What's your story about?
The title of this post is probably a trigger for anyone writing a novel. Sorry not sorry. Even when we’re able to handle the actual writing, talking about that writing with another person is like trying to maintain your composure while a dinosaur sniffs your face (I just saw Jurassic World Rebirth).
Last weekend, at Harrogate, at an event called The Dragon’s Pen, four publishing professionals pulled the names of attendees out of a bucket. If your name was called, you came up to the mic and got 2 minutes to pitch your story. At the end of it, the professionals would each give their candid feedback. Whether the pitch itself worked, whether they were interested in the underlying story, and whether they’d be interested in seeing some pages.
Nearly every writer I know can’t imagine anything more harrowing than pitching your story to get feedback live in front of two hundred other writers (Is this why the crime and thriller festival is held in Harrogate?) So, kudos to anyone who managed to string together a coherent sentence under such circumstances.
But as people pitched their stories, I noticed a common pattern. Almost no one could actually say what their story was about. They got pieces in – the hook, sometimes the protagonist, maybe an antagonist or the vague shape of an obstacle, but then the pitch fizzled out into abstractions, tones and themes, inspirations and influences, comparable books and demographics it might appeal to. But what’s the actual story? I couldn’t tell you a single one.
Then I came back to work, and noticed a similar pattern in how status reports were written. Blah blah resource constraints. Blah blah schedule slips. Blah blah programmatics and reprioritization, optimization and escalation. Okay, but how is the project going? When I dug deeper, nobody seemed to know. They just copied over what they were told by other people, and or said things like, “We’re yellow, but trending green. Kinda limey.” I don’t want to know the aura of the project, I want to understand what got done in the project.
I’ve ranted in a previous post about lessons I’ve learned in clarity and conciseness, but I think now it’s not a matter of skill, but courage. I realized this when I read Brandon Taylor’s most recent Substack post about how he teaches students to write synopses that spoil the story.
When we discuss novel excerpts, I ask that everyone prepare a list of plot events in order, a summary of the dramatic premise or situation, and what they considered to be the key moment or moments in the piece. This is to be prepared before we come to class, ideally as they read and make their marginalia.
Since I started doing this, class discussions have gotten less themey—they are still very themey, but that is just the nature of how people read now, so that’s to be expected—and we waste less time being confused about who this random person is and what’s going to happen.
Themey. The word sent off explosions of realization and anger when I read it. YES, this was exactly what I experienced at the Dragon’s Pen. People pitched stories that “were in the vein of Gone Girl” or “had the same tone as Ben Abramovich,” or “explored themes of women caught between the demands of career and motherhood.” But what’s the stoooooory?
And anger because it doesn’t have to be this way. We’re all emulating the marketing nonsense that sold some other book, using the same tired phrases that editors and agents have heard a thousand times before. We write obfuscated, complicated status reports because we’re unable or unwilling to cut through the cognitive complexity. A long time ago, an executive asked me to provide daily updates on his pet project. It was a stupid project and it wasn’t going well. After two other people tried to couch my direct language in corpspeak, I wrote back on the thread to everyone, including him, “This is like squeezing juice from a very pulpy orange, and even when we do it, the juice is bitter.”
He canceled the project immediately, thanking me for my candor.
I’m realizing, as I write my own synopsis for my next novel, that there are dragons lurking in the things I’m not saying. “After a fight, Nisha abandons Deepthi instead of being the Designated Driver to the party. The next morning, Deepthi is found dead.” What did they fight about? How did Deepthi die? Instead of concretizing plot points, I veer off into theme-land. “Nisha feels guilty and isolated, made worse by Deepthi’s parents treating her as their own daughter.” Yeah, but what happens?
Certain authors have a faux-literary bent, straining for profundity by using words that suggest meaning without actually meaning anything, like tempura with nothing inside. I really hope I’m not one of them. I recently finished Heart Lamp, the collection of short stories by Banu Mushtaq that won the Booker. What was extraordinary about it was the clarity of storytelling. It genuinely felt like a grandmother was chasing me around to eat, and telling me the story to keep me in place while she stuffed a ball of rice into my mouth.
