How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill

Dedication

To the memory of Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, and for the storytellers in the Hurston/Wright workshops

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

Introduction

Who Your People?

Rhythm in Writing

Asking Questions and Excavating Memory

When a Character Returns

What Do You Want from Me

What You Got?

The Natives of My Person or Blood Is Not Enough

Sweet, Bittersweet, and Joyful Memories

How to Write a Memoir or Take Me to the River

Where You At?

Looking for a Place Called Home

On Abiding Metaphors and Finding a Calling

How They Must Have Felt—Imaginary Tulsa

This Louisiana Thing That Drives Me

How You Living?

Seven Brides for Seven Mothers

Once More with Feeling

Craft Capsules

Craft and the Art of Pulling Lincoln from a Hat

What It Look Like?

Ready for the World

Wrangling the Line, Meditations on the Bop

Fiction Forms

Craft

Jericho Brown in Conversation with Michael Dumanis

Who You With?

Those Words That Echo . . . Echo . . . Echo Through Life

Write What You Know or Nah?

Nations Through Their Mouths

Writing Through Loss and Sorrow

An Interview with Barry Jenkins and Morgan Jerkins

How to Read

Nothing New

Yearning, Despair, and Outrage

Journal

Muscularity and Eros

Going Back

Plotting the Plot

Re-Vision

The Art of Revision

Afterword

Credits & Permissions

Contributors

About the Editor

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

How We Do It is not a conventional anthology of craft essays. Our request of the writers in these pages was a statement quite literally explaining how they go about making what they make. What happens to move things from a blank page to a beautiful book? So this is a book of answers—answers to questions new writers ask every day about how to produce writing that proves their very identity as a practitioner. In other words, this is a book for anyone who is a student of the craft. More particularly, though, this is a book for younger and newer Black writers in undergraduate and graduate workshops and in absolutely no workshop at all. We hope teachers find these words useful for their students, and we hope students who have yet to find their teachers learn from these thirty-two pieces born out of absolute generosity and hope for the future of Black writing.

We have arranged this volume in a way that we hope defies supposed boundaries set by genre. I am certain there is news for the poet in the essay on vernacular by Daniel Omotosho Black. I believe the poet Evie Shockley is indeed in conversation with the filmmaker Barry Jenkins. That certainty and that belief come from how much I learned about my own work and my own attempts at work from the process of reading and organizing these essays. This is a book I wish existed twenty years ago. I would have led an easier life if it had.

How We Do It is divided into eight sections, with a range of essays in each: Who Your People?, What You Got?, Where You At?, How You Living?, What It Look Like?, Who You With?, How to Read, and Going Back. The titles here are intended to communicate the fact that these sections could not be narrowed down to the kind of jargon with which writers are accustomed. We weren’t going to name the sections voice, tone, setting, character, or good advice because every essay here gets at more than any single topic. Who Your People?, for instance, includes meditations on characterization and speech. It has bare-bones, real-time directives from Crystal Wilkinson, like when you begin to talk about your characters as if they are members of your family, then you’ve got it right, and an exhaustive list of questions any writer may want to answer when envisioning the full, human life of someone imagined. What You Got? is a section on the uses of personal and communal experiences in writing, no matter how traumatic or dire those experiences may be. Here, Hurston/Wright Foundation founder and writer Marita Golden advises, To write your story well, you must fully understand and be willing to stand up for its significance and necessity.

The next section, Where You At?, elucidates the possibilities for place, environment, and region in our literature. It is also the section where it becomes clear that these writers do not always agree and very often seem to be talking to one another directly. W. Ralph Eubanks discusses how a poem by the former poet laureate Natasha Trethewey continues to teach him how to make Mississippi itself tantamount to the role of a character in his essays. This is followed by an essay by Trethewey herself, in which she recalls:

My mother had come of age in Mississippi during the era of Jim Crow and at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. She had grown up steeped in the metaphors that comprised the mind of the South—the white South—and thus had not missed the paradox of my birth on Confederate Memorial Day: a child of miscegenation, a word that entered the American lexicon during the Civil War in a pamphlet. It had been conceived as a hoax by a couple of journalists to drum up opposition to Lincoln’s re-election through the threat of amalgamation and mongrelization. When I was born, my parents’ marriage was illegal in Mississippi and as many as twenty other states in the nation, rendering me illegitimate in the eyes of the law, persona non grata. My father was traveling out of town for work, so she made the short trip from my grandmother’s house to Gulfport Memorial Hospital, as planned, without him. On her way to the segregated ward, she could not help but take in the tenor of the day, witnessing the barrage of rebel flags lining the streets, flanking the Confederate monument: private citizens, lawmakers, Klansmen hoisting them in Gulfport and small towns all across Mississippi . . .

