On Wednesday, April 23, the Word for Word Literary Series welcomed award-winning author Tananarive Due. A leading voice in Black speculative fiction, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award. Her books include The Reformatory (winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Chautauqua Prize, Bram Stoker Award, World Fantasy Award, and a New York Times Notable Book), The Wishing Pool and Other Stories, Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.
After reading from The Reformatory, Tananarive Due answered questions from the audience and from associate deans Jacob Powers and Paul Witcover.
Following is a transcript of that Q&A, edited for the page.
W4W: The Reformatory has been a breakout book for you, hasn’t it?
TD: It has won more awards than any book I’ve ever written, which I’m not saying primarily to brag, but it does stir and move me and also makes me very curious about what it is about this book that is affecting people so deeply. I’ve been publishing since 1995. And there’s not even a close second place in terms of the response that The Reformatory has gotten. Maybe it’s because it came from a very deep place. It took me seven years to write, which is also longer than I’ve ever spent working on a novel. But I am just thrilled that this story that is rooted in my real-life family history has found so many readers and captivated so many readers.
W4W: Tell us about that family history.
TD: My late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, was a civil rights activist and really the first horror fan in my life. I don’t want to just skew it to civil rights, but I think a lot of people are beginning to connect, for the Black community in the United States, how horror and history go hand in hand. As I said in Shudder’s documentary Horror Noire, Black history is Black horror.
My mother was a college student back in the ’60s. She was arrested trying to get seating at a segregated movie theater, and on, and on. I mean, lunch counter, you name it. Register to vote. I mean, there was always a reason that the very simple demands of citizens of this country for equal rights were met with violence and were met with imprisonment.
My mother was tear-gassed as a 20-year-old college student. And she never fully recovered from that tear-gassing. She wore dark glasses indoors almost exclusively eighty percent of the time for the rest of her life, to the point where her dark glasses are on display at the Florida Archives in Tallahassee, Florida.
She loved horror. And I think she used it as an outlet for her own pent-up trauma, but also having it in your bones, in your genetic memory, that lack of safety, that lack of community support, the idea that you are an interloper, that you do not belong, and having to fight through that in so many aspects of life, which I think is something that I unpack in a lot of my work. And The Reformatory happens to be based on real events that took place at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, which was an institution that was operating between about 1900 and 2011.
When I was on book tour, I met a survivor who had been there in the ’90s, a white man, and was shaking like a leaf when he met me, because his trauma was still living with him. And earlier that day, I had been on the phone with a Black survivor who was about my dad’s age, in his eighties, and he was still living in his trauma, to the point where the first words out of his mouth were, “It still hurts.”
This institution spawned so much terror among young men. It was a segregated institution. There were white kids there, mostly poor, and Black kids there, obviously also mostly poor, who were forcibly put to work, who were shot at when they ran away or tried to run away.
If you’ve read Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, there’s a reference to Boot Hill on the very first page. That’s the cemetery at the Dozier School. I haven’t been able to get past that first page, because my great uncle was literally buried at Boot Hill. It was because of the personal nature of this story that I knew I had to write about it.
I’m doing kind of a sleight of hand in this novel, because I am a horror writer, and I knew right away, after interviewing survivors of the Dozier School, that I had to write about this place. From the very first time my dad and I went to a meeting—my dad loved a meeting, so he was always happy to go with me. When I heard the testimony of men—some of them Black, some of them white—there during different periods, but all of them older, recalling horrific beatings in a whipping shed that was called the White House—which I’ve kind of insidiously named the Funhouse in The Reformatory, just to make it even worse, the irony of calling a terrible place like that the Funhouse. But I was compelled to write it. I thought about nonfiction briefly, because I had done that memoir with my mother. And this was her uncle. And I don’t think she ever knew he existed, by the way.
A few months after she died, I heard from the State of Florida. I think it was called the State Attorney’s office for the State of Florida, which technically was Pam Bondi’s office, although it was not Pam Bondi who called. It was someone in her office who was actually very empathetic, who said, listen, you may have a relative who’s buried at this school, and we’re looking for permission from family members to begin exhuming remains. And the whole idea that my great-uncle was fifteen in real life when he was sent there, and he never came home. He was stabbed to death. And he’s buried there at Boot Hill. And the whole point for me of writing The Reformatory was to give him a better story. He had been forgotten by his family.
