No, I am not thinking of converting. Too many things about Islam do not fit with my thinking. However, there has been too much fear and hysteria about Islam since 9/11/2001. Gary Willls is a writer I have been paying attention to for around 40 years now. Seeing Garry Wills and the Q'uran on YouTube, I wanted to hear what he had to say. I think it is sensible.
Neither McDougall nor Morrissey have written their books as explicit interventions to the current febrility that characterises so much of the public discourse about Islam’s place in the West, but their works are vital interventions, nonetheless. Their authoritative but unobtrusive expositions in a supposedly post-expert era move us beyond a hackneyed and essentialised depiction of a faith that is professed by around one quarter of humanity. Those promoting such a view, McDougall argues, are more often than not engaging in more ‘self-promoting paranoid fantasy than historically informed, judicious realism, but that has not prevented it from selling well’.
I wonder how much of what think we know of Islam is a fever dream and how much of it is accurate. It could also be that so long as we rave we create our own problems.
About all I can do is think. Today was another one of those days of fogginess. I do not know whether it is because of the hernias or not taking my meds as I should. I tried napping and never really fell asleep, only wasted time. I got up after 8 pm and decided to order a sandwich and work on this blog. I have not stepped out of the apartment building since this morning. Not that I feel anything lost, other than time.
Before the portions quoted below, there as a discussion about French grammar and I wonder if that does not make a difference between their novels and ours. English is far less formal than French. Think about it.
A traditional “realistic” novel strives to develop characters with believable physical and psychological detail, but Bessette’s approach might actually be the more lifelike one: while she pursues her narrative with a detective’s intent, the novelist remains more or less visible as the source of the artifice, and she never lets us forget that what we are reading is a text. Put another way, it’s useful to know that Bessette once described her writing as “auto-biographie realiste, non fantaisiste”—“realistic, non-fanciful autobiography”—which makes me think of Gertrude Stein, whose work Bessette read and admired. In his afterword to a later edition of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1948), Stein’s short novel about several mysterious incidents that occurred one summer while Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas were living in a country house in eastern France, John Herbert Gill writes: “Like much of Gertrude Stein’s work, the detective novel she produced is a kind of interior monologue, in which past and present, the contents of the writer’s mind as well as the room and the landscape in which she is situated at the moment of writing, are joined … The ‘continuous present’ in which Gertrude Stein’s writing lives erases all distinction between the work itself and the writer as she sets it down.” For Stein—and, because everything she wrote was filtered through her particular consciousness: the first and last person.
***
There’s the sense here, as Alice Oswald says,
that “it’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a
poem has to exist.” Add to this Bessette’s notion that “traditional
prose … even when it has thoughtful and intelligent things to say,
remains a very commercial product.” A Poetic Novel, then, is perhaps one
from which all the excess—words, commerce, false comfort—has been
wrung, because the author (and her reader) is living under duress, in
extremity, at a time when the finitude of life is quite clear. All of
which is not to suggest that a Poetic Novel must be somber and heavy,
because Twenty Minutes of Silence
is nimble, playful, funny, irreverent. I particularly like the
exchanges between Monsieur the Chief Inspector and his Deputy, who
remind me of Chandler’s brutally absurdist cop duos (The Little Sister’s
Fred Beifus and Christy French, for instance). Bessette’s impatience
with the traditional elements of a novel is apparent: it seems she
simply did not write what didn’t interest her. To make a profound book
by stripping it to the bone (to the “I,” the first and last person)—to
write, as a scrawled note in her literary archives declares, “the
biggest novel of the world by the smallest novelist of that world”—that
was her ambition.
This is all for “Chasing Ashes”. I do not know what it will, only that it has to be different.
And, given the stipulation in the flight
forward against revision, mistakes cannot be fixed but must be
incorporated into the whole as the novel progresses, making an Aira book
always surprising, even (or especially) to himself. The resulting pull
of his fiction’s compulsive, ever-fresh flow along unusual narrative
channels feels somehow at once both organic and precise. Perhaps it is
Aira living so fully in the moment—catching his thoughts in midair as he
writes his scenes—that makes life itself, in all its random
strangeness, come so startlingly alive on his pages.