Sequestered on the Colored floor, my mother knew the nation was changing, but slowly. She knew . . . I would have to journey toward an understanding of myself, my place in the world, with the invisible burdens of history, borne on the back of metaphor, the language that sought to name and thus constrain me. I would be both bound to and propelled by it. She knew that if I could not parse the metaphorical thinking of the time and place into which I’d entered, I could be defeated by it.

And yes, it was important for us to include previously published work from some of our greatest writers so that we were always contextualizing our contributors in a long tradition and a widely vast current moment. For instance, a 1979 interview with Ernest J. Gaines (and Callaloo editor Charles H. Rowell) also appears in this section. Gaines is clear about his need to be with the land—not only with the people but to be with the land. I come back not as an objective observer, but as someone who must come back in order to write about Louisiana. And beyond that need, he discusses how he decides on point of view and his appreciation for adaptation. Of course, I have questions about what Gaines means when he associates bad writing with too many Black Arts Movement writers (as if excellence is characteristic of more writers from any other movement).

Our How You Living? section shows writers’ habits and ways of moving through the world such that their lives are open to inspiration and play. Here, Camille T. Dungy quips, The first thing a writer needs to do is to learn how to pay attention. Our What It Look Like? section follows with actual writing exercises from Tony Medina and Afaa Michael Weaver, and a full discussion on the uses of form in any genre from Tiphanie Yanique. I’m probably proudest of gathering the Who You With? section, which is ultimately about empathy and collaboration. How do we write those who are supposedly and obviously different from ourselves? How do we maintain creative partnerships with those who audiences might not expect? Is it possible to speak for the community through our work?

The final two sections are meant to help move writers toward making use of well-known advice I am not sure everyone understands. In public forums since the dawn of Q&As, writers have been asked their advice for those interested in learning the craft. Quite often and no matter who is asked, the answer is read. Read more. Read widely. How to Read begins to get at what to do with all that reading and how to translate it into well-wrought writing. Angela Flournoy discusses how reading frees us to write grief and tragedy as we feel it and not as if there is some prescribed way to do it right. Terrance Hayes’s journals show us how to live in the world of tradition, how to ingest as much of the past literature as we can, as if it is air. Carl Phillips’s long essay provides example after example of what syntax is and how to employ it given one’s reading of it in other work.

In our final section, Going Back, Elizabeth Nunez discusses how literature (and Shakespeare in particular) taught her to write and how to write plot. Her essay offers a series of litmus tests for anyone who is wondering if what they made actually works with sentences like Plot is the arrangement of events in a story to achieve a desired effect and Plot is not simply about the clever arrangement of events in a story. It is about how these events affect the character. It is about the character’s journey through these events. She is joined by Mitchell S. Jackson and Charles Johnson, who write about going back with the freshest of eyes to revise our work.

In all, How We Do It is a kind of selfish gift. I want you to have what I always wanted. Here is an anthology that gives us modes to try on the way we might wear and change clothing. And these wonderful writers are proof that nothing ever beat a failure but a try.

Jericho Brown

Atlanta, Georgia

Who Your People?

Characterization and Vernacular

Rhythm in Writing

Daniel Omotosho Black

I’ve always loved the rhythm of Black vernacular. It’s in the preacher’s hoop, Black women’s talk at kitchen tables, Black men’s guttural laughter in barbershops, the sway and clapping of the Black church choir. We are a people who move and have our being in metered time. That’s no secret. Writers and scholars have documented this phenomenon since the 1960s. What is elusive is how to capture this pace, this cadence on paper. It’s not simply an issue of writing in Ebonics. Rather, it’s the ability to seize the reader’s consciousness and move it in musical time. That, my friend, is a literary craft, a stylistic device, that is hell to master.

