Rebutting a Point David Jauss Didn’t Actually Make

I recently learned that I’m a part of the herd in yet another depressing way. According to David Jauss, recent guest contributor on Brian Klems’s Writer’s Digest blog, my choice to write my WIP in the present tense is so “common place” it borders on cliché. Jauss’s post is an excerpt from his book On Writing Fiction. In it he makes the point that the present tense has become “the default choice for young writers.”

David Jauss

I’m certainly not claiming to be young, my beard’s almost as white as his, but I am an early career writer. As such, I’m always on the lookout for free and pertinent writing advice. So I didn’t delete that day’s WD email, “The Pros and Cons of Writing a Novel in Present Tense.”

By the way, kudos to Klems for crafting an effective subject line. It may seem uninspired at first glance. But it worked. It got me to read the post.

And that’s how I learned that a fundamental structural choice I had made for my debut novel is trite.

Or is it?

Jauss at least partly bases his conclusion on his experiences with his undergrad writing students. (And it’s only fair to admit that I’m probably being a bit harsh in my depiction of his views on verb tense. Sue me, I got defensive.) While he obviously views the “fad” of present tense writing as a bad thing – I’ll get to that in a bit – mostly he seems concerned with giving less experienced writers some tools to help them choose the right verb tense for their manuscripts. Choose being the operative word in the previous sentence. I applaud and support him 100% in that goal. I also thank him for sharing his list of Pros and Cons.

His post is worth reading, if for no other reason than Jauss’s (short) list of the limitations and advantages of the present tense. He doesn’t say anything new exactly – he is definitely aiming at a greener audience – but that’s part of his point. Which is the other reason his excerpt is such a good read. A well reasoned discussion of verb tense is long overdue. The quote he includes from one of his students really says it all: “Isn’t [present tense] the way fiction’s supposed to be written now?”

Jauss answers in the resounding negative, which is fine. Where I start to break with him is over what seems to be his assumption that the past tense is “the way fiction’s supposed to be written,” that its primacy has merely been usurped by a new trend. That writers need to return to the more venerated model.

How is that better? I hope his (alleged) implication is merely an accident of excerption. Otherwise, he’s simply advocating trading one thoughtless choice for another.

As his essay so nicely points out, both tenses have their advantages and disadvantages. Hopefully, he argues elsewhere in his book that there should never, ever be a default choice in any part of the fiction writing process. That every element of a well-crafted novel should contribute to the story, down to its tiniest word. Because that’s what the great writers do: they make thousands of great choices that result in great fiction. They weigh the pros and cons of each detail and never rely on any short-hand settings, no matter how time honored. Jauss tacitly cedes this point when he states that “the best writers almost always seem to know, either consciously or intuitively, when to use present tense.” Until I read his book I can only hope that this is the lesson he’s teaching his students and not that they should simply replace one lazy habit with another.

And now, mostly because I can’t help but be a smart ass (and because I’m still feeling a bit defensive), I want to offer a quick critique of the validity of his preference for the past tense. Isn’t its use the real cliché choice? After all, Professor Jauss himself calls it “a tense that has served authors since the very inception of fiction,” which is sort of the definition of trite. I’m just saying.

Ah, but I must tread carefully, lest I engage in a debate about an argument he actually made. And where’s the fun in that?

Instead I will simply conclude my rebuttal of the argument David Jauss did not make, confident of my rhetorical (and completely imagined) victory.

Testing Cunningham’s Thesis

In my February 5th post I wrote about an idea M. Allen Cunningham shared in the recent Poets and Writers inspiration issue. In his essay he explores turning “creative limitation” into a “positive force” and argues that “imposed limitation” stimulates creativity.

My day job recently forced me to put Cunningham’s thesis to the test.

This season, I’ve been crazy busy with my not-writing work – I’m a freelance theatrical stagehand. Most recently, an old friend who runs the scene shop down at Texas State called me for a gig, filling the last beautifully empty week in my calendar until the end of the season. I kind of wanted to kill him even as I said yes. It makes me feel a bit like an ass to complain about getting paying work. But feeling like an ass has never stopped me from blundering on before, so here goes. I despaired when I lost that week of free time. I didn’t realize how much I had been fetishizing it and draping it in (probably unrealistic) expectations in regard to my neglected WIP.

Then it was just gone. Once more, my ‘writing time’ had been superseded by my annoying need for food and shelter.

I’m proud to report that I eventually stopped feeling sorry for myself. Even more surprisingly, I rose to the challenge and set my alarm for four a.m. More surprising still, I actually managed to drag myself out of bed when it went off the next morning.

I wrote for two solid hours before “starting” my day.

I know, I know. There’s nothing new in a writer getting up insanely early to work. But it is new to me. And, even though it puts a deep ache in my lazy bone to say it, I have seen the light. Okay, not exactly the light; it’s still dark in those quiet hours. But I am now officially a believer in the get-up-before-the-rest-of-the-world-and-write strategy.

When I have to be.

Luckily, that only turns out to be about half the time. My paying work usually starts in the afternoon or evening, leaving me plenty of time for both sleep and writing. So it’s a comfortable commitment, one that fits easily into my long standing dedication to not working too hard if I don’t have to. But it is a new commitment that I am (so far mostly) keeping.

And I wrote some strong words in those predawn sessions. I also kept up on all three of my blog commitments. I couldn’t help feeling a little proud at the end of the week: I had been tested and not found wanting.

True confession time:

Getting up that early sucked. And I only did it three out of the five days I worked my unusual eight-to-five schedule: on one morning I snoozed until 4:30, and on Thursday I didn’t get up and write before work at all. But I’m still calling it a good week, a personal victory on a small scale. A definite step in the right direction. And I can’t stress how happy I continue to be with the product of my early mornings.

If you’ve got a day job and you’re considering a predawn writing practice, I say go for it. You’ll be tired in the evenings at first, but it gets easier. If nothing else, when you tell people about it they’ll think you’re hardcore.

Next up for me is Ballet Austin’s New American Talent Contest at the Long Center. Their work calls start at 8:00 a.m. Mine will start at four.

Journalism is Hard

I’m not a reporter, and, outside of blogging and contributing to my union’s newsletter, I don’t write a lot of nonfiction. But recently a story caught my eye on Facebook and I started to pursue it.

Did I mention I’m not a reporter or journalist of any kind?

I don’t want to go into the specifics of what is an ongoing situation, but I decided to go at my ‘scoop’ like I imagined a real journalist might. I created files on the major players, started interviewing anybody who’d talk to me, and generally began to dig into the story. I even successfully pitched the story idea to the managing editor of a small national magazine. Unfortunately, I did not bother to learn how the people I was researching might feel about my sudden interest.

Even when it started to become evident that I was, in fact, most definitely not welcome as some sort of imbedded journalist in their fight. All of the principles remained friendly. But their evasions of certain subjects turned into outright refusals. Then pretty much everybody stopped talking to me at all, instead referring me to their official leadership who politely recited the party line or had no comment.

But I was on their side, I reassured them. I promised them I was there to help The Cause. That was my top priority. My getting published in a nationally distributed magazine was secondary to my noble desire to lend them the power of my pen! Why couldn’t they see that? I even went so far as to voluntarily cede the right of final veto on the story. They could pull the plug anytime they felt I wasn’t helping. It seemed like a fair trade for unfettered access to a complex and fluid situation.

Of course, when I was proposing this quid pro quo I didn’t go so far as to baldly state what I wanted, i.e. to be on the ‘inside,’ to know everything. I smoothly let that part be implied.

Some things are best left unsaid.

You can imagine my surprise when I realized they hadn’t agreed to my little deal. Worse, my sacrifice of creative control, my obvious sympathy with the subjects of my story, even my innate charm and general likeability, had all added up to diddly-squat.

I was stuck on the surface of the story in a neat little ethical trap of my own making. If I kept digging into what I had begun to suspect was the true heart of the matter then I knew I would be in violation of the promises I had made to my story’s subjects. But I also knew if I stopped following the evidence where it led me, then the magazine I had pitched wouldn’t want the story.

It’s taken me a couple of days to figure it out, but I finally concluded that I’m just not the person to write this article.

Maybe I might have been if I hadn’t charged in thinking I had all the answers. Maybe if I had taken the time to find out what my subjects wanted. Come to think of it, maybe I shouldn’t have been thinking of these people as ‘subjects’ in the first place. And maybe, just maybe, I shouldn’t have assumed the ‘help’ I tried to jam down their throats was needed or even wanted.

This story, the one I’ve lost the right to tell, is about a group of people fighting a good fight against a powerful dirt bag. It’s about how they’re using creative and imaginative weapons to even the odds. And it’s about the help they do need and are quite clearly and specifically asking for.

But it was never about me.

Luckily I managed to figure that out before I did any harm to some folks I honestly did want to help.

Though the digging, the learning and categorizing of the various moving parts until unexpected pictures and connections emerged? That part was fun. This may not be my last bout of random journalism. Hopefully it’s just my last time screwing it up in this particular manner.

Nikki Loftin’s Nightingale’s Nest Sings

Nikki Loftin is a gifted storyteller. Her sophomore middle-grade fantasy, Nightingale’s Nest, (2014, Razor Bill) proves that.

At last month’s Austin SCBWI Working Conference I was fortunate enough to attend Sarah Ketchersid’s (Executive Editor, Candlewick Press) seminar on the importance of raising the stakes for your novel’s hero. Not surprisingly, Nikki was there too.

It got me thinking that I’d love it if she led her own class, maybe “Techniques for Torturing Your Hero in Entertaining and Compelling Ways?” Whatever she called it, I would definitely attend.