I don’t think my mother knew that her father had a brother. First of all, she never mentioned it. If she did know, she was born a couple years after Robert Stevens died. And I do think that her father, who was physically abusive toward my grandmother—I think it explains a few things about his personality when you know that he had a brother that he lost at the age of fifteen, that was sent into the jaws of this facility, like so many other young people.
They found more than, I believe, 55 or 60 sets of remains here. Sometimes, obviously, they would die of natural causes. But I would say there were many other reasons that these young people died here—trying to run away, dying from exposure. As I said, I’ve seen accounts that people would shoot at them as they were running, which I believe. No one has ever been arrested or even posthumously accused of murder or sexual assault, which I understand was also rampant at this facility. And the idea that my great uncle had just disappeared into this hole in the ground, forgotten by his own family—well, not forgotten, I’m sure, by his parents. He had a namesake, an uncle of mine from another line of the family who did not even know for whom he was named.
So that’s the kind of erasure I’m talking about. And the reason it happened, I would suppose, is because it was so painful. And they felt so helpless. What do you do when you’re up against the state? What do you do when you’re up against these forces that are so much bigger?
I knew I had to tell Robert’s story. But I had to figure out how to tell it. And this was a traumatic experience, working on this book. I’m gratified that it has reached so many people and that so many people enjoy it. But wow, was it hard to write. The only thing that kept me going was that I knew what my ending was. I won’t spoil it if you haven’t read it. But I knew that my ending was a better ending than what Robert got in real life. And that was my North Star when I struggled to keep up even a sentence a day writing quota, which is what my husband and I talk about on our podcast, Lifewriting.
Even if you just do your project in a sentence a day . . . Sometimes that sentence was outlining. Sometimes that sentence was just rewriting a sentence that wasn’t working. But I finally, because of COVID–when I was fearful that I might actually die without finishing the book after I’d been working on it for more than five years–that got me serious. That got my page quota five to seven pages a day, I think, was the quota I put myself on. Did not always hit it, but I had a chart up on my wall. So I couldn’t lie to myself about my progress. A zero is a zero. And then if I have a five, I get a smiley face. So I couldn’t lie to myself either about the fact that I was working on my book or I wasn’t working on my book. It was right there on the chart I could see every day.
And that was what it took. It really took that push to get the book finished. And there were times I almost gave up on it, honestly. I was very worried when I heard about The Nickel Boys, because I’m a fan, obviously, of Colson Whitehead. And the idea that he was writing a novel set at literally the same facility that I was writing about, also in history, also with Jim Crow overtones, it was a little too close to home. I thought, well, will there be room for both of these stories? And honestly, my agent had to convince me to keep working on it. And I’ll credit my agent for that, and my husband, obviously, but also Colson Whitehead himself, because back when we were both on Twitter, I just had to ask him, are there any ghosts? I’m telling you, if he had said that this was magical realism, like Underground Railroad, that might have been a wrap for me, to be perfectly honest. But he said, no ghosts, my friend. And that told me, OK, maybe there is room. And the books are very different, but still, you can probably imagine, writers, that wasn’t confidence-inspiring.
So in any case, I’m glad I stuck it out.
W4W: Us too! You’ve got two protagonists in this novel. Two points of view. Tell us about your protagonists.
TD: The premise of my novel is that a twelve-year-old boy, Robert, who was just on his way to school with his older sister, Gloria, who’s seventeen, got into a schoolyard tussle. The older kid pushes him. Robert kicks the kid back. It’s the kind of thing that, honestly, might not even be noteworthy if it happened in a school today, even though our schools are much more heavily policed today. So sometimes students do get arrested for these kinds of events. But in the world of this story, Robert kicked the sixteen-year-old son of a very rich white planter, the McCormack family, and there is hell to pay. He’s sentenced to six months in this notorious reformatory. And in his naive child’s mind, he’s just afraid to go because he’s heard it’s haunted. Plus, six months is a huge amount of time when you’re twelve, like till Christmas. It’s summer. That’s till Christmas. That’s almost an incalculable amount of time for a twelve-year-old. But he’s most worried because he’s heard that the reformatory is haunted.
