MFA in a Box by John Rember. Downers Grove, Ill: Dream of Things, 2010. Review by Sharon Harrigan

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MFA in a Box is a “why to write” not a “how to write” craft book. If you are looking for instruction on technique, such as point of view, pacing, and plot structure, see Julie Checkoway’s terrific Creating Fiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs. But if you are ready to plunge into the depths of your writer’s soul and uncover the secrets that you might be holding back, then MFA in a Box could change the whole way you think about the process of writing.

The book unfolds through stories—from the author’s life, books, and world events—to illustrate hard-to-understand truths. The chapter “Writing Violence,” for example, uses the story about Jack Henry Abbot and his prison memoir and relationship to Norman Mailer to show a number of ideas, such as the need for irony in writing. Irony is the “struggle against the absurdity of having a god’s mind in an animal’s body,” and without that struggle stories die. Irony is “the difference between the way things are and the way things are supposed to be.”

This chapter was especially relevant to my writing, because I see the need for more violence in my plots, not necessarily physical or actual but a recognition that the world is a violent place, an insistence on not ignoring the Cold War artifact that is the world we live in (which Rember also calls “writing in the Now.”)

“Violence” can mean conflict pushed to its boiling point. Rember says, “When I advise new writers, I encounter people who find it difficult to resolve the conflict in their stories. . . If the conflict has to be resolved by violence, the writer often as not leaves the scene. . . nobody’s life—least of all the writer’s—is transformed.”

Two points at the end of this chapter also made me look at my work in a different way: “You wouldn’t want to write if you didn’t have criminal tendencies” and “Writing will run into taboos that are deep in your genes.” Writers write, and I’m no exception, to question the world because we don’t accept everything at face value or we don’t believe that what’s on the surface is all that there is. And we are cheating our readers and ourselves if we don’t face up to taboos.

The chapter “Writing Shadows” is about images (“if an image sticks in your mind, it will generate a story if you let it”), about Ezra Pound, and about going deeper into scary places–the Valley of Death–in the writing process and hoping we can find our way back. “If I could change the past so it were less embarrassing, my present would be less substantial than it is, because I would have had no need to develop the sort of moral heft that lets me live with shame,” Rember says, making me (almost) grateful for so many embarrassing moments in my life. He tells Ezra Pound’s morally complicated story to show that Pound’s “lack of moral heft might be related to his lack of shame.” These two quotes made me vow to take my writing to a deeper and darker place: “Writing moves you toward a consciousness of everyday life as being just the surface layer of froth on a dark sea of reality.” And: “Faulkner says it’s the writer’s duty to delve deep into grief and  scars, in order to lift humanity’s collective heart.”

The chapter “Writing Family” has this brilliant quote from Kurt Vonnegut: “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.” This chapter gives me the courage not to worry about offending my family when I write (or, perhaps, just the resignation that it’s going to happen, and to try to avoid it is to accept bad writing). Rember says,  “Writing is one of the rare professions where a dysfunctional family can help your career.” Because if the family rules are crazy and don’t work, it’s more likely you’ll see them, figure out that they’re arbitrary, and be able to break them.

The chapter gives a number of examples of ways authors have taken family dysfunction and turned it into art. But the only way to do this is to confront the secrets that are easier to keep hidden. Rember says: “Once you have the courage to look at the secrets your secret-keeping machine is keeping, you can gain tremendous energy for writing.”

“The Writer as Witness” chapter tells the story of Rember’s admission into the College of Idaho and transfer to Harvard. It also tells the story of the power of good writing. He found that he could get an A or B in any class as long as he wrote good papers, explaining: “I’ve learned that if you can write well, people believe what you say, because there’s an implicit cultural understanding that when you write something down, it’s like having an extra brain out there.”

The power of writing is even greater than that, he says. It can change the world. Rember says: “When I begin working with a new writing student, I tell her: ‘You’re going to be a witness for mute and suffering people who lack your ability to perceive. Your writing is going to make the world a better place.’” The writing needs to “cross a threshold into a deep and painful place.” “You don’t have to live there,”’ he says, “but you have to be able to go there. And you have to be able to get back.”

I’ve only covered half the book. The rest of the chapters discuss grief, writing depth, and writing mom. I have been lucky enough to study with Rember as part of the Pacific University MFA program, and he is one of the best teachers I’ve ever encountered. Writers not fortunate enough to work with him personally can still learn from the decades of teaching experience that went into this book.

If you are ready to peel away the layers of secrets you are keeping from yourself and your readers, to confront the dark side of writing and stop worrying about avoiding narrative conflict and saving face, then you will be finish this book a changed person. Reading the book is a kind of spiritual experience. It is a Pandora’s box as much as an MFA box, one you will want to keep opening every time you find yourself compromising your writing by hiding the world instead of revealing it.

The Patterns of Paper Monsters by Emma Rathbone. New York: Regan Arthur Books, 2010. Review by Sharon Harrigan

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The Patterns of Paper Monsters is a coming of age novel about a seventeen-year-old boy from the wrong part of Northern Virginia. His father abandoned him early in life, his mother is an infantile alcoholic, and his stepfather is a chronically unemployed wife beater. All the present action takes place in a juvenile detention center, where Jacob is being held for attempted armed robbery of a convenience store. But Rathbone manages a tricky feat: she turns this dark material into a hilarious trip through the twisted mind of a teenager with a sharp wit and enough attitude and energy to power a whole novel.

The book is framed as journal entries Jacob writes every evening, and the action covers the last few months of Jacob’s time as a prisoner, ending with a short narrative of what happens to him after he is released. It is written in the first person and present tense, which gives it an immediacy that pulls the reader in. Jacob uses a lot of sensory information, which makes us feel like we are in the room with him.

As with most first person narratives, the driving force of this book is the voice. It’s defiant and  judgmental of people and things that don’t seem authentic, sincere, or fair. It’s confessional, unrepentant, sarcastic, clever, and honest. It is never self-indulgent or self-pitying. With his honesty and perceptiveness, Jacob gains our sympathy.

Because Jacob is a nonconformist bent on seeing the world in his own way, he allows himself a lot of word play and inventiveness, which makes his journal entries surprising, refreshing, and funny. I started to underline the funny lines to pull out for quotes, but I had to stop, because I was underlining the whole book.

The humor helped cushion the jagged edges of the book’s theme: how to escape from a childhood of violence and neglect and come out intact. The violence is not just in the back story; while Jacob is in the detention center, his stepfather beats his mother so badly she goes into a coma. By the end of the book, she hasn’t recovered and may die or have permanent brain damage. Jacob also has to deal with the threat of violence at the detention center. David, a new boy, hatches a plot to blow the place up, and tries to force Jacob to help him. Without humor, I probably would have found these events difficult to read. This book showed how much humor and darkness can work together.

Even the gestures are funny, like this one: “My mom broke a cookie in half and tried to dislocate a chocolate chip from its socket.” It’s not just funny, though; it also reveals a lot about the characters. Jacob filters in the violence from his life and puts it into his descriptions of everything, including something as benign as watching someone eat a cookie.

Rathbone perfectly captures Jacob’s tone. It’s odd and jarring but precise. Instead of “Who’s that?” Jacob says: “Fuck is that guy?” Even with this tough way of talking, Jacob gets away with a multitude of metaphors and similes, while still sounding authentic and conversational. The analogies work, because they are not clichés, and they all serve to deepen our understanding of the characters. For instance, “All the anger, all the resentment I feel that day knocking around inside me like sneakers in a washing machine.” The analogy works because it’s so goofy, because the quotidian quality of washing machines and sneakers linked with something so abstract and complex as anger is startling. It also works because it’s sensory: we can hear the sneakers pounding on the metal.

I love metaphors and similes but usually have to cut them because they are more decorative than functional.  I am going to try to learn from the way weaves analogies into this book to add to the meaning. Jacob’s mixed metaphors give us a window into the way his mind works, for instance: “like everyone is writhing in some cinematic rinse cycle of redemption.”

When Jacob acts like he’s from Mars and all our Earthling rituals are new to him, it’s funny but it also reflects his feeling as a true outsider. For instance, he calls a cell phone “a shiny black miniature communications device” or when he calls Christianity “some religion where you can’t have sex.”

Rathbone does an impressive job using setting as character and portraying class differences. Jacob’s hometown is remarkable both for what it is and for what it is not: “It’s not the northern Virginia of freshly painted highways and wincingly bright glass buildings. It’s not the northern Virginia of tailored town centers with marble walkways and aggressive-looking plants. It’s a land of deserted concrete plazas, slumping strip malls, and schools with losing sports teams.”

Rathbone makes us empathize with Jacob, even though he is rude and defiant of adult authority. This is a problem for my teenage characters, too. I want them to be sarcastic and arrogant in a way that I think is true and captures the energy of someone at that age who really wants to live a life that isn’t boring and ordinary. Part of how Jacob gets our sympathy is by using grandiose phrases like: “If there was one message I could write in the sky with clouds, it would be . . .” You have to love somebody who sees his job as never expressing something in the expected way.

One way Jacob keeps his expression out of the ordinary is to replace a word out of a colloquial phrase with one that evokes an image, such as substituting “swab” for “take”: “meeting them, having them swab some impression of me.” Or he adds an adjective, usually visual, such as: “they are supposed to reach out an offer me some carpeted guidance.”

What’s interesting about such a rapid-fire observation machine as Jacob is that he does almost no talking at all. In fact, he makes a great effort to talk as little as possible. The dialogue that we do get is a study in how a teenager can be as aggravating as possible to an adult. The follow is one example, after he signs an “honor slip” in microscopic letters:

“That’s too small.”

“It’s my signature.”

“It’s unreadable.”

“You can’t read it?”

“No.”

“I can read it.”

Jacob hates the juvenile detention center, but he is not eager to live in the outside world, either. He has contempt for what he considers normal. But halfway through the book, he starts to change. He is cracked open by a girl he meets, a fellow juvie named Andrea. As time goes on, they have more intimate conversations and, he says, “it’s like we have day passes to each other’s souls.”

Patterns is a classic coming of age story, because its protagonist starts the book with a big dose of immaturity and arrogance, imagining that he is much wiser than he actually is, then later realizes he doesn’t know as much as he thought. At the beginning, he acts as if he’s already an old man: “I know something already that most people learn only once they’ve reached the end of whatever personal disappointment corridor they’ve started on . . . everything . . . is totally sad and completely pointless.”

At the end, Jacob is not transformed into a heartwarming greeting-card message spewing automaton, but at least he is trying to figure out how to live in the world without committing any more crimes. His “second cousin” (a kind of “Big Brother” the center assigns him) finds him a part-time job, and on the last page Jacob is sitting at his desk, trying to figure out “what it is that people do.” But the transformation is huge, because he knows that he doesn’t know. He is going to stop pretending he knows everything and instead try to learn.

I liked this book so much I recommended it to my book group (of nonwriters). I can’t remember the last time they enjoyed a book so unanimously. I recommend it to all readers, writers or not, young and old. If Jacob won over a jaded parent of a teen like me, he can win over anyone.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower. New York: Picador, 2009. Review by Sharon Harrigan

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Not since Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America has a short story collection excited me so much with its irrepressible, in-your-face humor and rule-breaking anti-heroes. Towers made me want to try doing what he does. It looks like so much fun.

The stories are about hopeless losers who don’t find redemption. Most are in first person, from the loser’s point of view, which usually inspires empathy. But it doesn’t in this case. These characters blithely follow their own excesses to a wild ride of self-destruction. It’s amazing that Towers manages to keep us turning the pages, anyway, faster and faster. He does it by making the language inventive and clever, by weaving in a deft thread of suspense, and by making the characters insightful and funny.

Tower shows a remarkable versatility. In addition to the first-person stories, he has a story in the second person (“Leopard”) and third-person omniscient (“On the Show”).  The title story, historical fiction from the point of view of a Viking plunderer, stretches his versatility the furthest and is the only one in which the novelty became too apparent for me.

The narrators range through a middle aged real estate developer in a hate-hate relationship with his brother and the world, a twenty-four-year-old engineer/inventor, a nine-year-old boy who chronically lies and dreams of beating up his stepfather when he turns sixteen, a sixteen-year-old girl who would rather put herself in danger of rape than suffer the embarrassment of being seen with her father, and a seventy-three-year-old man who knocks on his neighbor’s door hoping she’s a prostitute and discovers she’s a drug dealer. What these characters have in common is their obnoxiousness, which stops just short of evil.  But because they are rude, sarcastic, and unfiltered, they can say anything they want, and what they say is often extremely funny.

Two of my favorite stories were “On the Show” and “The Brown Coast.”

“On the Show” includes multiple plot threads and gets into the heads of several different characters, making for a complex architecture. It’s omniscient, so it juggles readers’ attention from character to character. Towers pulls it all together by making it clear by the end that one plot line dominates (the question: who is the pedophile who lured the seven year old boy into the bathroom?) I thought it was Ellis, one of the carnies, but we only find out at the very end that it is the cattle contest judge, an icon of civic fortitude flown in from out of state, who did it. No one in the story finds out, but we are privileged, through omniscience, to get in the perpetrator’s head. This was the most complicated story of the collection, and it left me breathless.

“The Brown Coast” I found interesting because of its inverse climax. Unlike the traditional arc (building to more and more tension and rising until the conflict bubbles over, then coming down to equilibrium), it starts out with tension and conflict, builds to a climax that is a rare moment of euphoria, then the falling action leads us back to the pile of shit we started in. The narrator has invited his estranged brother to visit him in his cottage in Maine. They have a history of cruelty to each other, which is undiluted by maturity.

But something happens that promises to change all that. They go hunting and, miraculously, the narrator shoots a moose. The narrator, his buddy, and his brother clean and dress the beast in an operatic ritual of male bonding. The brother–a failed classical composer forced to eek out a meager living as a music therapist–considers moving out to Maine, which promises to enlarge his soul with manliness. They all expend a hero’s effort to haul the animal back to the cottage, and nothing will ever by the same, we think. Until the meat starts to rot. The animal was sick, and his virus is spreading fast after his death. The brother and buddy refuse to eat it, but the narrator, always in denial, ends the story by taking a big bite of rancid meat.

Meanness can be funny, and this book is hilarious. Partly it’s the juxtaposition of unexpected words in the same sentence, like “with sunset still smoldering behind the molars of the Appalachian range.” The self-loathing is funny, too, such as “Matthew, he repeated, in the way you might say ‘cancer’ after the doctor’s diagnosis.”

But the book is more than funny. When you read: “The land here met the water in a steeply sloping apron of mud that sang with mosquitoes and smelled terribly of fart gas,” you know you’re in for a lyrical roller-coaster ride that is dark, metaphorical, sensual, complex, hilarious, profane, and rollicking fun.

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Review by Sharon Harrigan

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One of the great pleasures of this book is implied in its title: lists of objects. Almost always they are a collection of concrete and practical things, like safety pins and insecticide. The lists can go on for four or five lines, gaining speed and breadth.

With the accumulation of real things and a barrage of specific sensory details, (e.g. “he would sometimes taste the envelope flap, knowing her tongue would be there”) O’Brien earns the right to offer a few choice abstractions or metaphors. When he finally writes “they carried their own lives,” it feels inevitable as just as real as everything else in the list.

I had read the title story before; reading it again was a revelation. The lyrical expansiveness of the multitude of lists seemed both illicit (breaking rules for economical writing) and Biblical (like the strings of who begat whom in the Old Testament). These lyrical riffs, these poetic and Walt Whitman-like digressions, puzzled and inspired me. Are fiction writers allowed to do that? I wanted to know. The answer is yes, if you can do it like Tim O’Brien.

But I don’t think the lists and lyrical digressions would work without the skeleton of forward-moving plot holding the story up. The lesson: You can have riffs if you also have momentum, and one way to do both is to alternate as O’Brien does. Part of the story is a specific incident in time leading up to Ted Lavender’s death, and that plot alternates with the part of the story that describes habitual actions,  not grounded in a specific time.

I had read the story in an anthology and was impressed by the use of a sustained trope and parallel, repetitive structure, which seemed like the architecture of a poem. The second time, the poetic structure was even clearer. It reminded me of Allen Ginsberg’s long-lined lists but also of a more traditional form, like a sestina, with its repetition of ending words. I can’t remember reading another story with both so daring and meticulous.

“On the Rainy River”
Although the title story is the most anthologized, there is much to learn from the other stories, as well. In “On the Rainy River,” O’Brien uses precise sensory details to win our trust.  For example, when he makes general statements like “It was not pleasant work” (about the pig processing factory) we believe him because of the details. Then, after a page of describing exactly what his job was he earns the right to say that after he got his draft notice in the mail, his “life seemed to be collapsing toward slaughter.” This abstraction and summation works because it is held up by the skeleton of precise, concrete details.

O’Brien uses lists to give a comic, manic effect, like the lists of people responsible for the U.S. getting into an amoral war: “All of them–I held them personally and individually responsible–the polyestered Kiwanis boys, the merchants and farmers, the pious churchgoers, the chatty housewives, the PTA and the Lions club and the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the fine upstanding gentry out at the country club.” Then he lets the concrete lead us into the abstract: “I headed straight west along the Rainy River, which separates Minnesota from Canada, and which for me separated one life from another.”

When the narrator tells us he is longing for a life that doesn’t include being sent off to war, he gives us objects to explain what kind of life he wants: “All I wanted was to live the life I was born to . . . I loved baseball and hamburgers and cherry Cokes.” Those objects give us more feeling of longing than a whole paragraph of abstractions and generalizations would.

O’Brien uses his skill for specific detail in his portraits of people. For instance, when the narrator first meets Elroy Berdahl (the man who “saves his life”) we are presented with the kind of details that make him seem real: “He wore a flannel shirt and brown work pants. In one hand, I remember, he carried a green apple, a small paring knife in the other. His eyes had the bluish gray color of a razor blade, the same polished shine.” Then O’Brien earns the right to give us something abstract, a little metaphor: “As he peered up at me I felt a strange sharpness, almost painful, a cutting sensation, as if his gaze were somehow slicing me open.”

At the climax — when the narrator is in the boat with the old man and has to decide whether to jump in the water and swim to Canada, dodging the draft–the lists starts to explode and break all rules of plausibility. The tone—frantic and dangerous—matches the mood of irrevocable decision-making. The narrator is about to die in a way: he has two selves as possibilities, and by choosing one only, the other will die.

The story starts to read like the proverbial moment before death when people can see their whole life flash before their eyes; the narrator can even see his future and the past before he was born. He saw “everybody screaming from the sidelines, rooting [him] on.” He gives us enough sensory details–the popcorn smells, and cheerleaders’ smooth, brown thighs—that the scene becomes real. Then he sees Abraham Lincoln and Saint George, “and several members of the United States Senate . . . and all the dead soldiers back from the grave, and the many thousands who were later to die.” Once he has our credibility, the prose becomes more and more fantastical.

This scene goes on for a page and a half, opening up into more magic and dream logic. The use of so many words, so many images and sensations and time periods, has the effect of slowing down the climax so that we experience how much time slowed down for the narrator. The moments last forever, as we wonder if the narrator will flee to Canada or not.

“Rainy River,” like the title story, is a tour de force of varying rhythms. O’Brien alternates short, staccato, matter-of-fact sentences with strings of long, complex lists of objects, starting simple and plausible and visual, and becoming more absurd. For instance, after the long-winded and explosive lists at the climax, the story ends simply with short, simple words and phrases: “I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to war.” The last three sentences are a summation, though they turn the traditional war story on its head. We expect to be told that people who don’t go to war are the cowards. The surprise of the sentence structure mimics the surprise of their message.

The varying rhythm works in the book as a whole. Long, complex, lyrical stories are often followed by short snips of stories. For example, “The Things They Carried” the first story, weighs in at 26 pages, but it is followed by “Love” (3 pages) and “Spin” (7 pages)–lighter in tone, as well, and more conversational. “On the Rainy River,” one of the morally heftiest stories of the book, is also one of the longest, at 20 pages, followed by two extremely short ones: “Enemies” and “Friends” (2 pages each), both of which are anecdotal with twists at the end.

O’Brien also uses repetition of beginning phrases in sentences to give a poetic cadence and insistence, for instance: “They didn’t know Bao Dai from the man in the moon. They didn’t know history. They didn’t know the first thing about Diem’s tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalism, or the long colonialism of the French–this was all too damned complicated, it required some reading–but no matter, it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, which was how they liked things, and you were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing or dying for plain and simple reasons.” The two short sentences are followed by a very long one, with digressions and dashes, like the first two were just winding up to give the third its power.

“The Man I Killed”
Many of the stories use visual details that make us feel as if we are watching a movie and can see all the close-ups. For instance, “The Man I Killed” starts with a long paragraph visually describing the man. The first sentence is an eight-line-long list of physical features separated just by commas and ending: “his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him.” The effect of this nonstop sentence is to make us feel the adrenaline pumping in the narrator’s brain, the speedy, surrreal quality of the experience.

Fiction vs. Memoir and the Meta-Life of the Story
Part of what’s interesting about this book is the way it tries to blur the feeling of memoir with fiction. When I read the first story, “The Things They Carried,” I felt completely enveloped in the artifice of fiction. The structure is so intricate and symmetrical, it felt almost like a poem in its repetition, digressions, symmetry and musicality, that I just wanted to admire it as a man-made thing. Of course, the specificity of the information gave the writing the confidence that makes it sound true, but I assumed it was fiction.

However, the second story, “Love,” is written with the tropes of memoir, starting: “Many years after the war Jimmy Cross came to visit me at my home in Massachusetts, and for a full day we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and talked about everything we had seen and done so long ago.” Then in the middle of the story, the narrator asks Jimmy Cross’s permission to write his story (to write what Tim O’Brien wrote in the first story). The narrator even has the author’s name.

Jimmy Cross gives Tim permission but tells him not to write about anything embarrassing. Tim agrees, but the reader knows the in-joke, that he did not keep his promise, because we have already read the first story, in all its embarrassing glory. At this point, I flipped to the copyright page and checked the statement that all the characters in this book are fictional. It was a nimble trick for the author to make it seem so much like memoir when it isn’t.

In “How to Tell a True War Story,” the meta-life of the story deepens. The first sentence is “This is true.” The fact that he has to say that makes me suspicious. It’s a trick. He’s planning on my confusion, my desire to know if this book is fictional or not. He’s laughing at me.

In this story, I find out that “true” doesn’t necessarily mean something really happened. Now I am getting somewhere. True means that it conveys the spirit of the experience. O’Brien gives us two counterintuitive examples, one of “a true story that never happened”–something he made up but that gives the essence of what the war was like. (A guy jumps on a mine to take the blast for the three other guys he’s with, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway.) He also gives an example of something that actually happened but isn’t true (the same story but the one guy is a dead hero and the other three live): “Even if it did happen. . . even then you know it can’t be true, because a story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant.”

“How to Tell a True Was Story” also tells us how good, confident writing makes a story true even if it is implausible or impossible. For example, Rat Kiley must have thought it was the sunlight (not a grenade) killing him. “But if I could ever get the story right,” O’Brien the author and Tim the narrator says, “then you would believe.”

“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” is a big, complex story, operatic almost, whose subject is, partly, the rules of writing a good story. For example: exaggeration can make readers feel the truth more than the exact truth would. Rat Kiley tells the often-interrupted story of Mary Ann. Kiley exaggerates, but “it wasn’t a question of deceit. Just the opposite: he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. . . Facts were formed by sensations, not the other way around.”

This story, because much of it is in Kiley’s voice, has more colloquial, colorful phrases, like “A real tiger. D-cup guts, trainer-bra brains.” At important intersections in the story, Rat Kiley pauses and welcomes participation. For instance, he asks Mitchell Sanders to guess where Mary Ann was when she didn’t come back for the night the first time. Mitchell guesses that she’s with the Green Berets, explaining: “No other option. . .  That’s how stories, work, man.” The effect of these street-talking soldiers discussing the mechanics of fiction writing is funny. I was delighted to be in on the joke.

This paragraph is something that could benefit all writers, beginners especially: “Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.” This advice is especially helpful for war stories, when there is such a temptation to give it a cautionary or uplifting moral.

At the next pause, Rat Kiley says he was redeployed and didn’t know what happened to Mary Ann next.  Sanders responds: “You can’t say . . . I don’t know the ending. . . you got a certain obligation.” If this were memoir, he would stop there, but luckily we are in fiction, and even the fictional characters know that for the rest of that story, he’ll give them hearsay, speculation, and beyond.

O’Brien’s characters offer much more on the process of writing, like this gem: “By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others.”  This is the practical pointer I found useful: “You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.”

In “Notes” O’Brien describes how he wrote the story “Speaking of Courage”: “To provide a dramatic frame, I collapsed events into a single time and place, a car circling a lake on a quiet afternoon in midsummer, using the lake as a nucleus around which the story would orbit.” The idea of collapsing time for simplicity, clarity, and emphasis and inventing a natural counterpoint and metaphor unity is good advice for fiction writers.

The Things They Carried has much to offer and I would recommend it to any reader: a profound topic (the morality of war and what it’s like to live always on the brink of death), complex story structure and artful language, and a practical discourse on how to write. The two most practical lessons I have already started to use in my writing are pay attention to variation of sentence length and use concrete objects and specific, sensory detail to earn the occasional use of abstractions.