July 30th, 2018 - I Walk Between the Raindrops

Dear TNY,

I wanted to let you know that “I Walk Between the Raindrops” is reaffirming my previous assumptions about your policies on name-based publishing.  It should be noted that I have extensive experience reading Boyle’s work so it will not be possible to leave the author out of this as I normally do.  That being said, I’m not going to beat him up.  He’s done nothing more wrongly than he normally does.

I read a lot of Boyle very early on in what I believe to be the actual beginning of my endeavor into writing.  And I think serious short fiction writers should read his work.  The dude is prolific.  So prolific, in fact, that his work has this formula to it.  As a writer in this current era awash in writers (by their own admission, not anywhere close to a Fitzgerald/Hemingway/Stein era definition), you hear all the chinboogie about MFA voice.  It truly is something to be feared, as having a “voice” is a quality that, I think, most of us are looking for in a writer.  MFA voice is a sin that none of us should want to commit lest we see those rejection letters piling up (the other sin being personally ordinary).  But if I were asked to point my finger to quintessential examples of MFA voice, it would be difficult.  Most don’t make it to publication, and workshop stories are usually too freshly hewn to pass along.  As it stands now, my general response is, “Read T.C. Boyle.”  The reason I point them to Boyle is that his work is uncannily formulaic.  He’s usually going to drop a good hook in the beginning, followed by a small aside within the story that includes information necessary for the payoff later (without being too overt about it; also, that information may be the hook), followed by a meandering path in which more somewhat necessary information is piled on (making us forget the initial information) until we reach the end, in which he ties all the plainly written clues together in a neat bow that we all facepalm over as we had not seen it sooner.

But that’s just it.  Like, read Boyle.  Read Boyle when you want to understand the mechanics of how good stories and storytelling work.  Don’t read Boyle when you want to read great stories, though.  Stories the buck the “rules” and make something totally wonderful.  His stories a nice house in a nice neighborhood that you appreciate being a house and functioning as a home.  But, he isn’t going to make The Sea Ranch Chapel.  Ever.

Yeah, I can get behind Boyle for very specific use cases.  But, TNY, I cannot get behind Boyle for your pages.  You have just self-identified as novices.  Haha.  Just kidding.  Because everyone that knows anything about literature already knows that you are novices.  The only people you have under your thumb are the plebes that believe you are an authority on writing.  But, like, people still believe in a sky ghost that made the world in seven days and that we are different from the animals and that Trump is right and good and moral.  Wait a second, do you…believe…this is literature?  Oh no.  Oh no.

Speaking of The Sea Ranch, I’m still pissed Denis Johnson is dead.  And so that I can be as clear as possible about Boyle’s beige usage of short fiction vs brilliance, sink your teeth into “Doppelganger, Poltergeist” and tell me you can’t see the magic.

Oh, I recently submitted a story to you with a small resume in hopes that you’ll hire me as fiction editor.  Think about.

Until next week,

Nick