Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction

Subject Matter

Subject Matter In his terrific book Making Shapely Fiction, the late Jerome Stern has a section titled “A Cautionary Interlude,” in which he lists different kinds of plots that writers should avoid writing. It’s a smart list that illuminates a host of common problems, and I have read that list aloud to my students countless times. In this chapter, I hope to take Stern’s idea one step further by listing actual, very specific subjects that carry with them assorted problematic baggage if the writer isn’t careful. Throughout this book I make note of “default modes,” by which I mean that beginning writers tend to gravitate toward the same things, whether it’s imagery (clichés like “piercing blue eyes”), syntax (overuse of as he, as she, or as they constructions), or narrative strategies (writing increasingly incomprehensible sentences the deeper a narrator sinks into psychosis). For the experienced reader, the above examples are all painfully familiar— code, if you will, that the person writing the story is either a novice or someone who doesn’t listen to criticism of his work. But for the novice writer who is eager to move beyond these default modes, there’s no way to know what a default mode is unless the writer reads thousands upon thousands of pages of work by other novice writers, or unless someone with more experience (for example, the creative writing teacher) reveals to the novice precisely what those default modes are. There are default subject matters, too, and every time I teach a beginning fiction writing course, I can count on seeing many of these at least once. There’s nothing inherently wrong with most of these subjects—and, in fact, many great stories have been written using them—but the fact is that most of the stories I read by beginning writers who choose these subjects are not great stories (or even moderately good ones) because each subject matter 15 subject presents one or more potential problems, problems that are difficult to avoid if you don’t know what those problems are or why they’re problems. I’m in a unique position because I have read well over a million pages of fiction written by beginning writers—frighteningly, this is not an exaggerated figure—but also because I have edited theme-based anthologies, for which I often put out calls for submissions, and what I discovered was that for every broad subject there’s a default story. My first anthology, for instance, was a collection of stories about adultery. About half of the one thousand stories I culled through, in my attempt to find a few dozen stories worthy enough to be included in the book, were about older men having affairs with younger women (almost all written by older men), and most of those were about (surprise!) male bosses having affairs with their younger female employees. It was hard imagining that these weren’t mostly fantasies recorded for posterity. Most of them were not very good. The characters were familiar from one story to the next, and the plot arcs were often predictable. My task was to find the one good, original version of this story. Which story transcended these familiar elements? Which story surprised me? What this experience taught me was that whenever I sit down to write my own stories, I need to think carefully about the default version and the almost insurmountable task of transcending it. If, for instance, I decide one day to write a father and son story about hunting, I’ll need to think long and hard about all the other father and son hunting stories I’ve read, because, let’s face it, there are thousands of father and son hunting stories out there. What can I bring to the table that’s fresh? What are the tropes of that particular genre that I need to avoid so that my story doesn’t read like the other two million father-son hunting stories? In this chapter, I have listed the most common subjects for stories that I come across each semester in my fiction writing courses, and I’ve attempted to explain the inherent pitfalls of each one. Again, I’m not suggesting that great stories can’t be written on these subjects—in fact, I have included for further reading at least two examples of successful stories and/or novels for 16 subject...