I’m writing about. That’s, I think, the sort of different challenge: 'I think this is a crisis. I’m writing about someone for whom it wasn’t a crisis. Is there a way in which my experience is not a crisis, actually?' Does this cause me to reflect and better understand what I’m going through? Was my initial instinct not the full story?"
— The Problem of Other Minds: Maggie Doherty, interviewed by Merve Emre. Episode Nine of “The Critic and Her Publics”. New York Review of Books. June 11, 2024
What cost does someone refuse to pay?
"For many of us, we can't pay the cost of defunding the police or any other act aligned with justice, as soon as there is any cost at all for doing so. We'd rather pay the much higher cost of funding the police, and treating the many symptoms of supremacy as "the way things are," meaning "the way things have to be."
And the question for me then is: what is that cost we can't pay?
I think it's our share of supremacy — whatever that share might be for each of us."
— A.R. Moxon, interviewed by Parker Molloy (Patreon), May 30, 2024
The character is trans
5 Questions For Writers To Explore Being Transgender: A former editor for best-selling and award-winning authors offers five storytelling hacks to help you explore being trans. Stephenie Magister, Prism & Pen, Apr 20, 2024.
Be the friend
"The pathway to what Paul Linebarger called 'psychological disarmament' begins when we find that friend — or when we are that friend. We have to work together to find the guy who is messing around with the gas lamps, and get the receipts to prove it. Unfortunately the problem that confronts the United States now is that the gaslighter is not just one guy. We are in an era of stochastic, decentralized gaslighting — and the traumas we suffer from psychological attacks began generations before we were born. Even if we as individuals get really good therapy, we cannot recover fully until our communities are also given the tools to recover. That's because the secret of psychological warfare is that it is not purely about vibes. It's about politics. And the only solution to political trauma is political transformation."
— Annalee Newitz, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. W. W. Norton, 2024. Chapter 6: Dirty Comics.
What would the world look like after the oppressors were gone?
Annalee Newitz talks about 19th-century colonization in North America and "indigenous tribes pushing back with a movement that gets called the Ghost Dance. This is a spiritual and a political movement. It's an anti-colonial movement. It takes the form of tribes coming together, and dancing and singing. The Ghost Dance itself is about describing the world as it would be without the white settlers. And it becomes this really powerful way of pushing back against the war — but more importantly, against these psyops of stealing kids and trying to teach them to reject their indigenous history. And the psyops of trying to manipulate tribes by writing down all of their traditions and using this against them. This is a way that many, many Western tribes reasserted the importance of their histories and were able to have these peaceful gatherings, where they articulated what the world would look like once these horrible white settlers were gone. In a way, it's science fiction. It was speculative worldbuilding."
—
"There's No Way You Can Talk Back to a Gun": On Psychological Warfare. Annalee Newitz, interviewed by Charlie Jane Anders. Happy Dancing. May 28, 2024.
What possibilities would be open to people in a better world?
Looking outward is also looking inward (emphases mine):
"In the evenings, after getting home from the mountain, I switched from writing non-fiction to fiction. I was tired of mining my personal history, I told K. I wanted to look outwards rather than inwards for a while. I read Kelly Link, Abbey Mei Otis, Helen Oyeyemi, Carmen Maria Machado. In their stories, the line between internal and external world became blurred, porous enough that a character’s desires or fears might shape the world—but never in the ways one might expect. Puppets came to life and manipulated their owners, children had to sacrifice parents to protect their homes, a handbag or a tent might offer a doorway to another world. Much like in Everett’s thesis, person and environment became intimately and confusingly entangled. Looking outwards could, in other words, also be a way of looking inwards."
— Many Worlds and the Queer Imaginary: Imagine three possible futures for yourself. Let your future selves be bold..., Emet North, Reactor, May 8, 2024
North leaves us with a question (emphasis mine):
"One final piece of the thought experiment, this one particularly for my queer and trans community. Imagine an alternate version of yourself, one that has received all the acceptance and support the world so often denies us. An alternate self whose parents greeted their queerness or transness with joy rather than anger or fear or disgust. A self that didn’t have to hide, who never held the doors to the closet shut for simple self-preservation. A self whose government hasn’t tried to take away their rights, their access to care. Who hasn’t had their body politicized and made a talking point for self-righteous politicians. Here’s what I want to know now: How would that version of you move through the world? What possibilities are open to them?"
To awaken others to your moral vision: 'Control the context', 'refuse the monotone', 'fall in love', 'manifest spectacular goodwill'
Matthew Frye Castillo writes in Prism & Pen:
"I think of Audre Lorde describing the responsibilities of ethical people, whom she called warrior poets:
“That is the work of the poet within each one of us: to envision what has not yet been and to work with every fiber of who we are to make the reality pursuit of those visions irresistible.”
Gran Fury and ACT UP made 'those visions irresistible' by controlling the context, refusing the monotone, and falling in love."
Or:
[P] Reading an old Vulture interview with Dropout TV CEO Sam Reich, and I felt this quote all the way down through the bottom of my shoes. It angers me how rare this sort of philosophy is.
— Paul and Storm (@paulandstorm.bsky.social) Aug 26, 2024 at 1:43 PM
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What can you do to awaken and "manifest" the reader's "spectacular goodwill"?
What's 'universal' is reaching out to people who already want to get it and giving them permission to similarly lean into who they are
Grace Loh Prasad points out the common assumptions that "true literary craft should be divorced from questions of identity and marginalization" and that "art has authority when it is recognized by the widest possible audience without the need to explain itself." She says: "I started to recognize a persistent, troubling flaw in my writing: I was over-explaining myself" and that this was "a way of trying to justify my presence instead of exhibiting confidence in my authority and expertise....Seen another way, it’s my way of spoon-feeding a lazy reader who I am assuming is different from me, rather than rewarding a curious reader and trusting them to fill in the gaps or look up anything they don’t automatically know." In doing so, "I had unconsciously internalized the indifferent reader — the person who could not be bothered to make any effort to know me better." So, "rather than thinking of them as hurdles for the unfamiliar reader, unexplained or untranslated concepts can be seen as a gift to the people who understand them–to your best and most ardent audience." You can "focus on the people who need your story, who have been longing to see themselves reflected in books, who have waited their whole lives for someone to articulate something that approaches their experience." So: "Invest your energy in reaching the people who are already on your side, who are rooting for you and want you to succeed," and "give permission to others to do the same–and this, in the end, is what will make your story universal." ("It’s OK If Your Writing Isn’t for Everyone," May 21, 2024)
Does the group have a mind?
"The group, like the person, was assumed to be sentient, to have a form of mental activity that guides action. Rousseau (1767) and Hegel (1807) were the early architects of this form of analysis... [Many social theorists after them] were willing to assume that the group has a mental life that plays a part in the patterning of group behavior."
Wegner, D.M. (1987). Transactive Memory: A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind. In: Mullen, B., Goethals, G.R. (eds) Theories of Group Behavior. Springer Series in Social Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4634-3_9
Pick a compelling title
Michael Gallant gives some tips in How to Write a Book Title That Gets Attention, BookBaby, January 11, 2024:
- "Be clear and concise."
- "Use strong, evocative language."
- "Be original and unique."
- "Make sure your title is relevant to your book’s content."
Present well
8 Tips for Practicing Scripted Scholarly Presentations by Erin K. Maher, PhD
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