Exposition

 [Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

 Let me expose another weakness in my writing: interesting exposition.

That is why I wanted to give attention to Andrew Martin on How to Manage Exposition: Don’t Fear the Info Dump (Lterary Hub). If you read enough science fiction, you know about info dumps. My eyes glaze over and skim automatically. Even worse is when one reads a series to find earlier info dumps squeezed into the later volumes. 

Some points I gleaned from Mr. Martin's essay:

What fear of the dump translates to in practice is a broader resistance to the work of exposition in a story or novel. I’m not talking about a philosophical objection to backstory, the way Joy or Diane Williams reasonably might in work that is disorienting by design. Rather, it seems to be about something more fundamental—an anxiety that providing too much concentrated information about a character or situation is, on its face, artless, or worse, boring.

Like a lot of workshop-based neuroses, this is rooted in the experience of seeing something done badly, or doing it badly oneself, and hearing a teacher explain wearily why it should be otherwise. We all have our familiar writing hobbyhorses—me, I’m a stakes guy, sorry. There is of course a thing as too much backstory, and when a writer frontloads information before giving the reader a sense of why it has some kind of emotional or psychological value, it’s hard to expect them to keep reading. Historical fiction, fantasy, and science-fiction are particularly vulnerable to this problem, as the process of explaining a time period or world different from ours can stretch to nearly infinite dimensions if not checked. There’s also the dreaded shadow of “show don’t tell” hanging over all of this—boy do I wish I could talk to the guy who came up with that. You don’t show someone a story, dammit, you tell it.

And this:

As with finding a title for a novel or story, if no great option presents itself, the goal with exposition should be to do as little damage as possible. Tell us what we need to know, don’t go on for too long, get out of there. The better course of action, if at all possible, is to be stylish and elegant with your exposition, as one strives to be in all things. Mary Gaitskill is particularly good at this ideal combination of straightforwardness and pithiness. She’s not afraid to tell the reader things, but she maintains her poise while doing so. Her very recent New Yorker story “Something Familiar” contains a good example. The protagonist is recalling the very Gaitskillian jobs of her youth:

“Nude art model (poorly paid), waitress (she got fired), hostess (she wasn’t charming enough), whore (bingo.) That was another threshold she’d crossed with Carly; they had both started at the same place, a “house,” rather than outcall, which they’d agreed was too dangerous. They did it on an emergency basis, off and on for maybe five years. Neither took it seriously; it seemed of a piece with the pleasing artifice of clubs and magazines, an almost comical piece, more real and more absurd than dating. And safer, actually, on an emotional level; none of the men she met there could really hurt her.”

There’s a jaunty Nabokovian compression to the first sentence that draws us in, and the comparison of sex work to the “pleasing artifice” of clubs and magazines is a surprising turn that holds our interest. But the rest is simply informative, neither coy nor overly blunt. We’re learning important things about this character, filtered mildly through her consciousness. Gaitskill has the confidence to know that backstory is action, is story, if it’s done right.

And finally this:

...It was important to remember the principle that exposition shouldn’t feel any more rote than action or dialogue. Every sentence in a novel carries weight, provides an opportunity for the writer to display their sensibility.

Now, if I can find the time and the talent to do this with my own work!

sch 3/12 

 

The Deluge Is Upon Us

Monday was almost a complete write-off; another one of those lethargic days.

So, notes were collected and are now being published. 

8/10 

I decided against submitting but I found Strange Hymnal a beautiful site with very interesting writings. Please give it a look.

Submissions: 

Plain Tales from The Flatlands to Split/Lip Press, Slant Books, and Boudin Novelette Chapbook Contest.

The Unintended Consequences of Art to Sequestrum 

8/11: 

“After Making Landfall” rejected:

Thank you for your fiction submission to Unbound Ink. Although it isn’t the right fit for our journal at this time, we truly appreciated the opportunity to read it. We wish you all the best in finding a home for your work, and welcome future submissions to our literary magazine.

All the best,
Rosanne and Allison
Co-editors, Unbound Ink  

I made it to Matins, retrieved my phone, and headed out to do some grocery shopping. Only the deluge started. I got smokes and got home soaked, even with an umbrella. It was supposed to be a light rain.

I made it to Payless later in the afternoon. 

8/12:

J  was to come over for lunch. I broke the date. I had been raining hard off and on since yesterday. I woke twice n the night to the sound of pouring rain.

I did need to go out to the Sheriff's for my year check in, that I was not being a threat to the peace and safety of Delwawre County, Indiana. That was the most harrowing bus ride I have ever had. Some streets were flooded, the DIY warehouse's parking lot had about two feet of water covering it, and several routes had detours.

