Do you make every series a series of three? For example, “planes, trains, and automobiles” or “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit”? Instead, consider using two or four items in each series. Three items completes too much energy.

  Do you stay within a scene, or do you fall into frequent flashbacks that jolt your reader out of the fictional moment?

  Are you taking things too lightly? Remember, too many comedians and not enough strippers will continually negate any tension that might arise. Add more strippers. Cut back on your cleverness.

  Problem:

  Your stories ramble and meander without coming to a climax.

  Consider:

  Did you plant a gun? What unresolved expectation can you revisit?

  What character can you kill in the second act in order to heighten the seriousness?

  Can you send your characters on a brief road trip that will wreck their complacency?

  Problem:

  You lose interest in the work before it’s complete.

  Consider:

  Does it explore a deep, unresolved issue of yours?

  Are you depicting a horizontal series of plot events that doesn’t deepen? Are you reintroducing objects and allowing them to morph as symbols?

  Problem:

  A scene runs on and on without contributing to the horizontal or the vertical of the story.

  Consider:

  Before writing the scene, did you plan its purpose? Does it establish or introduce something? Or does it deepen the risk and tension? Is it a lull to pace an upcoming reveal, or to suggest time passing? Or does it reveal something and resolve tension? Always, always have some inkling of your scene’s purpose before you begin to work on it.

  Problem:

  Your work fails to attract an agent, editor, or audience.

  Consider:

  Does that really matter? If writing is fun…if it exhausts your personal issues…if it puts you in the company of other people who enjoy it…if it allows you to attend parties and share your stories and enjoy the stories told by others…if you’re growing and experimenting with every draft…if you’d be happy writing for the rest of your life, does your work really need to be validated by others?

  Problem:

  Your fiction fails to engage the reader.

  Consider:

  Do you rely too much on big voice and abstract verbs? A reader can always be entranced by an object in motion within a setting. The eye moves in tiny jerks unless it’s tracking a moving object. Are you clearly depicting an object or person in motion?

  Problem:

  Your beginnings don’t hook readers.

  Consider:

  Do you begin with a thesis sentence that summarizes, or do you begin by raising a compelling question or possibility?

  Problem:

  You don’t have time to write.

  Consider:

  Do you listen to music while commuting, or can you allow yourself to daydream in silence? Do you keep a pad and pen in the bathroom? Beside your bed? In your car? Do you make the most of your writing time by compiling notes and ideas throughout the rest of your life?

  Problem:

  You don’t want to freak out your family.

  Consider:

  By telling the truth you allow others the same opportunity.

  So long as you’re clearly writing fiction, you force other people to own the fact they might be the characters (and they might be dicks). If they take offense, you can simply deny that any characters are based on them.

  Problem:

  You can’t find a workshop.

  Consider:

  Start one. Enroll in a class. Find any social structure that will hold you accountable to produce work.

  Problem:

  Your workshop sucks.

  Consider:

  As Ken Kesey once told me, “All workshops suck at some point.” You will love and hate one another. Ultimately, does your workshop keep you producing work?

  Ken Kesey

  Problem:

  Writers in your workshop demand major surgery on your work. They suggest useless revisions or state baseless opinions that offer no creative insight.

  Consider:

  Screenwriters I know must sit through marathon meetings with producers and actors, all of whom want reasonable and unreasonable changes to the script in question. A good writer knows what she can use and makes note of the helpful advice. And a professional knows not to push back, but just to smile and thank everyone for their contribution.

  Problem:

  Your audience isn’t surprised by your work.

  Consider:

  Are you? Do you withhold your best idea for the end, or can you use that strong idea near the beginning and trust that the story will naturally build to a stronger climax than you ever could’ve initially imagined?

  Problem:

  You write from an outline and lose interest partway to completion.

  Consider:

  How about writing from a partial outline? Know the mechanical breakdown at the end of the second act, and trust that the story will resolve itself better than you could ever anticipate. How can you surprise your reader if you can’t surprise yourself?

  Problem:

  Your work fails to break readers’ hearts.

  Consider:

  Are you being too clever? Have you established emotional heart authority? Does your work sound too much as if it’s being told by a writer instead of an actual person?

  Problem:

  Your main character is a shallow stereotype.

  Consider:

  Can you make her do something totally despicable but for a noble reason?

  Problem:

  Your work isn’t as good as Amy Hempel’s.

  Consider:

  No one’s is.

  A Postcard from the Tour

  About the time DVDs first appeared, but before the death of the typewriter, my father called.

  By long distance, he asked if I’d spend Christmas with him. He told me to catch the Coast Starlight Limited from Eugene, Oregon, to Portland, then switch trains and ride the Empire Builder as far east as Spokane. A pain, but what a surprise! On Christmas Eve he picked me up at the station. Chains clanked on the tires of snowplows as they crossed and crisscrossed to keep the downtown streets clear.

  My father and I, we hadn’t spent a holiday together since I was in Cub Scouts. In two terms I’d graduate with an undergraduate degree in journalism and begin paying down a mountain of student loans. Journalism because it looked like a safe bet. Not writing fiction because, geez, everyone knew fiction was a colossal crapshoot. We drove to a truck-stop diner where he drank a cup of coffee while I ate a chicken-fried steak. He carried a thick, brown envelope under one arm and set it on the table between us.

  To show me, he lifted the flap. He slid out a thick stack of paper, lined sheets of notebook paper. These he fanned across the table between us. Handwriting covered the pages. Words scribbled in pencil and ballpoint pen.

  He said, “You want to make your old man rich, don’t you?”

  Why was I surprised? This guy, my father, was always holding up a paper clip or the plastic tab used to hold shut the bread bag. He’d say, “The man who invented this never had to work another day in his life!”

  He figured he could publish a book and sell it to railroad employees, current and retired. To judge from the union rolls, he said, it would do big business. The handwritten words were sentences were paragraphs were stories he’d collected from co-workers. He’d already promised them a small cut of the profits. To put him on easy street, all I needed to do was edit the material. Maybe doctor the stories a tad, he said. Add color and action, to polish them into rollicking, two-fisted yarns. A Cannery Row, but about freight trains. With me as Steinbeck.

  And railroad stories…I’d grown up hearing them. He’d bring them home to tell at breakfast. Stories about the whorehouses along A Street in Pasco, just across the tracks from the roundhouse, a short walk for any crew. Or stories about what crewman had a different wife and family at each end of his run. The stories about tribesmen on the Colville Reservation who’d get drunk on foggy nights, to sit on the tracks with a blanket pulled over their heads, to fall asleep and wait. Long descriptions of the bloody guts and the delay. Ghost stories about the same. Tales about rednecks in Idaho who sat trackside and used rifles to blow out the windows of Cadillacs being shipped to Seattle on open-sided car carriers. Picture a hundred showroom-ready Caddies shot to shit. Stories about these same hillbillies causing derailments—with concrete blocks, with iron bars—so they could loot the crushed boxcars. Stories about the yard bulls who beat the teeth out of hobos they’d found hitching rides.

  But these stories, the ones he’d brought me, scribbled down by brakemen and freight conductors, these weren’t like the ones I’d loved. In blocky handwriting, here were scenes of nice guys playing pinochle around the coal-burning, potbellied stoves in old-timey cabooses. No dismembered ghosts or switchyard whores haunted these scrawled notes. If anything, these stories needed un-polishing. They didn’t teach un-editing in journalism school, but I couldn’t say no.

  He watched me shuffle the pages. He asked, “You dating anyone?”

  By this he meant a girl. When was I going to get married and start a family? By my age he’d been married, had three kids, and had already thrown a bah-zillion track switches for the Northern Pacific. These days he lived by himself in a tiny house deep in the woods on Mount Spokane. While I pretended to read the stories he got up to use the pay phone. Pay phones, like typewriters, were about to disappear from the world, but we hadn’t the foggiest idea, not yet.

  He came back to the table smiling. He’d been offered a holiday shift that paid triple time. That kind of big money he couldn’t turn down. He told me to eat up so he could drop me at a cinder-block motel in the fried chicken-smelling fast-food strip at the edge of downtown. Me and my fat envelope of so many censored recollections without tension or suspense.

  “I understand,” I lied. Work has always been my family’s noble reason to escape itself. We’d volunteer for double shifts on Thanksgiving and Christmas. “I’d love to be there,” we’d tell each other, shrugging, “but I’m on the schedule at work.”

  Typewriter ribbons and landline phones and record players, where did everything go so fast?

  My dad went to work.

  Cold and alone the next morning, Christmas morning, I turned on the motel television.

  A movie was just beginning. A Cat Stevens song played on a record album while an unseen actor lighted a candle. He wrote a suicide note. The actor stepped up on a chair, put his head in a noose. He kicked the chair aside. Over the course of the movie he pretended to cut his throat. To self-immolate. To disembowel himself, and he never died. Instead, he proposed marriage to Ruth Gordon.

  What Tom would call, The moment after which everything is different.

  Would you believe me if I told you that my father bought me my first dictionary? Back in high school when I’d told him I wanted to write he gave it to me for Christmas. God only knows where he’d found it. Decades before the internet, he dragged home a dictionary the size of a suitcase. Glossy full-color plates filled the middle pages, pictures of precious and semiprecious minerals, the animals native to every continent, the leaves and flowers of the world. Its size and weight made it impossible to carry, but it was the biggest and most expensive he could find. May one of his many, many graves always be in my head.

  As the movie ends on television, I’m still sitting in that musty motel room on Christmas Day. But the outside world isn’t the same world. The snow…even the sky is a new sky.

  This world is a world where anything can happen. Downtown Spokane isn’t just Spokane, not anymore. And I wander in the maze of these empty, icy streets marveling at the explosion of what’s suddenly possible.

