'To what extent should writers avoid cliché? To the extent that this question is asked.'

Lancelot Schaubert on prose technique

Coming next week for paid subscribers: the best-written book of the month.

Lancelot Schaubert is the author of the novel Bell Hammers, which Publisher’s Weekly called “a hoot” and we picked as one of the best-written submissions from our subscribers. You can read its opening pages here, and more picks from subscribers’ submissions here.

He’s sold dozens of stories, hundreds of poems and essays to outlets as varied as McSweeney’s, The New Haven Review (Yale’s Institute Library), Shondaland (Shonda Rhimes’s publication), The World Series Edition of Poker Pro, TOR.com, Riddlebird, and the Nonbinary Review and The Anglican Theological Review on the same morning. He edits The Showbear Family Circus as well as the anthology series Of Gods and Globes, and performs songs from his albums H.A.L.T.S. and All Who Wander.

Many readers who no longer buy novels cite their inability to fully immerse themselves in fiction, to suspend their disbelief. How important are voice and style in BELL HAMMERS to casting the fictional spell that helps such immersion?

"I'm about to bullshit you and it's all true."

That's the intro line to the voice and then the first two words of the actual novel are "Buckass naked..."

So, I suppose it depends: do you want to feel as if someone's telling you a story? If so, it's quite important to have the narrator shouting about mutant groundhogs and whatnot. If not, well those people bounce out of here rather quickly. Don't let the door hit you on the way out, you know?

On the other hand, sometimes transparent prose helps — there's a reason Sanderson's books sell so much and at the forefront is his prose may be the most transparent in the world. I forget I'm reading a book until my wrist hurts from holding those cinder blocks.

Aspiring writers are usually told either that style and substance are in fact the same thing, that they are ‘one’, or they’re advised to look at these two qualities separately. What guidance can you give such writers about the relationship between substance and style?

Story comes first. We're not talking about scientific abstracts, philosophical tractates, or journalism. But the story still comes first — if that's what we mean by substance, then they're absolutely not the same thing.

I think the greatest loss to the American novel — whatever that aspires to become — happened as a result of multiple MFA programs essentially turning their fiction departments into longform prose poem departments, which is like turning Hollywood into your grandma's photo collection. I love prose poems, I love CD Wright and others, but fiction focuses on the nature of desires chased through time towards some ultimate fulfillment or unfulfillment that recontextualizes the meaning of the protagonist's life. This, generally, engenders empathy. And applying an extremely sanitized, over-workshopped prose-poem atmosphere to that sucks the life out of it.

So whatever we talk about, it needs to be nested within the microcosm of desire.

Substance, then, seems to me to be what you're talking about — the sense experience, feelings, thoughts, actions, speech — of the protagonist in response to various active and passive stimuli. In other words, what the hell are you talking about? Both on the existential and existentiell levels.

Style, then, seems to me to be how you're talking about it — words in the right order (poetry, according to Coleridge, is the right words in the right order). In other words, how do you mean?

Style can be as wild as House of Leaves and as simple as King's "plums deify". I think somewhere between David Bentley Hart's How to Write English Prose and Strunk and White sits the relative possibilities of your own style, at least in English, but the deeper we go into our own etymological history and the more we shake hands with other cultures and tongues, the more the bounds of the possible expand. 1700's English was wild.

When planning BELL HAMMERS, to what extent did you disconnect substance from style? And when editing it?

Well, the style's origin was directly cribbed from interviews with my grandpa. I found the land was losing a particular kind of speech, a diction I've only seen mirrored in the tongues of Irish Jews here in NYC, fascinatingly enough. I talked about this on Mary Robinette Kowal's site during the launch of the book. It's hilarious to me because...

Okay, here is a combo of two one-star reviews of Bell Hammers:

Partly it was the use and misuse of the southern Illinois dialect. It seemed folksy and contrived and affected, perhaps because it was used too broadly.... I have a feeling the author has never been to Southern Illinois and doesn't even know how to pronounce "Cairo."