I got the photos off the camera and have posts that will be appearing over the coming days of photography.

I  ate dinner at Savage's Ale House. Maybe I ate too much, but it is still bothering me. Not that the sandwich was not wonderful.

I went to sleep early, but that lasted only four hours.

8/13:

Up early to a gloomy day. No rain, but no sun. Have had enough. Going to make a groundhog and wait to do more. I do not feel like writing.

 

sch 

 

Does It Matter That Prestige Lit Is Dead?

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.] 

 I have tried my hand at many things related to writing. I like science fiction, and I love detective stories. I wanted to try my hand at flash fiction because I thought it might help me write better short stories. Most of what I write is experiments with genre, even if I am more inclined to write what is, to my mind, literary fiction. But I am not interested in prestige fiction. I think prestige cuts off fiction from readers. That also lets me rationalize that my talents do not rise to a level necessary for prestigiousness.

What prompts these statements from me is Dennis Wilson Wise's review essay Prestige Fiction Is Dead (Los Angeles Review of Books).

In the final analysis, anyone still committed to the novel’s specialness—probably most folks reading this article—is bound to consider Novel Competition thoroughly depressing. But Brier is a historian, not a prophet. He has no answers, no grand solutions, for the novel’s lost pride of place. The prestige competition is over, he says; there’s just “less to be gained by denying it now.” And that rings true. Although winning a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award can still make one’s literary career, we no longer expect our literary lions to become public intellectuals. Once upon a time, authors like Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, and Susan Sontag were recognizable faces on the television circuit. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine any novelist finding that same prominence.

That paragraph made me wonder if we are not settling into the same patterns in literature as we are in politics: pre-WWII divisions have returned. I knew Truman Capote and Norman Mailer from television long before I read their work. But how much did the public know about Booth Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis, J.P. Marquand, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pearl S. Buck, or Eugene O'Neill during their heyday? Consider my list contains three winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a long-running best-selling author, and four winners of the Pulitzer Prize. The only writer who did not win any awards for his writing was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Who is read today by the general reader? Fitzgerald. Prestige is the eye of the beholder; literary fame is ephermal.

But from my list, who is not a good writer? I would suggest none. They may be stuck in their time (Tarkington and Marquant and Lewis seem most likely to suffer from this fault), but they wrote to the best of their talents. I found The Good Earth a surprise for not being boring. I think Fitzgerald probably did not rise to the challenges of his talents, but they are better talents than I have, and what would America be without The Great Gatsby? If I recognize humanity in their work, then I think it is worth reading.

That means to me that we write not to make a television appearance or be lauded in The New York Review of Books. It means we write as best we can to connect with humanity.

Sam Kahn's What Has Gone Wrong With Fiction in Our Era? A Laundry List (Castalia) includes much that makes what I have written foolish, certainly off the main stream. But then I am far from the main stream of American publishing. Nor do I have an MFA. I am a writer with nothing to lose and, at my age, little to gain.

I feel more in line with Damien Cowger of New Ohio Review Recommends…

And there I end today's sermon.

sch 3/12 

 

Fire Up Dwtwn Muncie: The Photos (Better late than never)

 

The Downtown Farm Stand for pizza, the best in Muncie!

I was trying to give a sense of the crowd size, I hope it worked. It makes me think I should get over to Anderson for one of their festivals for comparison purposes.

 

sch 

Indianapolis Writers Reading Their Work

  [Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.]

We should not forget there are writers living and publishing in Indiana. Yes, they will be out of Indianapolis, for the most part. Let us support them, regardless of genre!

From MirrorIndy (a local news source) comes ASMR: Soft-spoken storytime with Indy authors 

sch 3/12 

 

 

Why You Should Read William Kennedy to Save America

 [Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.]

I did not get around to reading William Kennedy until I was past fifty. Even though I had a copy of Ironweed lying around for decades, even though I read Legs. My mistake.

When I was younger, 45 years ago, I had my mind fixed on William Faulkner and emulating his Yoknapatawpha County in Indiana. I gave up. It was a concern about whether my talent could make money. There was also trying to emulate a little too closely Faulkner's themes.

I was a coward and an idiot. If you want to write, do so. Find ways to keep body and soul together; use your imagination. I was not devoted enough; I was a dilettante.

And read more widely. William Kennedy is a better example of applying local history to the North. (Joyce Carol Oates' When We Were the Mulvaneys is another example.) All we have to do is to look and see what there is. I admit I had to leave Indiana to see what its story was.