  Soon after the death of my father, but just before answering machines and disposable cardboard cameras began to disappear, I flew to London. I went on tour for something, some book, making the rounds of radio interviews with different programs on the BBC. In cabs, in the Underground, escorting me was my assigned publicist, Sue. Beautiful Sue, men whistled at her from construction scaffolding. And maybe people stared at Sue, but she was on the lookout for the elephant.

  The Sultan’s Elephant, it was a piece of street theater. Part robot, part puppet, it was performance art hired by the city. Beginning one morning with what appeared to be a wooden spacecraft crashed into a steaming crater on Pall Mall, the performance was to last seven days. As per rumors, this gigantic robotic elephant would ramble through central London.

  No one we met had actually laid eyes on the elephant. Oh, we saw the traffic jams. In every cab we hailed, the driver was cursing the elephant. We’d sit in gridlock, hearing how the elephant was on Gower Street or in Soho Square, always around the next corner, always just out of sight. We heard the car horns honking. The week was dwindling. The Sultan’s Elephant would be gone soon. Sue and I were hopeful, but we had a book to promote.

  On the elephant’s last day in London, we went to the Waterstones bookstore on Piccadilly. A city-block-size building all glass on the outside that booksellers called the Crystal Palace. We shook hands with another writer and spoke to an audience of book buyers in an upper-floor conference room. People ate box lunches. Everyone present kept sneaking looks out the windows. We listened for any chorus of angry honking that might herald the elephant’s arrival.

  What did we discuss? Was the sun shining? Does it matter?

  As we left the building, walking down a concrete stairway to a metal fire exit door, we heard it. Music echoed between the cornices and caryatids, the very wedding cake curlicue pediments and carved-stone Palladian windows of the Charles Dickens office buildings. Sitar music and flutes and drums floated toward us. Cars along the one-way street disappeared as if something beyond the next curve was blocking the flow of traffic. People on the sidewalks forgot to go anywhere. Businessmen wearing hats, carrying umbrellas and briefcases. People pushing strollers. Police officers, beautiful Sue and me, we all stood and watched to see what would appear from around the far bend in the road.

  Bankers in pin-striped suits. The stylish yuppies, people in those days used to call Sloane Rangers. The street turned into a still photograph of everybody holding their breath.

  A dozen books later, I’d tell this same story at a dinner party. My version of seeing the elephant. I’d be sitting at one end of a long table. At the far end a woman I didn’t know, hadn’t met, she’d begin to cry. The attention would swing to her and she’d explain between sobs that she’d also been in London that week. She’d seen the elephant and ever since had been trying to tell people the tale. “No one believed me,” she would say, struggling for a breath. “No one could understand how it changed me…” She’d begun to doubt her own memory of the event.

  Hearing me had confirmed that she wasn’t deranged. She hadn’t been exaggerating.

  There first appeared a team of men wearing turbans and billowing pants, walking in the center of the street. Behind them rose and fell huge gray feet, legs as tall as the buildings, a waving trunk, tusks, and high atop the elephant’s back, a temple filled with topless female dancers. More men walked beside the huge feet and trailed behind it. Pent up behind them was the stalled traffic.

  The veiled, bare-breasted dancers danced. The musicians played. Crowded faces stared from high-rise windows eye-level with the elephant’s jeweled head and the Arabian Nights temple fluttering with banners and streamers.

  The elephant’s trunk swung and let loose with a geyser of water. With the blast of a fire hose it sprayed the crowds. Cold water. People screamed, pushing to find shelter in doorways. Paper shopping bags burst. Screams turned to laughter, everyone’s shoes skidding on wet pavement.

  Above us, a young man stepped out an open window. He wore a dark-blue shirt of some shiny, satiny fabric and stepped onto the ledge of a gingerbread cornice. Above the elephant’s head, he stood suicide-high above the street, using both hands to hold a cardboard camera. He squinted through the viewfinder, clicking pictures, when the trunk swung in his direction. A blast of water struck him, and he dropped the camera. The drums and flutes went quiet. The horns stopped honking.

  The group stare of so many people followed that falling camera, down past windows, our eyes tracked it past windows, windows, windows, past staring-out faces until it shattered on the concrete. The young man slipped as well, in his dark-blue shirt and his slick leather shoes, shuffling fast on the wet cornice sloped to shed rain. His hands grabbing at air. No one’s scream was their own and mine joined Sue’s and our scream blared with the screams of lawyers and topless dancers and screaming cabdrivers as we all saw the man fall.

  People turned away. People who’d closed their eyes, they wouldn’t look. They were so sure he was smashed dead at our feet.

  The moment after which everything is different.

  Did I forget to mention the flagpole within grabbing distance? If so, I didn’t mention it because the flagpole wasn’t there. It wasn’t there until the man grabbed it. His hand caught the wet flagpole jutting out from the cornice, and he stopped his falling for the heartbeat it took for people inside the open window to grab his shirt.

  We’d watched a man die. He was dead in our minds, and then he wasn’t.

  He’d been saved. The horns and drums started up. The elephant took another gargantuan step. We shivered in our soggy clothes now. Complained to each other how our shoes and hair were ruined. Our wet wristwatches had stopped. Taxi horns drowned out the music.