When I was in Panamá at the Centroamérica Cuenta Festival I attended a panel about the life and afterlives of Gabriel García Márquez — headlined by his son, Gonzalo García Barcha, his editor at Alfaguara, Pilar Reyes, his friend and fellow literary eminence, Sergio Ramírez, and finally, Jaime Abello Banfi, journalist and director of the García Márquez Foundation.

I went because I’m endlessly fascinated with Gabo and because I knew Pilar and Gonzalo. Years ago, when I was living in México City, my brother Frank invited me to lunch with Gonzalo at the family house. García Márquez was still alive and there was a chance that the Great Man might pop by but he never did, alas, and I never got a chance to meet him, to thank him.

Anyway, the panel was fucking amazing for a thousand reasons and I hope they post it online but what struck me and stuck with me was that during the conversation someone mentioned that García Marquez never taught a writing workshop in his life1. I think it was Jaime who said something along those line that Gabo thought you were either a writer or you weren’t, punto.

My first reaction: Gabo can do whatever the fuck he wants.

My second reaction: a writing workshop with García Márquez would have been one for the fucking history books.

My third reaction was a little more complicated. Those comments made me reflect not so much on workshops per se but on my own pedagogic impulses, my own drive to be helpful to other writers in whatever way my depressed self can be helpful — i.e. this Substack. It isn’t that I’m selfless, and writers who focus on their work exclusively are not. It has more to do with the way my art is wired within me.

I’m not one of those autotelic talents like García Márquez. (Let’s leave aside the fact that García Márquez was 10,000 times more talented.) My writing isn’t self-sustained or self-generating. My writing self isn’t as fundamental, as ser, as Gabo’s was. My writing identity is more of an estar state. Never certain, always conditional, in a permanent state of becoming and unbecoming. Worst of all, I don’t seem to be able to learn from myself as directly as I should.

Walking around the Casco Viejo after that panel I began to consider that I help other writers because, sure, I want to help — but perhaps also because it is a way of helping myself. (All writers are selfish, just differently.) Truth is, I have trouble speaking directly to my art, but when I am in conversation with other people I seem to hear myself better, and my art seems to hear me better.

Turns out my art needs an interpreter to hear its creator.

Foucault said, The advice you give to the other is equally given to yourself.

For now, it’s only in giving advice to others that my writing self hears the advice that it needs most.

Hears and, one hope, listens

.

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As some of you know I’ve been writing a genre novel, The Epic Gilgamek, whose first (and only) half I’ve serialized here. There have been joys and discoveries in this process and plenty difficulties, too. I am no easy writer; fiction has always been a struggle and writing in a new genre has only added to the challenge.

But as with any serious endeavor — and writing a novel is an unquestionably serious endeavor — there are challenges and then there are challenges. These last few months have been a challenge of the latter kind, a challenge familiar to many who write long.

I’ve reached that place in my novel that can only be described as the messy muddled middle. I’ve exhausted the thrill, energy, and reason of the initial conception, and I have not yet discovered the method / reason / enthusiasm that will guide me through to the end state. I’m adrift in the Lagrange point, stuck in a dead zone between creative landmarks or familiar currents.

I am, for lack of a better term, lost.

A necessary perdido-ness if you intend to write anything novel, but also a distressing state that tests writers and their writing alike. This is when lots of writers straight lose it, decide their novel sucks, they suck.

I can relate; I find this messy muddled middle especially excruciating – with reason. It is here in this Sargasso zone that I’ve abandoned all my failed novels. It is here that I abandoned my Martian novel. It is here that I abandoned a fantasy novel titled The Shadow of the Adept. It is here that that I abandoned a novel about my childhood with my father.

The messy muddled middle is my fucking bane.

But whether you got history with it or not: it ain’t easy murking your way out of this perdido-ness at the same time as you’re trying to decide whether the obstacles you’re having are regular ole obstacles or a signal that it’s time to drop the book and move on to something else. It ain’t easy doing these two labors at the same time (if you’re like me) as you’re being bombarded by all sorts of negativities about your self and your talents, a bombardment that always goes Napolean hard when I’m lost in that perdido space, unprotected by the compulsive gravities of beginning and ending.

If I had a better childhood and a better mind maybe this shit wouldn’t be so insufferable, but to quote Ralph Ellison I yam what I yam.

Three months stranded on in this perdido zone, three months wracking my head for a solution and trying to parry my anti-writing self-loathing and what’s been helping me a monton is reminding myself:

FIRST To trust the work, not the writer. In other words, to focus on what the work is saying about itself and not what I think the work is saying about me as a writer and a person. I try to remember the work does not stare at me; it stares through me towards a higher realm we call art.

SECOND To engage in good orderly direction — which means to work a little bit every day in spite of my doubts — to keep working until the novel and my heart become less perdido or the perdido-ness tells me what I need to know. Or as Stephen Mitchell famously wrote in his translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh: When there’s no way out, you just follow the way in front of you.

THIRD To understand that the true lesson / wisdom / value of writing is not instrumental but covenantal. Sure, it’s swell to clever our way out of these perdido zones (and I may have found an exit from my Sargasso labyrinth this week and I’ve been following this Ariadne current at full speed) and sure it’s awesome to finish a manuscript — as much as it sucks bigly to have to abandon a long labor of hope and heart.

But what’s pushing me through this particular Sargasso perdido-ness is less a good idea or a better strategy — it is reminding myself every single day that the real grace of writing is found in our sticking to it, in our covenant with the art, a covenant that neither finishing nor failing can enhance or harm.

Or as I said elsewhere: A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, or because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

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I’ve always had an infacility with languages. Which is a wild thing for a writer to say, but it’s true. Learning English when I did (and how I did) must have fried whatever language center or gene I had — because after I learned English, nothing about languages ever came easy again. I studied German for four years in high school (honors track, don’t ask) and it was un disastre total comedy. My accent was fucked (Roberto Blanco I was not) and even during the non-depressed stretches when I studied hard I still couldn’t put together a simple sentence without screwing up the conjugation.

My language card was like a Vancian spell book in Dungeons & Dragons. Everything written on it vanished as soon as I open my mouth.

When I was in my twenties I lived for up to a year in Berlin, Amsterdam, Rome, Tokyo, and in each city I got some serious exposure — none of that expat solipsism -- and yet all that added zilch to my Deutsch, Nederlands, Italiano, or Nihongo. I still remember one night in Holland my local girlfriend literally lost her shit because I kept confusing Ja and Nee, yes and no. Like, who the fuck does that?

You know how certain fiction writers have a sideline as translators — Murakami, Lydia Davis, and recently Jhumpa Lahiri?

That was never going to be me.

I was the opposite of a polyglot; I was a counterglot.

But it was in my native tongue that my language disorder expressed itself most weirdly.

I grew up in a Dominican home where my parents spoke zero English and didn’t want to hear it from us, where Spanish language TV and radio were on all the time, and yet my Spanish vanished so fast it was almost a conspiracy. By the time I was in high school I couldn’t have asked you what the weather was, and yet my siblings (the ones born in the DR) were all still fluent, and when my sisters spoke Spanish no one confused them for anything except Dominicans.

I know people who don’t give two fucks that they lost their mother tongue, who got bigger problems, but for me it was always a sore spot. I was a kid who wanted to travel the world — a gift for fluency was supposed to be part of the package. Plus, I was the only one of my siblings who maintained a relationship with the Dominican Republic, and yet I spoke Spanish the worst?

Reality level ironies and fictional level dumbness.

I tried repeatedly to fix my Spanish, taking classes in graduate school, hiring tutors, studying on my own, but it all came to grief. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I finally made the decision to live in Spanish full-time and see what the fuck would happen. In 1999 I used a Guggenheim fellowship to move to México City for a full year — and in that time I refused to speak English for more than an hour a day (exceptions made for my dear friend and neighbor, F—). I actually used a damn stopwatch to keep track.

Longstoryshort: at the end of my year in México something shifted. All that stubborn insistence got around — or through — whatever block I had. For the first time since I learned English I actually managed to acquire language. True, it was the language I should never have lost in the first place, but such are the wages of immigration. What had me flying was that I was no longer a complete embarrassment in my mother tongue. I could once again speak to my abuelo fluidly.\

But some blocks can be broken and still not be defeated. This was one of them. Turns no matter how hard I tried after I came back to the States, how many books I read in Spanish or how many movies and shows I watched without subtitles — or how I often I spoke Spanish (every fucking day) — my Spanish never improved beyond what I acquired in México.

Not the most optimal sitch, especially considering how ferociously judgmental Spanish-speakers are with us No Sabos kids, but what can you do? I survived being an immigrant in English, I could survive being an immigrant in Spanish, and it’s not like I was a complete loss.

Heck, I can sit for a TV interview or teach a worldbuilding seminar in Spanish like I did recently in Panamá. Sure I needed help from the participants, but we got through it easily enough. I even had a conversation on stage with one of my heroes, Rubén Blades, and did not fuck it up completely, despite the pressure.

But cierto: I mess up words and tenses and conjugations all the time, but I figure what with half the world struggling with a language not their own like I did when I was kid, I’m in good company. And being in good company I’ve learned to accept my linguistic flojotude, to approach my weakness with a mixture of shamelessness and humility, to stay game. Subjunctive ruins my day and no matter what I’m talking about — could be the simplest shit and the simplest sentence — I still find myself sifting through my vocabulary, trying to locate the right word, the right structure, the right conjugation to communicate what I’m feeling, thinking.

It’s how I write, always, and now how I speak my mother tongue. English flows, alas, but Spanish is brick by brick, bird by bird.

There are worse fates than having all your languages be second languages. I know because I’ve lived a few of them.

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Drop in on my conversation with my every brilliant pana Dimitry Léger as we chop it up about writing, our wild beloved island and of course his fabulous new novel Death of a Soccer God.

Here’s what I said about the novel: “An explosion of a novel, bursting with wit, passion and politics, Death of the Soccer God recalls Paul Beatty by way of Kapuściński’s The Soccer War, but in truth Léger is a complete original. He has written a wild, moving tale that should not be missed.”

Below is the link, Substack will of course send out a reminder and no worries if you miss it — I’ll upload the video after we’re through.

See some of you soon!

https://open.substack.com/live-stream/219429?utm_source=live-stream-scheduled-upsell

To understand my Rubén Blades story we have to go back to a time and a place — my time and my place — Central New Jersey, in the 70s and 80s. Exit 11 on the Turnpike or 123 on the Parkway. Not your standard Latine neighborhood at all — not at the beginning, at least. Nothing like what my cousins had in Perth Amboy, in Union City, in the Bronx, in East New York. When they immigrated they arrived in real barrios where Caribbean culture and Caribbean Spanish were, if not everywhere, at least general.

My family didn’t have any of that. We lived near an active landfill, an apartment complex where almost no one ever stayed long except folks like us. My cousins landed in América — we landed in America — and it would be years before I heard the kind of Spanish on our streets that my cousins were getting in theirs. As for stores, businesses, restaurants, bars, social clubs, night clubs, the community, the society, the culture — zip fucking zero. Impossible to describe the hostility of that time and place. People would see our faces, hear us speak Spanish, and would straight up throw whatever they had in their hands at us — and I’m not just talking about white folks, either.

We got the message quick. No one spoke Spanish in public unless it was absolutely unavoidable. We erased everything that could be considered foreign from our visible selves, became more American than even the Americans, Naipaulian mimic men. My older sister, who was phenotypically Black, ran straight into Black America and never looked back. My brother, who was phenotypically white, jumped into White America like it was a lifeboat, and in a way it was.

And me — who missed the Dominican Republic like we all miss love — who couldn’t let the island go — I did a little of both. Made books and roleplaying games and running all over New Jersey my identity.

To no avail.

No matter how much I tried to divide myself into that time and place, something was always left over, and that remainder was the me who spent the first years of his life on the island, who couldn’t be resolved in any way that made sense.

My folks didn’t help matters any. Bad enough they chose to live deep in the American Zone, but worse still neither my mother, nor my father while he stuck around, gave two shits about preserving any kind of connection with the island, with Santo Domingo. Didn’t care if we forgot our Spanish. Didn’t transmit the culture or history or society. Didn’t talk about Santo Domingo at all except when they wanted to frighten us or ghettomog us. They had their reasons, of course — trauma is the great silence — but damn. If I asked them about the Dominican Republic they always said some shit like just be grateful you’re not there.

In those years I couldn’t have named a Dominican writer if my life depended on it. Not even Juan Bosch. I could name a few ball players but that was it, and ball players couldn’t do what I needed them to. It seemed almost a conspiracy. My mom, for example, would play her Spanish-language albums only when we kids were out of the apartment and if we went anywhere near them we were dead.

Not exactly raised-by-Black-Panthers-or-Young-Lords type shit, but it is what it is and when you’re as hungry as I was, you figure out ways to piece it together. You make do with what you got. You spend more time with the Latine families who aren’t on some anti-island bullshit. You cherish every single trace of the DR. (The flag on the fuselage of Lindbergh’s plane? Fuck yeah!) When you visit your family in the Bronx or East New York or Perth Amboy you listen you watch you see you remember — in other words you turn into a continent-sized aquifer, absorbing everything. And you keep searching, always searching.

For what?

You know for what.

And then in 1977 while everyone (including my nine year-old ass) is obsessing over Star Wars, Metiendo Mano drops. My Bronx cousin shows me the album cover and plays that first song, Pablo Pueblo, for me. I’m not usually a music person but I listen and he helps me understand the lyrics; my Spanish already in disarray. And then we reach these bars.

Y vuelve a ver las paredes
Con las viejas papeletas
Que prometían futuros
En lides politiqueras
Y en su cara se dibuja
La decepción de la espera

Struck dumb, I make my cousin play the song over again. Those lyrics and that voice burning up every silence in me. I never knew someone could sing a story, like a real story. I have no idea that I am witnessing Blades’ innovation, him shifting the idiom of salsa, the arrival (or formalization) of literary / novelistic dimensions in salsa (and beyond.)

And then my cousin says something extraordinary.

Rubén Blades wrote this.

Some names are wreathed in lightning, in salvation, in futurity — Rubén Blades is one of them.

(Names take on special meaning when your own name is unpronounceable.)

But along with that extraordinary name — a revelation.

Call me superdumb, but I have no clue that songs are written and only realize it when my cousin says Rubén Blades wrote this.

I’m nine years old and don’t yet have any of the authors (Caribbean, African diasporic, immigrant, Latine, Asian disaporic, indigenous who would transform me. I don’t even know that literature exists but how I wish looking back that I did). I am nine years-old with no musical talent at all (would have even less in a year when my sister decides to jam a bamboo shoot into my right eardrum for no reason whatsoever) and me and my cousin are playing that album over and over again, mesmerized. I am nine years old and I’m thinking I would like to write something like that one day.

Something (I would later discover) like literature.

(At the time nothing but a throwaway but in retrospective the bells are ringing out in the cosmos).

One reaches their talents through divers ways, many of them unknown and subterranean, but if you grow up cut off from your roots, you’re going to need artists like Blades on your side. Artists whose art cuts through underdevelopment and canons and leaps out of the cars that drive by and the apartments you walk past and the bodegas you buy from. Artists whose art doesn’t need a curriculum or even your undivided attention to reach you and change you. Artists whose art follows and protects and inspires you like destiny follows, protects, and inspires those it has chosen. Artists who keep you in lightning long enough for you to find your own sky-splitting ignition. Artist who introduce you and prepare your for an entire traditions before you even know there are these traditions.

It would be another decade before I found the books I needed, the histories I was starving for, the community I dreamed of, before I made my first tentative attempts at my own Pablo Pueblo. Rubén Blades ain’t the only reason I’m a writer. There are other folks I’d love to claim — Morrison, Marshall, Lamming, García Marquez, Hong Kingston, Cisneros — but he accompanied me through all these writers, all these books, the shining Caribbean thread that held it altogether. He taught me a lot of things I needed to know, first and best. That we are all buscando América — something all Americans should know and which kills us when we forget. That there are desaparecidos, victims of repression, and of a war against of memory.

¿Adónde van los desaparecidos?
Busca en el agua y en los matorrales
¿Y por qué es que se desaparecen?
Porque no todos somos iguales
¿Y cuándo vuelve el desaparecido?
Cada vez que los trae el pensamiento
¿Cómo se le habla al desaparecido?
Con la emoción apretando por dentro

And importantly: you got to have courage if you’re really going to open your mouth about shit the society doesn’t want to hear and you have to rhythm. Courage to say what needs saying against all odds and rhythm so other folks might listen openly.

Despite how enticing the single source origin myth is, no single artist or influence makes an artist. In my case, no single writer made me a writer, but Blades sure as hell saved my life, and what is art if not a reflection of lives untold?

If you’re interested in Rubén' Blades’s extraordinary trajectory, best place to start is with Abner Benaim’s documentary Ruben Blades Is Not My Name, trailer below. (I’m in it for five seconds, looking bedraggled as usual.)

