Tanya Perkins | April 2021

Volume 53 Number 2, November 2020

Topic: 

It’s a question we all ask sooner or later: What makes a story interesting (in the simplest terms, not boring)? To answer, Spark examines how journalists evaluate their own stories in terms of perspective or angle and structure. In making the point that great topics don’t automatically create great stories, Spark invites fiction writers to move past what they find personally interesting—though that’s not a bad place to start—and consider how a story might be “gestur[ing] beyond itself to some universal of human experience.”

I. EDUCATIONAL SETTING:

This essay would work well in an advanced undergraduate or graduate workshop. As students progress as writers, they need to start thinking about their work as a thing in the world separate from themselves, as Jane Smiley says in her oft-taught essay, “What Stories Teach their Writers:” [The story] “will not live unless it separates itself from you entirely and it can’t do that unless you are receptive to what it is trying to be.” It takes metacognitive courage to let that happen, though, and Spark’s article offers ways for students to do just that, figuring out what the story is trying to be and/or what it has to say to a reader beyond themselves or their teacher.

Is the essay appropriate for use in multiple educational settings?

Because Spark draws upon strategies used by journalists, audio essayists, producers, and other nonfiction writers, the essay would work well for both fiction and creative nonfiction settings, as well as workshops in video or audio essays. It also has potential for use in community creative writing workshops or continuing education courses, since the essay makes repeated use of popular journalistic venues such as NPR’s Planet Money and This American Life, which may already be familiar to participants in nonacademic settings.

II. Lesson objective

Often students come to creative writing because they’ve found great pleasure in journaling or writing stories, with only themselves or perhaps a close family member as reader. That’s a wonderful start, but at some point they need to extend feelers beyond their own emotional acre, to borrow Anne Lamott’s phrase, in considering what might resonate for a reader. Heather Sellers, in her textbook, The Practice of Creative Writing, identifies this element as insight or wisdom about the human experience: “A writer looks closely at his or her subjects and... brings to light some of the more interesting features of human nature—why we do the things we do, why we avoid certain situations, why we repeat behaviors that are clearly counterproductive.” (p. 311) And here we have the key term from Spark’s title: Interesting! And interesting doesn’t just happen for readers because I found it so. What students can learn from this article is how to creatively reflect on what might make their story interesting to a reader, borrowing thinking strategies from nonfiction writers and video/audio producers whose professional genres oblige them to consider their subjects from vantage points somewhat different than those of fiction writers.

Spark recounts journalist Michael Paterniti’s process of researching and writing an article for GQ about Chen Sah, an otherwise ordinary man who happens to patrol for potential suicides across an enormous bridge in Nanjing, China. On its face, maybe interesting? But Spark considers this as a case study that can help students see the difference between what Vivian Gornick calls the situation and the story—the situation being what we would call the plot and the story being the “emotional experience,” or what Sellers calls “insight.”

This latter element is where students often stall out, understandably, since the process of moving from the immediacy of the story’s action to the more subtle and nuanced emotional resonance that we ideally hope we can convey, is challenging indeed, for all of us. Smiley describes it thus: “Almost always, when you are telling a dream to someone else, the only thing that interests him about your dream is whether and how he himself appeared in it, and how you felt about that.” And, hey, look, there’s that word “interests” again; only Smiley uses it to draw our attention to the essential self-interest of us all as readers: Where do I fit into this story?

What do you want them to learn from it?

Spark’s essay offers three deceptively simple ideas, gleaned from her in-depth analysis of Paterniti’s experience: (1) Reflect on what makes the story interesting to you—not superficially, as in, well, it was just the best Christmas ever! But what made it the best Christmas ever? What will you remember years later, once the thrill of opening up the PlayStation 5 has long faded? (2) Try to articulate the difference between the topic and the story, an exercise borrowed from the producers of NPR’s Planet Money, who offer what Spark describes as a “go-to sentence:” I’m doing a story about X. And what’s interesting about it is Y, the Y being the emotional resonance that extends beyond the immediate particulars of X. And finally, (3) Reflect on what your story seems to be saying in the larger context or, to use Spark’s quote of Chana Joffe Walt, “where the story reaches to the universal.” All three of these, of course, are variations of the same thing—the fundamental reason why we come to literature in the first place is to live a little larger, to take part in a life beyond our own and yet which seems irresistibly familiar to us.

What discussions do you hope this article will generate?

Anytime we speak of the “universal of human experience,” it’s inevitable that questions of what that actually means will arise, since historically it’s often defaulted to a straight, white, able-bodied, cisgendered male experience. It’s useful—critical, in fact—to engage students in discussions about how this might play out in light of Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement, and other social justice reckonings. That we can share common experience is manifest, in the simplest sense, by virtue of belonging to a particular genus and species of sentient tetrapod with a highly evolved nervous system, one that impels us to reproduce, raise children, ritualistically dispose of our dead, and make art, music, and really great pizza. Yet we cannot travel to that place of universality (and interest) by any route other than that of vivid and relevant specificity, which can seem a paradox to students. And while it is true that diverse readers will find commonality—what’s interesting to their own experience—in different places, it is also worth discussing how the generosity of the universal means we aren’t bound to any one given representation of “common experience,” that by definition it encompasses pluralities.

III. CONTEXTUAL INTRODUCTION OR LEAD-IN

Spark opens the essay by referring to responses one might have in the midst of a workshop, but while ideas on the insights a story seems to be offering might be appropriate at that point in a student’s journey, it will be even more so later on, once revision is well underway. Almost all of the examples Spark offers are those of journalists working on stories that are already taking shape; the lesson seems to be that insight and hindsight are closely related. Therefore, it will be most useful to introduce this essay into the curriculum at a point where students are revising. That Spark references Ira Glass’s advice about how reflection on the meaning of a story helps to “justify [its] existence” takes for granted that the story already has an existence.

Does the article topic fit within a current lesson plan or recurring discussion?

Whether or not the article would fit within a current lesson plan or a recurring discussion is dependent on the teacher’s own approach but regardless, it would be important to scaffold the advice carefully, since as Sellers notes in The Practice of Creative Writing, trying to orchestrate meaning in advance risks defaulting to cliches or generalizations. What we try to help our students understand is that the messy, complicated, and uncomfortable things that arise in their work—often what they want to excise—end up being the very kernel of interest that brings the piece to life, that gives it the justification for existence. In The Making of a Story, Alice LaPlante argues that the presence of messiness is a cause for rejoicing, since it is often in “chaos” that a work “has the potential to be really interesting [there’s Spark’s word again!] and worth exploring further” (p. 115). But to get to that place, students have to live with their “ugly baby,” to borrow Lynda Barry’s phrase, for at least a little while, to understand what the story is trying to become.

But this is easier said than done, as we know, and so although fiction writers often bristle at formulas or heuristics, carefully placed questions can crack open a new way of thinking about what they already have on the page—as opposed to running from it or chucking it and starting anew. As teachers, we often ask for students to turn in a brief reflection on a creative piece along with the draft itself and so it is at that check-in draft stage, that one of Spark’s questions might be useful as a reflection prompt: Why is this story interesting to you, now, at this point? What about it, specifically, interests you? Having a draft somewhat cooled on the page lets a student get some distance from it, so that they can look at the draft through the lens of such questions.

IV. BROADER DISCUSSION POINTS AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDENTS

What main points from the article do you want to draw students’ particular attention to?

The main point that Spark makes is that great story ideas aren’t automatically interesting. More is needed—“psychological insight, cultural perception or something else...” she suggests—which arise from the students’ own take on the significance of what the story seems to be saying/doing or, as Spark says, “the understanding that ties the individual story to the larger community of listeners.” But the hard work, the heavy lift, comes after our discovery that our first take turned out to be wrong, as demonstrated by her case study of Paterniti’s unexpected discovery in the Yangtze bridge story. Paterniti went into the project thinking that Chen could be the organizing center of the story, yet (though Chen was certainly key) he found that the impersonal, gargantuan presence of the bridge itself formed a metaphor for a nation in transition—and the opening frame of his story. He had to see it to believe it (a lesson in the power of primary research). Trusting the wisdom of images to call forth what is interesting is a lesson that deserves to be shared. “The first idea you need to give up when you begin to revise,” Smiley tells us, “is that you know what this story is about.” In a way, the deadly bridge became a character in Paterniti’s story, which recalls Michael Kardos’s advice in The Art and Craft of Fiction on what makes an interesting story—“high stakes.” And while bridges don’t care deeply, human characters can and should care about something very much, “life or death,” as Spark says in her essay. But life or death as a phrase is just an abstraction; the image of a middle-aged Mr. Chen with “blackened teeth and a raspy cough,” roaming the massive bridge to spot suicides is something very different, the embodiment of life and death, which shifts the story from just great material to—something interesting.

