#32: Write Like No One's Reading

Plus, "A Lesson Before Dying" by Ernest J. Gaines. Plus, a request.

I was tempted to name this “Final Dispatch” and in a way it is one. I am all done with my MFA! As of May 9 I’m a master twice over—a double-baked croissant. I began this thing back in 2023, once a month or thereabouts. It’s been real and now I am done.

Nonfiction doesn’t come naturally to me. Much easier to take the truth and twist it, peel away the husk and shell—in this analogy the truth is a coconut—get all the way to the kernel and maybe hold on to that.

Fiction isn’t real, but it can still be the truth—not the clean factual truth but the messier kind. Here’s the most profound thing I learned at my MFA: you can make up a bunch of stuff, lie through your canines and be all outlandish and outrageous, but if you’re writing toward something true—love, say, or shame—you’ll end up somewhere good.

Another thing I learned: it doesn’t matter who’s reading, and who isn’t. This is not an ego thing but a craft thing. It is important to remind yourself to play, dabble and experiment and do a little dance at times. It’s crucial to have fun and not get too intense about it, not to worry what someone else might think. These last three years I have tried to do exactly that.

Where’s the proof? Take this story of mine that just came out, “Twink Country, Bear Country,” about two young men trying their hand at love. It’s a story, it didn’t actually happen, but most everything in there is an actual thought I’ve had.

For instance, the following are instances of things I’ve either thought or said in bed over the years:

“Come caress my flesh.”

“Unsheathe thy Excalibur.”

“You’re my banana, I’m your peanut butter.”

“You have a heart of gold and the body of a pornstar.”

For my story I took many such tidbits, slapstick on their own, and stuffed them inside a flesh-and-bones character. I took some other thoughts (sadder, less spicy) and put them inside a different character. Then I made those two people collide. You can read the outcome here.

I love fiction. I love writing it, and I love reading it too. I plan to fiction for the rest of my life. I can tell that I’m getting better, can’t you?

Book 32: “A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines

A young man, poor and Black and not especially literate, is sentenced to death in the Jim Crow south, that too for a crime he didn’t commit. In prison he becomes a hog—not a literal one, but that is how he behaves, like a beast condemned to the slaughterhouse, and even in front of the woman who raised him, his aunt. The man will die and his aunt knows this; she knows too that he is innocent. Her one hope now is that he will die a man and not a hog.

Enter the teacher of the local school, where the convicted man was once a student. The aunt approaches the teacher and tasks him with her nephew’s transformation. The teacher starts visiting the young man in jail, not all that willingly, and not very successfully at first. The hog grunts and eats his gruel off the floor, and the teacher is saddened and disgusted and confronted by his own demons.

Will the teacher’s final lesson take? Will the hog die a man? Ernest J. Gaines takes this question and runs it through the prism of his language. A ray of light becomes a rainbow, and we are dazzled. I do not know many works of art as quiet as this one, as careful toward its readers, and as successful. Somehow it qualifies as light summer reading. Go forth and be moved.

Finally, a request.

Now that I’ve graduated, I’m planning to retire this Substack thing in favor of old-school email. I’ll send one out each time I have something published—like once or twice a year. What do you think? Let me know how that sounds?

Thanks for reading. Goodbye, Substack!