And if you wish to read part 1 of this Blades Cycle see here

Unless you’re a writing orixa, writing is difficult in longitudinal ways that elude description. Because writing is so challenging, we must strive always to reduce the friction, the forces that inhibit our talents. Talent slayers are many in our world but one that I suffer from in particular is a vulnerability to disappointment.

Disappointment is standard human suffering, sharpened by both hope and precarious circumstances, that triggers doubts about our selves, our abilities, our hope in the possibilities of the world. Disappointment is a shitty human universal, but far too many of us, especially us artist types, feel far too much of it. When a story fails or we are rejected by an agent or encounter some other literary setback, the disappointment arrives too quick, hits too hard, too deep, and stays too long. And if the disappointment is acute enough, it (to quote Thomas Hardy) leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.

Those of us who are too much the Disappointment Artists cannot follow Henry David Thoreau’s sage advice — If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment — and as a consequence end up losing valuable months — in my case years — overwhelmed by the pain and weight of our disappointment.

In my cosmology of art, disappointment is the Second Deadly Venom of writing.

A venom, I’m sure, that has cost us many brilliant writers and an infinite numbers of brilliant texts.

It’s not so much that the Disappointment Artist (us artists with too much disappointment) needs healthier relationship with their disappointment — of course we do, of course one needs to heal the wounds that make us so vulnerable to disappointment fortississimo.

But it’s more than that.

In his discussion of the moral life, Stanley Cavell described people needing “the friendly and credible words of others in order to find one’s way”.

Well, in my sense of the writing life, a writer cannot find their way without friendly and credible words from others but most importantly from ourselves.

Problem is, disappointment makes such “friendly and credible words” from ourselves impossible.

An aporia that disappointment itself fills and when that happens there’s no more dialogue with ourselves — only a confrontation with our unbearable disappointment and with the people and events who taught us to feel disappointment so disproportionately, people and events who because of their past immutability make hope for better outcomes hard to imagine.

People and events we are often deeply attached to, an attachment in turn deepens our bonds to the lessons they stabbed us with; lessons which we then wield ourselves against ourselves.

For those of you who know of what I speak, the agony of that solipsistic dagger is beyond compare.

There is hope, of course. Disappointment can leave scars on all of us but never so many that we cannot be renewed, that we cannot begin again in a different register, a friendly credible register.

Even those of us who are deeply scarred by disappointment, who find it almost impossible to forge a stable permanent credible friendship with ourselves, can achieve a detente that will permit us to flourish as artists.

Perhaps you have not yet healed the injury of your many disappointments and therefore cannot prompt friendly credible words from yourself. Well, as Stanley Cavell suggests, if we cannot yet be friends of our own minds, we can become a different kind of enemy with ourself, a Nietzschean “worthy enemy” — “one who does not simply accept my present stance, who does not necessarily agree with me, but who helps in eliciting my position and my desires by keeping the conversation open.” 1

We should strive be a credible friends to ourselves but if for the moment that’s impossible one might attempt to adapt for the interim, during the healing phase, a worthy enemy stance that helps you to remember the dreams and hopes you have for yourself and your art and keeps the possibility of a friendly credible self open.

The poet Dean Young writes Some cries never reach us even / though they’re our own.

How very true. But also: some cries we think are our own are not our own.

To purge ourselves of the Second Deadly Venom we must recognize that cries and disappointments that are not our own must be given back to the people and events that stabbed them into us. Returned through long worthy process of naming the weapons and their wielders, of separating the crime committed against us from our identities, of forgiveness.

And it is with that quiet return that the artist and their art can begin.

Read about the First Deadly Venom here

My abuelo was the first person who took me to the movies. I was five, maybe six — this was back in my DR days, a long long time ago. Why this even happened amidst all our terrible poverty was because every now and then my father sent remittances from the US, and for a few weeks there would be food in the house and maybe some new clothes and there would be movies.

This is what counted for and would forever define hombre time — those screenings with my abuelo.

My grandfather was a small serious brother with Doc Savage white hair, a complexion and features that barely failed the paper bag test. And when I say the brother was serious I mean it dominicanishly: un tipo serio. Also and more importantly: one of the gentlest, most peaceable cats I’d ever know (which maybe ain’t saying much given where I grew up, but there it is). Never heard him raise his voice or lose his temper, never laid hands on us kids — which considering that we were four hoodwild manganzones shows uncommon restraint. (Then again, my mom had hands enough for us all.) Was famously something of a soft touch, the dude people always stole on. He once had a little business hauling produce and charcoal in this rundown truck of his, but then he loaned the truck to a neighbor for the day and never saw the truck or the neighbor again and that was the end of his business days.

In spite of being such a benevolent guy (or maybe because of it) my abuelo turned into someone else completely when it came to movies. First off, he only ever took us to see action flicks, the bloody Hong Kong kind (I wouldn’t even know there were kid movies until we moved to the United States). My older brother was of course thrilled, never one to skip an opportunity to chortle at an on-screen massacre. Me, I was the weak link, a medio pendejo who recoiled when the folks on screen got their skulls cracked open or wet cement ground into their eyes, something that actually happened in one of those movies.

My abuelo never made a sound throughout the film, always sat formally, with his Trilby in his lap, but each time someone miraculously escaped being slaughtered he’d grimace, which I never failed to notice. And then as soon as the flick was over, even before we were outside in the blazing sun, he would immediately start in on how the hero — if homeboy had the poor taste to emerge from his adventure alive — should not, in fact, have survived.

It’s ridiculous, he’d say, and then describe in exhaustive detail which gunshot or stabbing or fall or punch or car crash should have cold slain him. He’d rattle off deaths like a priest reciting catechism, not so much angry as disappointed, so expressive in his legendary of murder he could have given St. Lawrence the Deacon pause.

Years later, after he passed — easily, I will happily report — and I was doing research on his childhood, I spoke to his younger sister who informed me that they had lost nine siblings when they were growing up. Very common in the 20s and 30s, she explained, describing how grips of kids in their campo were swept away by every kind of horrible disease, and of course by starvation. After our conversation I hit the books and realized she wasn’t exaggerating — infant mortality in the Caribbean in the 20s bordered on the cataclysmic.

All the years I knew him Abuelo never once mentioned any of his lost siblings, never once referred his childhood’s misery. He showed me how to cut sugar cane (which he did for years). How to get a bat to smoke a cigarette. How to pull up yucca — but nothing about those early horrors.

Now when I recall those movie outings together, I wonder what exactly my abuelo was talking about and, in his own displaced way, whom.

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As writers we seek to create characters and worlds that have the presence, the authority of what is real, of what is. This is a formidable task that we can make easier by selecting materials or deploying techniques that are themselves convincing.

One such technique that has helped me always is a Character’s River. In Texas Hold’em, the River is the last card flipped over, the one that determines the hand. If we imagine people (and by extension Characters) as a hand in poker, we all have cards beyond our face cards, beyond what’s easily discernible to others. Sides of ourselves that are revealed only under pressure or when our carefully curated self-assemblage slips. These River reveals are not just memorable (and often, at the interpersonal level, decisive), they are important tools for selling our Characters in fiction, for appropriating the presence of the real.

You will recall Maya Angelou’s famous exhortation When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

Wise words for life and for writing. To create believable Characters, organize instances where your Characters show us who they really are — in other words, create a Character River. Reveal a side of them that would not be otherwise accessible to a reader.

Often this River side contrasts with their outward demeanor, with their face cards, alludes to their inner contradictions. Sometimes the River reveals that the surface-self is in fact deep — is in fact, character.

Perhaps one the most famous Rivers in nerd canon is Frodo’s startling reaction when confronted with the danger that Gollum has put him and the entire Shire in:

‘But this is terrible!’ cried Frodo. ‘Far worse than the worst that I imagined from your hints and warnings. O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!’

Hitherto Frodo has presented himself “as nice a young hobbit as you could wish to meet”. But when his life is in peril Frodo lets slip a ruthless inhuman aspect, a River reveal that will over the course of three volumes determine the fate of the world.

And then there’s Pilate’s final words at the end of Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Pilate has just been shot by Guitar (the bullet was meant for Milkman) and you would think as she lays dying in Milkman’s arms she would rage at the injustice but no; she says instead:

“I wish I’d a knowed more people, I would of loved ‘em all. If I’d known more, I would a loved more.”

And here at the end of her life we see who Pilate was all along, and an already convincing portrait becomes imbued with the presence and authority of the real.

Third example (sans spoilers): I recently watched Curry Barker’s wild film Obsession. The protagonist Bear spends the opening quarter of the film agonizing over revealing his “love” for his friend Nikki. And then Nikki asks him point-blank if he’s into her and his response, a River if I’ve ever seen one, exposes an aspect of Bear that haunts the rest of the film.

You got a Character you want readers to cleave to — to feel in their marrow and hearts and dreams?

Stage a River. Make it surprising, low key or high key.

Back in graduate school I left a generous tip at a restaurant and as I was leaving I saw the woman I was dating at the time steal the tip. This really happened, in Ithaca, at Plums. I didn’t say anything. I walked half a block with her and then pretended I’d left something at the restaurant and went back and left another tip.

What happened next doesn’t matter. What matters is that when I design Characters I’m always looking for Rivers that equal the unnerving truth-effect of that surprising reveal.

Last month when I was visiting Stanford an alert reader pointed out a technique in my story Ysrael that is common enough in cinema but not discussed enough in fiction — the Reaction Shot. In film a Reaction Shot — cutting away from the action to show a character reacting to the action — creates an emotional model for audiences to agree or disagree with.

In fiction a Reaction Shot — showing a character’s reaction to some provocation in the diegesis — is my favorite descriptive shortcut, what in my homebrew I call a triplazo, triply beneficial because —

1. Like in film, literary Reaction Shots MODEL your reader’s emotional responses.

Readers doesn’t always know when to react or how and Reaction Shots help guide their responses. The reality is readers understand and connect more viscerally to another person’s reaction than the most lyrically written descriptions ever penned. We’re just limbic like that.

2. Reaction Shots FORTIFY your descriptions.

Film can capture immense detail effortlessly, but we writers need every shortcut we can muster if we are to sell the Illusion of Life through our words. Let’s say you want to convince your readers that X is disgusting. Sure, you can elaborate on how disgusting X is via descriptions but if you really want to sell X efficiently, show us a Character’s convincing reaction to the disgusting-ness that you’re describing.

3. Reaction Shots ILLUMINATE your Characters.

How a character reacts to stimuli, especially if said reaction is chosen astutely, will bring that Character to life in ways that very few things can match, especially if said Character is not responding how the “average person” might respond. Even better for your characterizations: if there are other reactors to provide a comparison. Collective Reaction Shots can differentiate Characters with an enviable quickness.

As far as structuring, Reaction Shots can precede the description; they can succeed the description; they can occur concurrently or they can replace the description. Each will have their own benefits and drawbacks depending on what you are describing.

Obviously, not everything needs a Reaction Shot but when curated wisely, they will create circuits for immersion, all the while performing necessary narrative labors.

There are peculiar challenges to writing long — when you spend months, sometimes years with your Characters. I cannot speak for anyone else but each time I’ve written novels (one published, one in progress, five or six in ruins) I’ve found myself susceptible to what I call Character Lock — when I achieve a good-enough version of my protagonist / protagonists and I write the book around that fixed vision, instead of letting the characters evolve through the process. Sure, there might be a little movement throughout, a few surprises in the Character’s approaches to the obstacles my imagination throws at them, standard drift, but more often than not when I lapse into Character Lock the protagonist I start with on Day 1 will be roughly the same mangazón I’m pursuing on Day 365. An arrested character trapped in the initial amber of their conception.

If one is alert to Character Lock, one will end up encountering quite a few otherwise awesome published books whose protagonists suffer from this condition — where the protagonist is both sufficiently complex but static. Good enough for their novel, I guess, but too static for the Illusion of Life that I seek. What I’ve also noticed is that my absolute favorite novels don’t suffer from Character Lock and not only at the obvious diegetic level but in subtle molecular ways that are often hard to put a finger on in the text, but that help imbue the Character with that much desired state of lividity.

See that’s the rub: as a writer you can build Character growth straight into the superstructure of your Story — Protagonist X is dumped by the other corners of their magic hunting triad, eventually learns humility but realizes they will struggle to overcome the inner guardedness that got them in the situation in the first place — which is cool and necessary and helps hold off the static fail, but which also can sometimes feel as though you have a Character who is like a plank of nicely textured wood (complex but static). When the structured change of the Conflict hits, the Character changes, sure, but they change like a nicely textured piece of wood changes when it is split. Sure, the Character has altered but the sense of inhuman stiffness before and after the change remains.

But what if you’re seeking to imbue your characters with a looseness, a fluidity, a life-ness, an animation that expresses an already present microscopic lividity? Life, as Octavia Butler teaches us, is change — so when the structured change of the Conflict hits, you feel the Character is not a piece of complex but static wood upon whom an alteration has been wrought, but instead a living being who has absorbed one of “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”

A lifeness that is almost never identified by its presence, but almost always by its absence, apophatically.

Or perhaps this is too weird and too ephemeral an aspiration – what if you seek to keep your Protagonist reading as a real person throughout the long process of writing a novel or a durational work of fiction?

How I cope with these challenges is that I like stay searching for my Characters throughout the entire process of writing. Which is to say: I’m always looking to understand my Characters in excess of the Story I’m writing. And therefore I work on my Characters in parallel ways, details that rarely make it into the Story, but whose awareness informs the Story in powerfully subtle ways.

I’ve touched on this before, but put simply: I learn more about my Character than the Story needs, a knowledge that nevertheless cannot help but to imbue my characterization with a hard-to-pin-down lividity or lifeness.

(It is in this characterlogical excess that my characters most often come to life.)

One exercise that has produced sweetly for me on this front is what I call the Unpopularity Principle.

Read more

So this is how it happens. About ten months ago you receive an invite to participate in a literary festival in Panamá. You’ve been a published writer for thirty years, and these invites still never fail to bowl you over. Your younger self could never have imagined it — shit, your elder self can barely imagine it.

Anyway, you’ve been to Panamá but never to any book events. This festival seems cool as fuck — and best of all the people organizing it are supremes. You’ve worked with them before and they are top professionals at putting literary-holidays together. That’s what these festivals are to you — Thanksgiving and Halloween combined, but for books.

The terms are swell; you agree to participate with a happy quickness. You cross off a week in your calendar and then you forget about it. Ten months is a long way off and you have a lot of shit to do. You have to teach, first and foremost. You have to write a few small pieces for certain editors. You have to work on your novel, the one that is making you miserable. You have to do your university administrative work and your community work and always you have to write letters for your students. In those ten months you suffer a tremendous family loss. It makes you sit down a lot, and cry at random times.

You’re in the middle of all that when Panamá begins picking up. The organizers send an email with possible flights. You pick an itinerary and you receive your ticket a day later. Now the block in the calendar has information. That’s when you begin to revisit the details of your participation. Do you have to write anything? No, and that relieves you. You did agree to run two 3 hour seminars on worldbuilding. You’ve been teaching worldbuilding for a decade and know what you’re doing, somewhat, but this is a different type of classroom with different demands so you try to prepare for that and hope for the best. You’ll keep it fun no matter what.

Biggest challenge will be speaking Spanish. Your Spanish sucks, but what can a Jersey Domo do? You’ll make it work. If you run into trouble, folks in the audience will help you. They always help you. Book people excited to talk books never look for excuses not to talk books.

And then the organizers email you to discuss an idea they have for your biggest event — a conversation between you and Ruben Blades.

Rubén Blades? The greatest singer-songwriter-composer in both Americas Rubén Blades? Actor, activist, politician, twelve-time Grammy winner, Fania All-Stars “Pedro Navaja“ y “El Cantante“ Rubén Blades?

You assume they’re kidding. They are not.

To be continued…

I published the original post earlier today and turns out it was confusing as fuck. Let me try to make my point again without too many Marvel Comics references. ( I’ll leave the original confusion below for the curious.)

No surprise — as a writer I spend long hours at my “writing desk” consumed in the slow solitary task writing.

Additionally, I’m trying to write novels and I’ve discovered no way of doing these without bringing to bear heroic levels of dedication. Maybe other folks can breeze their novels out — not me. I have to spend years of steady focus before I can produce even a rough draft.

If you’re a writer like me and you got to grind OD for the fiction to flow then you’ve probably come face to face with some pitfalls of long writing. Pitfalls that derive from the actual long labors themselves, and not any difficulty within the fiction.

Novels have many diegetic challenges — challenges that arise from the fiction — and many extradiegetic challenges — challenges from the life and real world outside the fiction. Por ejemplo: I have to make my Characters compelling and convincing (diegetic challenge) and also I have to find consistent time every day to write (extradiegetic challenge).

There’s one extradiegetic challenge I’ve faced in all my long writing projects that I ain’t seen a lot of talk about: how the actual solitude of writing, the experience of being alone and quiet at my desk, can begin to leak into the writing.

Por ejemplo: I will find myself writing a Character who for no reason at all goes on for pages without a lot of dialogue. I, the writer, ain’t talking during my writing process and now my Character, for no reason, is also not talking to anyone in their world.