One of the conceits in the story is that if you want to summon a haint, which is an African-American southernism for ghosts and spirits, if you want to summon a haint, you say their full name, which is, of course, an echo of say their name, say her name in our contemporary times,
I always wanted this to serve as sort of a microcosm of our national prison industrial complex. Although I will say that in 1950, we were much less that than we are now, ironically. I mean, we didn’t have the freedom. We had the Jim Crow laws. You had all kinds of arrests for vagrancy just because people thought you should be working. I mean, definitely, there were a lot of things stacked against Black people legally, but there were not as many Black people behind bars in 1950 as there are today, and certainly not children as there are today. And the police were not nearly as militarized.
Robert is very sensitive to spirits. He’s really struggling to find his bearings between the spiritual realm, which nobody else at the reformatory seems to be able to sense except him, and then the social realm of trying to navigate relationships in a place full of kids who are tougher than he is. I mean, no children belong here, but he definitely doesn’t belong here.
So one of the points of view is Robert, and the other is Gloria. With Gloria, I wanted to go for a little bit more poeticism to establish that she’s bringing her intellect and her poeticism into the way she looks at the world. She’s got a little more lyricism and a little more wisdom than her younger brother. As for Robert, I feel like his superpower is that he’s so young. I’ve always loved child protagonists, but this is the first novel—first solo novel, I should say—that I’ve written with child protagonists. The thing I love about a child protagonist, especially in horror, is that they are so much quicker to accept what’s right in front of them, what’s before their eyes. And not to say that Robert wouldn’t have needed many years of therapy after this situation, but I can guarantee you, Robert deals better with his imprisonment at this place than I would have.
W4W: You teach Afrofuturism at UCLA. How does that apply to The Reformatory?
TD: Anyone who’s seen the movie Sinners, there’s one scene, a musical scene, and I’m not even going to describe it. But if you’ve seen it, you know the scene I’m talking about. That is the visual representation of what Afrofuturism is, which is holding the past, present, and future in a single moment.
That was one of the things I wanted to accomplish with The Reformatory. It’s set in the past, very firmly a historical novel, but I wanted it in conversation with the present and our current issue with mass incarceration and overpolicing of Black children and Black people and minorities in general. But also, Robert and other characters in this story have an eye toward the future.
There’s a scene where one of the music instructors at the reformatory gives shelter to the older sister. I won’t say why, but she gives shelter to the older sister. And she has a television set. So this is in 1950. Television is fairly new. She can turn on the TV and she can see the snow. And she says it was a gift from Louis Armstrong, of all people. But there’s no station close enough for her to get a broadcast. So she’s poised to meet the future, but the future hasn’t quite arrived yet.
And in the same way, there’s a point in the story when Robert hears the fringes of a freedom song. Now, this is a song that wasn’t a freedom song. It wasn’t part of any civil rights movement in 1950. But 1950 is right at the edge. It’s before Emmett Till. So 1955 is Emmett Till. And then we go to the Montgomery bus boycott, and then we get the student sit-in movement, and you get the voting rights protests. And all those things were going to happen, but they hadn’t happened yet.
What you had in 1950 was individuals standing up to the system like Harry T. Moore, who appears in the book and was assassinated in 1951, roughly just a few months after Robert encounters him in this story. And it’s actually Gloria who encounters him. And Gloria doesn’t have Robert’s gift for seeing ghosts, but she has a little bit of a sense of prophecy. She can tell. If she meets someone who’s about to die, she can feel it.
So the future is right at the tips of their tongues in this story. There are these aspects of the future that we, as contemporary readers, know. Oh man, if you just wait 10 years, there’s going to be massive protests. But this hasn’t happened yet. It’s too early for that when this story takes place.
So The Reformatory is Afrofuturism in that sense. A lot of people think of Afrofuturism as science fiction stories that are set in the future. But another version of Afrofuturism is Black fantasy stories. And this, as horror, is fantasy. And in this fantasy story, which happens to be historical, the characters are in this moment, for me anyway, of past, present, and future colliding in the story.
W4W: Let me pull a question out of the chat. “As a Mexican-American, sometimes I feel pushback or a sense of impostor syndrome when writing about themes that present my culture. As a fellow minority writer, how do you navigate the professional world of publishing while maintaining your cultural identity?”
