Review: Tips from genre fiction add thrills to any writing

Review of: Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

Author: Benjamin Percy
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Grade: A

I’ve loved Benjamin Percy’s essays in Poets & Writers magazine, where he evoked the power of thrills and chills, horror and terror to inspire even the most literary of writers. He's a writer who can both contribute to Esquire and write comic book series. Now he’s gathered more than a dozen of his essays on writing into Thrill Me, a volume dedicated to putting the power of genre writing into literary fiction. Or, if you please, showing genre writers how to hone their most cherished tools without descending into clichés.

“When people ask if I grew up a reader, I say yes, but not the type of reader they image: a small, scholarly child with glasses perched on the end of his nose. . . A book was never far from my hand – balanced on my nightstand, shoved into a back pocket, tucked into the glove compartment of the truck – but usually it was a broken-spined mass-market paperback with an embossed title.”

From a boyhood immersed in the words of Zane Grey, Ian Fleming, Tom Clancy; fighting alongside Conan the Cimmerian; zipping breathlessly through hundreds of thousands of pages by the likes of Anne Rice and Stephen King, Percy dropped with a shock into a creative writing class whose rule was: no genre submissions. 

Miraculously, he survived and indeed fell in love with the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro and more, and realized that in spite of his omnivorous reading, he had failed to understand, “the careful carpentry of storytelling.” 

It was from those literary writers that he realized the basic rules of story had been in plain sight all along, even in the goriest and most shocking of genre tales. And in Thrill Me, he lays them out for his readers (and fellow writers). 

First things, though, Thrill Me isn’t a cook book. In fact, at one point Percy assures us that there are no rules. Except there are “rules” which writers are free to break – once they’ve mastered those rules and understand what they’re doing. And if they can make the breaking work.

However, for a refresher of “rules,” Percy starts with the first commandment of all storytelling: establish a clear narrative goal, and takes us through the steps needed to develop a sense of urgency in readers (“. . . the most basic reason we read (is) to discover what happens next”).

He follows this with discussions of how to stage the kind of “set pieces” – the pivotal scenes “that you cannot forget. . . that (readers) will take with them to their grave.” (Tip: be sure a short story has at least one such scene, a novel at least four.) And of the basic methods for designing suspense; how to deal with backstory (his preference is to eliminate backstory – except of course, when the backstory works); of the importance of setting; and the uses of interior monologue (“There is nothing wrong with characters thinking. . . so long as it is strategically employed”).

And yes, he tackles that bugaboo of genre writing: violence. “The concern here is not with what is moral, or right, or proper, but rather with what is effective, asking how depictions of violence best serve a story,” quoting that “dark-hearted godmother of literary fiction,” Flannery O’Connor: “the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him.”

But lest we forget, Percy warns us that merely splashing buckets of gore across the pages can throw readers out of our stories, in the manner of excessive special effects in movies – “I’m not weeping or laughing or even gripping my armrests . . . I’m simply marveling at the way computers can create illusions.”

One of the “rules” of writing – if it feels like writing, cut it – applies as well to depictions of violence as to depictions of pretty scenery.

More even than the how-tos of dealing with violence, I give Percy an A for his attitude toward revision. After spending a year rewriting his third novel, his editor’s take was “Fantastic. Exactly what we wanted. Now would you mind cutting. . . and fixing. . . and while we’re at it, how about let’s rethink the ending?”

It’s enough to make a writer cry. Of laugh, reread the rules, pick up the tools, and try again.

Adventure classics -- Healing through violence

The Outsiders

by S.E. Hinton

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I read a news story about a woman firefighter/EMT who was outraged by the refusal of her male colleagues to discuss their feelings after harrowing episodes at work. Instead, the men wound down by watching violent movies.

They probably didn’t understand why depictions of violence helped heal them of the trauma they had encountered. But Aristotle would have understood. And S.E. Hinton understood also, even if not always conscious of the healing the artful use of violence -- I emphasize the word artful -- can bring.

While reading The Outsiders, I lost track of the number and variety of injuries and deaths Hinton catalogued in her depiction of gang violence. The predominantly male cast of characters are so deeply committed to violence that Susan Eloise Hinton’s publisher suggested using her initials to keep reviewers from using her gender to dismiss the novel. Maybe they didn’t believe a good girl could, or should, know bad stuff.

Writing in “Poets & Writers,” Benjamin Percy and Aaron Gwyn quote Flannery O’Connor, calling her “our dark-hearted godmother,” on the uses of violence.

“With the serious writers, violence is never an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially, and I believe these are times when writers are more interested in what we are essentially than in the tenor of our daily lives.”

In a world where gore is available freely and instantly online, Percy and Gwyn offer suggestions on the legitimate uses of violence: it’s a catalyst for change, not the answer to the problem; and imagined violence has more power than witnessed violence. In all cases, the readers must be emotionally invested, not simply titillated.

The initial confrontation of The Outsiders begins: “‘Need a haircut, greaser?’ the boy confronting protagonist Ponyboy Curtis asks. “(He) pulled a knife out of his back pocket and flipped the blade open.

“I finally thought of something to say. ‘No.’ I was backing up, away from that knife. Of course I backed right into one of them.”

But by the end, Ponyboy can say more than no. He can say, “I could see boys going down under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world, and it was too late to tell them that there was still good in it. . . It was too vast a problem to be just a personal thing.”

(Percy and Gwyn’s article in the May/June 2011 issue of “Poets & Writers” is available for purchase through “archives” at www.pw.org/ )

(Next Friday -- At least Ponyboy’s brothers had his back. Lucy Pevensie won’t be so lucky, in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.)

　

Wordcraft -- Living poets and writers

Eight poets, novelists and short story writers will read and mingle at Southern Methodist University’s third annual literary festival this Thursday through Saturday, March 24-26.  All readings and receptions are free and open to the public but the Saturday luncheon with the authors requires a reservation.  The festival features poets Matt Hart, Rick Barot and C. Dale Young; novelists Benjamin Percy, John Pipkin and Rosalyn Story; and story writers Danielle Evans and Cynthia Phoel.

With the exception of the luncheon, all readings and receptions will take place in the DeGolyer Library on the SMU campus’s north side.  The library is the second building to the southeast of iconic Dallas Hall.  The festival opens with a reception at 6 p.m. Thursday, followed by readings by Story and Hart.  Pipkin and Phoel will open Friday’s activities with readings at 3 p.m., followed by a 6:30 p.m. reception and more readings at 7 p.m. by Percy and Barot.

Saturday’s luncheon from noon to 2 p.m. in Room 153 of Heroy Hall will include a discussion and a chance to meet the winners of SMU’s undergraduate writing prizes.  To RSVP for the luncheon, call 214-768-2945 or email smulitfest@gmail.com/  Following the luncheon at 2 p.m., Evans and Young will read from their works.

Rick Barot has published two volumes of poetry, The Darker Fall and Want.  Danielle Evans is the author of the short story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, and her writings have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008 and 2010 and New Stories from the South 2010.  Matt Hart is the author of poetry collections Who’s Who Vivid and Wolf Face, and Light-Headed, out this spring.  Benjamin Percy’s latest novel, Red Moon, is forthcoming.  He is also the author of the novel Wilding, two books of short stories and numerous other stories and articles.

Cynthia Phoel’s linked short story collection, Cold Snap:  Bulgaria Stories, was published by SMU Press in 2010.  John Pipkin is the author of Woodsburner, a historical novel about a forest fire accidentally started by Henry David Thoreau in 1844.  Pipkin lives in Austin.  Rosalyn Story, a journalist, author and classical violinist, divides her time between writing and performing with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.  Her books include And So I Sing:  African American Divas of Opera and Concert and the novels More Than You Know and Wading Home.  She lives in Dallas.  C. Dale Young is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Torn, out this spring.  He practices medicine, edits poetry and reaches in the Warren Wilson MFA program for Writers.