So when you're born in Southern Illinois, raised in Southern Illinois, are directly fighting a book desert of 25,000 square miles and a population of 1.3 million people (think: the Bronx; or three Bostons) in order to breathe life into a specific style of storytelling, and so directly record the dialect of your grandfather which you transcribe, what can you do for these people? How can it be a caricature?

I have asian and hispanic friends who make the exact same complaint about trying to depict first generation immigrants from their own family in screenplays and novels and having white producers and editors tell them it's racist. Stereotypes. Which, I get some of the desire: you don't want to end up in a Warner Bros situation or old Disney films. But to tell me I can't write either in my grandpa's own voice or in the voices of those neighbors I'm trying to help for the sake of both #ownvoices and also token stereotypes? Which is it?

The wildest thing about all of this is I tried to write something similar for my black Dominican stepmom who is now a widow after dad died and was told — multiple times — to essentially sit down and shut up because I didn't have a hispanic experience. Which, okay, I didn't cross a border after migrating thousands of miles. I get that. I honor folks who have had to struggle so hard to make it here. And yet, my step mom was one of those people? So what about her first generation experience? What about my experience with her? My late father's?

This is why many novels suck these days: fear has over-gripped the market and over-played its hand. And so you end up with an asshat overcorrecting the other way, being blatantly racist and what have you. There has to be some sort of whole that doesn't deny the part, some sort of synthesis that allows us to speak to these stylistic, true, experienced nuances of tongues in our own families and neighborhoods and yet remains generous, empathetic, specific to a context, and so forth.

I don't have the answer, but I sure as hell won't start lying about my experience just to keep from treading on someone's toes. Go read someone else's book if you have to, this is how my grandpa talked. This is how my step mom talked. And so forth.

As for substance, there are times where the novel's substance suffered because I included so many of the stories when there are probably 2-3 in the middle of the tall tale that could suffer exorcism for the sake of the whole. How do you choose? Particularly when part of what you're doing is creating institutional memory for your family, a sort of heirloom? Especially when both your grandpa and father — the two main interview subjects — die before it's released?

I don't know to what extent I disconnected it, but I know it was backwards: the style came first with this one and I stumbled my way into a story. Every novel is different: the process of learning to write the novel you're working on is the novel. They're always-already in the process of having been written sometime in the future. The difference of each process is latent in the journeys of desire.

How can literary style be defended against widespread distaste for the slick linguistic style of marketing? Do you ever find yourself agreeing with readers or writers dubious about style?

Why defend anything so personal as one's style? Is that not the same thing as defending one's own existence? I think something's existence is its own defense. If it's better inherently, then being better is sufficient. No defense needed. If it isn't, let it die. Or expose the violence of those who do not want you to exist for the shame that it is. Why fuss about it? And who's to say what's obscure (or popular) in one age will not reverse fortunes in the next? Or profitable (unprofitable)?

Here's some food for thought: the number one barrier to creativity — in terms of hard data — is self-righteousness. Defensiveness. When you're worried about complaining, explaining yourself, or arguing your case, you cannot explore. You cannot play. You cannot live the poetry of life for the joy of the thing.

Who wants to write like that?

I would much rather simply play with the words. That's the difference. The point isn't that you can't make money writing poetry in America. The point is that all our poets are paid by Starbucks, Folgers, McDonald's, and Apple.

Poets and designers make plenty. The question is whether they're happy. Ours are not. They occupy desks. Was this not the entire point of Mad Men? They are not happy because the ends of the style is a proximate good, not an ultimate good. Change the ends of the style from a proximate to an ultimate good — and make sure they're rewarded handsomely — and the problem with "slick marketing" disappears overnight.

Kendrick, for instance, is having a great time.

(Continues below)

How much time did you spend editing BELL HAMMERS?

Too much and not enough. Years. If we're going from the first interview to the final audiobook publication, then something like six or seven years. Four if we don't include the audiobook.

But I have a novel quite like The Road that I wrote in four weeks and it's basically done. Starting to look for an agent to sell that one. It's probably time I get an agent at this point, however hesitant I remain to that process.

For some writers a draft means rewriting an entire manuscript, while for others it can mean scanning through the text for typos, etc.. What’s your definition, and has this changed over time?

Depends on the draft. Both? Neither? I've rewritten in both ways and they tend to blur the lines for me. Where does draft two begin and draft three start? My nemesis novel, which I still haven't cracked, is up to draft 15. But half of those were more scans. Still, to have 7 drafts that gutted 20,000 words apiece? That's a nemesis novel.

To what extent should writers avoid cliché?

To the extent that this question is asked.

That is to say the people asking the cliche question allegedly care the most. So there's an inverse relationship to the cliche of the question and the cliche in the work.

Freshness, virtuosity, wit, and that elusive stylistic quality known as charm: how might a writer whose prose lacks these qualities go about learning them?

Try to make a priest laugh with a blue collar joke. Or your grandmother. Spend some time in the breakroom of the Jackie Gleason Depot and then, correspondingly, do tea at Bloomingdale's and try to get them to laugh. Get a roomful of diverse women together and see if you can actually charm them all into, at very least, smiling. Read Chesterton. Read Lewis. Note the lineage, then try to make one of those imagistic jokes. Retell the 200 classic jokes in a speculative light. Sketch puns and refuse to draw attention to them.

Make fun of yourself. Good God almighty, I sound like a windbag full of farts right now.

How can aspiring writers avoid haughtiness but still write with authority?

(1) Don't, in your spirit, look down on others, (2) Don't, in your spirit, practice favoritism, (3) remember the poor and remember the illiterate and love them dearly and offer them the unconditional respect and dignity you would seek in their position, (4) be sincere, (5) don't care about whether or not someone will call you haughty because someone always will, (6) speak from out of your core personhood and (7) write towards the saintliest version of yourself. By that I mean you made you-i-er and embodying heroic virtue.

The one stylistic quality you can never overdo is clarity. Do you agree?

It's unclear.

What do you understand by the term overwritten, and do you consciously avoid overwriting?

I'm uncertain what others mean, but most of the time I find overwriting in my own work comes from distrusting the story, distrusting the text, or distrusting the reader. You'll see this in cheap metafiction often where, rather than say something interesting about the nature of fiction or creativity, the writer self-consciously — in the most pejorative sense imaginable — draws attention to the text as a text. Joss Whedon and his ilk at their worst emulate this. "Well golly gee, that's the sort of thing I'd say were I in a vampire tv show," or whatever.

It's a cheap effect and it loses its luster because, nine times out of ten, it's the writer saying, "I feel insecure saying this sincerely in a postmodern world of cynicism and irony, so I need throw a yellow flag onto the field in the middle of play so that people know I'm savvy enough to see and recognize the foul." But you don't have to do that. You can simply be honest to the humanity and divinity of the phenomenon you're describing and move forwards: we've long moved beyond postmodernism, both in the halls of philosophy and in the halls of all of the humanities.

If I say more, that'll be overwritten. This addendum itself may well be.

How close did you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at the minuscule nature of the prose issues you were working on in BELL HAMMERS, and what were those issues?

Those issues were predominately oriented around run-on sentences. "She grinned like she did when she got what she wanted but still hadn't expected on account of the insecurity her own daddy's put in her." That's one of those stories in a sentence. Some of them get egregious and they bog down the text in a way that doesn't breathe as well as it does in the audiobook version, where I performed it in my grandpa's brogue.

Erik Hoel has stated that the MFA’s domination of modern literature has produced writers trained through gruelling workshopping to minimise their work’s ‘attack surface’. We might note the parallel influence of focus groups on political discourse and of test audiences on cinema. Has too much workshopping added to the volume of flavourless published prose?