Not that I this Aira's talent:
...Aira
combines an innate genius for fiction with a humbling erudition—he’s
read everything, and translated much of it, from Shakespeare to Stephen
King—which is how he can, before our very eyes get away with his
flights. Any process is, in theory, replicable, but applying Aira’s
would end the career of most writers.
I just feel like my own stuff is so constituated.
Although I am not put off by Dostoyevsky nowadays, I think that has more to do with having joined the Eastern Orthodox Church, there is something true in Mark Nayler's Dostoevsky is a dreadful writer(The Spectator).
Given Dostoevsky’s reputation as one of the untouchables of literature, I
was surprised at how bad his prose is. It lacks grace and balance.
Instead of taught, stylish sentences, Dostoevsky works in messy,
interminable paragraphs that erode the reader’s goodwill. I’m partly
grateful, though, because his exhausting prose at least forced me to
reflect on the complex relationship between reader and writer.
And this is not how I would not want to be thought of:
My negative reaction to Dostoevsky, as I
recently discovered, places me in distinguished company. Vladimir
Nabokov once described him as “not a great writer, but a rather mediocre
one – with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of
literary platitudes in between.” Ernest Hemingway had mixed
reactions: “How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and
make you feel so deeply?” he asked. For Henry James, Dostoevsky’s novels
were “loose baggy monsters” and “fluid
puddings.” James couldn’t finish Crime and Punishment. Reading it, he said, was “like having an illness.”
We too often blame ourselves if
we don’t like or “get” a classic work of literature, thus absolving the
writer of all responsibility. But after battling my way through almost
1,500 pages of Dostoevsky, I’m in no mood to be generous. The fault
is mainly his.
Two rejections came in:
Thank you for sending "After Making Landfall." After careful consideration, we've decided this submission isn't right for AGNI.
Kind regards, The Editors
Visit AGNI Online, featuring selections from our print issues, as well as a trove of new Web-exclusive writing.
To stay connected, sign up for the AGNInewsletter!
And this for a submission from last year:
Thank you
for your submission to Press Pause Press. We did not find "Coming Home" a
fit for Press Pause at this time, but we appreciated the chance to
consider your work, and we wish you the best of luck finding it a home.
The court’s attacks on congressional power have not come through its monumental decisions regarding reproductive freedom, firearms, or presidential immunity.
Instead – and more quietly – the court is also attempting to strip
Congress of its authority to carry out its most important function: make
laws for the benefit of the American people, where the voting
population can hold the elected officials who make those laws
accountable through the ballot box. As described below, the unelected
members of the court weakened this core relationship between the
American people and their government by dismantling pro-democracy voting
rights laws, inventing new judicial doctrines out of whole cloth to
reject duly enacted laws, rejecting administrative expertise, permitting
the president to fire the heads of otherwise independent agencies, and
dismissing legislative history as a tool for interpreting the
legislative intent behind congressional action.
Taken together,
this arrogation of power upsets the careful system of checks and
balances created by the founders, elevating the court above Congress, a
“co-equal” branch of government where the founders believed policy
decisions should be made. These judicial interventions have made it
harder for Congress to protect civil rights, voting access, and the
environment. What is worse, they position the judiciary as America’s
primary policymaking body, a role the founders never intended for the
courts.
***
As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 47:
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary,
in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether
hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the
very definition of tyranny.”
Thank you again for submitting 'The Unintended Consequences of Art' for
consideration by The Future Fire. The editors have read this work and
after some discussion we have decided not to take it for publication.
We'd like to thank you again for thinking of us with this piece, and wish you the very best with your writing in the future.
Thank you
for sending us "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1861 – 1984."
Unfortunately, we do not have a place for it at this time. However, we
appreciate the opportunity to read your writing and your interest in
Peatsmoke.
We hope you find a good home for your work elsewhere, and wish you the best.
We are grateful
that you trusted ANMLY with "After Making Landfill," however, our
readers felt that this particular packet was not a good fit, and we will
be unable to publish it. We wish you luck in placing this elsewhere.
Thank you for submitting to Ploughshares. We have decided
not to include your submission in an upcoming issue, but please be
assured that "After Making Landfall" was carefully read.
Editorial decisions at Ploughshares are often informed by
our vision for future issues, and as a result, we unfortunately must
reject quality submissions more often than we'd like. Thank you again
for the opportunity to consider your work.
For future submission opportunities, please note that our Emerging
Writers' Contest is open each year from February 1-March 31 and our
Regular Reading Period is open from June 1-November 15.
He noted, “Based on my experience teaching and lecturing across the
world, the Creative Resistance is strongest in North America, much less
dominant in India, and still less in China and Korea, with Europe
somewhere in between. When I taught a class on AI and creativity in
Seoul last summer, with students from across Asia as well as Latin
America, they had a single concern: please teach us how to use these
tools effectively. The only person calling for creative resistance was
an American student who had strayed into the class.”
That seems pretty typical of American politics as well.
Maybe
that’s the real debate. Many people in the US tend to look at social
issues through the lens of politics, and since our politics is so
divided, there is little to no middle ground, and no attempt to
compromise. The Creative Resistance seems to mirror the us-against-them
mentality that dominates our national discourse.
***
The above opinion of AI by people in other countries is closer
to my own. I see it as a useful tool to enhance my work. It allows me to
do research much faster4,
and it occasionally offers input that augments my thinking, much like a
human work partner. Its errors are annoying, but I believe I have the
experience and judgment to weed them out of my work process.
I don’t use AI for writing. I don’t use it for planning or to brainstorm. I don’t use it to edit my work5.
I am not tempted to use it for those purposes, partly because I have
what I consider a very strong imagination, as well as decades of
experience in creative writing and just don’t need it, and mostly
because LLMs are tools that rely primarily on compilations of standard,
mainstream literature, and I don’t want to write like that. They mimic
writing styles, rather than attempt to create anything imaginative or
original. They are useful as writing tools mostly for people who do not
really know how to write.
I do not see it useful for my writing, and after too many years of doing my own research (and still regretting two errors), after letting one other person, someone I trusted at the time, I do not outsource my research.
Writers themselves, of course, have always guarded their own punctuation
ferociously. (“I absolutely insist on this comma,” wrote Baudelaire,
putting a removed one back in on a page proof of Les Fleurs du Mal.)
Editors remove commas or dashes at their peril; equally, Hazrat shows
neatly how, in adding a ton of commas to Jack Kerouac’s draft of On the
Road, his first editor did violence to the breathless dynamism of the
prose. This is all evidence for her admirable insistence that
punctuation is part of writing itself, an essential component of style
and of the architecture of thought.
Ivy Compton-Burnett's forgotten genius (Engelsberg ideas). A short piece about a writer I do not think I had heard of but the site turns up interesting items of all sorts. From what I read, complicated and distinctive, with the possibility of fomenting some ideas.
Ivy Compton-Burnett’s literary method is quite unique, relying almost
entirely on dialogue to drive the action. There is very little
exposition, scene-setting or character drawing, and plot, as such, is
perfunctory, often drawing on creaky devices from Victorian fiction. ‘As
regards plot’, she wrote, ‘I find real life no help at all. Real life
seems to have no plots.’ Compton-Burnett’s dialogue is quite
extraordinary – it has to be, as it has so much weight to carry. Her
characters talk endlessly in long, formal, finely nuanced conversations
which seethe with dark subtext, unspoken motives and fierce passions.
