Recently, the New York Times tackled the burning question of why authors tweet. One main reason? To connect with the reader, of course:

For one thing, publishers are pushing authors to hobnob with readers on Twitter and Facebook in the hope they will sell more copies. But there’s another reason: Many authors have little use for the pretension of hermetic distance and never accepted a historically specific idea of what it means to be a writer. [...]

Jennifer Gilmore (3,463 followers) finds hearing from readers helps her understand the influence her novels have on them: “On Twitter, I have a sense that people — those you know and those you don’t — read your work in a way I have not always felt in the world.”

Not all authors feel this way; as the Times article notes, Gary Shteyngart often writes in persona (including that of his dog), while Jeffrey Eugenides argues, “It’s better, I think, for readers not to communicate too directly with an author because the author is, strangely enough, beside the point.” But by and large, it seems that readers want to feel connected to their favorite authors—not just to their works, but to the authors as actual people. Love a book, the logic goes, and you’ll likely love the author, too.

But does that logic hold? What if you don’t love the author?

Writing in The Faster Times, Abigail Rasminsky describes a stilted book-signing encounter with Joan Didion that left her feeling “dirty, like I had turned into a predator, sucking her for something she wasn’t equipped to give”:

The relationship, I saw with renewed clarity, is always to the writing—not to the writer. That fleeting moment Phillip Lopate calls a “shiver of self-recognition” comes from the ideas, the words themselves, meticulously lined up again and again, not from the person standing before a crowd, rereading them after the long struggle.

This kind of personal disappointment in a writer you adore is one thing; at home, as Rasminsky does, you can ignore the physical existence of the author and renew your relationship with that author’s words. But what if the author ruins your relationship with the writing? What if you actively despise the views of an author you love? In the Huffington Post, Dave Astor writes about his conflicted emotions on learning that Orson Scott Card is anti-gay:

It was on the Web that I discovered Card has actively and publicly opposed same-sex marriage, which greatly upset me because I’m a strong believer in gays and lesbians having the right to wed. So I asked myself: Do I ever want to read this guy again? [...]

Ultimately, I decided I would not open a Card book again. This is similar to a decision I made years ago not to read much of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer because of the macho nonsense they were guilty of in their personal lives. (And I didn’t see a Woody Allen movie for a long time after his shenanigans that might have almost bordered on incest.)

Astor’s decision reads almost like a business boycott: he vows not to “devote any more eyeball time to a guy who fights against an important civil and human right for millions of Americans.” Will Orson Scott Card notice, or care? Probably not. But that’s not the point. If you, as a reader, know an author fervently supports a cause you hate, every word that author writes might seem tinged. In that case, the distinction between the writer and the writing may be academic.

When I was a moody teenager, I developed crushes on movie stars based on the roles they played. Chief among them: Tom Cruise, because of Top Gun and—I blush to admit it—Far and Away. Fast-forward twenty years. Tom Cruise impregnates the virginal Katie Holmes and startles the nation with a lunatic jump on Oprah’s couch. This is in no way the same as, say, opposing same-sex marriage (a cause I, like Astor, strongly support). But I haven’t been able to watch a Tom Cruise movie, new or old, since.

The actor is not the acting. The writing is not the writer. But sometimes, the two overlap.

• Critics of Rick Moody’s work often seem more like critics of Rick Moody himself. What’s the deal with that? Jonathan Callahan investigates.
• Further blurring the line between writer and writing: David Foster Wallace writes a story in which David Wallace imagines the thoughts of a friend who takes his own life. Scott F. Parker’s thought-provoking essay, “The Real Question,” attempts to unravel this.
• Would you trust Hemingway’s Yelp reviews?
• Forget tweeting with the author. Maybe you’d rather just tweet with the characters.

That’s how I’d have capitalized this recent article by The Atlantic, which asked that rather big question. Describing Alex Jenni, a French biology teacher who recently won the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary award, the article noted,

In the Alexis Jenni school of thought, a writer may be someone, anyone, with a compulsion to scrawl or the conviction of having something to say. A writer is not defined by his career, but the simple act of writing regularly. And authors who found success through the muck of making ends meet have taken that approach for some time now, in practice at least. [...]

T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, was inclined to keep his day job even after it was financially necessary. When the Bloomsbury group offered to set up a fund that would allow him sufficient funding to become a full-time writer, the poet turned them down. “This idea that Eliot should be freed from the drudgery of work misses the point that he was actually very interested in the minutiae of everyday life—he was a commentator on the quotidian,” British Library curator Rachel Foss told The Guardian.

