Author: Kelly Caldwell

“Beginnings, I think of them as like holograms. If you cut any piece of a hologram, it contains all the information of the whole. And so I think the beginning of a piece should also contain all the information of the whole.”

That was the author Nick Flynn, speaking to my Memoir 2 class recently about  Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. A student asked why he chose to open his book with a scene that some readers find off-putting:

(1989) Please, she whispers, how may I help you? The screen lights up with her voice. A room you enter, numbers you finger, heated, sterile almost. The phone beside her never rings, like a toy, like a prop. My father lifts the receiver in the night, speaks into it, asks Where’s the money? asks, Why can’t I sleep? asks, Who left me outside? The phone rings on a desk when he lifts it, the desk somewhere in Texas, someone is always supposed to be at that desk but no one ever is, not at night. A machine speaks while my father tries to speak, it doesn’t listen, it only speaks, my father’s face reflected dimly on the screen.

Suck City recounts what happened when Nick was working at a homeless shelter, and the father he’d only met once before in his life showed up as a client. His beginning does contain important pieces of the larger story — Nick’s father, his homelessness. It puts the reader into the nightly struggles of unhoused people, as it shows them trying to stay warm in an ATM vestibule. 

But also, Nick said, it was representative of the larger story because some readers would find it off-putting. 

“Yeah, there were sections I could’ve started with where you definitely would have had an easier time,” Nick said. “But then, I would have been selling you a false bill of goods because the rest of the book would confuse you anyway. So why not just confuse you right at the beginning so you know what you’re getting into?”

OK, he’s kidding there. But only kind of. Because the beginning is a bit disorienting, just like Nick’s father. 

“You’re getting introduced to his character, not from my point of view, but from his point of view. You’re in his life, in his mind.”

But the author is not wholly absent from that beginning. Because it challenges the reader, which is how Nick likes to write a story.

“There’s a difference between passive art and active art, and for literature, I think you want to be actively engaged. I really wanted the scene at the beginning to feel like the reader is now complicit. Anyone who’s been in a city has gone into an ATM, and there’s been a homeless person there. And what is your experience of that? I just wanted the reader to have that experience, be part of it, and to consider the other side of it while you’re in it.”

Each of these aspects, they really do sound like they could drive readers away right? But they didn’t.  When it came out, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City won a PEN Award, made the New York Times Bestsellers list for a hot minute, and has stayed in print for 20 years. In fact, Norton just released a new edition to mark the book’s 20^th anniversary. What some might call off-putting are actually the story’s strengths.

OK writers, your turn: Open your work in progress, and look at your beginning. Does it, like a hologram, contain the information of the whole? Does it engage the reader the way you will engage the reader for the entire story? Is it as daring as you are?

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

A thing I like to say to my students, maybe too often, is expectations ruin everything.

That’s the good news.

Also, the bad news.

It’s good news when we are trying to build adversity—or in memoir, when we’re puzzling out why everything went wrong—because expectations are a great place to look.

I interviewed a marriage therapist once who said that unspoken expectations were the chief cause of strife among her married patients. They carried beliefs into their marriages—sometimes subconsciously, sometimes acutely aware of them—about how they’d celebrate Thanksgiving, or who’d be responsible for cooking dinner. But they never talked about them. When their new spouse failed to live up to those expectations? Disaster.

So when things are going off the rails for your characters, and you’re not sure why, look to their expectations. Are the characters even aware of them? In my memoir classes, students often discover that they’d held unarticulated hopes and beliefs. That they were secret from everyone, including themselves, created anguish and chaos, often for everyone involved.

But there are other expectations working on us when we write — those we anticipate our readers will hold. Those can sometimes be helpful, when they’re things like, “Don’t bore your reader.” Or, “Readers expect the beginning of the story to grab their attention.”

More often, though, what we think our readers expect from us, or what they actually do expect, can be unhelpful, to say the least.

Author Brit Bennett said of her debut novel, The Mothers, that, after it came out, readers seemed to think her characters would adhere more to stereotypes.