Consider the first paragraph of Red Lungi, one of the stories from Heart Lamp which appeared in the Paris Review:
There’s no end to the woes that mothers face come summer vacation. All the children are at home. When they’re not in front of the TV, they’re either climbing the guava tree in the front yard or perched on the compound wall. What if one of them falls and breaks an arm or a leg? Then there’s the crying, the laughter, the punishments they inflict on one another based on some arcane system of justice … This was why Razia’s headaches worsened when the summer holidays started. The nerves in her temples throbbed, her hot head felt like it would burst, and it seemed as if the veins at the back of her neck might snap at any moment. One after the other the children rushed in with their complaints, crying and screaming … and then there were their games … abbabbaa … battles with swords and machine guns, bomb attacks … !
What’s the story about? “The woes that mothers face when children are home during summer vacation.”
Who is the protagonist? “Razia, a mother.”
What’s the conflict / obstacle? “Her headaches increase as the children cry and scream.”
It’s really that simple. Compare that to the opening of Behind her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough:
Pinch myself and say I AM AWAKE once an hour.
Look at my hands. Count my fingers.
Look at clock (or watch), look away, look back.
Stay calm and focused.
Think of a door.
Can you answer any of the three questions? Maybe I’m not being fair, and this is more like a prologue. Let’s go to Chapter 3 where the paragraphs get less experimental and the story supposedly begins. What’s the story about?
There’s still mud under my fingernails when David finally comes home. I can feel it stinging against my raw skin, deep under the beds. My stomach twists, wringing fresh nerves out as the front door shuts, and for a moment we just look at each other from opposite ends of the long corridor of our new Victorian house, a tract of perfectly polished wood between us, before he turns, swaying slightly, towards the sitting room. I take a deep breath and join him, flinching at each of the hard beats of my heels against the floorboards. I must not be afraid. I need to repair this. We need to repair this.
Can you answer any of the three questions yet? Not even if you read the Wikipedia summary? You’re not alone. I think we claim to be afraid of spoiling our story when we boil it down to the clear facts, but the reality is that we’re actually not entirely sure what those facts are. We’ve digested so much corpspeak and political doublespeak and social media gibberish and AI-generated nonsense that we’re living in an Orwellian world where we think we’re reading a story, but we’re actually reading a processed meta-story that’s meant to tickle our emotions without actually awakening them. In such a world, even to call a thing what it is is a deeply political act. When I pushed the program managers at work to write what the status actually was, they balked – the people reading it would be upset, they said, asking me to consider the optics of saying “This isn’t going well” in a climate of layoffs.
Maybe truth and clarity are beyond us for now, at least in English. Heart Lamp’s translator Deepa Bhasthi writes:
Bandaya means dissent, rebellion, protest, resistance to authority, revolution and its adjacent ideas; combine it with sahitya, meaning literature, and we get the name of a short-lived but highly influential literary movement in the Kannada language in the 1970s and ‘80s. Bandaya Sahitya started as an act of protest against the hegemony of upper caste and mostly male-led writing that was then being published and celebrated. The movement urged women, Dalits and other social and religious minorities to tell stories from within their own lived experiences and in the Kannada they spoke.
I find it particularly heartwarming based on this that the cover of my edition of Heart Lamp is the text from one of its short stories. No hiding behind abstractions, metaphors, or vaguely shadowy imagery. The text is revolutionary. What’s the story about? Shut up and read it.
We deserve stories that reveal and liberate us, but we seem to be either afraid or ashamed of stating what our stories are really about. Instead, we try to attach our concrete, lived experiences to more universal abstractions – “challenges of motherhood” or “living with disability” or “struggling for belonging.”
Well, fuck that. Next time someone asks me what my current novel is about, I’m going to say, “Twenty-five years ago, Nisha’s best friend Deepthi died in what was ruled an accident. Now, Nisha’s father-in-law is on trial for the sexual exploitation of a minor, and her husband might have killed Deepthi to hide his father’s crime.” If you want to read it, let me know.