For modern-day counterparts to Eliot, there’s Days of Yore, a website that interviews artists “about the years before they had money, fame, or roadmaps to success, and inspires you to find your own.” Here, Deborah Eisenberg discusses her “late start” to writing and Jennifer Egan describes how she went on an archaeological dig. But this isn’t just a nostalgic look-what-crazy-job-I-did-when-I-was-young-and-hungry site.  The site’s co-founder and editor, Astri von Arbin Ahlander, a self-described “aspiring artist” highlighted in the Atlantic piece, argues that the day job is a way of life for today’s writer:

Says Von Arbin Ahlander, “We’re kidding ourselves if we think we can make a living on writing.” As for the romantic ideal of the leisurely writer life, slowly crafting one’s masterpiece in the calm solitude of a big, empty house: “I mean, that’s over,” she added, “Unless you’re a trust fund baby.”

So if 99% of writers today need to have a “real job”—beyond pounding furiously at a typewriter all day—then what DOES make a writer a writer? One commenter put it bluntly: “I became a writer when people started to pay me for my writing. Before that, I was an aspiring writer.”  Another took the oppoite view: “I dislike the very concept of ‘being a writer’. That is something fakes and wannabes say at bad parties to impress the foolish. [...] I’m quite happy to say, if the subject ever comes up, ‘I write’, but never ‘I am a writer’.”

Here’s a better question: Why such angst about a self-imposed title, a person who writes versus a Writer?  It’s a question of proving your seriousness.  Most other professions have clearly defined borders: lawyers have law degrees and bar memberships; doctors have M.D.s and board certifications.  Realtors, health inspectors, schoolteachers like Alex Jenni–each needs certain objective qualifications and credentials.  You know they’re serious because they’ve spent time in school and training; you know they’re (ostensibly) qualified because they’ve been tested and granted licenses.  So you turn over your lawsuit, or your appendix, or your child, and let the experts work.

Writers operate outside these boundaries.  You don’t need an MFA–or even a high school diploma–to write.  You just pick up your pencil and go.  Anyone can call himself or herself a writer, and anyone can be a writer.  Democratic?  Yes.  But that also makes it hard to prove your seriousness, which is really the topic the Atlantic–and the commenters on the article–delicately circle around. Who’s just a dilettante, and who’s a capital-W writer? Is it a career or just a temporary occupation?  Something you happen to do, or something you are?

Recently a stonemason (yes) came to repair the foundation of my house.  He made up haiku while he was working, he told me, reciting one to me as he chiseled away the old mortar.  But he was quite firm: he was not a Writer.  He was a stonemason, the last in a long line of stonemasons, the “and son” of DeAngelis and Sons.  That was his art.  The haiku, he insisted, wasn’t writing, just something he did to keep his brain active.

So was he a writer?  Are you?  The answer may all lie in your attitude towards your art–or towards that “something you do” just to keep your brain active.

Further Reading:

• A related question: do you have to be a genius to create a work of genius?
• By the way, does “work” writing count as “real” writing?  In the Huffington Post, Holly Robinson says yes.

On New Year’s morning this year, I was sitting at a kitchen table in Cleveland, Ohio. I grew up in Cleveland and love it, but (like most people) in the way you love your old rusty car with the duct-taped mirror and muffler tied up with a string, or your dingy old house with the drafty windows and the sagging roof—both of which are, unfortunately, all-too-common images in the city of Cleveland. To top all this off, we were in town visiting a seriously ill family member and had spent most of the past few days in a hospital room, listening to the slow wheeze of the oxygen pump.

All this is to say that on New Year’s Day, when I picked up the comics page of the Plain Dealer—an ailing section of an ailing newspaper in an ailing city—I was not at all surprised that they weren’t at all funny. Two-thirds of the strips tried to crack jokes about the outlook for 2012 and could muster only a deep cynicism. The other third didn’t even try. The funniest comic was a Peanuts strip, which was copyrighted in 1961.

At times like that, needless to say, it’s hard to feel positive about the upcoming year. So I’m grateful to Colum McCann for this essay—drawn from an address at Boston College—for reminding me why (and how) to be optimistic.