Or I will find myself writing a Character who, despite having family and friends and even a partner, spends long pages alone, lost in their thoughts.

I, the writer, am isolated — so my Characters become isolated.

Or my writing, produced by a long reflexive literary process, suddenly itself becomes overly reflexive and literary — too arch, too studied, too inorganic, too manufactured — in other words too obviously literary. This one is trickier because plenty of writers or writing projects don’t require a jovial informality, but my current work definitely needs that very much. And when I spend three or four weeks at my writing desk I can sometimes get consumed in the task of literature, in my literature-making, get so caught up in the quest for the Norton-level Literature Gold Medal that questions of does it sound real or does it sound convincing are ignored.

I call this the Mobius Effect, in reference to comic book art titan Jack Kirby who spent 12-14 hours every day for over fifty years hunched over his drawing desk. One consequence of all that desk work is that Kirby designed a lot of comic book characters who were either strapped to desks or chairs (Metron in his Mobius Chair) or had to hunch for whatever reason. This always struck me as the visual corollary of what I’m trying to explicate here.

Maybe one day I’ll make being stuck at my desk day after day after month after month part of my fiction but that’s not where I’m at right now — I’m just trying to keep my literary world reading less like a fictional echo of my anchoritic desk solitaires — static, isolated, solipsistic — and reading more like a real world — alive, connected, kinetic, crowded, ever-changing.

I want my fiction to be a product of my desk labors and not a simulacra of me at my desk laboring.

Thanks and see you next week!

Below please find a very confusing earlier version of the above essay:

There is an occupational distortion that we writers we must be alert to that’s best characterized by comic book titan Jack “the King” Kirby. For those who don’t already know: Kirby is widely considered one of the most influential American comic book artists ever; Kirby more or less made Marvel Comics Marvel Comics, co-creating nearly all its signature heroes — Captain America, Black Panther, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, the X-Men, and countless others. Kirby was also one of the most prolific comic artists, illustrating “over 20,000 pages of art, around 1,500 covers, not to mention hundreds of pages of 1960s layouts, hundreds of unpublished material and commission pieces.” For nearly his entire 50 year career, dude spent 12-14 hours a day at his drawing table. (The King and Stephen King have a lot in common.)

I repeat: for 50 years Kirby spent 12-14 hours every day at his drawing table.

Now’s let check out some of the characters Kirby designed in that time:

What should be clear (and which I am not alone in noticing) is that of all Kirby’s long hours at the drawing table, lashed to his Mobius Chair, leaked into his creations.

To be explicit: because he was lashed to his table he lashed many of his characters to fictional versions of that table.

As writers, we too are lashed to our own Mobius Chairs and while Kirby was able to transform his Mobius Chair into something remarkable, we writers don’t always have that option (depends on the story we are telling) and must consequently be mindful not to let the physical fact of our Mobius constraints seep into our own work in unconsciously detrimental ways.

Common writerly Mobius Chair fails:

We are alone in our silent toil and therefore we create very isolated or under-connected characters.

We alone speak in our art (literally) and therefore don’t allow for other contrary voices to enter the work.

We are carefully crafting literature and therefore our sentences take on the studied artificiality of our craft, sounding artificially literary, less overheard than manufactured.

The Mobius Chair — spending long hours at our labors — is what produces our literary magic but unless we pull a Kirby and make that chair part of our magic, we must not let the toll that chair demands from us leak into the work unbidden.

Office Hours Question: I am currently writing a story that takes place in a very real place, but a place where the everyday reality of life is so brutal and unforgiving that for the average American, reading about it could feel offensive. I don’t want to soften it, as I feel its authenticity is a big part of what makes it what it is, but I also don’t want to turn off potential readers. You are someone who has fearlessly gone all in with your writing, and with great success. So I’m wondering, how do you navigate criticism or pushback from editors/publishers/readers for being too real and raw? How conscious of this are you when writing, and do you ever feel the need to hold back or omit certain things?

Dear Shields Green,

Thank you for your kind question and forgive any shortcomings in my response, just trying to help — and as always please understand that this is the opinion of one slow-writing writer.

If a reader criticizes my Setting, I tend to take that very seriously at the level of craft, but not at the level of authenticity. Questions of authenticity have a nasty habit of consuming writers, especially writers of color or writers from marginalized backgrounds. For a while they sure as hell consumed me, but authenticity I’ve come to realize is a trap that sidesteps what really matters —

— is our Story working as a Story.

After all, there’s no way to satisfy someone who believes or even suspects you’re not X enough, especially if that person is in our head (and so many of us writers have this invisible asshole inside us undermining our work). We waste so much time trying to convince these inner Authenticity Police that we are X enough, when ultimately that’s a game you’re always going to lose, and one that’s going to fuck up your work by dissipating or misdirecting your narrative energies.

For me, getting my Stories to work as Stories is infinitely more important than clearing some arbitrary authenticity checkpoint manned by literary ICE agents. After all, when I write about NYC or the Dominican Republic or Central NJ or dominicanidad, I’m not arguing that my vision of these spaces is authoritative or universal. My art is always only my point of view that anyone and everyone is free to disagree with, or put down the book.

Rather than be tormented by authenticity I now begin with the simple proposition that my audience utterly believes I am utterly qualified to tell my Story.

I begin with the proposition that my audience is happy to see me.

Begin there, and questions of authenticity die as they should.

This leaves me to address the criticism of my World only through craft — all the better for me and for my work. After all, craft always delivers a sweet return on our investment because the more we wrestle with craft (as opposed to bullshit like authenticity) the more we build our craft, and in this game you’re going to need all the craft you can get.

Wrestle with craft and you get more craft. Wrestle with authenticity and you kill your craft.

Authenticity kills craft.

I have that written on a card over my desk.

So we get to the real rub: is the pushback on Setting a craft problem? Clearly, nightmare worlds are not uncommon to fiction — I doubt settings get grimmer than Butler’s Dawn or Sweet Home Plantation in Morrison’s Beloved. But in both cases the authors took their time to establish their characters and the setting’s “normal” mode before throwing us headfirst into the extremity. After all, even combat zones have downtime, and while TV/movies often encourage storytellers to start with something adrenalized to hook viewers in, it is narratively far easier to establish the world’s normal baseline first and then dramatize the wildness.

You have to have a certain kind of talent to first introduce your Setting in its crazy mode; I for one don’t have that ability, which is why I go the easy way and first establish the baseline and then disrupt it — repeatedly.

But let’s say I introduced my Setting well — the next craft question I ask myself is about complexity. In real life, folks have access to how varied their reality is, but in fiction we writers have to prove that complexity.

In other words: I grew up in poor neighborhoods in both the Dominican Republic and Central Jersey and while there was a lot of awful in these spaces, there was also the banal, the trivial, the boring, the absurd — and yes, even joys — and I always try to gesture to that complexity.

If our Setting is one-note or supremely over-determined — if our Setting lacks complexity — chances are we’re no longer in the realm of fictionalized reality — chances are we’ve ventured into the sloughs of allegory, and unless we’re writing in the John Bunyon mode, perhaps best to be avoided.

Plus when we make our Setting tendentious — it’s Brutal! — we rob the reader of their chance to participate in the co-creation. We’re telling them what they should experience instead of showing them the evidence of the World and allowing them to reach a conclusion themselves.

So to recap: How do I navigate pushback / criticism on my maybe too-brutal world? I assume a positive reader, I ignore questions of authenticity, I focus on craft and getting my Stories to work as Stories.

And as I’m doing all this, I ask myself: Is this even real criticism / pushback from an actual reader or something that I’m anticipating?

Which is a question I asked you.

If it’s real criticism you check your Story’s craft — be sure that’s in order.

If you’re just anticipating push-back … you should stop anticipating the negative. Anticipating criticism is a bad way to spend our energies and a bad way to imagine audiences. I’ve written about proleptic objections in elsewhere but the bottom line is why as a writer imagine a scenario for yourself where you’re already losing?

Better to imagine a reception where your craft wins the day, where your World is compelling and convincing.

As writers we need to cultivate a relationship to our writing that is not post festum (we’re adapting Giorgio Agamben here) — where the past is better than the present.

I wrote so much better back when I was taking classes. I wrote so much better when I didn’t have a job or when I was younger.

That’s bullshit and a waste of your creative energies and a way to foil yourself before you even get in the game.

But equally we must avoid cultivating an ante festum perspective as writers that nervously looks to the future (positive or negative) and therefore (like post festum) misses the celebration and the necessary work that is this present, that is the writing, that is you.

Hope that’s not too off topic or too rambling but maybe something in this will help. No matter what — good luck!