“It’s a book about Black characters, but I think there’s a way in which people are reacting to the characters — and their not conforming to what is expected — which has been very telling of what people think or expect about Black narratives,” Bennett told Electric Literature. “Black people are as diverse as any group of people, which should go without saying! But it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that that’s shocking or surprising to people in a way that I just didn’t think it was.”

You want to resist falling into that trap, unless of course, you’re going to use it to surprise the reader. [Spoiler ahead!] Think of the ending of the movie Frozen, when it seemed like the movie’s happy ending would be the same as most other Disney princess movie happy endings, with Anna marrying her paramour, Kristoff. Instead, the ending of the movie reveals that the love of Anna’s life is her sister, Elsa, and vice versa.

For writers, I think the most insidious way expectations ruin everything is when we set them for our own stories, creating in our minds the idea of how a story will resonate, or read, or succeed.

I wrote about that expectation recently, so I won’t repeat myself, except to quote, again, Gotham teacher Teresa Wong:

“To exist, [your story] has to be a little bit flawed,” Teresa said. “But then at least it can be shared, right?”

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

I shared a pretty embarrassing story with my students the other day, so I figured, why not go for broke and tell it to you all as well.

For a few months when I first started freelancing, I found myself completely stymied whenever I began a new story (often on deadline!). I’d try to start in the middle. I’d try to download my research. I’d try to start at the end. Every time, I ended up deleting everything and starting over.

I could only really begin writing (and this is the embarrassing part) after I’d type out seven words:

The Ottawa County Board of Commissioners today…

When I first got out of college, I worked as a reporter for a community newspaper and wrote hundreds of articles about the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners. Apparently, I’d moved on, but my mind had not.

That I couldn’t work before typing that phrase infuriated me. It’s not like that board was the only thing I wrote about. When I wasn’t writing about tax millage, I wrote about disaster aid. Heroic rural maternity nurses. An obscenity trial that echoes our current struggle with book bans.

Compounding that, I accused my mind of sedition. “I don’t live there anymore,” I’d say to myself, arms crossed, refusing to type the words my mind wanted to hear. It felt like some part of me was trying to drag me back to when I was 22, inexperienced and unsure. So I resisted.

Because that always works so well.

What I failed to realize was that I’d inadvertently created a ritual.

I mentioned rituals last month, and wanted to return to them, because some people (read: me) undervalue the role they play in our writing process. But we ignore them at our peril. You might create one you hate by accident.

More likely, you’ll keep struggling every time you sit down to write, when there’s a tool that can help you make that happen more quickly.

Rituals, says the writer Amitava Kumar, fill a need, “the need for those conditions of work, the meeting of place and habits, that allow the right words to emerge.”

Or you can think of them another way, as a way of staking out territory for yourself, and your work, says writer Sheryl Garratt.

“Ritual can be a way of reclaiming space,” Garratt writes, “of bringing us back to the present moment.”

Kumar’s ritual is walking. When he laces up his walking boots, he says, “The work of writing has begun. As important as the act of shutting the door of the study has been the act of opening it and stepping out for a stroll.”

Other writers clear their desks, eat a sandwich, do yoga, play three hands of computer solitaire. Saul Bellow did 30 pushups. Jesmyn Ward makes herself a cup of tea. (For many of us, caffeine is involved.)

The precise actions involved don’t matter, as long as they help you cross that bridge from your busy life into your imagination.

That was the real problem with my accidental ritual—when I started accusing my mind of trying to force me to live in the past, when I fought it, the ritual I never meant to start stopped serving any purpose. Eventually I replaced it.

And then, when my life changed, I changed my ritual again.

Next time you make time to write, pay attention to what you’re doing just beforehand. Do you have a ritual? Does it help you build a bridge, or is it getting in your way? If you don’t have one, or you hate the one you do have, create a new one. Build it for yourself with the generosity and enthusiasm you’d bring to knitting your BFF a new scarf, or making a loved one an omelette. Find one that soothes the chattering part of your mind. One that works.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty