Authorities in the village of Miejsce Odrzanskie, which has around 300 residents, don’t know why no boys have been born there since 2010, but they are beginning to worry about filling farming jobs in the future. …
Community head, Krystyna Zydziak, said 10 girls have been born since 2010.
If the chance of a baby being a boy and the chance of a baby being a girl are equal, then the odds of 12 consecutive births all yielding girls is (1/2)12 = 0.0244%. That’s small, but when you consider that there are many towns and villages in the world, it shouldn’t be surprising that at some point, just from randomness, 12 girls are born in a row in a given town.
Anne Lamott is the author of nearly twenty books and numerous short stories, but she’s best-known among writers of all stripes for her essay “Shitty First Drafts”. Her pitch-perfect rumination on the writing process captures the messiness of penning books, short stories, plays and scripts, all of which start with a shitty first draft:
This is how [writers] end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. … Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.
If I might borrow some of Lamott’s magic, I’d like to a coin a corollary to her term. If the story-writing process starts with a shitty first draft, it ends with a crappy cover letter.
To bust ass to write a great story and then summarize it in a paragraph or two is the tragicomedy of the author’s endeavor. It’s reaching a marathon finish line and having the judges inform you there’s one more mile to go for good measure. As with Lamott’s first drafts, my cover letters are initially shitty, but they are so insubstantial I prefer to view them as merely crappy.
A one-page single-spaced cover letter has to satisfy seemingly a half-dozen tasks at once: Introduce the work, summarize its contents, establish the writer’s bona fides, suggest the writer’s past successes without dwelling upon them, demonstrate the writer is committed to the craft but is someone the editors can work with when revision time rolls around, and most of all, that the work being submitted is perfect for the publisher’s needs and will sell like hotcakes (if that’s their goal; it’s not a given.)
Hence as I’m writing a crappy cover letter to an editor, a voice in the back of my head whines: Can’t you just read my manuscript?
This is my theory why writers generally loathe to tell strangers about their work. (“Oh, you’re a writer? What do you write?”) Standing before someone and explaining a book in twenty seconds is essentially ad libbing a cover letter in audio-book form. When I’m telling a person about my work the same voice in the back of my head whines: Can’t you just read my books?
Whether submitting to a major New York publisher or a twee not-for-profit literary magazine, cover letters don’t merely summarize—the writer has to sell the story in one or two short paragraphs, even if the intention is for no one involved to make a dime. By and large writers are horrible salespeople, hence, crappy cover letters.
(This may be why so many writers love Glengarry Glen Ross. It’s a peek into a bizarre alternate universe no writer would want to inhabit—but damn is the dialogue sharp and the situation taut. Always be closing.)
I recall one published writer whose counsel for success was Write your cover letter first. His bright idea was to make sure your novel can be summarized in a sellable way before writing the novel itself. (Is your cover letter crappy? Write different letters until one is good, and then turn it into a novel.)
I’ve never done this so I can’t advocate for it. Personally, I think it’s kind of crazy. I have to write a novel before I know what I should have written.
I have scant advice to offer a writer confronting the challenge of whipping up a cover letter for their latest story. Know that you’re not the only writer who hates this final mind-numbing step. One option is to limit your cover letter to your credentials and pray the editor reads your story cold. (I’ve done this with short stories to mixed success; I sincerely doubt it would work for a novel.)
Like Lamott’s first drafts, your first stab at a cover letter will read like crap. So, walk your cover letter through a similar process as any short story or novel: Take your time writing it. Put it through several edit passes. Ask your writer friends to critique it. Hell, pass it out at your writing workshop if they’ll allow it. Remember, writing is an iterative process.
And when you think it’s ready to send…let it sit on your computer for a week or two. Trust me, when you return to it fresh later you’ll spot all kinds of problems you missed before.
I’ve spent twenty-five years writing in cafes. For a quarter of a century, I’ve attempted to produce passable fiction within the thin caffeinated air of Bay Area coffeehouses. I’ve endured countless hours of crummy music blasted overhead by baristas with something to prove—coexisted with hundreds of cafe patrons as neighbors, each with differing notions of privacy and personal space—suffered wobbly cafe tables and seats as hard as steel—and consumed gallons upon gallons of coffee, steamed soy milk, and espresso shots—all in the name of writing books someone might want to read.
My first foray into the writers’ cafe subculture came in the mid-1990s with the purchase of a Fujitsu laptop computer. This machine freed me from writing on a desktop PC-compatible occupying the corner of my bedroom. This freedom gave me a way to find a neutral place to get writing done—a place neither the home nor the office.
Cafes back then were largely for drinking coffee and reading a newspaper or book. Writing, when it was done at a cafe, was performed with pen and paper. The parallel advents of cheap personal notebooks and wireless Internet rewrote the cafe landscape in America, morphing the coffeehouse from a casual light-fare experience to a pseudo-shared office for the creative class.
Any writer will tell you, finding a good writing cafe is a cherished gift. Every change-of-address I’ve made over the last twenty-five years was always followed by long days of stumbling from one neighborhood cafe to another in search of the right one—the mother lode, Nirvana, the comfortable and welcoming writer’s cafe. Even when traveling abroad I make a point of finding a local cafe for writing.
As such, I’ve written in so many bad cafes I cannot begin to categorize them—but I’ll try.
Where to begin? There are the noisy cafes, the cafes where the baristas play Dave Matthews so loud I cannot hear my own music, even when I press my headphones tight against my ears with my palms. There are the cafes I can never find a seat in and must ask to share a table. Most creative types seem to find this burden distasteful and will invent an invisible friend joining them shortly, so, sorry, I’ll need to sit elsewhere.
There are the overpriced cafes. There are the cafes with rock-hard high stools seemingly designed by 1970s McDonald’s interior decorators. There are the cafes that are too hot, even in the winter. Here in San Francisco the opposite is largely the case, the cafes where the owner props the door wide open no matter how cold it is outside, allowing chilly breezes to charge inside at sporadic moments.
Clocking in years of cafe time taught me never to tell to anyone sniffing around me that I’m writing a novel. Doing so only elicits all manner of unproductive responses, from snarky to nosy to rude to inane. More than once I’ve had to pry myself away from a chatty cafe patron who, delighted at my endeavor, felt compelled to describe to me all their book ideas. (Sometimes they offer to let me write their book—”We’ll split the profits fifty-fifty.”) In an otherwise wonderful cafe in Campbell, a regular got his tenterhooks so deep into my work I would startle to find him crouched behind my chair peering over my shoulders to watch me write.
I’ve seen tip jars stuffed full of bills ripped from counters, the thief racing out the door with coins clanging across the floor in their wake. I’ve seen notebook computers swiped off tables while the patron was still typing and likewise rushed out the door. I’ve written in cafes decorated like giant doll houses, cafes decorated like discount clothing stores, and cafes so meticulously decorated I felt I’d entered a movie set. I’ve seen a darkened cafe in San Francisco arranged like a ziggurat with staggered levels of cafe patrons seated facing you as you enter, every one of them typing furiously on their MacBooks. The uniform rows of the backlit Apple logo could only remind me of the 1984 Super Bowl commercial.
There are cafes that cap their electrical outlets to force laptop owners to run on battery power only. There are cafes that employ exotic WiFi systems that only give you so much time online before you must buy another drink or pastry. Some cafes are too-brightly lit, making one snow-blind in the evening hours, and some cafes are so dim you cannot see your hands on the keyboard. There are the cafes that close early, eliminating prime evening-hour writing spurts, and there are the cafes that don’t open weekends for mysterious reasons.
I’ve been in cafes where the owner would assure me I could pay anytime before leaving—and then grouse I never paid for the first coffee when I return to the counter for a refill. I’ve been in cafes where the owner relentlessly pushed a food purchase on me. I’ve been in cafes with owners who grumbled under their breath about people not buying enough coffee or staying too long.
The Slate.com feature “My coffeehouse nightmare” is the Platonic example of this type of owner. He served his coffee “on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie,” hired a Le Bernadin baker to produce specialty croissants, and thought the fast-track to coffeehouse profits was pulling Vienna roast espresso shots instead of Italian. In six months, his cafe was out of business. “The average coffee-to-stay customer nursed his mocha (i.e., his $5 ticket) for upward of 30 minutes. Don’t get me started on people with laptops.” By which, of course, he means people like me.
Cafes hold a unique position in American culture. They straddle commercial and social divides. As a cafe patron, you are engaging in commerce with the owner and her staff. On the other hand, you share a quiet, almost intimate, personal space with other patrons, perfect strangers often seated less than a foot away. Unlike a movie theater, where all are sharing a common experience, cafes are a collection of private moments (reading a book, engaging in conversation, outlining a novel) hosted within a shared public situation. At the risk of romanticizing it, successful cafes are places where both halves—the commerce and the social—are well-balanced. Failure, I’ve always found, is where such balance is missing.
My personal code of cafe ethics? Always buy something. Don’t bring in outside food or drink. Tidy up the table before leaving. Don’t hog the electrical outlet. Voices down and phone calls outside. Please and thank you carry a lot of water in any situation, social or commercial.
What cafe do I recommend for writing? The one I’m sitting in right now. And, no, I’m not telling you its name.
I’m not trying to be mysterious here. I truly believe revision is where a story is honed and distilled. Revision is where the writer’s vision and passion surface after cutting away the dead weight and dead prose. Revision is pruning back a bush and revealing the topiary within.
My tweet was in response to a question (“What’s your favorite part of the writing process?”) which was followed by a warning (“If you say revising I will have a hard time believing you”).
What can I say. Every stage of writing is difficult. There are no moments of pure pleasure for me. Even calling a manuscript finished and walking away is painful. The satisfaction is in the sum of the parts (akin to “work is its own reward”) as well as pride in the finished work.
One response to the question said something to the effect of “getting paid is the best part of writing.” That’s not part of the writing process, no more than collecting the bill is part of the cooking process in a restaurant. Even if you’re earning enough from writing to keep the lights on, great, but that’s not the writing process.
