Giving a guest lecture at Grub Street in Boston this October, I found myself revisiting the question of what good writing is. I’d been invited to speak at Cam Terwilliger’s class on narration and point of view, “Telling the Story: Perspective, Narration, and Imagination,” to provide an editor’s opinion. After the day’s craft lectures and exercises, I asked the class what they were left wondering. What, the students wanted to know, do I look for when I open one of the hundreds of envelopes we receive a month, most manila or white, addressed in blue or black ink, sent from post offices across America or via airmail and adorned with stamps from foreign countries?
Like Charlie peeling back the wrapper of a Wonka Bar, I hold my breath, I said, wanting to glimpse a ticket’s brilliant gleam. But what is that flash of gold?
Honesty is the answer I kept returning to, a word a member of the class used when I asked what they loved in the best writing they knew. Honesty—and, I added, a sense of seeing the world through a very specific set of eyes. One quality is emotional, the other technical. But it takes both to create a world that a reader will find worth inhabiting.
“How quickly do you know?” they asked. Unlike Charlie’s golden ticket, the glint of gold in great writing isn’t something you register in a pre-conscious way, your stomach leaping before your brain has caught up, but it’s almost that fast. Great writing carries a sentence-level DNA. It takes time to know if a piece is truly successful, but you know immediately whether that DNA is present—that honesty, that uniqueness of vision. If it’s not there, there’s nothing you can do. But if it is, you may have found the real thing.
The first short story in our current issue, Farley Urmston’s “Pretending,” is an excellent object lesson. The story opens:
The streets are quiet near Samuel’s house and no one is in the shops, not even the shopkeepers. Mr. Chigudu’s OK Market is empty, too; anyone can go inside at any time because there is nothing to steal or protect, only trash and dirt. When Samuel and his sisters dribble their football down toward the hospital, Prisca likes to stop at Mr. Chigudu’s and go inside to play a game. She likes to pretend she is the president’s wife, that she is shopping for clothes and jewelry in Italy even though Mr. Chigudu only sold powdered milk and maize, and this is Zimbabwe.
Samuel is eleven, and Prisca is nine, and their sister Lasha only six.
These five sentences contain all the story’s central tensions and themes: Zimbabwe’s colonial past and postcolonial present, what it means to be a child in a ravaged country, familial love. Urmston works in delicate brushstrokes, Lasha “only” six to Samuel’s eleven, the vanished powdered milk and maize turned, in the children’s imaginations, to Italian clothes and jewelry. The story announces itself immediately, inviting us to see this world through Samuel’s eyes, eyes which see the shop’s shattered glass as mundane, not startling, which understand plundering, which recognize that what is worth stealing must be protected.
“Pretending” is Urmston’s first published work, a uniquely exciting find for an editor. Reading that first page, the only signal this was the real thing I held in my hands was the exceptional honesty of her vision and exceptional craftsmanship with which it was rendered. But both sparkled with the clarity and immediacy of a newly minted doubloon. By the time I finished reading, I knew: Yes! Gold!
Open our autumn issue to any piece and you’ll find a mini-primer on how this sentence-level—or line-level—DNA operates. Christine Poreba’s “Why Is the Falling Orange?” launches with a gorgeous, puzzling image: “I can’t say whether they rise or fall, / the lines of orange that have appeared above / New York Harbor at not even four o’clock—” The haunting harbor scene, and the question of subjectivity it poses, leads us into an investigation of time, movement, transformation, all promised by those orange lines that might be rising, might be falling, but for a beautiful instant are held in place.
On a lighter note, Matthew Olzmann’s “Mime Camp for Children” begins, “This seems like such a bad idea. It can’t / possibly be real, but there it is— / a flyer promising ‘Intensive craft workshops / by today’s top practitioners.’” Funny? Yes. But the poem later takes an existential turn, signaled by the subtlest hint in the opening lines when the speaker questions whether the mime camp is real. Ontology, epistemology—both are at stake, though we’re too busy laughing to know this until the poem’s stunning end.
When I open an envelope, I’m willing to go anywhere. Powdered milk and maize, Italian jewelry and broken glass, flyers for mime camp, orange lines above New York Harbor: I love it all. As I settle in and begin to read, I hope for what any reader hopes—to meet another person on the page, to see the world through his or her eyes, and in this way, to inhabit a world that is bigger and richer than we ourselves could ever imagine. That honesty, that specificity, that wideness, is great writing’s current, and its currency.