This summer, I’ve been fortunate enough to attend the Odyssey Writer’s Workshop in Manchester, New Hampshire, a six-week craft intensive for speculative fiction. The genre tends to evoke images of rocket ships and wizards in the popular imagination, but encompasses all kinds of stories with non-mimetic worlds, including literary fabulism, theological meditations, psychological horror and thriller, and hybrid motifs (rocket ships piloted by wizards, for example). My classmates have amused, horrified, intrigued and moved me with perspectives and ideas I never would have encountered otherwise.
The focus on craft and form at Odyssey is so powerful because the instructor, Jeanne Cavelos, is both deeply knowledgeable about the tools and theories but ultimately not prescriptive about what it is that makes an individual story and individual writer’s voice “work.” I was nervous about this going in: I wanted to know what I knew I didn’t know, to have what I expressed also be understood, but would I lose something about my own intuition in the process? My experience, nearing the final as I write this, has been the complete opposite of the fear; in recognition and practice of certain conventions, I’ve been more able to consciously put aside the ones that simply don’t work for the stories I want to tell, and strengthen my ideas when they do. So I wondered, where did I learn that fear in the first place?
Outside workshop, in the mercurial and sometimes brutal process of actually getting the words out into the world, there is a tension between many publishers increasingly visible and grandiose claims to want “diverse voices” and those same publishers’ actual behavior: getting more conservative and narrow in their selection about what is “marketable” (or its soft synonyms, “relatable” and “likable.”
“It didn’t quite come together for us.” What on earth could that mean? I t might mean, “this was excellent, but could use some clarification on sentence level, and we simply don’t have the resources to go through that process for a short story–sorry, good luck, try again please!” It can also mean, “look, I know we say we wanted diverse voices, but the very form of this text reflected a tangible expression of difference, and really what we want is conventional stories with a palette swap to make us look more progressive as a brand.”
Sometimes this is as plain as using language that is natural to you but considered “broken English” or “slang” that must be set off in italics, explained or outright removed. Sometimes its in the way people assert hard rules against things like second person point of view or lengthy flashbacks–“nobody actually experiences their body or their memory that way”–when, indeed, those of us intimate with dissociative states or post-traumatic stress very much do. Sometimes it’s as subtle and well-intentioned as narrative proportions and tension that don’t fit the three-act, arc-shaped mold (“slow to start”, “the ending didn’t quite land”)– as though Freytag’s Pyramid is a universal truth devoid of cultural context. For writers from marginalized perspectives, even the most polite and neutral rejection or omission can putrefy into fear and doubt within, because there is no way to know for sure “why.”
This kind of anxiety can manifest in complex and tragic ways even within the in-group. Portrayals of your own experiences approached with nuance, transgression, or self-satire might be considered too dangerous to air in the face of daily systemic oppression, airing the “dirty laundry,” perpetuating “bad representation.”
And sometimes a small, independent online magazine (for example) simply has a specific editorial vision (and likely a volunteer masthead), which is a kind of narrowness that, if part of a larger environment of many different cultural and aesthetic goals, can foster healthy artistic variety. But the key factor is that vast plentitude–too often the visions and personalities driving new or smaller publications seem a bit too much like more of what already exists, which means a finished story might have over a dozen possible appropriate markets to submit to… or none at all.
I’m grateful to have had the opportunities through my Fellowship at the Writers’ Room of Boston and admission to the Odyssey Writing Workshop this year to make my writing into a studied practice. Gaining time, space, and actionable techniques is an invaluable privilege. One of the most valuable things I’ve learned this year so far is that “good writing” depends so much on context, and being able to identify what is happening formally in my own work has made the choices more deliberate and the intentions clearer from the first draft. At the same time, concern about exclusion and homogeny are not mere sour grapes from the fringes. I would love to see publishers and editors committed to “diversity” consider and respond more seriously to formal expectations in whatever genre they’ve committed to. What is the shape of a “good story?” Who is the “average reader?” Are there expectations and norms that may be getting overripe in the desire to innovate?
-2018 WROB Fellow Julian K. Jarboe