Been three months since I’ve wrangled out one of these — been on a tear with writing advice and the Gilgamek novel I was serializing here. (For all five of you wanting a Gilgamek update I might be able to start part two in a month — fingers crossed.)

Not much to say about the state of our world except that each time I write one of these we’re in a worse situation than we were before. We’re back in an insane illegal war, back in another self-inflicted economic crisis — but you don’t need a recap — you’re living it. As my students keep reminding me, the damage that this president and his cronies have inflicted will not be easily undone for years.

What helps me is spending time teaching and surrounding myself with friends and art.

One of my dearest friends recently asked me for some book recommendations (which I promptly listed) and I realized this morning I should share these with you all, so without further ado here is some of what kept me in hope these last months.

And as always: tremendous gratitude to all our subscribers. Thank you for hanging and sharing with us. The plan always: deeper tools for deeper work.

AND ALSO … TIME FOR ANOTHER OFFICE HOUR!

If you have any questions regarding building stories or the creative life in general — if you have any questions about anything we’ve been discussing — please post them in the comments section below or message me directly.

READ

Kirino is one of my favorite writers, but her latest is another banger. Our protagonist Riki has come to Tokyo from the provinces and she ain’t making it at all in the Big City and in a desperate attempt to better her lot she decides to become a surrogate for some wealthy art types. A sharp delicious slow-burn. Lots of folks visit Japan and fall in love with the orderly delicious surface; Kirino reveals the costs and the agonies that lurk below.

I’m reading on the Boom lately and never read Paternostro’s book until now. If you’re as obsessed with García Márquez as I am this book is for you — fun as fuck and twice as chismoso as your most chismoso relative.

Olivia Manning sounds exactly like the kind of writer I’d jump out of a slow moving vehicle to avoid. She was desperate for fame — “I don’t want fame when I’m dead; I want it now” — and complained so often about her lot — and about her younger more famous arch-nemesis Iris Murdoch — that her friends (not her enemies mind you) called her Olivia Moaning. (If you want the full scoop check out Emma Garman’s piece here.) And yet FORTUNES OF WAR is one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time. Young introverted Harriet joins her young extroverted husband in Bucharest where he works at the university — just weeks before the Nazis invade Poland and Romania allies itself with Hitler — and the young Brits have to flee to Greece, trying to stay stay ahead of the Germans. The writing is surprising, the drama top-notched, and it’s the kind of book that a writer gets once in a lifetime, the kind of book I’d jump out of a slow moving vehicle to read.

I’m a huge fan of Amitav Ghosh. Started reading him back in The Calcutta Chromosome days. GUN ISLAND is Ghosh at his best — a skittish book dealer takes a trip to the Sundarbans at the behest of his aunt — he’s supposed to find the hidden shrine of Manasa Devi and this wild jaunt ends up launching him on a quest to track down the source of the legends of the Bengali folk figure called Bonduki Sadakar, the gun merchant, an odyssey that takes him across time and language and across our rapidly warming planet. GUN ISLAND is a gem and you’ll devour it in a day, two tops.

WATCH

Never played the video game that inspired EXIT 8 but this movie is straight up fucking amazing. Not only chilling and weird, this film perfectly captures how hard it is for folks to listen to simple instructions even when their lives depend on it. Our protagonist receives a phone call from his girlfriend who informs him she’s pregnant; girlfriend is trying to decide whether to keep the baby or not and before dude can say anything of worth he finds himself trapped in warped version of the train station. Most horror films ain’t remotely uplifting, but EXIT 8 is. If you’re not into horror but are curious about the genre — this is a perfect place to start.

You heard me talk about this series before and now that the final season has dropped I’m back here trying to tell you all — FROM is fantastic must-watch tv and Harold Perrineau deserves a bushel of Emmies. FROM shares a lot of DNA with LOST but it’s focused and smarter and actually delivers. Plus it has Harold Perrineau.

I said it before and I’ll say again: THE SECRET AGENT is the movie ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER wishes it was. Here’s what revolution actually looks like with all its shattering costs. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film is set in 1977, in the middle of the Brazilian dictatorship; it’s carnival, Jaws is playing and former university researcher Armando is being hunted by government goons; he goes to Recife to pick up his son and wait for the passports that will ferry him out of the country. Mendonça Filho understands how impossible it is to resist oppressive regimes and also how impossibly necessary it is. Wait until you peep the detached animated leg, dios mio. I could go on but what’s the use? Words can’t do this film justice — just watch this masterpiece and you will not be disappointed.

PLAY

When I was a student at Rutgers, I saw Fishbone three times. That’s how much I loved these cats. And here we got fellow Dominican Twin Shadow covering Fishbone’s When Problems Arise. Prepare yourself for double genius.

My friend sent me this Turkish virtuoso. And now I’m a believer.

FEAST

I had to deliver a keynote at Stanford this week and before I caught my flight home I was able to have dinner at San Ho Won. Friends have been recommending this spot forever and let me tell you: if you can nab a reservation, do it with a quickness. I was too full to have dessert and the servers shook their heads with heavy disappointment, so it appears I have to return for a rematch.

Boston folks, you have until August to hit the ICA and see this eye and mind opener of a show — SAY IT LOUD: AAMARP, 1977.

I’ve been living in the Boston area 21 years now (covers face) and I had no idea that AAMARP existed and the incredible work they accomplished and how truly fucked up Northeastern was to kneecap this extraordinary movement.

What the Museum says: Founded in 1977 by influential artist, educator, and activist Dana C. Chandler Jr., the African American Master Artists-in-Residence Program (AAMARP) at Northeastern University is one of the few longstanding residency programs for Black artists in the United States. With the university’s support, AAMARP has stood at the intersection of art, activism, and community for nearly five decades. A vital outgrowth of the Black Arts movement in Boston, AAMARP was envisioned as both an artistic haven and a cultural force—providing a “living focus” on “the diverse dynamics of African American aesthetics,” according to an early program description. Conceived as a Black artist-run alternative art space, AAMARP offered more than free studio space—it nurtured a thriving hub for exhibitions, poetry readings, dance performances, lectures, films, workshops, and public gatherings. Today, the program is still supported by Northeastern University and operates as a vibrant, intergenerational collective of thirteen transnational artists whose works across media offer a rich and varied reflection of the arts of Africa and its diaspora.

Countless artists have been involved with AAMARP, either as residents, exhibiting artists, or program participants. Say It Loud presents a dynamic selection of artworks by thirty-nine artists differently affiliated with AAMARP from its founding in 1977 to the present.

That’s it, folks! Stay strong out there and remember if you have any Office Hours questions, post them below!

My father was first; he reached Nueva York at the start of the Seventies, in the Years of the Puerto Rican Obituary. This was the decade of benign neglect and planned shrinkage, when New York City — specifically the poor colored neighborhoods in which my father was attempting to live — was being burned to the ground by the “cost-effective” policies of Roger Starr and his Rand Corporation cronies.

He had the “usual” Caribbean immigrant experience: he worked killing jobs, he slept in unheated buildings, he starved his ass off. All around him buildings exploded into flame. Fortunately he wasn’t in them, but it didn’t help his sleep any knowing that a family of seven had been roasted to death the week before in the building next door. The stench of the smoke, of those destroyed lives, seeped into his dreams.

Who’s surprised that after five unhappy years in Nueva York my father decided that he’d had enough? Right before he brought the rest of us over from Santo Domingo my father abandoned New York City, where he had friends, where he had a life, and relocated to New Jersey, where he knew no one. He said it was for our sake but I think it was also for his peace of mind (and to have all his infidelities). He settled in a Section 8 apartment complex that was bounded on one side by Old Bridge (where I went to high school with Vitamin C) and on the other by Sayreville (BonJoviLand). This is where me and my siblings lived when we reached the States, where I spent my Ghetto-American childhood, marooned in the middle of suburbs white as a gringo’s ass.

New York went from the Oz I dreamed about in the Dominican Republic to the distant sight of the Verrazzano Bridge (visible from the entrance of my development.) Transformed from the City of Everything to the ruined boroughs we visited on weekends. A future that had been promised but never arrived.

Eventually I would move to Nueva York, at twenty-six gaining the life I always thought should have been mine to begin with. I didn’t arrive in the Years of the Puerto Rican Obituary; it was, by then, the Years of the Nightstick. I had the “usual” Caribbean college-graduate New York experience. I worked temp jobs, I lived in an unwinterized apartment in Brooklyn, I smoked cheap hydro and was too broke for anything but activism. Nothing burned, thank God, not even bread. Often I found myself in Washington Heights, the capital of the Dominican Diaspora, visiting friends, visiting relatives; sometimes I would stand on the street corners with my writer’s notebook, trying to imagine what-could-have-been.

Certain nights, when I was restless and nothing was working out, I’d take the D over the Manhattan Bridge. As the train left the tunnel and began to cross the East River I’d step between the cars. This, for some reason, made me happy. It wasn’t really dangerous and the view it afforded of New York was beyond words. A city ablaze, suspended between blacksky and river. Our first night in the States my old man wanted us to see a similar city, on our drive from JFK. I remember our silence, the cold of the windows against our faces. The city looked like science fiction. Like an incubator for stars, where suns are made. This was before we realized that we were actually bound for New Jersey, when we thought one of those lights was going to be our home.

(an earlier version was published in the New York Times back in 2000)

Dialogue is one of the key channels of intrinsic characterization, along with interiority and praxis. What a character says, what a character thinks, what a character does — lock in on those three channels and you’ll be halfway up the mountain that is compelling convincing Character. Give the Character two other relationships (the extrinsic component) and you’ll have the summit in sight.

Because your average person lives in the world where there is a lot of “dialogue” (people jawing) and consumes media oversaturated with “dialogue” — TV, films, videos, music, theater — said average people tend to have strong opinions as to what constitutes good dialogue and what doesn’t. (Most folks, for example, don’t have nearly as much experience with Third person narration.) This is why dialogue is always something for the writer to keep their art on, to worry over.

You’ve heard the old saying kill your darlings — well, one should be extra terminator with their dialogue. Doesn’t matter whether you prefer your dialogue verbose, terse, or some gradation in between. Whatever your baseline prolixity preferences, always triple check whether a line of dialogue deserves its seat at the table, because folks will notice weak dialogue the way they won’t a weak line of exposition.

Most of you will know the standard rules of good dialogue.

Good Dialogue is conflict — if you ain’t using your Dialogue for Character combat, subtle or salient, remote or immediate, you might wish to ask why.

Good Dialogue has a telos or point — characters want something — whether it’s recognition, sympathy, obedience, persuasion or something material — and pursue said something through the dialogue. Good Dialogue is, in other words, building towards something.

Good Dialogue reveals Character — absolutely, should be the first rule. Especially when you put Dialogue — what a Characters says — into producing tension with what they’re thinking and what they’re doing.

Good Dialogue doesn’t perform the Writer’s work — doesn’t spend even a vowel explaining or setting up narrative points for the writer — good dialogue performs the Character’s work.

Good Dialogue adds — doesn’t just repeat or rhyme material, information the reader has heard before. Good Dialogue adds to the diegesis, to our knowledge of the World, the Conflict, the Characters. Some folks say that good Dialogue should surprise but in my experience I’m lucky to have a surprising bit of Dialogue once a story. I suspect, though, when they say Surprise they might mean this: adding. In good dialogue, information ain’t always necessarily surprising, but it is always dynamic.

Good Dialogue ain’t real talk — it just passes for real talk. It’s not enough, in other words, to study Dialogue in the real world (though you should); you need to study Dialogue inside of other narrative mediums to see what’s been done before and how.

On top of those I have my own warnings and suggestions:

Good Dialogue is dear — in real life talk is cheap but in fiction talk is dear. Bad dialogue can wreck a story quicker than a few bad lines of description.

Good Dialogue rebels — beyond essential — this is often the difference between convincing dialogue as a unit and everything else — sure you can jewel your individual lines of Dialogue to perfection but the entire dialogue system will be off, will strike readers as tendentious and collusory if the writer fails to introduce other voices other tenors other rhythms other opinions that countermand the tyranny of the authorial voice. The authorial voice is cool, restrained, civilized — we need to hear Orc voices — that way you are building the Illusion of Life.

Good Dialogue should be overheard — should strike as something overhead and not written / scheduled. This is more a general aesthetic goad than anything but it often helps when in the re-writing phase.

And finally Good Dialogue springs from a secret need — when designing principal Characters I like to include information that guides their utterances. For each significant Character I ask a simple characterlogical question: What is the single overriding outcome they seek to avoid whenever they are speaking?

For one Character the Need might be seeming, well, needy. For another Character it is being factually wrong. For another Character it is not seeming smart (which is very different from seeming dumb). Whatever you decide will be a part of the Character and, for me at least, shows up in the Story. I design this characteristic explicitly to be diegetically nonactionable. It’s a hidden mechanism for generating consistent interesting Dialogue.

(I’ve tried the opposite — to ask my Characters what is the one outcome they wish to achieve — but it did not work as well.)

I picture the Character’s Need as a submerged stone in the Character’s communication river. Invisible, and yet subtly (or profoundly) altering the flow of the communications.

Occasionally I am told by people that I write good Dialogue. Not exactly true, but any credit on this front belongs to this final trick, which if nothing gives me consistency and a compass to guide me while writing Dialogue and an intimacy with my Character I might not have otherwise had.

Nothing, after all, keeps you close to a Character like protecting their secrets.

Like a lot of campesinos from his generation my abuelo was only minimally literate. He could do his figures — he needed his figures to run his micro-farm — but read a newspaper, read an entire book? Not a fucking chance. Which meant, of course, after I became a published writer, he was the one relative who definitely wasn’t pointing out all the errors I made about Dominicans or berating me about how I had dirty-laundered the family (which is wild considering how little of my actual life I used in the books).

And yet, for all of that, abuelo was proud as fuck of me. He had copies of all my books and was extra meticulous with them, extra diligent that they didn’t suffer from the elements. A challenge in the Caribbean, especially as our old zinc roof leaked a lot and basically suspended services during rain and hurricane seasons. Even after my mother and her sisters rebuilt the house in Villa Juana — immigrant dollars — there was still plenty of moisture. But my books always stayed dry, though not unwarped, in their plastic bags.

Whenever I was around and he had visitors, my abuelo was quick to pull out my books, holding them up like they were something he was auctioning or like Moses practicing with the tablets. His friends invariably asking: You wrote these?

The real question behind their incredulity was not had I written these books, but why.

One friend, upon being confronted with books, asked me flat-out if I was a communista and not in a good way. Same figurín who was always waxing fond about the days when Trujillo executed people for littering.

That never happened, my abuelo informed me after his friend left. Maybe you would be beaten with truncheons, but not executed.

The lives these viejos lived.

Abuelo was one of those hale vigorous cats I used to say was going to live forever, but forever in Villa Juana lasted only 93 years. Up until his late 80s, he was cutting down everything with his machete, could beat young cats arm-wrestlig and then one day, without warning, he got sick. His heart started failing, no more cutting anything or arm wrestling anyone and I made a habit of coming home more often and it was on one those visits that he asked me to read my fiction to him.

I remember being super reluctant.

Go on, he said. And then he added: But just a little. Maybe worried that I would slap a Moby-Dick on him.

I plucked a book out of the plastic bag and started reading. I got half a page through before he let out a sigh.

What’s wrong? I asked.

He shrugged. Doesn’t sound like you.

That’s the way writing is, I explained.

He bowed his frail head, his hair so fine so white against his brown skin. He was named after the German plantation owner where his mother had worked a century before and I sometimes wonder whether he got more from that Hun than his name.

Next time you should make it sound more like you, he said.

I’ll try.

He nodded, glad.

A year writing incident has given me interesting insights into my own character-driven fiction and of course, as discussed earlier, into narratives of incident. There are the pebble insights important for mortaring the walls of your craft — such as accepting the fact that in dialogue a string of “she said” or “I said” are inevitable and an dialogue tag variations like “she blustered” and “he averred” usually only clunk up the works or make you sound pretentious. As formulaic as “she said” "or “he says” can be, this tends to be something that bothers the writer more than the reader, especially if the dialogue is good.

(I tend to side with Elmore Leonard who said: Never use a verb other than ‘’said’‘ to carry dialogue.)

Pebble insights and mountain lessons. Many of these I’ve discussed in earlier newsletters but two still stand misty on the horizon, unaddressed. The first involves something that should have obvious to me from jump, but alas wasn’t.

Of course narratives of incident are going to have incident, often on a scale (both in numbers and intensities) that would send some literary fiction heads crying for their madelines. In certain genres, Action Scenes — whether combat, lovemaking, competitions, dance maneuvers — will be ubiquitous, as these are the sine qua non of narratives of incident.

For a writer like me, getting use to the amount of incident was one challenge. The real problem, however, is that narrative incidents have a tendency to proliferate. And I don’t mean just a little proliferation. Incident is the bamboo of narrative and if you ain’t in there constantly chopping you’re always going to end up with more than you’ll ever need, which will ruin the story.