But it’s not impossible. Some Black writers are known for it. Morrison comes to mind as do John Edgar Wideman and Sonia Sanchez. Indeed, the 1960s Black Arts writers germinated in a time and space where the aesthetic emphasis centered around Black pathos. In other words, these writers meant to translate the beauty of Black idiomatic expression into literary artistic production. And this is the creative achievement contemporary Black writers inherit. However, mimicking it is another story.

It seems the first secret is in the consciousness of word choice. Check out this sentence.

After sunset, Willie Joe and Bessie went to the bedroom and made love.

This sentence is okay, but it doesn’t carry the rhythm of Black existence. It doesn’t show or celebrate the way in which Black folks had to make space for love when the entirety of their existence was subsumed in survival. But this sentence does:

After the sun went down, Willie Joe and Bessie made their way to the bedroom and did what they could do.

The difference here is several things. First, sunset is what the sun does every day; there is nothing particular about it. The sun going down, however, is Black people’s hope for a moment of rest. It’s the time of day when they get to breathe for a minute. Then exchanging went to the bedroom for made their way makes all the difference in terms of the rhythm of movement. Made their way implies struggle and difficulty, but it also implies desire and intentionality. It means they wouldn’t be denied. And finally, did what they could do does all the work to demonstrate the beauty of Black intimacy within the limitations of bondage and restraint. Writers are often taught (and rightly so) the craft of language economy—the use of as few words as possible to convey a point. And, generally, this makes for a smoother style and less laborious text. However, sometimes, in order to establish a Black rhythmic pulse in written discourse, one needs more words, more instruments with which to play the symphonic complexity of Black life.

Another way to establish rhythm in Black narrative is via the manipulation of punctuation. Of course, all creative writers use grammar to their advantage, forcing commas, for instance, to do what normally only periods do. Yet there are other punctuation marks that offer a conscious Black writer many options of how best to say a thing that represents the rhythmic nature of who we are. For instance,

Old Mr. John, that crazy-ass, half-blind, snuff-dippin’ man, told us a story—that’s all he did all day!—about the time he met a snake face to face. That’s right: face to face. Upright. Both of them.

I love this sentence for so many reasons. First, the use of hyphenated adjectives is, as Zora Neale Hurston explains in The Sanctified Church, a cornerstone of Black rhythmic expression. We tend to love the musicality of bump-bump, bump-bump, bump-bump phrases. They disturb and excite an otherwise lazy, common ⁴/4 time structure. In other words, a good grammarian knows how to write polyrhythmically. The use of various punctuation marks turns a sentence into a jazz moment where words and ideas get their own solo but also function to create one whole set. Listen to this:

They said Ethel Bell went to hell when she died. I don’t know. But I know this: she was one mean heffa, you betta hear what I’m sayin’.

Again, many would delete when she died because one has to die to get to hell. But I wouldn’t. That phrase means something a little different in Black cultural spaces. Put simply, it returns the reader to the day, the moment she died as a significant time signature in that community.

The moment of her death signaled a change, perhaps, among a people who had tolerated her existence a long time. It also means she was somebody, because folks keep thinking and talking about her after she’s gone. The use of a colon after But I know this is classic Black vernacular cadence. It announces that one is about to say something that folks ought to pay attention to. Some literary critics would posit, frustratingly, that one shouldn’t announce that you’re going to say a thing then say it. Just say it, damn it! But, again, I disagree. The announcement is the call. The colon holds space for readers to get ready. Then, what is said afterwards is the response. So she was one mean heffa is the point being made. Yet the statement after the comma—You betta hear what I’m sayin’—adds emphasis and humor that causes the reader to wonder just who this woman was. In some ways, it makes folks want to know her—although the whole point has been that you might not enjoy her. This intentional vernacular contradiction is the work of Black literary pastiche: the ability to sing a discourse instead of simply saying it.