Are there examples beyond the article?

Closely related to this exploration of what makes an interesting story is another Spark essay on surprise (“Surprise Me,” The Writer’s Chronicle, March/April 2017) in which she analyzes Tobias Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain” for elements of, well, interest and surprise! The protagonist is Anders, a book critic who just can’t keep his trap shut and so, in the midst of a bank robbery, is shot dead. What’s interesting is both the topic—what are anyone’s last thoughts?—and how Wolff structures it, slowing down time so that readers travel with Anders through his final moments to a childhood memory both sweet and odd, that of a kid who wants to play shortstop because “Short’s the best position they is,” they is repeating like a line from a song we can’t get out of our head—and suddenly Anders’s memory feels both poignant and oddly familiar, as if we’re re-discovering something from our own childhood. The unexpected slant is akin to Paterniti’s moves that focus the reader’s attention on physical particulars that are interesting in themselves, sure, but also reach toward what is larger and deeper, embodied in a character that cares intensely about something, to reference Kardos again. Surprise, as Spark points out in “Surprise Me,” isn’t just a hat trick but should, in fact, do just that—signal “something deeper, tectonic” (quoting Rachel Contreni-Flynn, p. 86).

V. CONSIDERATIONS FOR STUDENTS’ INDIVIDUAL WORK

As mentioned earlier, this topic is particularly relevant to students as they revise. To suggest that they start thinking about what makes a story interesting in the heat of the first draft risks stifling the creative chaos needed at that point, but once students are “re-envisioning,” the question of what’s interesting starts to be more appropriate. It offers a lens through which to figure out what kind of re-structuring might best foster the heart of the story, the sense of what matters. Closely connected is the question of how a student “releases information,” to draw on the Paterniti example. In developing the bridge story, Paterniti took a creative risk in diverging from how others have written about it and, in fact, from conventional wisdom—starting in medias res. Instead, he opened with the looming bridge itself as an introduction to the central character, Mr. Chen. Often we as teachers struggle to get students to restructure their stories, to opening them at a different moment, to presenting information in a new sequence. But as Spark demonstrates, this kind of structural decision making can help students refocus on where they want the story to take the reader.

One way to help students re-envision is to have them move their story away from the restrictive interface of the computer screen. Students can print off their stories, single-sided, then cut them apart with scissors, either into separate paragraphs or scenes and tape them to a wall at eye-level. Revision is literally “re-seeing” and changing the visual context from backlit screen to classroom or apartment wall, with different pagination. The story scenes lined up, like pictures in a gallery, can help students gain new perspective as well as emotional distance. It also makes re-ordering easier, since they can move the cut pieces around, taping and re-taping, to see what happens if, for example, a scene or paragraph halfway through suddenly becomes the opening. Or the ending.

VI. RELATED READING

A. “What Stories Teach their Writers: The Purpose and Practice of Revision,” by Jane Smiley, in Creating Fiction, edited by Julie Checkoway.

B. The Practice of Creative Writing, 3rd ed., by Heather Sellers.

C. “The Suicide Catcher,” by Michael Paterniti, GQ, 15 August 2010 [https://www.gq.com/story/suicide-catchers-nanjing-bridge-yangtze-river-mr-chen]

D. The Art and Craft of Fiction, by Michael Kardos

E. “Surprise Me,” by Debra Spark, The Writer’s Chronicle, March/April 2017

VII. CONCLUSION

Spark draws on numerous examples of how a story needs not just a riveting plot or great material to succeed but must also reach toward some kind of emotional reckoning or resonance within the reader. What is truly interesting about any story, fiction or otherwise, lies not in splashy prose or nail-biting drama, but “in the reflection, where the story reaches to the universal.” Or, to think of it another way, Spark offers this excellent summary from Vivian Gornick, that the raison d’etre of any story is found in the “emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.” To share that with readers in some kind of comprehensible way—isn’t that why any of us, teachers and students alike, keep writing?

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Tanya Perkin's short stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal of Creative Writing Studies and several other literary reviews. Her chapbook, People are Naturally Attracted to You, was published by WTAW Press in 2018. She is an assistant professor and chair of English at Indiana University East.