“Writing the Midwest” is a recurring series featuring writing advice from today’s most prolific authors. Whether it’s dealing with writer’s block, knowing when a piece is finished, or how and where to find inspiration, we’re delighted to present to you the very best guidance to help you and your writing. You can find links to the authors’ full interviews below.

On setting attainable writing goals: Chad Koch: I’ve found that writer’s block can be cured by changing focus from “I need to write a story” to “let’s just write 1,500 words today.” I was actually against this idea for a while because I thought I’d just be wasting time, but I recently did NaNoWriMo and it helped me finish my novel. In a lot of ways just getting something—anything—on the page moves things forward. Switching to word count also stifles your inner critic because now you measure yourself by a number of words, which is black and white (you either hit your word count or you don’t).

M. Drew Williams: I consider my process to be one long, drawn-out method of combating writer’s block. First and foremost, I try to read for at least two hours every day: The less time I spend reading, the less likely I am to gain the inspiration needed to write anything of merit. Throughout my work week, I try my best to jot down a few interconnected lines (or interesting words). By Saturday, I often force myself to write a poem, and even though I am not always successful in my efforts to do so, the effort itself at least gets me one step closer to actually writing a worthwhile poem.

Danielle Lazarin: Believe in process over product. Don’t obsess over the number of words you put down or publications. Committing the time to the work is the most you can do, the little thing you can control. There’s no guarantee that you’ll produce what you expect in that time, but getting comfortable with being in that chair in a disciplined way is the best you can do, and it’s enough—whatever amount of time that is. Over time, that collective work will end up in your product, even if you delete a lot of the words.

“Writing the Midwest” is a recurring series featuring writing advice from today’s most prolific authors. Whether it’s dealing with writer’s block, knowing when a piece is finished, or how and where to find inspiration, we’re delighted to present to you the very best guidance to help you and your writing. You can find links to the authors’ full interviews below.

On making every word count: Tatiana Ryckman: My reaction when I see a very thick book is generally, “This must not have been well-edited.” Naturally there are many times when I’m wrong, and I am glad to be. Yet there’s something really wonderful about letting a single moment stand in for significantly more. One can dip into that world and emerge slightly different. There’s something poetic about it—as in poets do this all the time. And I like making words work a little harder, to earn their keep.

Carol Smallwood: Read closely and be curious about word choice. I remember in the second grade the wonder of words came to me when the reading book had the word “suddenly” after all the one-syllable words. It had power, mystery, was grown up, and I couldn’t believe words could have such musical magic.

Samrat Upadhyay: I like tight and lean—and sometimes mean—prose. The expansiveness has more to do with how you are looking (the vision) than what you are looking with (the medium). If your focus is narrow, then even when you employ expansive language, the focus will remain narrow. I do believe that language can empower us to become far-seeing, even though we might be quite nearsighted in real life.

Midwestern Gothic Assistant Editor Marisa Frey talked with author Steven Wingate about his newest book, Of Fathers and Fire; how we construct our own identities; and the changing landscape of American politics.

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Marisa Frey: What’s your connection to the Midwest?

Steven Wingate: It’s long-standing and complex. For the past eight years, I’ve been living in South Dakota, but I’ve spent much of my life in the eastern half of Colorado—the non-glamorous part without mountains. My teen years unfolded in much the same environment you see in Of Fathers and Fire, though my town was bigger and closer to Colorado Springs. Still, I could look out my back window and see nothing but empty plains that stretched on for six hundred miles to Kansas City. Things were flat and we were not only isolated from coastal influences but very aware of that isolation.

So I’m not a Midwesterner in the way that someone from Ohio might claim to be, but I definitely consider myself a Great Plains writer and feel like part of the “Midwest conversation” on that basis. There’s tremendous overlap between the “Great Plains” and the “Midwest”—just look at a few maps of each geographical construct and see how similar they are. But there’s also a cultural overlap, that sense of separateness from the coastal edges of the nation. Both the Midwest and the Great Plains are part of “flyover country,” and it’s appropriate that this novel is part of the Flyover Fiction series from the University of Nebraska Press. I’ve got a lot to say about the region, and that series—which is dedicated to Great Plains literature—really allows the book to be seen in its rightful context.

MF: You said you took notes on Of Fathers and Fire for ten or twelve years. How did the novel change as you grew as a father?

SW: When I first started in on the material, my oldest son wasn’t even born. Now he’s old enough to fight me emotionally and define himself against me the way young men do, and my younger son is getting into the same territory. Seeing this unfold in my own life has given me a lot more insight into Tommy’s relationship with his fathers. (I make that word intentionally plural, because one father is real and the other imaginary, but both affect him.) Over the years I’ve been able to see how father-son relationships evolve and how sons define themselves both with and against their fathers at the same time. It’s something I missed out on personally, since my dad died when I was young, and I think I had to become a father myself to understand that process.

I’ve grown up in those years too, and my understanding of what fatherhood involves has developed a great deal. When I first started the novel I couldn’t write Tommy’s father, Richie Thorpe, as anything but a monolithic character viewed from the outside. He was a black box, a closed-off creature I could only write about. But as time went on and I had more experience as a father, I could see with his eyes. The thing that truly helped me get the book finished was my kids reaching the age where we could talk about my mistakes and failings. This was absent between Tommy and Richie in earlier incarnations of the novel, and looking back that was a fatal flaw. Only when I got to the point where I could talk with my kids about my own weaknesses could I actually pull off this book.

MF: Of Fathers and Fire takes place in a small, all-white town in Colorado in 1980, during the Iran hostage crisis. How did you navigate writing about xenophobia and why was it important for you to include?

SW: I felt I had to include it because it was realistic to the time, which was quite different from ours demographically and culturally. In 1980, whites accounted for 83 percent of America’s population; now it’s estimated at around 73 percent. Yet even back then, there were people saying they wanted to “take our country back” from the non-white “invasion” that was supposedly overtaking America. There were plenty of white people in my immediate orbit at that time who refused to hang around with “those people”—meaning non-whites—and if whites did hang around with “those people,” they were seen as decidedly inferior by those who held their whiteness especially dear. This kind xenophobia permeated the socioeconomic strata that I’m writing about in Of Fathers and Fire.

The underlying issue there is the question of who gets to call themselves an American, which never goes away and occasionally forces itself to the head of our national conversation. For me, this is a personal issue. My maternal grandparents came over from Poland in the early 1900s—a time when Poles were reviled here because a Pole assassinated President McKinley in 1901—and they never became U.S. citizens. It bothers me deeply to see the kind of hatred America has for immigrants, but sadly it’s nothing new.

Today’s xenophobia feels much more virulent than it did in the 1980s, and in fact a lot more like it did when my Polish grandparents came to America. I encourage anyone who thinks this level of hostility is unique to the Trump era to visit the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration and see what the headlines had to say about immigrants then. It actually makes today seem tame by comparison. But this current has always been part of America’s identity, and in the novel, I didn’t feel any choice but to look at it straight on.

MF: The political situation in the novel—which takes place in an era that you’ve said introduced the “weaponization” of Christianity—is similar to today’s. Do you think we’ve learned anything from the past?

SW: I wish I could say we’ve learned something positive, but I think what we truly learn from the past is how to perform the same kind of cruelties toward our fellow humans with greater efficiency. We do things tentatively the first time, then back off, then do it with more violence and precision.

Version 1.0 of the weaponization of Christianity—at least in my lifetime, since I’m sure there were other versions before then—came during the “Reagan Revolution,” partly as a backlash to Roe v. Wade. There was a very “us vs. them” attitude among the religious right, a sense that they wanted to “take back America” and return it to its glory days by subjecting it to the moral code of a very punitive form of Christianity.

Flash forward thirty-six years and you have Version 2.0, the “Trump Revolution” if you will, which even stole its main slogan from Reagan’s campaign. “Let’s Make America Great Again” was a Reagan slogan, and Trump simply took off the first word. Version 2.0 of weaponized Christianity has no problem putting kids in cages or relentlessly screwing over the poor people that the Gospels tell us to help. Those with that mindset don’t care if transgendered people kill themselves out of despair or if economic inequality is the greatest it’s been since right before the Great Depression. They simply want “their” country back, and in trying to do that they’ll pull out all the same stops they did during Version 1.0 but go for the jugular this time.

It’s as if 1980 was a dress rehearsal, and today is the real show. Today’s crowd hates the same people as yesterday’s (especially Muslims) and believe fervently that they’re saving America from itself. It’s hard to watch the country I love eat itself alive in the same way twice, but here we are.

MF: Tommy plays the saxophone and dreams of going to New York because that’s what his made-up father did, but he’s able to move elements of the earth and is interested in cars, like his biological father and grandfather, raising the question of how a person constructs their identity versus how their identity is constructed for them. How do you reconcile these?

SW: I could only try to reconcile all that emotional material by writing a novel—I needed all that space because there was no way I could do it more succinctly. The construction of identity is one of the great subjects of fiction, and the bildungsroman tradition (which this novel is a part of) is dedicated to it. Tommy’s adult character is coming into being before our eyes, and that’s fascinating for me to write because there are so many layers to it.

As you mention, there’s that biological layer—who we are even if we think we’re something else, which in the book is embodied in all the similarities between Tommy and the biological father he’s just met. There’s another layer we get by osmosis, simply from absorbing the time and place we live in. And finally there’s the layer of identity we create through identification or opposition with our own families and our cultures, like Tommy’s embrace of bebop jazz or his rejection of the knee-jerk militarism that’s all around him in Suborney.

Often we can’t tell which layer our own attributes stem from. Tommy’s love of muscle cars is almost genetic, yet it’s also the result of his class upbringing and geography. The fact that it’s a little bit of both fascinates me, and honestly, that’s one of the reasons I write fiction. When I was Tommy’s age I used to want to be a primatologist like Jane Goodall, but when I discovered literature I realized that human beings are vastly more interesting because of our identity formation. Showing Tommy’s transition from being the son of an imaginary sax player to the son of a criminal with limited control of the elements was the most fun I’ve ever had writing. 

MF: Of Fathers and Fire is as much about Tommy’s relationship with his mother, Connie, as it is about the one he’s just starting with his father. What was the most difficult part of portraying Tommy and Connie’s relationship?

SW: Not making Connie merely the “bad guy” in the book was my biggest challenge. She’s standing in Tommy’s path and has lied to him in ways that are difficult to forgive, but as misguided as she’s been she’s acted out of love for him.

Writing her love for Tommy wasn’t the hardest part, though. It was finding the ways that Tommy loved her, even after her lies are exposed. In early versions of the novel he simply wanted to punish her. But the longer I spent on their relationship, the more I saw that Tommy genuinely wanted a stronger one with her. He desires honesty for her, a coming clean that she’s denied herself. The easy thing to do would have been to let him simply hate her. The harder but more rewarding thing was to let him love her while being unable to tolerate her. 

MF: You’re an English professor at South Dakota State University. How does teaching influence your writing?

SW: My mindset with my students is a lot like my mindset with myself. The writing process always unfolds much more slowly than you’d like, 95 percent of what you’ll do is make sentences better, and the biggest trick is getting a tale to unveil itself. Every suggestion I give to my students is going to apply someday to my own work. Most of the time what I’m suggesting to them are narrative opportunities—”what-ifs” within a draft that might open up the work further and give it more depth, more chaos. Without chaos, fiction has no engine at its center.

Because I’m always finding ways to push my students’ writing deeper into its chaos, it helps me do the same with my own. Teaching writing and having to articulate that the development process has made me a much more aware writer than I would have been without it. Also, having to say things that are sometimes difficult to living human beings has taught me to be kinder to myself, too. 

MF: What are you reading right now?

SW: One regret I have about the teaching life is that reading for pleasure has really fallen off for me compared to when I was younger. I read for a living, and since most of that work isn’t fully formed, it can require a lot of energy to get through. I spend a lot of time looking at student writing that I can tell from page one isn’t working, then trying to be constructive and encouraging, saying “What could make this stronger?” or “Where’s the real story here?” That means I don’t always have energy or inclination left over to crack open a book.

I was warned about that phenomenon when I went into teaching and advised to develop a reviewing practice to make sure I had some skin in the game of contemporary literature. I followed that advice and I’m usually reading something for Fiction Writers Review, where I’ve been involved for almost a decade, or one of the other venues I work with. Right now I’m reading Cape May, a debut novel by Chip Cheek due out at the end of April, and I’ll interview him for FWR. It’s a great way to get to know other authors—or in Chip’s case, get to know them better—and it really helps to lessen the isolation I feel being in a such a rural environment.

The other thing that helps me overcome that reading gap is audiobooks since they don’t give me the eye fatigue I get from print books. (I love print books, by the way—I’m not one of those “death of the book” people by any stretch.) Audiobooks let me shut off my eyes and listen with my imagination, and I’m usually listening to a horror novel as I walk the dog, do the dishes, and (if I’m lucky) work out. Horror—especially the kind that verges into fantasy) lets me sink into the supernatural elements I love, and I’m learning a lot from Stephen King, Joe Hill, Clive Barker, Victor Lavalle, Neil Gaiman, Andrew Michael Hurley, etc. I’m poking away at a horror novel and consider it all their fault.

MF: What’s next for you?

SW: Now that I’ve tasted the novel, after many years of being a genre nomad who worked in all sorts of forms from poetry to gaming, all I want to do is write novels for a while. The next one coming out of the pipeline is set in eastern South Dakota, which is more properly Midwestern than Colorado. Nobody can argue with South Dakota as part of the Midwest, right? At least the eastern half, without the mountains.

But my characters aren’t Midwestern, which puts a twist on things. While a lot of literature the Great Plains and Midwest is about people who are deeply rooted there, almost part of the soil, my next novel is sort of a 21st-century immigration story. My protagonists are from the coasts—he’s from Boston and she’s from Los Angeles—and they end up in South Dakota like stray dogs to deal with their ghosts and demons: prescription pharmaceuticals, infertility, domestic violence, and an inability to let go of the dead.

I’m putting the finishing touches on this novel as Of Fathers and Fire is making its way into the world, and I hope the new one will also be part of the Flyover Fiction series because my main body of work is so heavily connected to the Great Plains. But I don’t want to talk about it too much for fear of jinxing it, because I haven’t sent it in yet. I think it’s finished, though I need to see Of Fathers and Fire set sail in the world before I can decide if it is or not. I’ll know in a month or two.

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Steven Wingate‘s works include the novel Of Fathers and Fire, published by the University of Nebraska Press in April 2019, the digital memoir daddylabyrinth, which premiered at the Singapore Art/Science Museum in 2014, and the short story collection Wifeshopping, which won the Bakeless Prize from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2008. He is an associate professor at South Dakota State University and associate editor at Fiction Writers Review.

“Writing the Midwest” is a recurring series featuring writing advice from today’s most prolific authors. Whether it’s dealing with writer’s block, knowing when a piece is finished, or how and where to find inspiration, we’re delighted to present to you the very best guidance to help you and your writing. You can find links to the authors’ full interviews below.

On balancing research and imagination: Kathleen Rooney: If a novel is too faithfully adherent to the facts of whatever really happened in its real life inspiration, then it probably won’t have the depth of character, the psychological realism, or the plot momentum to keep people reading. You need to give yourself the space to get imaginative and make stuff up, rather than merely novelizing actual events.

Rae Meadows: I find that I have to recreate a place in my imagination, even a real place that I have known, to have it work for me as a fictional setting. This was especially true for Salt Lake City in my first novel. It became an almost mythical place for me after I had moved away. For I Will Send Rain, although I did a lot of research about the Panhandle in the 1930s, I chose to visit the town I fictionalized only after finishing the novel. I think I have a fear of being hemmed in by the actual details of a place, not being able to separate the minutiae from telling details…. Probably the most difficult part of research for me is knowing when to stop, and then knowing what to leave out to make a period seem authentic without it feeling like a staged set.

Tracy Chevalier: It requires a huge amount of research to get the “feel” of the period right. But I love the research, as it gives me ideas as well as the time during which to develop the story and characters. It’s crucial though not to think that I am educating people about a certain people. Story and entertainment come first; the historical background is just that—background. Sometimes I’ll discover some juicy historical detail but can’t use it because it doesn’t add to the story I’m telling. It’s no good showing off all the research; I just have to absorb it so that the reader feels confident in me knowing what I’m talking about, even if I don’t spell it out. It’s a balancing act.

Midwestern Gothic staffer Ariel Everitt talked with author Elliot Reed about his debut novel A Key to Treehouse Living, the importance of creativity to children and adults, and the myths we live by.

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Ariel Everitt: What’s your connection to the Midwest?

Elliot Reed: In 2005, my family moved to Columbia, Missouri, so my mother could take a job at the University of Missouri. I entered the eleventh grade there. I stayed through college. I paddled in the Ozarks and fell in love with those streams. I paddled the Buffalo River. After college, I moved out to the country with a friend and we tried to grow vegetables. I lived in a barn. The thunderstorms of the Midwest loved that barn. Then we moved into a double-wide trailer off the two-lane blacktop south of Columbia right before the road descends, becomes gravel, and runs right along the banks of the Missouri. I wrote most of this book in that trailer. I have seen the great clouds of fireflies that frequent the bottoms in summertime.

AE: You grew up in both the American Midwest and the Czech Republic. How have both of these places influenced your writing?

ER: In Prague, where I lived between 2000 and 2005, I experienced a linguistic and cultural alienation that made me want to write. Missouri made me a naturalist. The Midwest is much more beautiful than most people know. I live in Washington State now. I miss being in a sea of foreign language. I recently experienced the linguistic alienation on a beach in Cape Town, where my wife is from, and it was great. There are many languages in Cape Town. I miss living in a place where communication is an adventure.

AE: Your debut novel, A Key to Treehouse Living, takes the unique form of a sort of glossary of the terms, ideals, and myths of an abandoned boy’s life. What strategies did you use to make this experimental form function so beautifully as a narrative?

ER: It was easy and it was not easy to maintain the conceit of this book—that it is an actual utilitarian document, an actual glossary—and this being a novel. I worried about what it was for a while and in retrospect, I’d say that not knowing what it was was a good sign. Donald Barthelme has an essay called “Not-Knowing” that sheds light. Lynda Barry’s What It Is is also good here. I needed to write a story because these places and characters kept coming back. I like writing about things in a glancing way. Each entry bends away from what you could call plot, then bends back in a recursive way. Maybe it’s like a recurve bow. I knew I couldn’t completely digress from a center because I wouldn’t be able to keep writing that way. You have to have a bend, you have to have something made of wood, you have to have the creak of the string tightening, and then, sometimes, you have a release.

AE: Treehouses are, of course, very important to the narrator of A Key to Treehouse Living, young William Tyce. What role did treehouses play in your own childhood, if any?

ER: I fell out of the tree I was climbing just outside a little-league baseball diamond in Roanoke, Virginia, when I was maybe six years old. I had the wind knocked out of me. That was the first moment I understood that one day I was really going to die. When I write well, it’s because I’m writing with an awareness of death. Grace Paley said something like, “Write what you’d die if you did not write,” and this captures what I’m trying to say about mortality and fiction and getting up in trees to find a view.

AE: Did any pieces of fiction or other texts particularly influence your experimental take on the format of this novel?

ER: Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood had a definite impact. I’d also been reading lots of inane internet content like, “THE BEST WAY TO EAT AN APPLE,” or, “FIVE MAJOR SURPRISES ABOUT COOKING BEANS,” and this stuff was really getting me excited. I adopted the imperative mode, at first, with one foot in satire. The first entry was “BUGLING,” and there was William’s voice talking about how one plays the bugle.

AE: Early in A Key to Treehouse Living, some examples of “teaching” the reader how to read the book are clear, such as in the section “ALPHABET,” in which we learn to read this novel as a list in relatively alphabetical order, as well as a sort of progression of development (that a child learns things out of alphabetical order because he is developing). What other methods do you employ early on in your work to “teach” the reader the “rules” of an unconventional piece of fiction?

ER: Hard to say. I knew I had to promise the reader there would be a point, or something like a story, that emerged from these entries. I had to make some connections between entries. Few people would sit down and read through a two-hundred-page, alphabetical glossary of terms relating to a nonexistent source text, but this book might prove that a lot of people would actually come pretty close to doing exactly that. Readers are very surprising. They are deeply suspicious and creative. Give them more leeway and agency than you think they need, but never intentionally obfuscate what you know if you actually know it. Don’t come up with random ways of saying something simple. Write without knowing.

AE: The myths William lives by are incredibly unique, and as a very independent child as well as a sort of orphan, he has had much freedom to decide which cultural beliefs he accepts or even likes. For instance, he dismisses the Christian story of Easter as a boring old myth that has been replaced by that of the more interesting Easter bunny. And certainly, an incredibly fascinating, enriching series of beliefs arises from this child’s freedom to think for himself. How might we hope to give ordinary children and even adults such intellectual freedom, and such space for creativity?

ER: Good question. Give them food to eat and someplace safe to be for a while. Give them free time and give them art. Give them a library card. Make them travel. I could go on and on! I don’t think there is a formula for creativity. Be nice to children and keep them safe, but also let them run around barefoot all the time and live with the wolves. I’ve never had children and I was not the best babysitter but the kids I babysat seemed to like me.

AE: How did you keep such an introspective and instructive narrator from overwhelming the story and weighing it down? Is this perhaps related to how the narrator says it’s hard for him to write about an abstract concept like boredom without “getting distracted by telling something interesting?”

ER: This is a hard question to answer because I find it hard to paraphrase the story of this book—what exactly would he weigh down? There’s a lot of story in this book, and it goes in a few different directions. William can’t really weigh anything down if the book is the testimony he gives in order to stay afloat. I don’t want this answer to sound like a dodge. I don’t mean it to be a dodge. This narrator isn’t going to bore himself when he’s writing. Do you bore yourself when you’re daydreaming? Deborah Stratman, one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, quoted another person, who I don’t know and whose name I can’t remember, who said, “I don’t know what it is to be happy, but I know what it is to be curious.”

AE: A Key to Treehouse Living maintains a gorgeous, dreamy, sweet, and consistent atmosphere, while also hiding and unveiling secrets and evolving as a narrative. Do you have any advice on keeping a consistently wonderful vibe in a story while also surprising the reader?

ER: This book was a gift. William was a wild baby left on my doorstep in the middle of the night. He came with a personality. Still, the book didn’t come out perfectly, and it took a lot of work to keep the thing readable. Tons of people helped me. A fiction workshop at the University of Florida responded very positively when I didn’t know if I had something like a novel. I might not have finished this book had it not gotten a positive response that day. I had more good readers after that, and very good editors. I think I write surprising fiction because otherwise, I’d get bored. It’s also very easy for me to get bored of surprises.

AE: William says it’s important to be able to tell the difference between a good idea and a bad idea. How can you tell if your story ideas are good or bad ones, or is fiction a bit different that way?

ER: I recently heard this one poet say, “When your work has value, you will know it.” You can’t learn how to know the value, thank god. Lifestyle choices can affect your taste, moment to moment. Certain moods or states of mind could improve or degrade your ability to pass judgment on your own work. I write sober.

AE: William says he once knew a kid who “called grass ‘skin’ and rotting wood ‘slug’ and I don’t remember much else but it was a really good language and I sometimes wonder if his language is still alive somewhere, but I don’t hold out much hope.” What do you do to keep your own language alive and uniquely your own? What value do you find in technically incorrect or bizarre usages of language?

ER: Deliberate misuse of language in the service of flair is usually bad writing. I say usually but I can’t really think of an exception. I’m sure there is one. Maybe Gertrude Stein? Even she is not misusing language or using it technically incorrectly—she’s using it perhaps in a bizarre way. Consciousness is paper-thin. Language is that plant-based fiber from which self-consciousness is woven. According to Strunk and White, every word should tell. I don’t know if I possess my language, but I can add to a collective language when I communicate.

AE: How did you approach the order in which events of William’s life come out in this not-quite linear narrative? How did you integrate these events into entries so smoothly, without making it feel forced?

ER: When I knew what was happening to William—rather than what he was trying to define at that moment—I let him describe what had happened. Sometimes he describes it in a glancing way, or as a side note in whatever it was he was interested in thinking about or explaining at that time. This changes about halfway through the book.

AE: In A Key to Treehouse Living, William draws inspiration from many books, including the glossary of one called FLYNN’S GUIDE TO WOODY TREES AND SHRUBS, EIGHTH EDITION. WITH ADDITIONAL FLOWCHARTS AND EXPANDED GLOSSARY. What are a few of the terms might you include if you wrote a guide to writing in such a glossary format—a REED’S GUIDE TO WRITING FICTION—and what lessons might you impart?

ER:

WILD-DOG ATTACK: A lie you once told to a friend, about a friend you had in common being attacked by wild dogs on his way home from a party. He was never actually attacked. Fiction is not supposed to be lies. Fiction is not supposed to hurt anybody, but it’s supposed to hurt.

EDITOR: A person who seems to understand what you’re trying to do 85% of the time. You only understand what you’re trying to do 10% of the time. Nobody understands what you are trying to do 100% of the time. Nobody should ever understand.

THE HOLY GHOST: A celestial entity made from a black hole and some puppies that got dumped off in the woods by a family who didn’t want them. This celestial entity understands that you do not understand, and can never understand, the extent to which your editor or readers understand your work: the chasm is impossible to bridge. Only the Holy Ghost can cross it.

READER, GOOD: A person who understands what you’re trying to do some of the time, but by no means all, and who will tell you something helpful some of the time. Mostly, this reader will not tell you things that are unhelpful.

MOUNTAIN CARIBOU: There are very few of these majestic animals remaining in the inland rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. Scientists describe these caribou as “wilderness dependent.” Find them and observe them from a distance. They do surprising things like migrate to higher elevations when winter comes on. Find your mountain caribou and observe it from a distance. It is on the verge of extinction. Do something to save it, and have fun while you’re at work.

COLE-SLAW STORY: Narrative that has the look and texture of cole-slaw. Sometimes it is too sweet. This story can be the perfect kind of salad.

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Elliot Reed received his MFA from the University of Florida in Gainesville and is currently living in Spokane, Washington.

“Writing the Midwest” is a recurring series featuring writing advice from today’s most prolific authors. Whether it’s dealing with writer’s block, knowing when a piece is finished, or how and where to find inspiration, we’re delighted to present to you the very best guidance to help you and your writing. You can find links to the authors’ full interviews below.

On utilizing ambiguity and the reader’s uncertainty: Dan Chaon: I’m tolerant of a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty, but a lot of readers aren’t. There have to be little nuggets or bread crumbs along the way that make them feel like they’re making progress in putting the puzzle together, or folks get frustrated. I have to hope for a reader that, like me, enjoys a certain level of suspension that may not ever fully be answered. Otherwise, “tension” feels mechanical, like one of those first-person shooter video games from the 1990s, where you’re just on a single path through the level on your way to the big battle with the boss. But for me, the questions have to be bigger and more compelling than any one solution.

Jacquelyn Vincenta: [It] seems to me that one of the most essential and yet most difficult elements in crafting a compelling mystery is to bring the secrets at play within the story as close to the surface as possible without anyone fully understanding them for what they are until the end. When these motivating, disruptive energies are present but not revealed they should give rise to words, behavior, and intriguing events that drive the story logically forward, even without the full truth of them being available to the reader… and yet we feel them there so that when the facts are all made clear, they resonate back through the tale. One of the deepest pleasures of reading a mystery is that experience, as you complete it, of reviewing the tale with newly enlightened eyes.

Lee L. Krecklow: I love blind spots, both for readers and characters. We’re most intrigued by the things we can’t see. One of the techniques I use to achieve this is an intimate but alternating third person perspective. The reader has close, internal perspectives from each of the players, but never at the same time, so one doesn’t have access to certain characters’ thoughts or emotions during key moments. The reverse is that the reader has certain pieces of information that the characters don’t, information which might help the characters or their relationships. Hopefully that creates tension and urgency. I’m also not above allowing some actions to take place off the page, so that a reader needs to keep reading into the future in order to understand what took place in the past. That’s just another form of blind spot.

“Writing the Midwest” is a recurring series featuring writing advice from today’s most prolific authors. Whether it’s dealing with writer’s block, knowing when a piece is finished, or how and where to find inspiration, we’re delighted to present to you the very best guidance to help you and your writing. You can find links to the authors’ full interviews below.

On crafting realistic dialogue: Matt Young: Understanding passive aggression has also helped me harness sarcasm and wit and snappy dialogue. It’s also a good way to build tension and complicated characters. I’m sure the way I think and write and the words I use and the images I focus on are all informed by how and where I grew up in some way as well.

Sophfronia Scott: When I write fiction it’s like I’m planting seeds. I have some sense of what I’m planting and in the writing process I see what grows and how it grows. I know, for example, that I must write a dialogue scene between two characters. I approach that work knowing some of what they will say to each other but leaving room for surprises as well. All this discovery can take place within one writing session.

Amanda Kabak: I think of the inevitable gulf between what we think and what we do, what we intend and what actually happens. I write about people who want to be quality human beings but who make decisions that undermine themselves and hurt other people. I drive through dialog past what I intend to where someone says something wholly unanticipated and game-changing. And I get it wrong for about twelve drafts (during which time I think I get it right several times before realizing I’m deluded) until I find the contradictions and idiosyncrasies that make characters fully-realized people. Once that’s in place, when they interact with each other, those interactions will ring true.

“Writing the Midwest” is a recurring series featuring writing advice from today’s most prolific authors. Whether it’s dealing with writer’s block, knowing when a piece is finished, or how and where to find inspiration, we’re delighted to present to you the very best guidance to help you and your writing. You can find links to the authors’ full interviews below.

On utilizing humor: Matt Mason: I love humor because it helps draw people in, disarms them, they come closer to you and don’t notice the mallet you’re holding behind your back until it’s too late.

Rebecca Adams Wright: Humor is such a natural defensive response. We’re all aware of when we’re laughing so we don’t cry, and we talk all the time about “black comedy” and “gallows humor.” I think humor plays a similar defensive role in fiction. Satire, especially, keeps violence and anger and grief just palatable enough that we won’t turn away. My most humorous stories are almost always the darkest, probably for that blade-dulling effect. It’s a balancing act for sure. The writer needs to be sure the humor is appropriate to the situation, keep a story funny enough to avoid melodrama or simplified pathos without overwhelming the emotion behind the comedy. I think about this balance while in the process of revision. Not so much while I’m drafting, because humor has to bubble up naturally. Force it onto the page, think about it too much, and you’ve already failed.