There’s a degraded discourse around the notion of optimism these days that says there is something soft about being an optimist—something wrong. It claims that optimism has no edge, as if it’s less than complete, less than the full deck of knowledge. The optimist is cartooned into the corner with an idiotic grin. I submit to you that none of that is true.

A good optimist never denies the reality of the dark. In fact, optimists are far more cynical than the best of cynics. They have to trump the cynic within. They have to examine the world. They have to go headfirst into the dark.

That is what learning is about. Cynics do not go forth. Cynics are trapped in their cynicism. It’s the end of the journey. They all fall down.

For McCann–as for so many writers and readers and thinkers–the key to optimism lies in story:

So much of good education is learning how to get to the other side of cynicism, how to cross that towering divide. This is not, I submit, sentimental. It’s full of sentiment, yes, but not sentimental. The best theologians, thinkers, philosophers, the best teachers, have always told us that we get to the light through the heart of the dark. You read, you engage. You become who you are by telling each other your stories. The bloodstream of the stories becomes the bloodstream of your life. [...]

If you can make the darkness visible, then you can make the light visible. So I call on you to practice resuscitation. Endure the rough weather. In fact, embrace it. Do not tread water. If you tread water, you might survive, but you won’t live. Swim in the waters that other people would drown in. Get ripped to pieces and learn to put yourself back together again.

Throw away the GPS. Read. Be like Job, and ask questions. Turn answers into more questions. Push the edge, become the edge. Expose your heart. Imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages. Raise your voice on behalf of those who haven’t had a chance to raise their own.

I am not a tattoo kind of girl, but after reading this essay, I’m seriously tempted to have some of it inked on the backs of my hands. Go ahead, I dare you: read McCann’s essay, especially that rousing finale, and try not to feel your spirit lift, ever so slightly, off the floor. And carry that optimism with you into the new year and into your work.

Happy new year, everyone, and welcome back.

Further Reading:

• Novelist Dean Bakopoulos, author of My American Unhappiness, on writing when real-life tragedies make fiction feel “fruitless.”
• Scott Parker on David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon,” and why this story of psychological suffering might actually be a story about “optimism for the chances of making it in the world.”
• Writing is one of the 10 careers with the highest rate of depression. So how do you go on, in spite of it all?

Everywhere you look, there are reasons not to write. If you believe in omens–as I do–you may start to wonder if the universe is trying to tell you something.

You may feel like you shouldn’t even start writing. Recently, the Huffington Post offered 10 reasons not to write your novel. And some of them are pretty damn good. For instance:

2. Someone has already written your novel, and better than you ever could. Certainly you’ve visited a bookstore, picked up a new release novel the plot summary of which filled you with loathing. “That’s the idea I had,” you mutter. See? What did I tell you?

5. Instead of writing a novel, why not focus on, say, sex? Imagine that you give your wife, husband or partner the same amount of attention that you lavish on this, this idea — these voicesthat you can’t get out of your head. Imagine what perfection you would attain in the sack! Think of how heroic and loved you would be!

6. Substitute parenthood for sex (above).

If you do manage to get yourself writing, you may constantly be wondering if you should stop. Novelist Tony D’Souza writes about scrapping his novel and starting (gulp!) from scratch.

On November 7, 2009, more than two years after writing the first lines, I crossed my fingers and sent the first 150 pages to Liz. I was a wreck. Maybe it really was a masterpiece, I kept trying to convince myself as I paced and chain-smoked cigarettes. After a few days of that, her email pinged in my inbox. She’d written, “Tony, a few of us have looked at this. I’m sorry, we don’t understand why you’re on this track…”

I showed the email to my wife, then did what I should have done some time before: I put Voyage of the Rosa down for a much deserved rest. No matter that we needed money urgently. No matter that I had slaved at it like doing lacquer-work for years. No matter that I loved it. No matter that I felt like jumping off a bridge. Voyage of the Rosa was not happening at that time, and somehow, I managed to admit it. The next evening, I wrote the opening 20 pages of my new novel Mule.

How do you keep going when faced with all these reasons to quite–or to not start at all?

The best answer I have found is this quote from Annie Dillard–which I have painted over my desk:

Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air. The desk and chair float thirty feet from the ground, between the crowns of maple trees. [...] Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

Like many writers, I tend to think of job-related writing–like copywriting, or editing, or ghostwriting memos–as Not Really Writing. In the Huffington Post, though, Holly Robinson expresses a very different point of view:

“Doesn’t it bug you to write other people’s books when you could be working on your own?” another writer asked me recently.