That’s because Loftin intertwines her plots so masterfully with her hero’s desires. No matter how hard Little John tries to do the right thing, his choices just keep making things worse. Nightingale’s Nest is at times heartbreaking and disturbing, but it kept me turning the page to learn if the preteen protagonist would ever catch a break.

In addition to her gripping plot, Loftin’s reinterpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale” deftly creates a setting and backstory that firmly establish Little John as sympathetic and oh so damaged – again all of the hero’s problems are tangled up in choices he did and didn’t make before the time period of the book. Then she unwinds a chain of events which genuinely and believably threaten to crush him, along with pretty much everyone he loves.

Nikki Loftin

Which brings me to the story’s other main character Gayle, the strange little orphan who escapes her abusive foster home by living in a tree and singing. Gayle has magic in the same way Loftin’s entire book has magic. It’s just part of her, it’s not explained or justified. Magic is simply something the world ofNightingale’s Nest possesses in casual abundance.

I strive to create that kind of … I don’t know, magicality in my own fiction. Sorry to make up a word, but ‘magical realism’ and ‘fantasy’ don’t really fit what Loftin creates. Her book’s world is very recognizable; the people are just regular folks with familiar, if dire, problems. The setting of Nest has everything a typical suburban/urban preteen would find familiar. Except Gayle. It’s obvious from the first sentence of the book that she’s special, a catalyst. Loftin even goes so far as to call the little girl’s music “magic” in the opening paragraph. And that’s how the author treats the supernatural throughout the rest of the book: it’s matter of fact, no big deal. Just another branch for the reader to hold onto to as he climbs.

Nikki Loftin’s skill with plot and world building are enviable and make for a tightly paced and compelling read. And her characters intrigued me and demanded my sympathy in all the right ways. In short, Nightingale’s Nest lived up to the expectation created by her debut, The Sinister Sweetness of Splendid Academy. I can’t wait to see what kind of world she crafts next.

Little Gods

I got a text Sunday night while I worked in the middle of a quickly emptying stage at the Long Center; Ballet Austin‘s most recent production had closed that afternoon. We were halfway through the load-out. I was exhausted and a little depressed because I hadn’t managed to work on my WIP in weeks. This was one of those periods where the pull of my day job was testing my commitment to maintaining a writing practice. And I was failing.

The text came from my brother in Maine:

“Hey Brad just wanted to let you know that Marylou passed away today. Love you Brian.”

Mary Lou was his mother-in-law, and her death had been imminent for months. I still considered her a friend, even if her crippling dementia had wiped any memory of me from her mind. We had gotten close one winter in the mid-nineties when I lived and worked in her home trading my then meager carpentry skills for room and board. She and her husband, a master carpenter, had hired me to help them convert their 18th century farm house into a B&B.

That text from my brother, so simple, with barely any punctuation, destroyed me in a way that I would never have predicted. I made an excuse to my crew head and fled to the upstage bathroom before I lost it. Luckily it was empty. I locked the door behind me and leaned against the gray tiles to stare down at my phone, nose dripping onto its screen. The words blurred out of focus.

Eventually my vision cleared and my breath smoothed. But I couldn’t pull my eyes off of my phone. Each time its screen went black I woke it back up to read my brother’s text another time.

A half-familiar thought was trying to penetrate my grief. Eventually I let it.

We humans are communicators like no other creatures on the planet. Sure, non-humans use language in varying degrees. I get that. But not like people. Our communication skills border on the divine. Take my brother’s text. With a few dozen keystrokes he quite literally pushed me into a new world where my friend Mary Lou no longer existed.

That is power.

And he’s not even a writer. But his message (re)taught me a lesson I’ll probably never finish learning: written expression has the power to change the very fabric of the universe. That’s at least part of why I started writing poems and stories as a kid. When I write I become a little god.

All writers do.

I’m not speaking metaphorically here. Writers of all kinds put words together in ways that transform their readers’ worlds. Whether it’s a text telling of a loved one’s death or a thousand page novel or a treatise on quantum mechanics, when it’s done well writing has the strength to shift any paradigm. Just consider the hundreds (if not thousands) of holy scriptures that humans have created, or the U.S. Constitution, or the Odyssey. I could keep going, but you get the point.

This post is not one of those of seminal documents. I know that. I just wanted to publicly thank my brother for his unintentional reminder of why I write. And say goodbye to friend Mary Lou. Both of them showed me something I needed to see at exactly the moment I needed to see it. It hurt to learn of my friend’s death, and I know her passing leaves a hole in a lot of lives, including mine. But at least one good thing came from her passing.

I went home that night and I wrote for hours. Most of it was crap, over-emotional and meandering. Stuff that will most likely never see the light of day. I didn’t care; I was writing again. It didn’t matter how I felt the next morning when the alarm slammed me into another fourteen hour workday. I had remembered my power. I had reclaimed my tiny slice of divinity. Once more I was a little god, however sleep deprived.