"Personal and specific, vulnerable and honest"

Hi friends,

Happy holidays and a sweet New Year to you all! As we wrap up 2023, I’m so grateful to my agent and publishing team for helping me get my debut novel into the world and to everyone who’s read, reviewed, and promoted it—or even bought a copy to use as a pretty accessory. I’ll always be incredibly grateful for this opportunity to share Endpapers with you.

As we look ahead to 2024, I have my eye on new work, new challenges and opportunities. I’ve been holding off on writing this newsletter because what’s been on my mind is something I’ve written about here before—the perennial challenge of coming up against your own limits as a writer—and I was waiting for a new idea to surface instead.

But then I came across this interview with Virginia Kantra in The Shit No One Tells You about Writing, and it struck me that so many of us struggle with our perceptions of good writing and whether we’re talented enough to achieve it. I fear it’s not something you deal with once in your writing career and then get to be done with forever, so surely it merits extra attention. Here’s what Kantra has to say about it:

SHELF LIFE: What is something you’ve learned about yourself later in your writing career that would have surprised your younger self?

VIRGINIA KANTRA: I always wanted to be a writer—a published author—so much. (Or a famous actress or the hereditary ruler of a small European principality or possibly a Dragonrider of Pern, but mostly I wanted to be a writer.) I thought that to do that I had to write like the authors I admired so desperately, the ones who had already sold. And in the years before I published, I tried. But it turns out that my best writing happens when I am being most myself—when I draw on my own experience and emotions, when I’m personal and specific, vulnerable and honest. 

About a month ago I finished drafting a novel that I lovingly refer to as a queer Handmaid’s Tale meets 9 to 5 (the 1980 film). I had a ball drafting it, relishing the excitement of a new idea taking shape and of trying out things I’ve never done before, like writing from multiple POVs. But now that I’m revising it, the honeymoon is over. I’ve come to the inevitable stage where I have to face the cold, hard truth that the book will never live up to the standard I originally had for it. And I’m no Margaret Atwood.

It’s like George Saunders said a few years ago on the release of his novel A Swim in a Pond in the Rain :

So this moment of supposed triumph—I’d finally found my voice—was also sad. It was as if I’d sent the hunting dog that was my talent out across the meadow to fetch a magnificent pheasant, and it had brought back, let’s say, the lower half of a Barbie doll. To put it another way, having gone about as high up Hemingway Mountain as I could go, having realized that even at my best, I could only ever hope to be an acolyte up there, resolving never again to commit the sin of being imitative, I stumbled back down into the valley and came upon a little shithill labeled Saunders Mountain. Hmm, I thought, it’s so little, and it’s a shithill. Then again, that was my name on it. —Literary Disco podcast (via LitHub)

I would venture to say that this might be the biggest, the gnarliest, the ultimate challenge we face as writers: how to get comfortable with our best, and even learn to lean into it. To let go of the authors we admire so desperately—yes and ouch, so desperately—and perch confidently on our own little shithills.

I’ve had this last week off from work, and I’ve had lots of unexpected writing time. I spent a good amount of it reading and hating the first hundred pages of my novel in progress. It’s so plain and boring, so UN-Atwood-like. So the best I could do. And yet. And yet. It exists, and I can see how to improve it. And it doesn’t have to read like Atwood. In fact, could never read like Atwood. And isn’t it the whole point that it doesn’t read like Atwood?

What I’m trying to say is that I’m learning once again that I can only write like me. Should only write like me. Because the whole point of this writing thing is to share something of myself with readers. To draw on my own experience and emotions, to be personal and specific, vulnerable and honest. And if I’m not doing that, what am I doing? Why am I doing it?

Once I had a full day’s distance from my novel draft, I realized that the real issue is not so much the writing itself; it’s that too much of it lacks specificity and vulnerability. I’m still getting to know these characters, so sometimes they read more like cardboard cutouts going through whatever motions will propel them to the next scene.

For inspiration, I cracked one of my favorite books: Memorial by Bryan Washington. Washington doesn’t read like Atwood either, but his writing feels alive and fresh, and a big part of that comes from specificity and vulnerability. Consider the following exchange between Benson and his boyfriend Mike’s mother, Mitsuko, who’s come to stay with them. Benson and Mitsuko have never met before this visit, and Mike has taken off to see his father, leaving Benson and Mitsuko alone. It’s the first morning after her arrival:

Mitsuko’s in the kitchen, opening things and looking into them and closing them back up again. Water’s boiling on the stove. There’s a mug on the counter. She’s cooked rice, sliced a cucumber, and poached an egg when I step on the tile, and she doesn’t look up, doesn’t even acknowledge that I’m around.
Then she nods my way.
Do you work, she asks.
What, I say.
You don’t work, says Mitsuko, shaking her head.
I do, I say. Mostly in the afternoon.
And what does that look like?
I’m at a daycare.
So you’re a teacher, says Mitsuko.
More like a babysitter, I say.
And Mitsuko doesn’t say anything to that. And I don’t prompt her.

It’s a deceptively simple exchange. Two people meeting for the second time under awkward conditions, but they’re extremely specific conditions, conditions that make them vulnerable. And when you look closely at their dialogue, it also has specificity. It’s no Good morning. I hope I’m not in your way. Thank you for hosting me. No Are you comfortable? Do you need anything? Mitsuko’s first question is right down to business. “Do you work?” And Benson’s answers are notably elusive—“Mostly in the afternoon,” “I’m at a daycare”—leading Mitsuko to probe, despite his claim that “I don’t prompt her.”

It’s each of them trying to exert control in a situation in which they have none.

Here’s one more example, from another one of my favorites—All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews. It’s only a few pages in. It’s a hot summer, Yoli’s family has just sold their house and has a few days to kill before they can move into their new one. They go camping and Yoli’s sister Elfreida has been complaining about it. Their mother says “C’mon, the point is we’re all together, let’s cook our wieners.”

The propane stove had an oil leak and exploded into four-foot flames and charred the picnic table but while that was happening Elfrieda danced around the fire singing “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks, a song about a black sheep saying goodbye to everyone because he’s dying, and our father swore for the first recorded time (What in the Sam Hills!) and stood close to the fire poised to do something but what, what, and our mother stood there shaking, laughing, unable to speak. I yelled at my family to move away from the fire, but nobody moved an inch as if they had been placed in their positions by a movie director and the fire was only fake and the scene would be ruined if they moved. Then I grabbed the half-empty Rainbow ice cream pail that was sitting on the picnic table and ran across the field to a communal tap and filled the pail with water and ran back and threw the water onto the flames…

Again, a deceptively simple circumstance, a propane tank catching fire during a barbecue. But tension (or vulnerability) was already high. And the way each family member reacts to the fire tells the reader so much about them, setting up what we can expect from them for the rest of the story.

Neither Washington nor Toews’s prose conforms to the poetic or literary ideals I grew up on, but in both cases it’s damn fine writing that feels like someone laying it all on the line, that brings the characters and all their messy feelings to life. And it feels like Washington and it feels like Toews and no one else. That’s the kind of writing I like to read. And the kind I want to do. The kind that comes straight from my heart, poetry or no.

For now, I’ll leave you with this. (Another signal from this week that encouraged me to write about this topic.) While I was enjoying a punk rock ride on my exercise bike a few days ago, the instructor on my little screen said that when she first started teaching, she asked her mentor what kind of music people wanted to hear. Her mentor said she should play whatever she liked and her people would find her. Indeed they have.

Happy writing to those of you who do. May you go into the new year expressing yourself and your heart, and may your people find you. And Happy New Year to all! I look forward to hearing what you’re up to in 2024!

Yours,

Jen