Not a bit. In fact, I love telling other people’s stories. What other job would allow me to walk in another person’s shoes so completely that I’d feel their blisters? Working as a book doctor or ghost writer, I have the opportunity to immerse myself in worlds as disparate as the priesthood, cooking, fashion design, and Tejano music — I just finished ghost writing an incredibly moving memoir for Chris Perez, the husband of the fantastically talented Mexican-American singer, Selena. Ghost writing isn’t just a paying job for me. It’s a passion. Sharing stories is what makes us human.

And you know, Robinson’s right: there is a certain joy in untangling awkward sentences, polishing language, and making muddied ideas clear. But in my own experience, that type of writing doesn’t fulfill me in the same way creative writing does, but it uses the same word-processing part of my brain–thus leaving it too tired at the end of the day for working on stories.

What about you? Do you consider your day-job writing to be Real Writing? How does it affect your drive to tell your own stories in your fiction?

• Robin Becker explains how teaching book reviewing helps writing
• How a police blotter can improve your writing
• One writer’s story of why he quit his day job

So November is halfway over–you’re half done writing your novel for NaNaoWriMo, right?

Right?

Whether you’re doing NaNoWriMo or not, there are always those days–or weeks, or months, or, let’s face it, years–when you just feel like you Cannot. Write. Anything. I don’t claim these are foolproof solutions, but here are my own personal tips to get started working again.

1. A journey of a thousand pages begins with opening your document.

Maybe it’s just me–but 90% of the time, just opening up the right file seems like a big step. I find a million other places to click: Facebook, the New York Times, that video of the sneezing baby panda for the hundredth time. And yet, once I suck it up and double-click that file and come face-to-face with my half-finished story, I usually find myself tinkering a little here, adding a little there… and lo and behold, an hour or two of work occurs.

If you have this problem too, here’s the fix: Set your computer to auto-open your documents when you turn it on. For Mac users, make your current short story/novel chapter into a login item (instructions here). And Windows users, just put your work-in-progress into the Startup folder (instructions here). Next time you start your computer, your documents will open automatically–and your own work-in-progress will be be right there, ready for you. No excuses!

2. Revising is always easier than writing.

I’m pretty convinced this is one of the great truths of the universe, right up there with Newton’s laws. It holds true no matter what you’re working on: application essays, term papers, dissertations, short stories, novels. You want to produce something great, but as soon as you think that, paralysis sets in. So focus on just getting something down on paper–anything. A paragraph. An outline. Keywords, a snatch of dialogue, a pertinent image. Remind yourself that you’re coming back later, and keep moving forward.

In Room to Write, a book of writing prompts, author Bonni Goldberg refers to this process as “making clay.” You can’t sit down and create a beautiful pot right off the bat–the first step is just making the clay. While writing the first draft of my novel, I pinned a sign above my desk that said “Fix that later.” You know what? It helped. And it’s still there.

This brings me to tip #3, which is:

3. Don’t re-read your own work–while writing.

It is so tempting, because reading is easier than writing. But re-read your drafts-in-progress too much, and your own words gain a feeling of finality, of inevitability. Of course that paragraph has to come after that one. Of course that scene has to end that way. And suddenly, you get stuck. You’re in an alley with no way out.

Only you know how much re-reading is too much, but for me, the process goes like this: open new document (see #1, above). Start reading from the beginning, and when you get to the bottom, start writing. Don’t look back–yet.

4. Embrace your fear of commitment.

Finally, there are those times when you know just what scene needs to come next, but you can’t get started. For me, this is often a risky scene: an argument, a love scene, a gesture of defiance, a moment of realization–a scene when the story pivots. Those scenes are hard to live through in real life, and they’re even harder to get down on paper.

Next time that happens, try this: open a new document, or get a blank sheet of paper (scratch paper works great for this). Copy the last few lines of your draft as a lead-in, and try writing the new scene on this blank canvas. If it doesn’t work, no problem. Delete the document–or recycle your scratch paper–and try again. Your original draft will be waiting patiently for you, unscathed by these false starts. 99% of the time, that frees you up, psychologically, to dive into murky waters or root through hard places or take whatever risks you need. (And when you’re done, maybe test that scene using the risky email test before you paste that bad boy into your draft.)

Okay, those are my tips for getting started when you’re sure writing is impossible. What are yours?