If there’s one trope of the mystery that stands out among all other types of stories—perhaps the single element that defines the mystery—it’s the solution being announced at the conclusion.
Almost all story leads the reader to a suspenseful ending. The mystery is unique in that the main character is responsible for explaining the prior events back to the reader in such a way as to make sense of them all. There are plenty of poorly-written books that open with a great dump of exposition to get the reader up to speed. Mystery has pretty much cornered the market on stories ending with an exposition dump.
This leads to mystery readers’ inevitable slaying of a story: “I knew who did it before I reached the end.” Usually this is put at some great insult or shut-down of the writer.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess most mystery writers don’t cringe when a reader claims to have solved the whodunnnit before the last page. Why?
Magician Eric Mead describes a bit of inside baseball for his craft:
…if a magician shows somebody a trick and ninety percent of that trick fools them but there is a little ten percent sliver over here that does not fool them, the average person will say that the trick did not fool them even though they can’t explain ninety percent of it.
…if that same magician shows that same trick to his fellow conjurers, it only takes that ten percent sliver for them to admit that they were fooled.
The same could be said for mystery writers and their craft. The problem of penning a mystery novel isn’t managing to befuddle the reader to the point of utter despair before they reach the last page. If you want to experience such confusion, try Gertude Stein’s Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, a novella one reviewer notes “since it’s more or less impossible to work out who any of the characters are, up to and including the person whose blood is on the dining-room floor…then it can only be called a detective novel in the loosest sense conceivable.”
For almost every other mystery book written, fooling the reader is kind of a side quest for the novelist. Even in an Agatha Christie book where six shady suspects roam the English country house, the reader has a better than fifteen percent chance of simply guessing the murder by yanking a name from a hat. And when a reader claims to have deduced the murderer before the final chapter, I would ask in return, can you fully explain the who’s, what’s, where’s, and when’s of the crime? Or are you merely working on a hunch, one that may have to do with meta-analysis of the book? (“The writer keeps making this character seem innocent. I bet they’re the one.”) Or did you suspect the character at one point in the story, fleetingly, before moving on to other suspicions, and later told yourself you’d figured it out? Be honest here.
This is Eric Mead’s 90%, the part of the mystery other novelists don’t fret over when reading someone else’s work.
The 10% most readers overlook but keeps other novelists up at nights? Writing a novel that readers will pick up in the first place; writing a novel that will carry readers to the last page; filling pages with knockdown dialogue, tight scenes, and wonderful prose; and the perennial dream, writing a novel people are still talking about fifty years later. This is the sliver novelists concern themselves with when admiring (or critiquing) another mystery writer’s work. This 10% does require storytelling sleight of hand, and when it’s working it’s all-but-invisible to the reader.
One fascinating (Vonnegut-esque?) tidbit in his interviews was an offhand moment in a 1971 profile by Richard Todd (New York Times Magazine):
The class began in a surprising way. Vonnegut remarked that last time they had been talking about form, and he walked to the blackboard and drew there a question mark, an exclamation point and a period. He said these bits of punctuation were the outline of a three act play or story:
? ! .
A student asked if the end might be “Dot, dot, dot.” Vonnegut agreed.
? ! …
So maybe this is a gimmicky or silly way to describe story structure, but I’m game to play along.
I’ve written about organizing structure to motivate my fiction, so this little lesson in punctuation caught my attention. The way I organize my thinking, the three acts of story (really, four) look something like this:
Act 1: Setup
Act 2A: Complication
Act 2B: Confrontation
Act 3: Resolution
This list comes from my reading of Syd Field’s books on film structure, which I’ve modified (slightly) for the purposes of writing fiction, especially novels.
Syd Field
I agree with Vonnegut that most stories, if not all, open with question marks. Even if I’ve read a book two dozen times—and there are books I can make that claim—the pleasure of the opening chapters is the illusion I do not know what is coming. (I would say this is related in spirit to Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief.) There are numerous, sometimes playful, ways to pose those questions when a story opens, but those questions are almost always there. Rare if ever does an interesting story open with all the questions answered and the main characters in possession of all the facts. Jim Thompson said there was only one type of story: “Things are not what they seem.” That is another way to say stories open with question marks.
Vonnegut’s exclamation point jibes with what I’ve labeled 2A, Complication. Exclamation points do not have to be action or cliffhangers. Sometimes a quiet revelation or admission can turn a story on its head and rearrange how we see the main character and their situation. I hold a pet theory that the art of storytelling lays in reversals (perhaps I’ll post about that some day). The exclamation point is one such reversal for the characters: a well-kept secret revealed, a surprising discovery, a fortune amassed, a fortune lost, and so on.
Vonnegut’s three punctuation marks (and most of his story shapes) imply three acts. I wondered if my idea about a fourth act, Confrontation, could fit into his punctuation-as-story-structure?
Confrontation, I think, could be expressed as an em-dash. Tension draws taut in the confrontation phase of a story. More than any other part of a story, confrontation is where the reader should be asking herself “Wait—what happens next?” In contrast, final acts are generally not “What next?” but rather “How will it end?”
With an em-dash, then, Vonnegut’s story structure could be punctuated like this:
