Author: Kelly Caldwell

Sometimes, when writers get together, an idea will ignite and become a kind of running theme for the duration. And so it was this week during HippoCamp Weekend, a mini-conference put on by Hippocampus magazine, that one refrain almost became the motto:

No heroes. No villains.

“Of course we do have people who have been heroes to us, or who have behaved villainously to us,” said Jiordan Castle, author of the YA memoir Disappearing Act. “It’s very important in nonfiction…just like it is in fiction, that the gray areas are not only more interesting, they are also more true.”

This is a different take on how we as writers usually think of heroes and villains. We like to say, make them three dimensional. We (including me!) like to say, look for their shadow selves so you can make them more fully human. You can have heroes and villains, we say. Just make them believable.

This was not that. When these writers said none, they meant, None.

This idea might sound radical, but I don’t think it’s new. In an interview a few years ago, Jamaican-born novelist Marlon James alluded to it while talking about readers who crave more Black characters in books, but want them only to be heroes.

“But representation doesn’t just mean heroes,” James said. “If we want to show the full range of human experience, it must include the bad. It must include the difficult. But I also want to believe they’re people, as opposed to types. Otherwise, we’re just going to end up with a bunch of one-dimensional villains and magic Negroes.”

It’s OK if you’re skeptical. But let’s say you were going to try to give up heroes and villains, cold turkey. The question then is, how?

James immersed himself in the mythology of African cultures, “because I wanted to know what it feels like to have that thing so far in the back of my skull that I take it for granted.” That, he said, it changed the way he viewed the world, and stories.

Castle sought heroes and villains that were things other than people. Her book is about growing up while her father was imprisoned, so “a more interesting villain is, in my case, the criminal justice system, a system [I’m] fighting against.”

And her hero? “It’s not someone coming in to save anyone. It’s the journey, the realization you have.”

Maryann Aita, author of Little Astronaut, had maybe the most fun method for avoiding heroes and villains: Self-deprecation.  

“It’s always okay to make fun of yourself, but avoid being cruel,” Aita said. “Self-deprecation brings a sort of awareness. You don’t want to be so cool that people don’t like you.”

For example, she said, if you write about a time you rushed to the bedside of someone in the hospital, be sure to include the fact that you packed three pairs of shoes.

“You need to ask, why would I bring—to a hospital visit—a pair of high heels, a pair of flip-flops, and a pair of sneakers?” she said.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Recently, the author Annabelle Tometich visited my class to talk about her debut book The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony, and the conversation was, frankly, epic. She and my students talked about discerning whether most of the scenes in your first draft are really just different versions of the same scene (probably); the difference between keeping your reader in mind and pandering to them; and how to write about identity without lapsing into nationalism.

But my favorite moment came when somebody asked Annabelle why she wrote a pivotal scene in the book the way she did, ending it where she did, and Annabelle answered, “I don’t know. I honestly don’t remember.”

She said that a few times, about writerly decisions large (how did she hit on the five-part mango-tree inspired structure?) and small (why did she use second person to start Chapter 24?).  

Annabelle made plenty of conscious choices when it came to writing her book, from its themes of growing up mixed-race in Florida to its title to its structure. But when it came to what some people call process, she just wasn’t aware of it.

“Every time I realized what should be next, I hurried to get it down on the page as quickly as possible,” she said. “Often I realized what should be next when I was at the grocery store or driving in my car, and I would rush to write it down when I got home.”

This thing we call process, it’s mysterious by nature. We’re not talking about the efforts you make to get the words out of your head and onto the page, nor the routine you use to make time for your creative work. We’re talking the means by which a writer realizes what a story needs next, and then creates it.

Or as novelist George Saunders described it, the writer doesn’t necessarily decide what scene to write, what point of view to use, or even choose their words.

“It might be more accurate to say that it occurred to [the artist] to do so; in a split-second, with no accompanying language, except maybe a very quiet internal ‘Yes.’ He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he’d had the time or inclination to articulate them,” Saunders wrote.

And the most impactful choices are the most inchoate, and incremental. A word or a sentence, added or deleted. Saunders likened it to a cruise ship turning.

Annabelle compared it to her mother choosing mango pits. Her family would go mango-picking at an orchard every year, and her mother would inspect every mango, choosing just a few pits to try to coax into seedlings. Some sprouted; some didn’t. A few became actual trees.

Did her mother have a process for making those choices? Did Annabelle when making hers?

“As much as you can call it a process, I guess?” Annabelle said. “I don’t really know!”

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Lately, my students and I are preoccupied with psychic (or narrative) distance, or how close the reader feels to a story. In close psychic distance, the reader stands next to the characters, perhaps even sitting in their laps. Long psychic distance puts the reader across the street, or in a hot air balloon overhead, or looking down from heaven.

John Gardner said in The Art of Fiction, “In good fiction, shifts in psychic distance are carefully controlled.” Writers often interpret that to mean the change should be imperceptible.

And sure, that works. In her story “Snowfall,” Deesha Philyaw uses first-person plural to plunk her readers as close to her characters Arletha and Rhonda as possible— or so you think.

“We, who apparently are built for everything, are simply not built for this. No gloves exist that keep our hands from freezing as we move snow and ice from one spot to another and from the car windshield. And no, the physical activity does not warm us up. It makes usresentful.”

Later, Philyaw uses second person to pull the reader even closer:

“In the South, the weather does not hurt you down to your bones or force you to wake up a half an hour early to remedy what has been done to your steps, your sidewalk, your driveway and your car, as you slept.”

The tightening psychic distance in “Snowfall” is a tractor beam—invisible and inescapable.

But you can be equally effective when your reader is acutely aware of the change.

In his film Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock starts viewers medium-close to Richard, who may or may not have murdered his ex-wife. The audience is close enough to suspect him, but not enough to be sure.

Then, another character kills someone, and we’re in the room where it happens.

The film then alternates between Richard and the real killer, Hitchcock keeping his audience uncomfortably close to the murderer. We’re walking right alongside him as he runs into his former co-worker Babs, as they stroll through London, as he invites Babs to see his apartment. At this point, the audience is trying to use its close psychic distance to psychically communicate STAY OUT OF THE APARTMENT, BABS!

Spoiler: Babs goes into the apartment.

And then, famously, the camera leaves.

It backs away from the closed door, down three flights of a winding, silent stairwell, onto the sidewalk, and across the street, people and cars filling the space between the audience and the building. We’re as far from that apartment as we can get without a rocket.

I saw Frenzy in a crowded theater, and when that camera started gliding backward, the once-quiet audience started shouting, “GobackgobackGOBACK!”

Different stories, different styles, different distances, but one thing’s the same. When Philyaw and Hitchcock shift the psychic distance, the story intensifies.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty