A professional basketball player was outmatched on the court. Fans thought that they could beat him, and eventually, he had his own television show, taking on the challengers and proving them wrong. He’s famous for saying, “I’m closer to LeBron than you are to me.”
He’s Brian Scalabrine, AKA the White Mamba, and I’ve been thinking about that fan psychology a good deal lately. On the courts of Substack, we talk a lot of smack, but our game might not live up to our claims.
Last year I wrote a series on advanced writing techniques and had begun the work on turning that into book form. That work stopped when I needed to step away, but I’m once again pressing forward. Over the next several months, I’ll post updated articles to help transform those ideas into something more book ready, but I believe there’s more to be done.
Fan psychology can lull us into contentment. It makes us believe the only thing holding us back is an inept industry. Writers get lazy. One reader came to me after he’d read an article mocking “the try-hards.” It claimed talent poured out of you like piss from a cow, or it didn’t.1 There’s was no point in trying to be better.
Whoever wrote that nonsense had succumbed to fan psychology. He thought he could beat Scalabrine, maybe even LeBron himself. An honest industry would have recognized his talents by now.
Don’t get me wrong. The industry is broken, but that’s something we can’t fix. What we can do is become better writers.
Allow me to strip away any false modesty and be real. I consider my breakout story, The Sphinx and Ernest Hemingway, to be art. It was published under my real name in 2006 in the second issue of Fantasy Magazine, and it would haunt me for the next decade as I struggled to repeat what I’d captured in that magical moment.
The story came within a hair’s breadth of being accepted by my dream publication, but in the years that followed, I realized that if the story I couldn’t live up to didn’t make it… what chance did I have? Frustrated and disgusted, I pulled my crime novel from a friend’s publishing house and walked away.
Only, walking away didn’t work. I kept writing, even if I’d told myself I’d given up on publication. Truth was, I was lying to myself. There were real reasons I’d walked away. First of all, the book wasn’t good enough. That’s why I pulled it. Second, I was seeing less stories published because I insisted on pursuing my own weird ideas instead of satisfying an audience, and finally, I could write well but not consistently well.
God bless Libbie Grant who helped with my attempts a decade ago and who read some of the worst lines I’ve ever penned to paper. Mind you, this was a decade after I’d published Sphinx, and I still couldn’t find my footing.
Check out her Substack. Read her books. She’s the real deal. She’s done it all, including publishing with the big houses.
Credit in inspiring my second life as a writer also goes to Chet Sandberg who I first met about the same time. His literary work showed me what flow really is. His lines are like a river, taking me along wherever they may lead.
Eventually I came here and started the series on advanced writing techniques, and the experience has taken me to a new level. Still, there’s more to be done.
The danger in comparing ourselves against ourselves, boosting our egos (or bruising them) against this narrow selection, is that the real barrier we must break is somewhere beyond.
The best ballplayers in the neighborhood can’t stand toe-to-toe with Brian Scalabrine. Yet, for me, the only acceptable goal is to out-write the professionals. If that’s your goal, too, I’ll share what I gather along the way, and together, we’ll kick literary ass.
The Biggest Improvement in my Consistency Came from this:
After mentioning the importance of subjective and objective writing in my last essay, I’ve felt compelled to write about the subject, but anything I say here will be raw and fresh. These are ongoing lessons shared in the heat of the writer’s battle, not pondered upon from the safety of years passed.
I’ve often quoted a paragraph Hemingway wrote about a downhill skier,2 and it’s largely objective writing and yet has a lovely flow to it. That counter example will stand in sharp contrast to this claim: subjective writing is the key to achieving flow in your writing. Through the various sentence structures and techniques I’ve discussed in my essays, we can achieve rhythm and flow anywhere, but it’s true that subjective writing makes it easier as it more readily opens itself up to sentence-extending techniques.
Many writers trip themselves up by limiting themselves to objective reporting of the story (a camera’s view of what’s happening), interspersed with the characters direct thoughts. The resulting reading experience can be jarring.
I’m a fan of objective writing and believe many writers use too little of it. It helps ground us in place and action. Interiority can be hinted at in ways that become profound when the reader is able to connect the dots and draw their own conclusions. That being said, one of my stumbling blocks was the ill-conceived idea that objective writing was better writing.
Then, as I realized the error of that thinking, I over-complicated my approach to a character’s interior life and shattered the flow of my writing. I promise you. It doesn’t have to be that complicated.
Let me stop here and introduce you to a Youtube video because it contains some points I want to address:3
The key points:
Don’t use emotion words (angry, sad, happy) to tell us what your POV character is feeling. They’re fine when your POV character is considering the emotional state of another character
Don’t us bodily sensations to tell us what a character is feeling. This one is huge. It goes against so much of the advice we get, and she’s absolutely right.
Avoid writing as if body parts have a will of their own unless that’s your actual point.
That second point was screaming in the back of my mind and demanding to be shared. Of course, this is a list of what not to do, but while sweaty palms aren’t a great way to write about fear, there are other options. One writing-advice Youtuber who recommends the sweaty-palms technique likes to tell us to get up inside our character’s body. Instead, get up inside your character’s mind. Use subjective writing to show us her thoughts and feelings.
Objective, camera-view writing and a character’s direct thoughts are extreme ends of a spectrum of possibilities in what’s known as narrative distance, and your writing is free to move along that spectrum. We will each have areas where we feel more comfortable, from which our writing will reach out into strange territories and return to safety. That point of comfort and the dance outward will help give our style a flavor that is uniquely our own, but the entire spectrum remains available to each of us.
The jarring sensation we feel from having direct thoughts dropped inside an objective paragraph comes from a lack of transition through degrees of narrative distance. The writer’s camera doesn’t have to be locked in place nor is the mind beyond its reach. We’re free to roam, and if done well, we have no need to explain ourselves when that distance shifts.
The spectrum is all about the degree to which the character’s perceptions and emotions flavor the writing. The stronger the flavor, the more we can readily use the various techniques available to us.
For more on narrative distance, I suggest this article by Eric Falden.
To explore my work on prose line theory, begin here:
Together, let’s move beyond fan psychology and grow as writers.
— Thaddeus Thomas
The “piss from a cow” line didn’t come from the article, actually. It was said by PD James about the way Agatha Christie wrote, and if memory serves me well, she stole the phrase from something written about the Beatles. In short, a few artists actually do create the same way a cow pisses…and with as much thought given to the process. Chances are, though, if we assume that’s us, we’re deluded. Anyone can piss, but most piss isn’t art.
In most cases, we’re also wrong when we think it true of any given successful artist. When a great talent makes something look easy, it’s foolish to believe it’s as easy as it looks, even for them.
He looked up the hill. George was coming down in telemark position, kneeling; one leg forward and bent, the other trailing; his sticks hanging like some insect’s thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow as they touched the surface and finally the whole kneeling, trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching, the legs shot forward and back, the body leaning out against the swing, the sticks accenting the curve like points of light, all in a wild cloud of snow. (Hemingway, In Our Time)
She specializes in memoir writing, and I confess to often rejecting her ideas before admitting to their merit.
Study Lev Grossman. There’s a lot I hate about his prose (passive voice, continuous verb forms, etc.), but he’s a genius when it comes to imparting the POV character’s emotional state in his environmental description. Pynchon does it a lot, too, but it’s harder to pin down in Pynchon because, well, Pynchon.