These have to be read with close attention to discover – gradually or,
often, explosively – what is really going on. It could be anything, up
to and including murder. You have to be on your toes even to keep track
of who is speaking, as these conversations often involve several people,
sometimes talking over each other or aside. It’s rather like listening
from outside a door – something Ivy’s characters frequently do, in the
course of uncovering what is really going on. They also have a habit of
suddenly materialising from nowhere, like Jeeves.
***
It is unlikely that these novels will ever again have a wide appeal –
they are too challenging, in too many ways, for a modern readership –
but it would be a sad loss if they were forgotten. Ivy Compton-Burnett
is a true one-off, and her novels are like nothing else in fiction:
others, including Henry James and Ronald Firbank, have written novels in
dialogue, but they are nothing like Ivy’s. She even, it seems, defeats
AI’s mimetic abilities: I recently challenged a chatbot to produce a
passage in Compton-Burnett style and the result was thoroughly
unsatisfactory – whereas Firbank came out well. Ivy herself once said,
‘Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it
down.’ It is well worth resisting the urge.
Arcan’s untimely death forced a re-evaluation of her work and persona.
Posthumously, she was transformed from a frivolous, middlebrow enfant terrible
into a subject of serious erudite study. Critics have been perturbed
that Arcan embraced conventional scripts of female beauty and sexuality.
Feminist critics have had a difficult time figuring out what to make of
her contradictory politics, her obsession with death, and her grim view
of female subjectivity. For others—like the Tout le monde en parle
panellists—her manicured, surgically enhanced good looks were evidence
of hypocrisy, given the biting assault on beauty culture she levelled on
the page. Their absolutist logic is unable to parse the messy reality
that a person can be intellectually critical of the same norms in which
they are psychically invested.
A new perspective on Lincoln that illuminates: Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln by Matthew Pinskerreview by Richard Carwardine (Literary Review). Maybe I just did not know that much about Lincoln as the party man before his election. It does not explain Lincoln, nothing ever will. It just shines a light on a spot.
Though behind a paywall, Edward N. Luttwak's review of The Arab Bureau by Eamonn Gearon (Times Literary Supplement) makes a great case for why history is important, even more than the hard sciences:
The question arises: whence did all this
modernity come? Even today, one does not associate Oxbridge – where
almost all Arab Bureau staff were educated – with the ultra-modern, but
it is a paradoxical truth that there was something exceedingly modern at
the core of pre-1914 classical studies: the new, hyper-systematic Roman
historiography invented in German universities under the leadership of
Theodor Mommsen. (German became a required language to study the
classics because of it.) Its purpose was to replace reliance on the
narrative historians, with their limited fields of vision, time-limited
coverage and personal biases, so similar to the inherent limitations of
agent reports (even the great Tacitus unfairly condemned Domitian’s
sensible withdrawal from unproductive Scotland, newly conquered by his
son-in-law Agricola, with his perdomita Britannia et statim omissa),
with the systematic collection of Roman inscriptions throughout the
empire by successive generations of student volunteers. Equally
systematically, these were collated to allow the extraction of “hard
data”, from which the actual dates of wars and other events, and the
politically revealing career paths of Roman officers and officials,
could be extracted, turning Roman historiography into a scientific
endeavour centred on epigraphy. The Roman history almost everyone in the
Bureau had necessarily learned at some stage of their education was
thus an excellent preparation for their intelligence work.
The first chapter of this book, which
explains why the Arab Bureau’s masters were ultimately able to use its
intelligence to drive out the Ottoman power and expand the British
Empire, has startlingly modern implications. It recalls the Ottoman
reaction to the first expressions of Arab nationalism: the public
execution in Damascus, on May 6, 1916, of seven prominent Arab
intellectuals and public figures, accompanied the same morning by the
execution of fourteen poets, journalists and political activists in
Beirut. The condemned were forced to walk to the gallows wearing
placards specifying their supposed crimes. In both cities, the Turks
failed to obtain the desired reaction – the crowds were horrified by
their cruelty. Now that there is a Turkish president who relies on the
Ottoman nostalgia of Turkish TV serials in offering his leadership to
the Levant, he is discovering that very different memories persist.