One other trick Black writers use to establish rhythmic expression is what I call repeated dialogue. I remember seeing it first in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. This whole book mesmerizes, of course, but it is the dialogue at the end between the women who speak of Pecola’s condition that arrests my consciousness. They say,

Did you hear about that girl?

What? Pregnant?

Yas. But guess who?

Who? I don’t know all these little old boys.

When the receiver repeats the words of the inquirer, then answers the question, the question itself becomes more potent. This stylistic device creates a kind of back-and-forth rhythmic banter that sounds almost like a duet of dialogue. They continue:

That’s just it. Ain’t no little old boy. They say it’s Cholly.

Cholly? Her daddy?

Uh-huh.

Well, they ought to take her out of school.

Ought to. She carry some of the blame.

These repetitive phrases force readers to discover that words often mean different things, depending upon who says them. The repetition also makes readers contemplate the levels of depth of what the author might be trying to convey without spelling it out. Of course, here, the horror of an eleven-year-old girl pregnant by her father is far too appalling to glide over. So, Morrison turns the dialogue into a rhythmic exploration of trauma. This is the Black speech I grew up loving:

Chile, I went to the store, and milk was almost three dollars a gallon!

Was?

Yes ma’am it was! And I put it right back.

Did you put it back, Stine?

You better believe I did!

As a child, I’d stand near grown folks as they spoke this way, smiling and laughing as their discourse shaped my literary sensibility. Now I get it: This musical rhetoric is my literary inheritance. My job is to assure it never dies, to make sure my characters sound like my people in all their beauty and complexity. Yet having been taught the English language by teachers who don’t know my linguistic legacy, I’ve had to break rules and resist conventions that promise to drown out voices I know so well.

Well, I pray I have done it well.

Asking Questions and Excavating Memory

Creating Complex Fictional Characters

Crystal Wilkinson

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experiences of the people who produced him.

—James Baldwin

In the same way a member of your family might say Aww. That’s Uncle Marlon being Uncle Marlon, characters in fiction are folks just being themselves. Folks in a specific physical place, doing something specific, navigating their experiences, wanting something (often something they can’t have) and these folks come with a lifetime of psychological history and reasons why they can’t have the things they desire or deserve. It is our jobs as writers to give them meaningful, full lives on the page, to tell their absolute truths without flinching.

It is the writer’s job to know as much about the people we create as we can, even though, if we’re wise, most of what we discover doesn’t have to end up in the pages of our final drafts. In fact, there is great power in leaving out particular things about a character’s life and leaving room for the reader to guess, to reach, to intuit a few things on their own. I guess I’m hinting at Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory from Death in the Afternoon, in which he says, If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. There’s a bit more to Hemingway’s theory and you can easily find it on the Internet if you’re interested, but it’s this knowing on the writer’s part that enables us to inhabit a life that feels true to our characters and their worlds, to ourselves, and by extension, to the reader.

We are walking, breathing people who carry copious amounts of experiences, haunts, faults, contradictions within one body. Your characters should too. I’d say the difference is how these things affect the NOW of the story you’re writing. You can’t dump everything you know in your story, but I believe you should know things, whether they appear in the story or not.

When I teach fiction, I warn students of Flat Rita on a page. When engaged in characterization, immediately the writer might know what Rita’s complexion is, whether she has box braids, locs, or a Jheri curl, and even the clothes she is wearing down to her platform shoes and bright red toenails. The writer might even know what her voice sounds like, but none of these things make Rita a living, breathing person—the ways in which she navigates her experiences make her a real person.

Often the writer doesn’t know how Rita’s feeling, what being good in Rita’s family meant when she was a girl, what she ate for breakfast, what she values, who her mama, and daddy are, or what she dreams about at night. They don’t know Rita grew up with a grandmother who directly experienced Jim Crow. That she went to church every Sunday, that she was molested by the next-door neighbor, that bucktoothed Johnny was the boy she fell in love with in third grade.

This kind of character deepening and excavation of a life comes from walking around your characters with curiosity and wonder until they become grown and full—vulnerable, flawed folks who have done things and lived through things and overcome things. And all of these things affect and inform who they are now at this moment that you are writing them and their world and their specific circumstances and this specific moment that they are living in now.

But how do you do that? How do you turn Flat Rita into a dynamic unique individual on the page?

