Exercise #2: Kindnesses of a Greater Quality
Robert McKee, Amber Sparks, Peter Kispert, Mary South, Leesa Cross-Smith, Megan Giddings, Deb Olin Unferth, Ander Monson, Tina May Hall, Stanley Crawford, Chris Offutt
Hi all!
Thanks to everyone who participated in my first exercise! As you may remember, I said there that I planned on sending this newsletter just once a month—and probably that’s still the plan going forward—but I know it’s an anxious time right now, where many of us might be at home than usual, while also maybe struggling to write, even if we have the time and the inclination. (I know I have been.) Given all that, hopefully you won’t mind receiving this bonus exercise, one designed to be both an interesting experiment in story shapes and (perhaps!) a small comfort in what I know is a difficult time.
I’ve also recommended some excellent new books: as you likely know, book tours and related events are being cancelled nationwide and many bookstores are temporarily closing, which could impact the success of books launching this month. So if you’ve got the means and need something new to read, now would be a great time to place an order. (All the book links in this newsletter go to Bookshop.org, which shares a portion of its proceeds with independent bookstores, but an even better option might be ordering directly from your favorite indie.)
As always, if you write something you like using the exercise below, feel free to say so on Twitter! You’re also welcome to share this prompt with others, if you’d like. 1500+ people got today’s newsletter, which means that even if we’re all at home, self-isolated from each other, we’re still not really alone if we’re writing this exercise anytime in the next few days: wherever you are, you might imagine yourself writing beside new friends.
Be safe this week, be kind to each other, and good luck with the exercise!
Happy writing,
Matt
www.mattbell.com
What I’m Reading:
And I Do Not Forgive You by Amber Sparks. Sparks is one of my favorite short story writers, and this collection of is her best book yet. Here’s a favorite sentence, from my favorite story in the book: "Because this is a fairy tale, the dress is made, and made perfectly. The dress is the exact color of blood, is a bright, saturated wound; it is a monstrous heart made of tulle and lace." You can read her “You Won’t Believe What Really Happened to the Sabine Women” at The Rupture.
I Know You Know Who I Am by Peter Kispert. Out the same day as Sparks’ book, Kispert’s is an excellent debut collection from a writer whose fiction I’ve been reading for years. I loved his story “On Hold,” which you can also read at Joyland.
You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South. South’s collection came out just this past Tuesday, and I’ve loved every story I’ve read in it so far. You can read the title story at The New Yorker, where it appeared earlier this spring.
So We Can Glow by Leesa Cross-Smith. Another new collection out this week! I’m really looking forward to reading this, after reading so many of Cross-Smith’s stories elsewhere. You might start with her “All That Smoke Howling Blue” from Cheap Pop, which was anthologized in Best Small Fictions.
Lakewood by Megan Giddings. I had the pleasure of blurbing Giddings’ novel, out March 24, calling it “a gripping thriller of ideas in the tradition of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, depicting a terrifying world of public complicity and government-sponsored malpractice.” It’s a smart and accomplished debut from a writer I’ve long admired.
Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth. I finished reading Unferth’s newest novel yesterday: about an attempt to free a million or so hens from a factory farm, it’s a fantastic book about how people become emotionally and intellectually moved to activism and action, as well as an impressive depiction of our complicity in the suffering of others (even/especially nonhuman others).
I Will Take the Answer/The Gnome Stories by Ander Monson. In 2005, Monson published his debut story collection and debut story collection on the same day; this month, he simultaneously published a new book of stories and a new book of essays. Very few writers would be brave enough to try this release schedule—and it’s another sign of how inventive Monson is that he keeps getting away with it. (Monson is also the co-founder of March Xness, which is in the middle of its Badness tournament now, another great source of fun and community you can participate in from home.)
The Snow Collectors by Tina May Hall. I’ve loved Hall’s stories since her chapbook All the Day’s Sad Stories came out, and her Drue Heinz-winning collection The Physics of Imaginary Objects is one I still think of all the time. The Snow Collectors is her first novel, and when I sat down to read it, I was unsurprised to find that it’s absolutely stunning so far—I can’t wait to read more. (I posted about its first page a couple days ago—Hall’s opening is a masterclass in how to compellingly deliver a novel’s starting material.)
Exercise #2: Kindnesses of a Greater Quality
"The writing of fiction, when it is going well, is an exercise in joy, in figuring out how to love the world.” —Stanley Crawford
In his screenwriting craft book Story, Robert McKee writes that “a story must not retreat to actions of lesser quality or magnitude, but move progressively forward to a final action beyond which the audience cannot imagine another.” This idea forms one of my favorite tests of the completeness of a piece of fiction—one answer to “How do you know when a story is finished?”—and I think its first part is good advice even for drafting: asking myself “Am I retreating to actions of lesser quality or magnitude?” is one metric I might use to test the scene I’m writing.
At its simplest, McKee’s formulation is simply a way of describing rising action: in most stories, the trouble gets more troublesome as the plot moves toward the climax. When I discuss this concept with my students, I often use something obvious like Star Wars or The Avengers to illustrate it: it’s clear to everyone that you shouldn’t put the biggest fight scene in an action movie first, then de-escalate for the next two hours. There’s a reason why every Death Star has to be bigger and badder than the last, why there must always be more Star Destroyers arrayed in ever larger fleets, why the only villain better than Thanos might be two Thanoses, and so on.
While the above mode of thought highlights the usual way of applying McKee’s idea, I don’t think it’s the only way to use the concept. For instance, if you replace “actions” in McKee’s rule with other nouns, you easily arrive at other workable formulations, including some that could produce very different kinds of stories:
A story must not retreat to beauty of lesser quality or magnitude.
A story must not retreat to joy of lesser quality or magnitude.
A story must not retreat to pleasure of lesser quality or magnitude.
A story must not retreat to acts of kindness of lesser quality or magnitude.
For this exercise, your task is to explore one of the four alternatives above, or else a similar rule of your own making, in a short piece of fiction. How do you write a story in which what escalates is not trouble or conflict, but beauty, pleasure, hope, or kindness? Instead of the usual kinds of obstacles a narrative might contain—complications and reversals designed to keep a character from getting what they want, forcing them to adapt and respond—how can you design “obstacles” that prompt or produce the escalation or expansion of kindness and beauty, joy and pleasure?
Remember that your use of these reformulated McKee rules doesn’t have to lead to a plot that works like Freytag’s Triangle or the three-act structure. Remember also that beauty and joy and pleasure and kindness might reside in the very language you choose to use, or the form of the story, or its structure and patterns.
In other words, can you write a story that escalates its beauty or joy or pleasure or kindness on both the level of action and the level of language?
I think you can.
Aim for 500-1000 words, which should be enough space to let you escalate away from wherever you start—and remember, as Chris Offutt suggests (in an essay in The Tin House Writer’s Notebook), to start as close to the end as possible, which I think in this case means you shouldn’t indulge any urges to start at abjectest misery just so you can easily show a movement toward relative joy.
With effort and luck, you might write a complete flash fiction or the beginning of something longer. As always, stick with the exercise for as long as it’s useful, then feel free to swerve toward whatever suggests itself next.
Good luck! See you in April!
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Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House/William Morrow in 2021. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
His personal website can be found at www.mattbell.com.