The Los Angeles Review of Books published Heaven of Hell: Colum McCann examines the craft and legacy of William Kennedy’s ‘Albany Trilogy.’ McCann gives what I think is a good overview of Kennedy. even though I have not read all the novels reviewed. It does recall for me those I have read.

But to heaven and hell, simultaneously, with time. Let’s begin instead with place, which has, in Kennedy’s work, an absolute beginning, and an absolute end, and a maelstrom of melodic middles. Joyce had his Dublin. Márquez had his Macondo. Faulkner had his Yoknapatawpha County. Good bedfellows, all. The dust out of which Kennedy builds his world—and indeed his whole notion of time—is, of course, Albany.

Sooner or later, we will all find ourselves on the corner of State and Pearl. With the cops and the crooks. The porkheads and the poolsharks. The singers and the sycophants. The junkies and the jailers. The politicos and the pimps. The hoors and the hustlers. The storytellers, the stolentellers and the swollentellers too. The lovers and the losers all packed together in a single city. On a single street. In a single piece of brickwork. In a single sentence even. Honest to God, Marcus, I don’t think I’m dead. We are only as possible as what happened to us yesterday. I liked all their lies best, for I think they are the brightest part of anybody’s history. He’s just a bum, but who ain’t?

A lot has been made of Kennedy’s hometown, and rightly so, since place determines character, and character determines fate, and fate determines story, and story contains the theory of everything. But, like many writers, William Kennedy had to leave his subject before he found it. As a young journalist, he got out of Albany—the “asshole of the northeast,” according to one of his characters—and headed out to Puerto Rico.

By the way, what I came to see about my part of Indiana (the state itself is a patchwork; any unity is a fiction of its own) is the rise and fall of industry, and (in opposition to Faulkner's Mississippi) is a case of the winner losing the victory. The last insight I own as much to Orhan Pamuk as anyone.

I may never get published. So be it; I will keep on writing. If I get published, I may be labelled a regional writer. So be it; if Willa Cather is a regional writer, then I am overawed by sharing that pigeonhole.

Being political, the federal government seems to be centralizing power; Trumpism seems to be advocating a uniform aesthetic, smothering America's imaginative life. Regionalism, localism, appears to me as the only antidote. The only tools left us to preserve America as a unity, not a totality.

SCH 5/12

 

 

 

Rejections: 5/4 - 5/12

 [Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.]

 Baubles From Bones rejected "Lessons Learned from a Green Meadow" on 5/4:

 Thank you so much for submitting your story, "Lessons Learned from a Green Meadow," to Baubles From Bones, and for your patience in waiting to hear from us. After much consideration, we've unfortunately decided not to move forward with it. 

We appreciate having the chance to read your work and wish you the best of luck placing it elsewhere. 

Many thanks, 

Elyse Leskovic, Editor 

Baubles From Bones

baublesfrombones.com

The Iowa Review rejected "Learning The Passion and Control Twist" on 5/8.

Thank you for allowing us to consider your submission, and for your patience as you waited for our response. Though this work hasn't found a home with The Iowa Review, we consider it a privilege that you thought of us and regret that the volume of submissions precludes a more personal reply.   

Sincerely,

The Editors | The Iowa Review

Broad Ripple Review rejected “After Making Landfall” on 5/11 with a review:

Thank you for submitting “After Making Landfall” to Broad Ripple Review. We appreciated the opportunity to spend time with the piece.

While we are not moving forward with the story for publication, there is a great deal here that feels thoughtful, emotionally ambitious, and intellectually engaged with questions of vocation, identity, longing, and artistic self-conception. The story is clearly interested in what happens after arrival, after ambition has partially been fulfilled, after the dream one has organized a life around finally becomes materially real yet emotionally unstable. That central tension gives the piece much of its emotional and philosophical energy, and I admired the seriousness with which the story approaches questions about art, passion, and selfhood.

One of the strongest aspects of the piece is its voice. The second-person narration creates an immediate intimacy with Gina’s consciousness while also allowing the story to dramatize a kind of self-interrogation. There is something compelling about the way the narrative voice both comforts and indicts her at the same time. The oscillation between confidence and self-doubt feels psychologically convincing, especially in the early sections where Gina reflects on family expectations, artistic ambition, and the ways external validation becomes entangled with identity. The opening pages in particular establish a strong emotional and thematic framework very quickly.