Kathryn Harrison: I don’t know how anyone without a sense of humor puts one foot in front of the other. I don’t know any reader who would put up with unleavened difficult-and-dark. And I’m the first among them—the first person I want to amuse is me. Because sometimes I have to laugh at what’s happening to me, on the page if not in the moment.

“Writing the Midwest” is a recurring series featuring writing advice from today’s most prolific authors.
Whether it’s dealing with writer’s block, knowing when a piece is finished, or how and where to find
inspiration, we’re delighted to present to you the very best guidance to help you and your writing. You
can find links to the authors’ full interviews below.

On rejection: Richard Russo: I’m not sure you ever really do overcome rejection or failure. Sometimes it’s possible to accept them and learn from them. Mostly they’re beside the point. You failed? So what? It happens. In fact, it’s supposed to happen. They didn’t like your story? Okay, write another. Maybe they’ll like that one. You internalize what you know to be true across the entire spectrum of the arts; the more you practice, the better you get. (“I can’t go on; I’ll go on.”)

Jamel Brinkley: Try not to get too bent out of shape about rejection. My book was rejected by the vast majority of publishers who looked at it. If possible, try to choose an agent and an editor whom you instinctively trust, who push or nudge you as necessary but always show respect for you and your work and understand what you’re trying to do. Have people in your life who are also going through the same process you are, or who have gone through it. They will understand the very particular challenges and anxieties involved in the process. Regardless of what is happening, good or bad, keeping writing and reading so you stay connected to the fundamental joys that made you want to be a writer in the first place.

Kodi Scheer: I wish I’d known the amount of emotional resilience required for this gig. If you want readers or strive for publication, which most of us do, the amount of rejection you have to endure is soul-crushing. Yes, writing does take a little bit of innate talent, but mostly it takes perseverance. I know some very talented writers—more talented than I am—who haven’t published because the few rejections they’ve received have been difficult for them. The lows can be tough to deal with, but I can’t imagine doing anything else.

“Writing the Midwest” is a recurring series featuring writing advice from today’s most prolific authors. Whether it’s dealing with writer’s block, knowing when a piece is finished, or how and where to find inspiration, we’re delighted to present to you the very best guidance to help you and your writing. You can find links to the authors’ full interviews below.

On unconventional techniques and approaches: Dan Pope: When the coffee shop closes for the evening, I have another, very odd, method of composition. At home, I turn on my piece-of-crap 2005 computer and call up a blank Word file. Then I turn OFF the monitor and take my keyboard (with a 30-foot extension) into the next room. By going into the next room, I can avoid (1) the awful humming of the computer and (2) the spectral appearance of the words on the screen and the concomitant temptation to change or erase said words. Then at some point, maybe an hour later, I’ll go back to the computer and push print and examine the words that spew forth. There will be many misspellings, of course. I’ll mark up those pages and send them off to that same typist [an individual, who types that material into his or her computer for a fee, then emails it to me for corrections, additions, etc.] for proper word-processing. You’d think that this would be a huge waste of time, but try it! Try sitting in a room with just a keyboard and your thoughts. I find it to be freeing and fruitful. If I had the screen on, I would be able to see what I was typing, of course, and I would be tempted to mess up a good sentence or paragraph. Instead, I just keep going forward. Is this weird? I’d be surprised if there is anyone else in the same hemisphere who works this way, with his or her screen off. I’m willing to admit that this is all very strange and ridiculous behavior.

Halee Kirkwood: I keep a notebook near me whenever I read. If a writer is doing something I admire, I attempt to pin down how exactly they astonished me, and then make a writing prompt for myself based on the techniques I noticed, whether that be on the micro or macro level. I don’t always make it to the prompt immediately, but I know it is there for me to try if I ever do hit writer’s block. I’ve also consulted my humble Tarot deck for inspiration on plot or theme or character development—there’s a wonderful book out there called The Creative Tarot by Jessa Crispin that revolutionized the relationship between creativity and intuition for me. Highly recommend!

Ira Sukrungruang: I’ll let you in on a secret: sometimes, if I’m really into my writing, I need to have something over my head. Like a hoodie, or a blanket, or if I’m home, I pull my shirt over my head and look at the screen though the head hole. Don’t mess with me then. The outside world is white noise. My brain is on the page.