The Question of Purpose

In among all the offers of SEO optimization, lucrative bank-transfer schemes, and actual emails from lovely clients that end up in my inbox, I’ve noticed the same question, or genre of question, cropping up recently. Though it could be chalked up to a certain amount of stir-craziness, especially in those of us who endure more polar climates, I think the question is an interesting one; not only that, it’s a question I had to figure out how to answer, not once, but a few different times for a few different people. The emails went like this:

Dear Brock, I have written this piece, and I was hoping you would take a look at it and give me some feedback.

Not so unusual, right? Like always, I ask my interlocutor to send along the piece, and I ask a few questions of my own. First, I ask who the intended audience for the piece is. Second, I ask what the writer wants to do with it. Self-publish? Submit to an agent? Send to a lit mag? But the responses to my questions have gone like this:

Dear Brock, I don’t know who this piece is for. I just wrote it; it came out of me, and I don’t know why. I definitely don’t know what I want to do with it. What do you think?

Oh boy. I mean, first off, asking me “what I think” about something is a surefire way to receive an extremely long, ponderous email full of qualifications and caveats. It’s a cue for a lot of thinking, and not very much deciding. But, after some hand-wringing and time spent staring off into space, I sent them some version of the following.

Ultimately, of course, it’s entirely up to them who their writing is for and what they’d like to do with it—boom! One-line email! As an editor, until those questions are settled, my hands are pretty tied. One of the pieces I received was short, just a few thousand words. If it was to be submitted as a short story, we might be ready to jump right into a stylistic edit, tidying it up and working on the prose. But if it was the opening salvo for a novel, all of a sudden we’re deep in developmental territory, getting ready for outlines and charts and character sheets. It’s a big difference!

Not all writing has to be for something. It’s fine, really, truly fine, to write for the sake of writing.

 The first point I try to make—and I try to make it sensitively because not only does it have the potential to cause offence, but also to cost me a prospective project—is that not all writing has to be for something. It’s fine, really, truly fine, to write for the sake of writing. You could call it journaling; you could call it practicing; you could call it brainstorming, drafting, whatever. I’ve got notebooks full of “morning pages” in the style of Julia Cameron,[1] and they’re never going anywhere, and that’s fine. Writing can have therapeutic value, can help you organize your thoughts, and it can be an unmatched creative outlet.

But if someone’s sending me an email, obviously they’ve got the feeling that they want to take their writing somewhere. And writing of this uncertain, liminal sort falls into a somewhat uniform window: rarely does someone write 100,000 words of hard fantasy and not have a plan; neither does someone write two or three chapters about Greek history and not envision a completed book. The liminal stuff is most frequently hanging out on the spectrum of reminiscence, memoir, and self-reflection.

Which, of course, is why I lead with the point about journaling. But the desire to share your story—to tell others what you’ve been through and how you’ve managed it, in the hopes that your struggle might wind up as someone else’s help—is a fundamentally human impulse that’s probably responsible for a pretty good chunk of our overall historical activity. The question is: how?

And look, there’s nothing wrong at all with straight memoir. If you’ve got a single episode you’re hoping to share, a personal essay or short piece could be the way to go, workshopped until it’s ready to submit to a magazine, online or in print. If it’s a longer story being told, perhaps even a lifetime, then we’re looking at a book-length work. The hard truth about memoir, though, is that it’s damn hard to do well. And again, the decision-tree continues to diverge.

 On the one hand, I have seen many excellent, well-written memoirs that were never destined or intended for publication. A grandparent wants to put their story down in order to pass it on to their children, grandchildren, and future generations. It doesn’t need an adrenaline-pumping hook, or an attentively crafted narrative arc; what’s most important is the emotion and vulnerability, the sheer truth of it. In this kind of memoir, having too many details is often a good thing, because otherwise how will those details be saved? Working on stuff like this requires a very different approach from writing whose authors dream of publication.

The hard truth about memoir, though, is that it’s damn hard to do well. And again, the decision-tree continues to diverge.

 If a memoir is destined for the slush pile, however, it requires a whole extra layer of scrutiny. The straightforward chronology of a family story isn’t going to cut it, and the editing is going to be a lot more ruthless. The author is going to have to find a way to sell this story to people who have no personal interest in it whatsoever, and even with a solid niche—say, a businessperson’s memoir, or a naturalist’s—it would be a disservice to the work if I failed to view it with a literary critic’s eye. The why of the writing becomes more complex.

Sometimes, neither of these will appeal to an author. They want to play with the text; perhaps what they’ve written is only loosely based in their own life—maybe Uncle Edgar has disappeared and The Twins have been invented, just for fun—then what? What if they want to tidy up some of the mess, or sow chaos among stifling order?

At this point I’ll begin excitedly talking about autofiction. Autofiction takes the “auto” from autobiography and the “fiction” from, well, fiction. Popularized in recent years by big names like Ben Lerner and Karl Ove Knausgaard, autofiction has a long history that many suggest encompasses the works of authors like James Joyce and Marcel Proust (though the term only came to prominence in the ’70s). I’m always more inclined to point folks towards my favourites of the genre: Kate Zambreno,[2] Emmanuel Carrère,[3] and Sheila Heti.[4] I recently had the distinct pleasure of doing a small bit of work on a new autofictional book by JD Derbyshire; Mercy Gene comes out March 14 from Goose Lane Editions, and I highly recommend it.

An autofiction, too, will warrant an entirely different approach again from an editorial standpoint. And an author may well want to take things a step further, and bury the “I” completely in a “true” fiction (which, you can tell from my scare quotes in both cases, is more a convenience of genre rather than a reality of writing, in my opinion).

We haven’t yet even touched the question of format (Story? Article? Blog? Chapbook? Monograph? Book?), so you can imagine how long my emails have been lately. But as with many things in life, the possibilities can seem endless and the guides few. Boiling things down to goals (what do you want; forget what you think anyone else wants) and intuition (what’s your gut telling you about this story) is probably going to give you the best answer you’ll ever get. In my responses, I simply try my best to lay out some options; especially those that writers may not yet have considered.

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[1] Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way (Penguin, 2016 [1992]).

[2] See, eg., Drifts (Penguin, 2021).

[3] See, eg., The Kingdom (Picador, 2018).

[4] See, eg., How Should A Person Be? (House of Anansi, 2014).

Introducing Structure

I recently came across a thought-provoking article by Thomas C. Foster, which in reality was an excerpt from his brand-new book on writing. (The article I found via the excellent weekly roundup over at The Porcupine’s Quill, just to show my work and shoehorn in as many hyperlinks as possible.) Foster is perhaps best known as the author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, which I admit is lingering unread on my bookshelves somewhere.[1] He’s prolific as both a teacher and author, and seems like as high an authority as you could hope to appeal to about writing.

Which means that I automatically don’t trust him. He’s also invoked a tired Biblical metaphor by titling his article/excerpt in part “The Seven Deadly Sins of Writing,” which rubs me the wrong way and makes me even more eager to disagree with him. Let’s take a look at his list.

Foster’s sins, though he implies he could certainly enumerate more, are: Worry, Self-Doubt, Overconfidence, Muddiness, Vagueness, Poor Structure, and Dishonesty. He then delivers the following zinger: “Notice that nowhere on this list is there a mention of semicolons. Or subject-verb agreement. Or sentence fragments. All of those things can be fixed.” The sins Foster is worried about are the ones that keep writing from happening in the first place.

In a sense, as an editor I can’t argue with him too much. Once writing gets to my desk, it’s already happened (by and large). The sins, I suppose, have been overcome. On the other hand, as a writer there are certain of these sins to which I can absolutely relate: Worry, Self-Doubt, Dishonesty, and even Overconfidence are well-documented psychological pitfalls of the writing life.