• FWR’s Founding Editor, Anne Stameshkin, offers a foolproof way to get yourself started when you’re feeling rusty–and we have lots more writing prompts to help you “Get Writing” in our archives.
• Valerie Laken describes a way around writer’s block and overcoming self-doubt: thinking of the writer as athlete and the teacher as a coach.
• More practical tips on writing a book.

In the late 90s, during an impasse in the writing of Middlesex, I put the manuscript aside. (I hadn’t fallen out of love, exactly, but I wasn’t sure where the relationship was headed.) Over the following weeks I began flirting with another novel, not a comic epic like Middlesex but a more traditional story about a wealthy family throwing a debutante party. At first, the new novel seemed to be everything I was looking for. It was less demanding, easy to be with, and rather nicely proportioned. Before I knew it I’d written a hundred pages…

As you might guess, the romance with the new story wore off, sending Eugenides back to Middlesex–and later, leading him to “cheat” on this new book as well.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, because I’ve working on my novel for the past 5 years, and okay, I’ll admit it–I’ve strayed a few times. There was a short story, then another. During a particularly rocky patch, I even started another book, as Eugenides did–though in the end I put those pages away and slunk back home, renewing my commitment to Novel #1. But Eugenides’ example is further proof of something I’ve always suspected: that unlike in the world of romance, in writing, these little dalliances are often necessary and even productive. Now and then, you need a break from one project, and often you’ll find the new story cross-fertilizing the old in ways that deepen and enrich both.

Read Eugenides’ full essay over at The Millions, and then ‘fess up: have you ever committed “literary adultery”? Do you find it helps your work, or are you a confirmed literary monogamist?

• What else can love teach you about writing? More than you might expect.
• FWR’s own Jeremiah Chamberlin recently hosted an evening with Jeffrey Eugenides for the Traverse City National Writers Series.
• More stories of successful long-term relationships with writing the ten-year novel and the ten-year story. Now that’s committment.

Some frustrated soul on Facebook has started an “I Hate Reading” page. Even though–in keeping with the “I hate reading” theme–there’s nothing actually on the page, over 475,000 people “like” it. AbeBooks issued the following video, entitled “Long Live the Book,” in response:

Okay, so some people hate to read. Some people aren’t book people. But some writers apparently also hate to read. On the New Yorker’s Book Bench, Macy Halford writes:

[William Giraldi] teaches writing at Boston University, and has been amazed at how many of the kids possess a passionate urge to write without also possessing an urge to read. This strikes him as crazy. “There’s an analogy there that I haven’t been able to complete,” he said:

Wanting to write without wanting to read is like wanting to ____ without wanting to ____.

He’d come up with a couple, unsatisfying answers, one involving race cars, one involving sex (he wouldn’t tell us what they were). But he threw it out to the audience to ponder, and now I’m throwing it out to you. What is wanting to write without wanting to read like? It’s imperative that we figure it out, because Giraldi’s right: it’s both crazy and prevalent among budding writers.

(Via.) Why would budding writers hate to read? Can you really write without reading? And for those of you who teach writing: if the answer is no, do you have trouble convincing your students that reading is useful?

I’m now in year 5 of working on my (first) novel, which seems like a long time to me. But according to everyone I’ve heard, 5-7 years is average for a first novel. For some, though, novelists just work Too Damn Slow. At least, that’s what Dwight Garner suggested in a recent essay in the New York Times:

There have always been prolific writers as well as slow-moving, blocked, gin-addled or silent ones. It’s worth suggesting, though, that something more meaningful may be going on here; these long spans between books may indicate a desalinating tidal change in the place novelists occupy in our culture. Suddenly our important writers seem less like color commentators, sifting through the emotional, sexual and intellectual detritus of how we live today, and more like a mountaintop Moses, handing down the granite tablets every decade or so to a bemused and stooped populace. We roll our eyes at how seldom Time magazine puts writers on its cover — it once did so quite often — and sense this is evidence of the public’s shrinking appetite for quality literature. Perhaps it has got more to do with our novelists’ lagging output, their eroded willingness to be central to the cultural conversation. [...]

Updike and Oates are extreme examples, but there’s something to be said for what might be called the Woody Allen Method: Good times, bad times, you keep making art. Many of your productions will hit; some will miss; some will miss by a lot. But there’s no time for the flatulent gas of pretension to seep into your construction’s sheetrock. This is how Trollope, Balzac and Dickens worked. Each would have agreed with Gore Vidal, who once declared of those who moan about writer’s block: “You’re not meant to be doing this. Plenty more where you came from.”

