When I was in high school, I took a playwriting class, and we’d sit there–all of us sixteen, seventeen, eighteen–reading our work aloud around the table. Our teacher, who was about thirty, would give us pointers: that speech is clunky; this character hasn’t said anything for ten minutes. But sometimes he wouldn’t say a word: he would look at us, hold his palm in front of his face for a moment, then let it drop to the table, as if he were offering us an invisible treat.

We didn’t really understand this Zen gesture at the time, but I can translate it now: it meant we were too close to the subject we were writing about. When something is right in front of your face—be it your palm or how your boyfriend broke up with you last week—it’s too close to really see. It’s nothing but a shadowy blur. Only when there’s some distance between you and it can you see it in a useful way.

The same is true in stories. Sometimes, in the quest for immediacy, we put our characters too close to the events they’re experiencing. And their lack of perspective can make the reader lose perspective as well.

So here’s the exercise: Write in the voice of your character 30 years later, describing the events of the story that is being told in the present. How does the character feel about these events now? How important was this day in the context of his/her life?

What you come up with may end up as the seed for your story to grow in a new point of view, as a moment of flash-forward for your character, or an Alice Munro-eque ending that leaps decades to join the character well in the future. But even if what you write never makes it into the story at all, looking back at the story—through the wrong end of the telescope, as it were—will offer you insight into the character and new perspective on the events you’re trying to tell.

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• Missed some of our Get Writing exercises? Check out the whole set in our archives.

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This week’s feature is Lucia Perillo’s debut story collection, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain (W.W. Norton). She is also the author of six books of poetry, most recently On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), and a collection of essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing (Trinity University Press, 2007). Her fifth book of poems, Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

In her recent reviewlet of this collection, Alison Espach writes:

Perhaps the collection is best described in my favorite story, “Doctor Vick’s,” when Perillo writes, “You know the only true world is the one you carry inside you.” These stories are compelling journeys because they are so true.

We’re giving away a copy of Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain next week to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

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Further Reading

• Read the rest of Espach’s review.
• Read Lucia Perillo’s poem “This Red T-Shirt” – published in The New Yorker, May 10, 2010

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Last week we featured Johanna Skibsrud’s collection This Will be Difficult to Explain, and we’re pleased to announce the winners:

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!

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Fresh from a relationship with a feminist scholar, I was on guard against Shann Ray’s American Masculine before I even cracked its spine. With a title like that, I thought, you’d better have a gay man in Chelsea, a drag queen in Flint, a straight man watching a hired man wash his yacht, a man living out of the back of a Volvo in a Wal-Mart parking lot, a Hispanic man washing dishes, a Hispanic man climbing the corporate ladder; you’d better provide one heckova Whitmanian catalog of Masculinity in the U.S. of A. My suspicions only deepened as I read the first few stories. In them men were rough, troubled, distant, and heteronormative. Women were the epitome of light, everything good that men reached toward.

But then a curious thing happened: the beating heart of these stories won. I took a breath and relaxed into Ray’s paternal, semi-omniscient arms.

Because it’s not fair to judge a collection by its title. Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior didn’t start out so winkingly alliterative and evaluative. Her publisher suggested that name.

And it’s not fair to judge a collection based on what the author didn’t intend. (See John Updike’s 6 Rules for Reviewing, dear curmudgeon.)

What Ray appears to want to do—and what Ray does—is give us wise, caring, broadly-scoped stories that roam time as freely as they range across the Western landscape in which they’re set, deeply spiritual stories with room for grand characterization—“the malice inside him like the outline of an animal in the dark,” sweeping views—“everything but the land was solitary and small under a wide, wide sky,” and muscular descriptions—“down to the tracks, the wheels, the black pump of the smoking engine, the yell of the machine.” Ray drives into rough terrain with honesty, and delivers intense portraits of what it means to try to be a man in the country, the city, an insurance office, a rodeo.

I love these stories more each time I read them.

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Read Shann Ray’s “The Great Divide” from The Better of McSweeney’s, Vol. 2

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Hello again, FWR friends. Welcome to the latest installment of our “First Looks” series, which highlights soon-to-be released books that have piqued my interest as a reader-who-writes. We publish “First Looks” here on the FWR blog around the 15th of each month, and as always, I’d love to hear your comments and your recommendations of forthcoming titles. Please drop me a line anytime: erika(at)fictionwritersreview(dot)com, and thanks in advance.

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This month’s First Looks picks take us in a decidedly international direction. Let’s begin with The Last Hundred Days, Patrick McGuinness’s debut novel, which was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and is publishing in the U.S. next week. Especially for those of you—I know you’re out there!—who are too young to remember much about the Cold War and Eastern-bloc dictatorships, this novel will introduce you not only to a foreign city (Bucharest), but also to some not-so-ancient history (the novel takes place during the last months of the Ceausescu regime in 1989). Beyond that, McGuinness is another new novelist coming from a poetry background, and I’m always interested in the products of that cross-genre training.

Next, early June will bring the U.S. release of another debut novel: Francesca Segal’s The Innocents. Billed as a recasting of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence—but set within a modern-day London Jewish community—this one hits many of my readerly and writerly interests: reworkings of classics I’ve loved, Jewish literature, and the international accent.

P.S. In keeping with the internationalist focus: If you missed my recent reviewlet covering Anne Korkeakivi’s debut novel The Unexpected Guest (set mainly in Paris), now is a perfectly fine moment to read it.

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Further Reading and Resources:

• Watch and listen: Patrick McGuinness recently visited Villanova University and read from his work there.
• Courtesy of The Man Booker Prize: a Reader’s Guide (PDF) for The Last Hundred Days.
• Listen to Francesca Segal read from The Innocents.
• Read Francesca Segal’s Granta essay, “In My Father’s Footsteps,” about her father, author Erich Segal.

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“I think the best stories start from something tiny. [...] A short story can easily destroy itself through metastasis. I think if you start a story with more than two scenes in mind, you may be doomed. At least you have a hell of a lot of work ahead of you. If I start off trying to get at this one little moment, that’s all I want to do. And then I have to build the world that makes that moment happen.”

~ Wells Tower

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Further Reading:

• Read more about Wells Tower on Fiction Writers Review
• Looking for something to read? Check out the Stories We Love
• Need inspiration? Try our Get Writing exercises

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Yesterday, I saw a woman wearing a garment that straddled the line between shorts and panties. Her outfit was revealing, and it made me ask questions like, “how far will fashion go?” and “what was she thinking?” Perhaps author Steven Millhauser had a similar experience at some point, and that led him to write “A Change of Fashion,” a short story that originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine, May 2006.

What would happen if next season’s fashions did not favor a slightly shorter hemline or a higher heel, but hiddenness? What if dresses took on shapes larger than Victorian hoop skirts and less revealing than burkas? In Millhauser’s story, concealing is the new revealing. Fashion is freed “from its long dependence on the female shape,” as women no longer feel the obligation “to invite a bold male gaze.” Women favor dresses that disguise the body, conceal the face, and, in later incarnations, can serve their purpose at a lawn party without the wearer having to wear them at all.

Teenage girls in particular . . . embraced the [style] . . . for they could plunge down, far down, into layers of costume that sheltered them from sight, while rivers of twisting cloth allowed them to bring forth forbidden longings.

Like much of Millhauser’s shorter works, this piece of fiction is allegorical above all else. There is no dialogue. We don’t know much about the quizzical and sole character, Hyperion. It doesn’t matter. Like Millhauser, the reader delights in following the idea to its outright conclusion.

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Read Millhauser’s “Getting Closer,” first published by The New Yorker (January 3, 2011).

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Desire is the writer’s best friend. When you know what your main character wants, you have your entire story. When someone wants something–badly–he or she will get up off the couch and try to attain it. The object of desire might be a new winter coat (”The Overcoat” by Gogol), a boy (”City of Boys” by Beth Nugent), money for a family member’s medicine (”King of the Bingo Game” by Ralph Ellison), a business contract (”Like a Bad Dream” by Heinrich Boll)–it doesn’t matter, as long as the desire is concrete and the character can pursue it. The character’s desire not only will fuel the story’s prose, the fact that your character wants that thing will make him or her interesting (in some ways, desire is character) even if he or she isn’t “likable” (think of Humbert Humbert).

The desire will create suspense (will he or won’t he achieve his desire?) and provide your story with a simple, easy-to-follow structure. What’s the first thing someone who wants that object of desire might do to attain it? What if that doesn’t work? (A big advantage: Getting your character out of his head and out of the house and in contact with other characters.) The story’s turning point will be the scene in which the character either achieves his desire–or realizes he never will. And the final paragraph? Having achieved or not achieved his desire, what is the character thinking or feeling?

Here’s the exercise: Imagine you are your main character (or just write from your own perspective). What do you really, really want? Now, start talking about that object of desire. Don’t keep saying, “I want X, I want X, I want X” Rather, just talk about the thing you want, in all its desirable specificity. Let yourself get caught up in all that wanting. If you get stuck, reread the first few paragraphs of Lolita.

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Eileen Pollack is the author of Breaking and Entering; The Rabbi in the Attic And Other Stories; In The Mouth; Paradise, New York; and Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull. She lives in Ann Arbor and is a member of the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.

• Get lost in our archives of “Get Writing” prompts.

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This week’s feature is Johanna Skibsrud’s debut story collection, This Will Be Difficult to Explain (W.W. Norton). She is also the author of a novel, The Sentimentalists (2011), and two collections of poetry: I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being (2010) and Late Nights With Wild Cowboys (2008). She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she is at work on another novel.

In his recent reviewlet of this collection, Ben Pfeiffer writes:

This Will Be Difficult to Explain is a slim, lime-colored book with a picture of a lackadaisical girl on the cover. It holds nine stories in just one hundred and sixty-nine pages, but although the book feels light in the hand, the stories pack a concentrated, emotional punch.

We’re giving away a copy of This Will Be Difficult to Explain next week to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

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Further Reading

• Read the rest of Pfeiffer’s review.
• Read an interview with Johanna Skibsrud on Maison Neuve.

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Last week we featured Lysley Tenorio’s debut collection Monstress, and we’re pleased to announce the winners:

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!

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