But you will note that three of Foster’s sins, in my opinion, fall neatly into the chasm between the writer and the editor. Muddiness and Vagueness, I would contend, are semantically similar enough to be considered the same. His own definitions kind of present them as two sides to the same coin: muddiness, which comes from a dearth of clear thinking, leads to vagueness, a preference for generalities in our prose.

Which leaves us with Poor Structure. It’s probably indicative of our different roles that both Foster and I choose to highlight one sin in particular. His outlier is Worry, which is what kills writing in its infancy. He wants you, the writer, to get it down, an approach shared by inspirational powerhouses like Julia Cameron,[2] Natalie Goldberg,[3] and Chris Baty.[4] And don’t think for a second that I’m belittling this focus; I’d love to talk about these and other empowering books on writing in the future, and despite my initial reservations I have nothing but respect for Foster’s intent in singling out Worry for a precision strike.

On the other hand, as a writer there are certain of these sins to which I can absolutely relate: Worry, Self-Doubt, Dishonesty, and even Overconfidence are well-documented psychological pitfalls of the writing life.

Still, my outlier is Poor Structure. It’s both within my purview as an editor—a work that’s come to me for structural editing embodies this utterly—and a concern over which I’m sometimes powerless. Often, by the time a piece of writing arrives in my inbox, the structural work has been done. I’m being asked to copy edit, to proofread, to fix the nuts and bolts that Foster considers secondary (I’m not bitter).[5] But that is to say that I frequently no longer have the power to effect change on a structural level: it’s out of my hands.

On the face of it, the whole project of assessing and improving structure is a bit absurd. Compare Hamlet, the prototypical five-act play, to a modern Harlequin novel, which tends to be laid out according to a formulaic three-act plan. Now compare those to something like Naked Lunch: widely considered a classic, thought to be incomprehensible by many (myself included), and utterly eschewing notions of structure.[6] This is the range of possibilities we’re supposed to think about when we mention structure? And even Foster relegates structure to post-writing, to the editing. It’s an afterthought rather than something to be considered from the get-go.

So look: I started out wanting to critique good old Thomas’s list of sins. But at the end of the day, I don’t have a huge problem with them. Like everything else in the world of writing advice, they’re simply guideposts towards better, more fruitful, more enjoyable writing, and you could add or subtract elements from his list with ease.

Structure, however, is a fundamental issue, and one that sets itself apart from the other doozies on his list. It’s also finicky and complicated as hell. Some writers don’t even want to think about it until the second round of edits: surely adhering to a structure will limit their creativity, will interrupt the flow, won’t it?

Will adhering to proper grammar and spelling interrupt the flow?

I mean, yeah, sometimes. But just being aware of them, being aware of the way(s) that language and writing works, means that 90 percent of the time you’ll be on the right track—and I’ll worry about the other 10 percent.

So let’s take a look at structure. More to follow.

Brock

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1 If we’re all being honest, the reason it’s lingering unread is that I’ve always been a little bit suspicious of it. Am I really certain I even want to read literature like a professor? Obviously it depends what he means by that; at face value, it seems to imply reading analytically, which could take a lot of the fun out of it. But maybe he’s trying to subvert our understanding of how, exactly, a professor might approach literature. Begrudgingly, I concede there’s only one way to really find out.

2 The Artist’s Way, 1992

3 Writing Down the Bones, 1986

4 No Plot? No Problem!, 2004

5 I also have to jump in here and admit that this was originally going to be the focus of this post, back when I was bent on being contrarian. My claim was going to be that often a writer’s grasp of these nuts and bolts will predict their mastery of the deeper issues of writing. The problem with this is that it’s fundamentally elitist, insults my potential customer base, and (as Foster might say) just generally a muddy idea. Plus, it’s way more fun to talk about structure than to whine about punctuation.

6 Given the amount of ink spilled about this book that I’ve invoked merely as an example, it would surprise me not even a little bit to discover that some literary scholar (perhaps a professor) has uncovered an underlying structure in Naked Lunch. I do not care. Don’t tell me about it.