I tell my writing students that when you begin to talk about your characters as if they are members of your family, then you’ve got it right. I often give the example of how old folks in my family (including my grandfather who was a farmer) would sit around and talk about characters on soap operas like they were real people. That woman ain’t gon never stay married with all that devilment she does. They would suck their teeth and cross their arms and shake their heads at these TV folks and be caught up in their TV lives. I sometimes eavesdropped on my grandparents, thinking they were talking about real people, but they were talking about the fictional characters who populated their television stories.

There are many ways to create characters, and there are a plethora of craft books and writing exercises that are designed to help you create characters. Janet Burroway in her book Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft presents five possible methods of presenting a character to a reader: directly through thought, action, speech, and appearance, and indirectly through the interpretation by the author (telling). These certainly give you a foundation, but I propose there is a deeper layer, the layer where memories and secrets and a psychological history lies.

The following questions are designed to help excavate some vital information to help you find out who your folks are. I suggest you answer these questions as quickly as you can and try to unearth new information about a character that you are already working with. Of course, there can be many, many variations on these questions and these questions are not the end-all to beat all, but the goal is to find out something new that deepens your understanding of who your character is.

What relationships are important to your character? Describe them.

What relationships are problematic to your character? Describe them.

Who does your character confide in?

What does your character believe in?

What is your character most afraid of?

What makes your character happy?

What’s your character’s favorite thing to do for pleasure?

What did your character eat for breakfast?

What did being good mean in their family?

What is an object your character cherishes?

Now, try these from your character’s point of view:

When I was five, ____________________________________

What I think about God: ____________________________

My father always _________________

I miss the smell of ___________________________

What I said was__________, but what I meant was ________________________

Last night I dreamt about ______________________

My mother always said _________________________

While the family gathered at the _________________, I would _________________

I wish I could remember ___________, but all I remember is _________________

Sunlight hitting the floor from the window made me remember __________________

Memory is essential. Memory isn’t history, but it may be the most compelling way in which a character works through historical events. Of course, the folks you create won’t recall the details of a remembered thing exactly the way other folks in their lives will. There is power and importance in this too.

Some of our greatest writers rely on memory to invent and investigate the lives of their characters. Consider Ursa in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, who not only grapples with her own memories but those ancestral memories and stories passed from her mother to Grandmama and Great Gram. Or consider Sethe, Paul D, and Denver in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and how what’s remembered and what’s secreted or forgotten are integral to the complexity of the lives of these characters and how Morrison’s narrative strategy is weighted by memory or rememory, as Sethe calls it. Rememory is a term Morrison gives to Sethe, which describes memories affected by not only an individual but also by others. In this way, rememory-ing is communal as well as individual, as are so many of our memories. What is remembered or rememorized can seep into the emotional history of a family, a people, a community for generations.

Consider your character’s individual memories as well as collective memories. What are they haunted by? Consider the haunts of your characters and what memories recur and have great effect. Use as many as you need to deepen and complicate. Consider the power of what’s remembered, what’s forgotten, what’s avoided, what enters when they least expect it. What do these things say about the emotional landscape of your characters? The core of your story?

Here are a few to consider, but come up with your own list. Don’t flinch. Dig deep.

A birthday celebration that they were present for. Could be their own or someone else’s. Who was there?

A religious experience that took place in your character’s childhood, real or imagined. How did they react? Where did it take place?

A time when they felt ashamed. What happened before the incident? What happened after?

Their experience of a national or regional tragedy.

Their experience of their culture.

A memorable Saturday or Sunday morning.

A day someone they loved disappointed them.

A place they go to for solitude or pleasure.

A strange interaction with a neighbor.

A time when they were hurt. Emotionally? Physically?

A memorable meal in your character’s life. A regular meal, a holiday, a celebration outside the house, etc. Describe both the food and the people that populate the scene.

An interaction with a wild animal or a swarm of insects. How does this moment relate to your character’s situation now?

The day someone died. Or the days before or after the death.

A day when they experienced injustice.

Something they lost and could never get back.

Something they found.

A secret they’ve held for too long.

Look over your list and expand the things that carry the most potential into a full scene and see