Talk about irony. Narratives of Character tend to die because there’s too little Character. Narratives of Incident tend to die because there’s too much Incident.

One narrative tradition trends towards attenuation; the other trends towards amplification.

Both have to be managed assiduously, which is why writers of Incident need to keep narrative shears at the ready in order to battle Incident Proliferation Syndrome.

Being aware of the Incident Proliferation Syndrome is one half the battle; the other half is identifying exactly the kind of incident that tends to run rampant under your watch.

In my case I tend to do too many Action Scenes; Actions Scenes are my bamboo menace — proliferate in my work like the red weed in The War of the Worlds. (For another of my writer friends, Sexy Scenes are her bamboo menace; she’s always including way more than her Stories can handle.)

After I write an Action Scene and give it a few days to cool — a necessary pause for me as I need distance from the creative smithing before my judgment re-emerges — I simply ask myself: can this Story sing without the scene? After all, an Action Scene can be awesome in and of itself, and yet add zilch to the overall Story. Those Yes-But-No scenes you need to snip and maybe recycle in a later chapter or book.

Remember, you need to be as ruthless pruning your Incidents as you are diligent in creating them.

I find that the Action Scenes that I write that always survive the ruthless shears are those that hew closest to the following definitional ideal:

Good Action Scenes are either salvific or alter a Character’s body, identity, or standing in an original and a diegetically meaningfully way.

In other words, the Action Scenes that stick

— don’t echo earlier Action Scenes (are always original enough)

— have a diegetic impact that alters the way the Character interacts with themselves, the World and/or the Conflict. (sprained ankles or broken hearts or a new sense of self or a change of status or best of all more peril.

— or dramatize a clutch moment where someone or something is saved or not saved.

For me, original-impactful or original-salvific survive — everything else does not.

Each Narrative of Incident is its own beat-beast, with its own choreographical idiom. Note the fractured dada-esque Action sequences that drive William Gibson’s Neuromancer

Pure mindless reflex: he threw the beer and chicken down and ran after her. He might have called her name, but he’d never be sure.

Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light. Seared concrete beneath the thin soles of his shoes.

Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now, and again the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye, bobbing in his vision as he ran.

Someone tripped him. Concrete tore his palms.

He rolled and kicked, failing to connect. A thin boy, spiked blond hair lit from behind in a rainbow nimbus, was leaning over him. Above the stage, a figure turned, knife held high, to the cheering crowd. The boy smiled and drew something from his sleeve. A razor, etched in red as a third beam blinked past them into the dark. Case saw the razor dipping for his throat like a dowser’s wand.

The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic explosions. Molly’s fletchettes, at twenty rounds per second. The boy coughed once, convulsively, and toppled across Case’s legs.

Compare Gibson with the clipped kinetic clarity of Joe Abercrombie’s action in The Blade Itself.

A twig snapped and he whipped round. There was a spear coming at him. A cruel-looking spear, coming at him fast with a Shanka on the other end of it.

“Shit,” said Logen. He threw himself to one side, slipped and fell on his face, rolled away thrashing through the brush, expecting the spear through his back at any moment. He scrambled up, breathing hard. He saw the bright point poking at him again, dodged out of the way, slithered behind a big tree trunk. He peered out and the Flathead hissed and stabbed at him. He showed himself on the other side, just for a moment, then ducked away, jumped round the tree and swung the axe down, roaring loud as he could. There was a crack as the blade buried itself deep in the Shanka’s skull. Lucky that, but then Logen reckoned he was due a little luck.

The Flathead stood there, blinking at him. Then it started to sway from side to side, blood dribbling down its face. Then it dropped like a stone, dragging the axe from Logen’s fingers, thrashing around on the ground at his feet.

How about Stephen King’s colloquial loquacity in The Stand?

So he felt a touch of fear and he began to descend the steps on the run, his shoes clanging, his hand slipping quickly over the steep, rust-pitted railing.

Down and down, circling, wondering how long until the vapor hanging around the mouth of the outflow pipe would catch, how long before heat great enough for ignition would rush down the pipe’s throat and into the tank’s belly.

Hair flying back from his forehead, a terrified grin pasted to his face, the wind roaring in his ears, he rushed down. Now he was halfway, racing past the letters CH, letters twenty feet high and lime green against the white of the tank. Down and down, and if his flying feet stuttered or caught on anything, he would tumble like the gascan had tumbled, his bones breaking like dead branches.

The ground came closer, the white gravel circles around the tanks, the green grass beyond the gravel. The cars in the parking lot began to regain their normal size. And still he seemed to be floating, floating in a dream, and he would never reach the bottom, only run and run and get nowhere. He was next to a bomb and the fuse was lit.

From far overhead there came a sudden bang, like a five-inch Fourth of July firecracker. There was a dim clang, and then something whirred past him. It was part of the outflow pipe, he saw with a sharp and almost delicious fear. It was totally black and twisted into a new and excitingly senseless shape by the heat. He placed one hand on the railing and vaulted over, hearing something snap in his wrist. Sickening pain flowed up his arm to the elbow. He dropped the last twenty-five feet, landed on the gravel, and went sprawling. The gravel scraped skin from his forearms, but he hardly felt it. He was full of moaning, grinning panic now, and the day seemed very bright.

What these examples make clear is that when it comes to Action Scenes what counts for austerity (First Golden Rule) is a highly varied beast indeed.

One writer’s austerity is another writer’s extravagance, and vice versa.

And yet no matter their diversity, all Action Scenes share a common inescapable limitation born of their medium. Literature has many glorious strengths but capturing action / motion well is not one of them. Fiction can’t even capture action mediocrely. It’s just the way it is — all media has affordances and disaffordances — fiction, por ejemplo, is awesome at capturing interiority, but sucks at capturing motion. Film, on the other hand, is superb at rendering motion but extra-terrible at depicting interiority, has to resort to all sorts of work-arounds.

Truth be told, literature only ever intimates action, sketches it.

Or to return to our dance metaphor: when we writers write action we are showing the action, the dance, through a narrative strobe light. Unable to depict the act entire, we writers must choose to describe the fragment we think most saliently vigorously represents the whole — the fragment that is, in other words, most synecdochal. We also choose to omit much that cannot be described, but we should do so in ways that will help Action Scene. Call these gaps generative omissions or call them as I do in my homebrew, gutters.

Gutters, of course, is a comic book term — gutters are the spaces between panels that provoke leaps in time and motion. Note the gutter between the panels below:

Gutters might seem simple but they are the imaginative engines of sequential comics.

Understand: sequential comics are obviously a visual medium, but they too are incapable of depicting visual reality with absolute fidelity; for all their visual and textual affordances, sequential comics must omit more than they can possibly include, visual and otherwise. But you don’t have to be Scott McCloud to understand that omissions in comic books are not always simple economies; they are often dynamic absences that suggest what comes next — they are voids that summon presences. That’s guttters, in a nut shell. Voids that summon presences. Gaps that summon action.

Like a good comic book artist, the writer composing an Action Scene should put in the details they believe will sell their Action Scene best and omit what cannot be described, but they should attempt to omit in a way that creates gutters.

In other words, the smart comic artist or Action scene writer uses gutters to suggest the very actions they cannot hope to depict and through that skillful omission provokes the reader to add what’s missing — to create from the fragments a beautiful whole, a co-creation that Scott McCloud calls closure.

Action Scenes, like a series of comic panels, work best when detail and gutter — omission and commission, presence and absence — harmonize to evoke what otherwise could not be evoked by the medium. Harmony is the key here. Too much gutter (too much exclusion) and the Action Scene becomes disjointed and hard to follow, lost in the shadows. The reader will have too much to do and too little guidance and will end up confused, frustrated, or both, filling in the gutters in ways that work against your Action Scene.

Too much detail (too much inclusion) and what you have is an over-elaborated processual without the gutters necessary to engage reader’s imagination in co-creative play. With too much guidance and too little to do, the reader might observe all the parts, if they don’t pull away in boredom, but they will never participate in generating the whole. They’ll never assemble from the overwhelm of fragment a moving unity, in every sense of the term.

All literature is a calculus of what goes in and what’s left out. But in sequential comics and in literary Action Scenes what’s left out can also be explicitly organized into a dynamic force — a void that in its inducement to play summons presences — into gutters.

Good Action Scenes are a well-organized archipelago of details whose gaps are gutters that excite generative play and not gulfs that incite confusion and boredom.

If Actions Scenes are a dance, they are a dance between the perfect detail and the perfect gutter, between the perfect presence and the perfect generative absence.

See our earlier discussions of Narratives of Incidents here

See our earlier discussions of Writing Action Scenes here