With the Fourth of July past, Donald J. Trump's best efforts to turn the day into an image of his jaundiced, misanthropic self, I have been leery of adding to the disgust. I would rather not cater to those who want to indulge in their masturbatory fantasies, regardless of their actual politics. We have not attained the goals sets out in the Declaration of Independence. I doubt it will ever be possible. There will always be those denied their equal part in American liberty, life, and pursuit of happiness.
And for a lot of Black people, both enslaved and free Black people during the American Revolution, they saw the declaration as doing multiple things. It wasn’t about American nationalism. It wasn’t about American independence. What it was about was a referendum on the definition of the human. It was also a justification for rebellion, right? And then, the third thing is that they saw it as a kind of lever to argue against the conceits of liberty — that is to say, that the claims that, you know, all people have a right to liberty, no matter who it was intended for, they could use that language against their slave owners, against those who ruled the colonies, and against those who ruled the new republic. And so, in some ways, they were making a case that their claims of freedom were far more universal than the provincial claims of the colonists fighting for freedom against British colonial rule, you know.
And ultimately, the American Revolution was hardly an anti-colonial movement, because in many ways it was a struggle to take control of this empire, this expanding West. I think one of the most important parts of the — or, the argument for independence was a resistance to the British Proclamation of 1763 that said that colonists cannot move beyond the Appalachian Mountains. And in the end, they were pushing against British limitations on expansion. In other words, they wanted more empire for themselves. And in the end, what we get is a nation that is pro-slavery, ultimately, or divided on the question of slavery, in which the proceeds and benefits of American capitalism would generate or flow to the — to those who are settler colonial — settler colonists, as opposed to Britain or the crown.
But the bicentennial took place at a time when the
moment of maximum danger for the republic seemed to have passed. Today,
that moment may not have yet arrived: the prospects for the next few
years, and the years after those, look pretty bleak. But reading about
the bicentennial, I nonetheless wondered whether the amnesia button
might be pressed once again—whether we could expect another explosion of
warm and fuzzy feelings—and what it might mean for the nation.
Privately I wondered whether I, too, would be susceptible, and whether I
could connect with any remnant of the old faith that I had first picked
up from children’s books, my parents, and the honorable masters of the
Austin Independent School District, or if it would all feel, well,
childish.
Gage’s trips around the US left her hopeful. “I came away from my
travels,” she writes, “heartened about the state of our country.” Even
in the places that recall the most painful parts of the past, she
suggests, “there’s a quiet hope that next time we’ll do it better.” At
the very least, she writes, traveling the country and learning about
history “makes it harder to say that things today are worse than ever.”
“For better or worse, public interest in history tends to peak at
moments like ours, full of political debate, anxiety, and division,”
Gage writes early on in the book—and there’s a sense that this book is a
response to that interest, as well as a corrective to the current
politically divisive climate. Her closing discussion of Connecticut,
specifically New Haven (a city close to my own heart), implicitly
reminds readers to look around them for the historical past, as her
introduction reminded us that we are all historical subjects, made by
history. Gage notes that she was surprised by how “intensely local” the
history that she found was—that the great conflicts of a nation are
played out on a local scale—and she praises the many citizen initiatives
she saw.
Five years later, in senate
debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Indiana’s John Pettit pronounced
his widely quoted statement that the supposed “self-evident truth” of
man’s equal creation was in fact “a self-evident lie.” Ohio’s senator
Benjamin Franklin Wade, an outspoken opponent of slavery known for his
vituperative style and intense patriotism, rose to reply. Perhaps Wade’s
first and middle names gave him a special bond with the Declaration
and its creators. The “great declaration cost our forefathers too
dear,” he said, to be so “lightly thrown away by their children.”
Without its inspiring principles the Americans could not have won their
independence; for the revolutionary generation the “great truths” in
that “immortal instrument,” the Declaration of Independence,
were “worth the sacrifice of all else on earth, even life itself.” How,
then, were men equal? Not, surely, in physical power or intellect. The
“good old Declaration” said “that all men are equal, and have
inalienable rights; that is, [they are] equal in point of right; that no
man has a right to trample on another.” Where those rights were wrested
from men through force or fraud, justice demanded that they be
“restored without delay.”
Abraham Lincoln, a little-known
forty-four-year-old lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, who had served one
term in Congress before being turned our of office, read these debates,
was aroused as by nothing before, and began to pick up the dropped
threads of his political career. Like Wade, Lincoln idealized the men of
the American Revolution, who were for him “a forest of giant oaks,” “a
fortress of strength,” “iron men.” He also shared the deep concern of
his contemporaries as the “silent artillery of time” removed them and
the “ living history ” they embodied from this world.
Before the 1850s, however, Lincoln seems to have had relatively little interest in the Declaration of Independence.
Then, suddenly, that document and its assertion that all men were
created equal became his “ancient faith,” the “father of all moral
principles,” an “axiom” of free society. He was provoked by the attacks
of men such as Pettit and Calhoun. And he made the arguments of those
who defended the Declaration his own, much as Jefferson had
done with Mason’s text, reworking the ideas from speech to speech,
pushing their logic, and eventually, at Gettysburg in 1863, arriving at a
simple statement of pro-found eloquence. In time his understanding of
the Declaration of Independence would become that of the nation.
The national idea is timeless and transcendent, an ongoing collaboration
across the generations. The historian’s role is to protect us against
facile appropriations of the past to serve present purposes, to
challenge the assumption that the founders’ “original intentions” —
whether they are supposed to be “liberal” or “conservative” — can be
fully known and should be authoritative guides to future action.
***
The libertarian assumption of a never-ending struggle between the
individual, with his “natural” (property) rights, and society,
exercising its voracious (property-consuming) power through the state,
was alien to Jefferson. Jefferson instead saw the progressive
development of society as the necessary precondition for the emergence
of the modern individual in full enjoyment of his rights; by eliminating
the despotic rule of privileged classes, a republican government would
secure national unity and facilitate individual “pursuits of happiness”
that in turn would promote the community’s prosperity and well-being.
In his fifth century work “City of God,” St. Augustine advanced the model of two entities,
one spiritual and the other temporal or earthly, each with separate
authority and functions. Augustine went so far as to use an image of two
walled cities separated from each other as a means to protect the
purity of the church.
During the Protestant Reformation
of the 16th century, both Martin Luther and John Calvin distinguished
spiritual from earthly authority and called for a division of labor
between the two. Luther distinguished “two kingdoms” – a spiritual
kingdom and a temporal kingdom that had separate authority.
Similarly, Calvin wrote that “Christ’s spiritual Kingdom and the
civil jurisdiction are things completely distinct” and, as such, “must
always be considered separately” because of the great “difference and
unlikeness … between ecclesiastical and civil power.”
No government can be Christian. The Papal States ruined the Roman Catholic Church. Let government into the pulpit and it is religion that suffers.
Has it been 3, 4 days since I gave the last update for myself?
Thursday was one of those drowsy days. Friday I made it to group, talked to KH, and had a day of discomfort and weariness. Then I got a bit of research done by not being to sleep; I did my dishes about 3 AM today. I do not know if I got dehydrated but I got light-headed and slightly nauseous and decided I am not going to bed feeling like this.
I went nowhere today but the convenience store. I went through Google Scholar looking for articles for my research project while running Netflix alongside. That worked for three movies. Well most of three. The Northman was too weird for that kind of treatment.
I went to sleep very early and just woke up again to work on the blog posts.
Principles of Plotting Part III: Variation (Counter Craft). Lincoln Michel always makes me think about what I am writing, so you might want to subscribe to his Substack. I am waiting to see what happens to “After Making Landfall”. It may be the most ambitious thing I have written in a formal sense. I wanted to combine a quest and an Eastern staying put/Ursula K. Le Guin carrier bag theme; I used second-person, third-person, and first person points of view. The second-person was mostly rising action and the third person was mostly oscillation. It keeps getting rejected.
A second objection I’ve seen might
be summed up as “Who cares if the plot is interesting? Maybe what
matters is other elements of the story, like the voice or the
character’s memories or the setting.” In both entries, I went out of my
way to stress that I admire the infinite forms of fiction and that
includes many “plotless” novels.5 Still, I think the question to ask yourself is why are
you including a plot if you don’t find it interesting and/or don’t care
to make it interesting on the page? If your story revolves around a
mystery plot where a detective figure finds clues to try to solve a
case, but you don’t care to make the mystery or its solving compelling…
well, why is it there?
There might be a good reason! I’ve enjoyed some novels that deconstruct and subvert detective fiction. I love Kobo Abe’s The Ruined Map, where the detective seems ever further from solving the case as the confusing clues mass. Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company
was my favorite TV show last year and it revolves around a character
obsessing over solving a ridiculous “crime” and finding ever more
ridiculous clues and conspiracies. Several Thomas Pynchon books could be
added here. I would suggest that these authors still make their plots
interesting, even if in absurd ways, and also that they undermine
traditional detective stories for specific thematic, comedic, or
narrative reasons. If your plot is thoughtlessly tacked on for no real
reason except you think you need to cram one into your manuscript to
sell it to publishers, well, readers will probably be as unenthused as
you are about the plot.
When I read articles like this, there are paragraphs where the brain snags on the idea and asks if I am doing this.
There’s an old writing saw that goes “an ending should feel both
inevitable and surprising.” You can apply this to every plot beat. A
clever plot consistently feels both inevitable (or at least logical) and
surprising (or at least fresh). We want to see the ideas tweaked and
concepts twisted—but not so much that it feels disjointed and not so
little that it feels repetitive. The reader wants to be both surprised
and not so surprised. Yes, this is hard to do. Who said plotting was easy?
In “After Making Landfall”, the first-person section feels more like a coda. The protagonist writer has decided the only way to fight impostor syndrome is to keep writing. Seeing the stymied passion between her boyfriend and an old girlfriend of his inspires her to not give up writing. But is that a surprise and inevitable? I am not so sure about the surprise, besides the reason she makes her decision. Too neurotic? It happens when I am not really writing.
Keeping reading, I hit another snag:
Part of why Variation is so important in any genre is that it
provides the reader with another reason to turn the page. They aren’t
just reading to find out what happens next. They are also reading to see
how you can delight them with the unexpected.8
My protagonist overcame the derision and lack of belief on the part of friends and family about being a writer; her culture in a way. She finds a boyfriend, the need to make a living, as a block in her career; the boyfriend leaves her, the job gives her a wider experience, she meets a new lover who encourages her writing. She gets published, only to find herself as the final obstacle. She has fulfilled her quest to get published; she needs to find out where she goes next. I like to think that is sufficient variation.
But then what about “Scenes from a Small Indiana Factory Town”? Driving KH nuts these past two years on how I keep altering my “Dead and Dying Stories” and too lazy to start over at the beginning, this is just a crazy experiment that only works with people from Indiana. So far, anyway. Right now, the form is a novella with one long arc from the rise of a factory town (like an overture or a prologue) setting the importance of the factory to the town and the importance of its founder to the factory. Then there is the arc where the family sells out, the town thinks it will be a boon, while the kids pay the costs of the changes (abortions, broken hearts, lost ideals). There is an arc about a bisexual girl getting pregnant and the boys in her life; There is an arc about the conflict between the brother representing the old idea of the town's preeminent family and the sister who wants nothing of it. There is the failure of the new owners and the final collapse of the factory, with the different ways that people cope with the failures imposed from the outside. There are longer arcs between art and commerce; between the homegrown efforts to remake what was, between those who want to build upon what they have and those who want only what was to return. Marriages falter, suicides are attempted or succeed; there is persistence in the face of reality. There is the loss of heroic leaders only to find success in the face of democratic cooperation. Whether I have pulled all this off is far from clear. Success is escape until those left can only succeed by following a madman.
One of the worst sins a plot-forward story can commit is to drop
plot lines. It is far easier to generate interesting story ideas or
mysterious elements than it is to finish them. So, there is often a
temptation to pull a Lost and cut the plot lines
you can’t finish and then walk away whistling, hoping the reader doesn’t
notice. This is a mistake both for ongoing storylines and for elements
that are signaled as significant to the reader. (This is the real
meaning of “Chekhov’s Gun,” aka that a gun shown in the first act must
go off in the third. That’s not because a play needs a murder—although
it rarely hurts—but because a gun placed prominently on a stage is
something a viewer will notice and expect to see have a payoff.4)
Okay, I think I am good here with “After Making Landfall” and not so sure about “Scenes”. The first really has only plotline. But the latter is a really a series of interconnected stories with interconnected characters. The same worry persists after reading this:
Still, completing storylines is only step
one. The more powerful and difficult thing to achieve is to bring the
storylines together in a way that feels both surprising and inevitable.
This normally means that the storyline trajectories intersect—thus
Intersection—and affect each other. The arcs and plots weave together to
form a complete pattern or picture. The ideal is that each part feels
necessary. If you removed one, it would untangle the whole thing.
There are parts that might be pulled and the plot, the action, might be able to continue. But the themes might take a hit. The distance between what was thought to be ideal and the reality of how those ideals are either no longer applicable or were always toxic is an important theme. It is meant to contrast with the craziness of originality, of creativity, that might just solve the problem of the town's future. This has me thinking, have I done enough to get these themse properly displayed? Display implicating plot for me.
While writing the previous paragraph, my mind went to the final scenes, I have a ghost tying up his story of ambition and failure and a love gone astray; I have a son justifying his faith in his father's art; but do I have the routing of the Bridges family? Then I went back to the essay, wondering what else I might find to help or to torment myself with.
There is a unique challenge presented to stories with several main
storylines and different POVs. In such works, you might still want to
have the character and plot arc of each character cross but you also
need to have the various storylines collide. Potentially, this could be
merely thematic but normally it is going to be more literal: your POV
characters will appear in the same place and/or act in ways that affect
the other storylines causing some level of chaos, closure, comedy, or
tragedy.
Yep, I need to look at the ending again. Especially with this paragraph in mind:
Redirection might take the shape of shifting the story to a new
plane that reorients everything that comes before. The blunt version of
this is the twist ending. But there are subtle ways of twisting, such as
how John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” and other means of redirecting to a
new plane. You might shift focus, zooming in to highlight the most
important element or else telescoping out to place the story in a wider
view. Or you might do both at the same time, such as when Donald Barthelme’s “The School”
shifts from a catalog of things that have died at the school over the
course of a year to a philosophical debate about the meaning of death
during one class.
In “Scenes”, my redirection was one character's failure and another's revival after attempting suicide. I am not feeling that was clear enough. “After Making Landfall”, it is a defiance of impostor's syndrome. I feel good about that.
Why “Scenes” came forward is that I am looking at a possible submission; only I need to add about 10 pages. Reading Michel's articles leaves me convinced I have excluded important parts. Well, useful ones.
Thank you
for submitting your work. While we're not able to accept this piece for
publication, we appreciated the opportunity to read your fiction and
hope you'll try us again in the future.
7/11/2026 - the April revision, so not a great disappointment.
Thank you
for sending us "After Making Landfall." We're grateful to have had the
chance to read and spend time with this piece, but unfortunately it was
not selected for publication in Cagibi. We wish you all the best of luck
placing it elsewhere and hope you will submit to us again.
