Suspend Your Disbelief

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Steven Wingate

Associate Editor

Steven Wingate is the author of the novels Of Fathers and Fire (2019) and The Leave-Takers (2021), both part of the Flyover Fiction Series from the University of Nebraska Press. His short story collection Wifeshopping (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008) won the Bakeless Prize in Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He has taught at the University of Colorado, the College of the Holy Cross, and South Dakota State University, where he is currently associate professor of English.


Articles

Essays |

Quotes & Notes: Best Shots and Shortcuts

by Steven Wingate

“Always give your characters their best shot.” — Stuart M. Kaminsky

As writers, we can add on (and on) to the external details of a character, trying to make that person real in the way that Pinocchio hopes to become so. Theoretically, we might be able to acquire enough details in a personality inventory for our readers to accept our characters as convincing. But ultimately, as Stuart Kaminsky knew, this way of creating character doesn’t work because it’s the subtext of our characters’ lives that make them real. Using the “inventory” process to get to know them is fundamentally flawed because it makes us lazy.


Essays |

Quotes & Notes: In Praise of Perpetual Self-Reinvention

by Steven Wingate

“Every book I publish is an opportunity for me to reinvent myself as a writer.” — Steve Katz

The easy thing to do when we finish one writing project, the default thing, is to simply think about what we’re going to write next. Katz’s words, however, call us to engage in a deeper kind of reconsideration of ourselves, because what we write and who we are as writers are two crucially different things.


Essays |

Quotes & Notes: Writing What's Yours, When It's Yours to Write

by Steven Wingate

“You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded.”
— Zora Neale Hurston

Consider Hurston’s words in the context of note-taking and revision, which we normally don’t think of as particularly inspired phases of the fiction process. Preparing the canvas can be a long and dreadful bore; we learn about our characters in slow motion, wanting to write the work itself but knowing that we aren’t yet ready. We synopsize, sometimes outline, sometimes take copious notes that we then ignore completely.


Essays |

Quotes & Notes: Peering and Leaping into the Author/Character Vortex, Part II

by Steven Wingate

“Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.”
–Gustave Flaubert

Practitioners of fiction may find this Flaubert quote hard to embrace, because if we’re honest with ourselves we’ll probably have to make some difficult admissions. Many of us—especially those who fell in love with the craft early, perhaps under the spell of Austen or Kerouac or Salinger—embarked on the fiction endeavor with an eye toward self-discovery. Most writers started writing because we found ourselves immersed in the character-self vortex as readers, identifying with fictional characters so intensely (as we searched for ourselves in them) that it became second nature to live in their worlds. From there it’s a small but decisive step to the other side of the formula: entering into the vortex as a writer and deciding to participate in literature as a transmitter of emotional signals rather than as a receiver alone…


Essays |

Quotes & Notes: Peering and Leaping into the Author/Character Vortex, Part 1

by Steven Wingate

Let’s face it: fiction writers do not have a reputation for being carefree, untroubled souls. Even
our fellow artists consider us broody navel-gazers who are overly introspective and perhaps even in love with our own problems. (We do, after all, tend to keep writing about characters whose psychic profiles overlap significantly with ours.) The general public is hardly more charitable, usually assuming that (a) we study them to gather material, or (b) we all write thinly-veiled autobiography, and are so blind as to not even be aware of it. Do we deserve assessments like these? Probably so…


Essays |

Drawing a Line in the Sand: Literature and Today’s Market

by Steven Wingate

I do not fear for literature, which has endured purges of all kinds, the death of the novel, the irrelevance of poetry, centuries without general literacy, and every other threat that has been hurled its way. Enough people hold it dear, and it is intrinsic enough to the human identity, for it to survive whatever problems plague it now. But I do fear for those young writers whose primary teaching in their craft is market-centered rather than literature-centered.




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