Garner understands and acknowledges the many delays that beset writers–jobs, ambition, revolt against the James Pattersons of the world–but in closing, he argues,

I’ve picked on Franzen and Eugenides, writers I admire, more than enough in this small essay. (And I’ve ignored many fine writers who publish more frequently.) But let me conclude with this autumnal observation. At their current rate of production, by the next time a novel from either appears, my children, not yet in high school, will have graduated from college. Actuarial tables inform me that my dogs, their muzzles not yet close to gray, will have died and been buried in the backyard. Two presidents may have come and gone.

I won’t entirely have forgotten these writers, but I will have learned to live without them.

What’s a writer to do? Well, for those novelists trying to speed up their output, Michael Agger (writing in Slate) looks at the research on how to write faster:

[Ronald] Kellogg, a psychologist at Saint Louis University, tours the research in the field, where many of the landmarks are his own. Some writers are “Beethovians” who disdain outlines and notes and instead “compose rough drafts immediately to discover what they have to say.” Others are “Mozartians”—cough, cough—who have been known to “delay drafting for lengthy periods of time in order to allow for extensive reflection and planning.” According to Kellogg, perfect-first-drafters and full-steam-aheaders report the same amount of productivity. Methinks someone is lying. And feel free to quote this line the next time an editor is nudging you for copy: “Although prewriting can be brief, experts approaching a serious writing assignment may spend hours, days, or weeks thinking about the task before initiating the draft.”

Are you a slow cooker? Do you worry about your pace of production, or have you made peace with letting things “stew”? If you’re the opposite of a slow cooker–a stir-fryer, let’s say–what are your secrets to getting work done?

• Why slow thinking (and writing) can actually be good for you
• The ten-year novel
• The ten-year STORY

I don’t mind admitting that I get stuck as a writer—occasionally. Well, pretty often. Okay, I mean constantly. And I’m not talking about jamming up over a flowery paragraph or a pivotal scene. I’m saying that I’ll be four pages into a new story (on what I’ve come to imagine on my worst days as the road to hell, thanks to a willful misinterpretation of Ron Carlson Writes a Story) and I’ll not only forget how to write a sentence, but I’ll lose sight of how a short story should even look. I used to feel ashamed about my lapse in genre memory and the sweaty-palm, shallow-breath panic that followed, but I’ve convinced myself that all writers catch the yips.

I’ve learned to keep a small stack of short fiction in my desk drawer as a remedy—a way to interrupt my bad habits, challenge my stale techniques, and remind me of the moves the best stories are capable of making. The story I keep on top is “Irish Girl” by Tim Johnston. Originally published in the now-defunct DoubleTake Magazine, it was later selected for the 2003 O. Henry Prize Stories and anthologized by David Sedaris in Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules. I first found the story in Johnston’s debut collection, also titled Irish Girl, which won the 2009 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. I’d bought the book because the contest judge was Janet Peery, who wrote another story I keep in my drawer as a curative tonic, “What the Thunder Said.”

“Irish Girl” opens simply enough with the protagonist as an eight-year old boy playing with army men under the kitchen table. His older brother kicks his leg—“not too hard but not too soft, either”—and tells him that his parents want to speak to him in the bedroom. Then, in a move I don’t recollect seeing in any other story, the writer breaks out of scene for the briefest of paragraphs to contextualize the family and the era they inhabit by telling the reader what the protagonist does and doesn’t know: “Charlie didn’t know… about Nixon’s decision to send troops into Cambodia, or how that led to the shootings at Kent State… He did know a little about the thirteen boys from the agricultural college arrested for rioting, because his father had been their lawyer. But he didn’t know that the trial, which had made the news every night for two weeks… had given his father the idea to run for office.” The story drops back into scene—the eve of his father’s departure for the Iowa House of Representatives—and the protagonist learns that his older brother is adopted.

The story does an excellent job portraying not only how the adopted brother grows distant from his parents and younger brother over the space of four years, the “blue light” going from his eyes, but it also subtly reveals a family held prisoner by its inability to adapt to a changing country. That’s a highfalutin way to say that it’s a damn good story, a story that cures the yips that ail me by reminding me what I can get away with in the best short fiction: direct language, echoing imagery, and earned sentiment.

• See the entire “Stories We Love” series (so far!)
• Find a copy of Irish Girl at an indie bookstore near you.