I also appreciated how effectively the story situates Gina within overlapping cultural and familial pressures. The details about her Italian American upbringing, the family’s reverence for engineering over literature, and the complicated relationship between ethnic pride and artistic aspiration all feel specific and lived-in. The references to Calvino, Dante, Eco, and di Lampedusa work because they reveal not only Gina’s literary consciousness but also the particular rhetorical strategies she learned to use in order to justify herself to her family. The story consistently understands how artistic identity is shaped not just internally but socially and culturally.

The sections involving Luke and Kathy are also emotionally textured in interesting ways. The dynamic among Gina, Luke, and Kathy creates a subtle triangulation between ambition, compromise, longing, and artistic abandonment. Kathy’s history as a musician gives the later conversations surprising emotional weight, particularly because Gina gradually realizes she has misunderstood Kathy entirely. The exchange about music “stopping making sense” feels especially important to the story’s deeper concerns about vocation and surrender.

I think the story is often strongest when it trusts those interpersonal moments and allows emotional revelation to emerge organically through conversation and tension rather than through explanation or philosophical framing. There are several scenes, especially in the bar sequence, where the emotional undercurrents become vivid and compelling precisely because the characters are not fully articulating what they mean. Kathy and Luke’s unresolved emotional circuitry is palpable there, and Gina’s growing awareness of it creates real dramatic tension.

As I read, though, I found myself wanting slightly more modulation between the story’s reflective/philosophical register and its dramatized scenes. Gina’s consciousness is intellectually active almost continuously, and while that interiority is central to the piece, there were moments where the density of abstraction and literary reflection began to outpace the emotional immediacy of the scene itself. The story often moves quickly from lived moment into interpretation, mythic framing, or philosophical commentary, which can occasionally flatten dramatic momentum. I found myself most engaged when the story lingered in concrete interaction before stepping outward into larger conceptual territory.

Related to this, I wondered whether the Odysseus and Macbeth invocations might benefit from slightly more restraint or integration. The literary allusions clearly matter to Gina’s consciousness and thematic framework, but there were moments where they began to feel somewhat declarative rather than fully embodied within the dramatic movement of the story. I found myself curious what might happen if some of those mythic and literary parallels were allowed to remain a bit more submerged beneath the surface of the narrative rather than explicitly foregrounded. The story already contains the emotional architecture to support those resonances without always needing to name them directly.

I also think there may be opportunities to sharpen Gina’s emotional arc more distinctly across the story’s final movement. Her realization at the bar and subsequent return to writing are emotionally legible, but I occasionally wanted a slightly firmer sense of transformation between her earlier feelings of fraudulence and the concluding embrace of artistic creation. The final pages clearly aim toward affirmation and creative rebirth, and there is something moving in that gesture, but I found myself wanting just a bit more emotional specificity in how Gina arrives there internally. In some places, the thematic conclusions seemed to arrive slightly ahead of the emotional process itself.

At the same time, the story’s sincerity is one of its greatest strengths. “After Making Landfall” is unafraid to engage directly with artistic yearning, self-doubt, compromise, and the emotional costs of vocation. That kind of earnest engagement can be difficult to pull off without collapsing into sentimentality or cynicism, and I admired the story’s willingness to remain emotionally open throughout. There is a genuine affection here for artists, strivers, and people who continue wrestling with creative identity long after the romance of ambition has faded.

What stayed with me most was the story’s understanding that artistic fulfillment is not a clean arrival point but an ongoing negotiation between ego, insecurity, longing, work, and love. Gina’s realization that creation itself matters more than external validation feels emotionally honest, particularly because the story never entirely resolves her uncertainty. That lingering instability gives the ending much of its resonance.

Thank you again for sharing the work with us. We would absolutely be happy to see future work from you.

Warmly,

Kelly Schoenegge
Editor, Broad Ripple Review

"Agnes" was rejected byFlying Island Journal on 5/12:

On behalf of the Flying Island Journal editorial team, I thank you for the chance to review "Agnes." Although there is much about your story that is commendable (e.g. interesting plot, some lovely phrasing) resubmission has been recommended after additional workshopping. According to FIJ Fiction Editor Joan Hawkins, your story "need[s] to be tightened, and in places, motivation needs to be clarified" while it would "benefit from a supportive writers group critique all around." 

Since FIJ's submissions platformis transitioning from Submittable to Duotrope's Duosuma, I suggest that you consider resubmitting your story elsewhere if you prefer a quicker review turnaround time. 

Best of Luck!

Hiromi Yoshida

This is the only rejection that disturbs; albeit not for the rejection. It is how long for the rejection to land in my email. I have been tinkering with "Agnes" for around a decade. After submitting it to Flying Island Journal, I did another submission or two. I will need to check the versions to see if I attained the changes thought needed.

sch 5/12