My Most Valuable Writing Lesson & Publishing Advice

"People remember and care about story more than anything else."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

---

Call me a nerd, but the most rockstar person I’ve ever met was not an actual rockstar but a social psychologist/Harvard professor by the name of Dan Gilbert. You might know him from Prudential commercials and an old PBS series. (These facts alone should be a testament to the fact that he is no ordinary academic). I know him as the guy who single-handedly changed everything I knew about professoring, and while he was at it, storytelling.

By the time I met him, I was a jaded postdoctoral fellow who had both taught and teaching-assisted my fair share of psychology classes at various institutions: both public and private alike, secular and religious, even a famed photography institute. I thought I had seen all the different configurations of how someone with a string of initials behind their name could teach a room full of adults about the incomprehensible things in their lives—namely, why people do and want the things that they do. I was wrong.           

On the first day of class, at the start of the very first lecture, Gilbert opened his introduction to psychology with—not a history of the field or a walk-through of terms or even a dissection of the syllabus—but with a tale of two people that I had never heard of before but have also never been able to forget. Amenah and Majid were their names. Their photos splattered across the giant lit screen at the front of an auditorium of students and TAs who thought they were there for a lecture but got, instead, a life lesson.

The abbreviated version goes something like this: Amenah was a student in Iran, and one the first day of class in a classroom not unlike ours, she sat down. The guys next to her—Majid—started to rub his leg ever so casually against hers. She moved seats; he followed. She stood up and asked him to stop; he said nothing. This would go on for weeks before one afternoon, on her way to the bus stop, Amenah saw someone come up beside her out of the corner of her eye. It was Majid. It was also the last thing she would ever see, because at that point, the man threw a pint of sulfuric acid onto her face.

She cried, “I’m burning!” And lifted her hands to her face, burning them as well.

Later, Majid turned himself in. Apparently, Iran was a country where the justice system could largely be summed up as “an eye for an eye,” because the judge sentenced the man to be blinded himself. But the day before he was scheduled to go to the hospital to receive his reckoning, something miraculous happened: Amenah forgave him. And per the ancient laws of exchanging eyes for eyes, this meant that Majid went free.

Gilbert flashed a recent photo of Amenah on the screen, smiling even as her face, long ago melted by acid, elicited a collective gasp. But things that make us flinch tend to be seared into our memory, and if I was a betting woman, I’d bet that all 800 or so of those Harvard kids in that room still remember this story, as I do. They may not be able to tell you what a scotoma is or geographically locate Broca’s versus Wernicke’s areas in the brain, but they likely will recall that the point of the story of Amenah meets Majid is this: two people could be made up of all the same stuff—the same 3-5 pound piece of meat between their ears, the same language and religion and geography—and yet turn out to be completely different in all the ways that matter because that remains the greatest mystery to not just psychologists, but everyone else with a vested interest in survival.

As a scholar—and author himself—of the human condition, Gilbert intuited that people remember and care about story more than anything else, no matter what they’re trying to do or accomplish otherwise. If this is true for undergraduate classes at Harvard, it’s also true everywhere else, including just about every major form of writing worth reading.

These days, when I’m not busy teaching psychology to unsuspecting students and trying to emulate Gilbert’s ways, I author novels, short stories, and essays, and edit the latter two too. Across all these hats, my singular peeve—the one mistake I see over and over again—is the lack of story. I wish writers understood that writing short fiction or creative nonfiction does not exonerate them from the need for having a “story” and all the required elements. By “story,” I mean "plot," loosely defined. And by “plot” I mean something has to happen between the opening sentence and the last words. That something has to be major and/or transformative enough to give the reader a reason for their time spent on these words when they could’ve been on TikTok, where interesting characters plotting crazy things abound.

Even in short stories and CNF, there should be some trajectory in one form or another--the character or narrator has to have gone somewhere--however metaphorical--and lived to tell the tale. The most successful literary nonfiction writers and journalists seem to intuit this—it’s no accident, for example, that Malcom Gladwell’s wildly bestselling books all center around a single idea but use chapter after chapter of stories based on idiosyncratic people to tell it. Take any one of them and you can see that the point may be about outliers or the deadly assumptions we make about strangers or our unfounded confidence in top-dogs instead of underdogs, but open any chapter and what you will find are tales about aspiring golfers or victims of racial profiling or ancient encounters between a shepherd-turned-short-king and a guy with a pituitary disorder.

Same for short stories. There is this long-standing and hotly contested stance in publishing that short stories don’t sell as much as novels. Years ago, I was explicitly told this when an iconic literary agency emailed me after seeing one of my first short stories published in ZYZZYVA. In the message, he said something to the effect of: if you’ve got a short story collection, save that for your second book. The idea, of course, was that short stories were a harder sell and therefore easier to pull off when a novel was already in the works. I didn’t end up being represented by this agent, but their advice stuck around for long enough such that by the end I was ready to query with a few dozen published short stories to my name and a manuscript for a novel, I went with the novel.

Only after I sold my first novel (The Band, forthcoming from Atria this April) did it dawn on me that this industry-wide preference for novels over short stories might be for a reason and not just some mass conspiracy against short fictions. After all, in the context of a novel, the need for plot is more explicit because of the nature of writing a full-length work. In short stories, many writers wrongly assume that because of the shorter length, the demand for a trajectory or turn of events isn’t there. If you’re Raymond Carver, you can apparently get away with this. If you’re anyone else who haven’t quite reached icon status, good luck. I’m not saying snapshots of life aren’t worthwhile. I’m just saying it’s harder to get into a story and rant or rave about it to everyone you know if nothing happens.

This probably single-handedly explains why linked short story collection or “novel-in-stories” are so popular. Jennifer Egan executed this to surgical perfection with her Pulitzer-winning Visit From a Goon Squad, which broke all the structural and formatting rules but managed to feel like a novel, with all its twists and turns, even as it relied on stories and even a series of PowerPoint slides to do so. Richard Powers did the same with his critically acclaimed masterpiece about how we’re killing all the trees, as did the Olive Kitteridge series about the interconnected lives in a single town. Even collections that aren’t explicitly linked—Brandon Taylor’s Filthy Animals come to mind—frequently have reoccurring characters, because if there is anything we know about the human mind, it’s that it loves meaning, continuity, closure. It’s harder to derive all that when the character stays the same and nothing changes.

As an editor at Identity Theory and Hotch Potch Literature & Art, this remains the single most common reason I reject submissions. Sometimes the writing is beautiful and the sentence structure takes my breath away. But I cannot accept a piece on the basis of its feels and figurative language alone. I suspect that I get these pieces because people who are naturally talented at writing are always tempted to rest on those talents instead of doing the much harder work of coming up with an actual plot. I say this because I’m one of them. Pretty sentences come easier to me than narrative arcs. (Are there people born with an innate capacity for plot? Maybe Stephen King). But at the end of the day, I—like everyone else—need a reason for living. And by “living” I mean reading.

In practice, this means that the protagonist needs to end up in a different place—literally or otherwise—from where they started. The difference between storytelling and other potentially satisfyingly pastimes like jet skiing is that in a story (unlike on a jet ski), where you start isn’t where you end. It’s not a roundtrip; it’s a one-way journey. Sometimes the destination is only in their head—the hero realizes something or discovers a new tidbit about themselves or their universe. In the best pieces I’ve read and accepted, the events that happen in the middle of the story clearly lead to this transformation, allowing the reader to trace the causal lineage from beginning to end. After all, in life as in fiction, figuring out what happens and why—there are few things more satisfying than that.

---