Attack surface? Who the hell is trying to freaking enter my fiction as an unauthorized user and try to enter data into, extract data from, control the ereader, hardback, or text?

I get what he's saying, but I wanted to spell it out: that's how stupid this is. No one's going to hack your fiction, people. That's not how criticism works. Just focus on improving your craft and chill out. Your traditionally published book isn't going to sell any more copies than a self-published book anyways, statistically speaking. You might as well have fun and go out with a bang.

Yeah, too much workshopping has hurt us. But so have bad faith gatekeepers and rather stupid reading lists. You can learn ten times what you can in an MFA program simply going into a diner at 6am on some Route 66 town and listening to how people tell stories. Do you know what literary great did that? Steinbeck. Read Travel's with Charley in Search of America. That's exactly what he's doing.

And he's having a blast two years before his heart killed him dead.

Has the democratisation of culture via the internet and Tall Poppy Syndrome led to crafted artistic beauty being viewed as unduly elitist? Can you think of any other cultural or societal developments that make writers reluctant or less able to craft exceptional prose?

Maybe? I don't know — I have neither a sufficient sample size before me to make a data judgement nor the citations from the requisite metaphysicians who would have thought this through, but certainly by some measures this seems to be the case. I think writers, as a whole, are just insecure and want to make money doing what they love and so half of you always wants to prophetically rebuke the world while the other half terribly craves acceptance.

You have to get to a point where you honestly want what's most beautiful, true, good, noble, real, united, the fundamental mystery in your audience. If you actually, sincerely, seek that, the size of the audience and the money it brings and whatever else won't matter because your scalpel will find its tumor.

Everything else is just potshotting IV needles at hard-to-find veins. Cruel way to treat your neighbor who just came in for their next summer read.

What do poor stylists most lack: guidance, accurate self-estimation, or something else?

Chaos. Not in their desk or their life. I mean they lack the courage to go out into the world and find as CD Wright would say, a "new language the unborn might dare to speak." Our job is to actually make new words, new paragraphs, new scenes, new sequences, new stories. Sure, everything's derivative. But so is science. The point isn't to make a new metaphysic or philosophy. We're not going to change anything about the nature of man. But we can move the language, the great conversation, forwards. That's how a PhD program works: finding the unknown unknowns and exploring there.

Where is the edge of the map for you? Do that.

The only way you're going to find the edge of the map is to actually climb up on the shoulders of giants — for you don't stand on the shoulders of giants if you never climb up there — and, once in the saddle, drive those giants into the abyss.

You know why I respect Steinbeck more than Hemingway? Because Hemingway never sold a piece to the speculative fiction magazines — he wasn't good enough. Steinbeck did. Steinbeck frigging saved his boat from another boat in the midst of a hurricane on Sag Harbor — he was the man and the writer Hemingway always aspired to be.

Is there anything else you’d like to tell aspiring writers about prose style?

Read things that differ from one another. Try writing one poem from every form in The Book of Forms. Record your family's thanksgiving. Transcribe that recording, then identify one phrase that sets apart each speaker. Make a habit of journaling weird turns of phrase, weird combinations of ideas, weird what-ifs. Read more fantasy and scifi, for the love of God. Seriously. There is no ghetto, it's just pearl clutching. If anything, "literary fiction" hasn't read enough of the classics to know how terribly, awfully derivative their premises are. My kingdom for a horse of a different color.

Name a book published in the past year that you admire for the quality and originality of its sentences, and describe what’s accomplished and original about them.

There is a classicist named Christopher Ruocchio writing a space opera that may be — if not the best science fiction book I've ever read, it's certainly in the top five. Book six came out, Disquiet Gods, and each book has grown better than the last. It will be exactly seven books, but every single one of them is superb and both like and unlike any science fiction or fantasy or, frankly, historical fiction of war that I've read. His study of the classics bleeds through the text at every turn and it certainly shows up in the prose. Read that.

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Sean McNulty