TD: I think that is a great question. And this is something that I unconsciously wrestled with when I was at your stage. I actually didn’t get an MA or an MFA. I got an MA in English literature, but I never got an MFA. But I knew I wanted to be a writer.
From the time I was a child, I was writing Blackity Black stories. I read Roots, and all of a sudden I had to write a little handwritten novel, Lordy, Lordy, Make us Free, about a young African girl’s experience in the Middle Passage. And I was writing about a Black girl trying to get in the Book of World Records. I mean, race had nothing to do with it, but it was a picture book, so I was coloring her to look like me.
And then something started to happen as I got older, as I got through high school with more exposure to canon. And certainly, by the time I got to college, a story started to feel like something that happened to a white male protagonist having an epiphany. That was what a story was feeling like.
So that was what I started to write. I started to write about white men, every once in a while a white woman. I wasn’t intentionally erasing my race. I didn’t consciously say, well, I’m going to keep away from anything—no, I wasn’t even doing it to sell, which is part of your question there, navigating them. It wasn’t about the marketplace. It was literally I had felt my own identity erased in my own mind because that was what a story was. So let me write a story.
And then I wondered why I wasn’t publishing. I would send out these very generic, kind of bland stories where I wasn’t accessing the deepest parts of myself. I wasn’t accessing the most important things I wanted to say.
My idea of a story when I was in college is a white housewife who’s bored with her life and decides she wants to go back to the theater. I’m sure there are many people who could write the hell out of that story. It’s not that that’s an illegitimate story. It’s that that was not my life in any way, shape, or form. I was nowhere present in that story. I was nowhere present in many of the stories I was writing during that period.
So I was battling two fronts, the battle to understand that I wanted to write genre, which was highly frowned upon when I was in college—hopefully, it’s a little better now; I have heard it’s better now—and also race, which no one was telling me not to do it. But again, it was just sort of a vibe that I wanted to fit in. Of course, you want to fit in. You want to write what feels like a story.
Really quickly, two things turned me around. One was reading the book Mama Day, by Gloria Naylor, which was the first time I had read a novel by a Black woman writing the metaphysical, where she was respected—because I’ve always loved Stephen King. My mother loved horror. You would think, well, why weren’t you writing horror? Because I didn’t think it was a respected genre. I thought it would bring shame to my family’s name or whatever, unconsciously. So Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day really made a light bulb go off.
And the genre piece—oh, I’m going to find this, you guys. The genre piece happened because I interviewed Anne Rice. I worked for the Miami Herald for ten years. I interviewed Anne Rice. And I’ve been telling this story for years. And finally, she got to hear the story. Someone published it in Locus magazine, and she actually tweeted in real time that she had just seen it. And I was like, so excited.
I asked her how she responded to criticism that she was wasting her talents writing about vampires, because literally that was what people were writing about her in New York Times Magazine, that she was wasting her talents writing about vampires. That spoke to me. I didn’t tell her I wanted to be a writer, like most journalists. But I was like, how do you respond to that criticism? And the way I tell the story is that she just laughed, and she told me her books were taught in universities, and that when you write genre, you can write about big themes like love and loss.
I found what she actually said. And it had such a profound impact on me that I made it the kicker of the news story. And you’ll know when you hear it why I started writing my first horror novel literally days after this interview with Anne Rice. And nine months later, it was finished.
This is Anne Rice telling me why she’s proud to write horror. “Everybody knows who Jane Eyre is. Mary Shelley, everybody knows who she is. And everybody knows who Frankenstein’s monster is. These are great, powerful, heroic images that really allow you to go outside of yourself to really talk about questions that change you. That’s what Homer did for the people when they went down to the corner tavern to listen to him. They didn’t know Achilles. They didn’t ever see the walls of Troy, but they sat there and listened to him talk about these enormous heroes and these enormous conflicts. And it was not just escape, but it was an escape that improves you. You go back feeling different, and that’s what literature should do.”
That’s what she told me.
Now, I know I’m a little far afield of Enrique’s question, because we’re talking about horror and not ethnicity, but I think that the things go hand in hand for anybody who’s feeling like an outsider, whether it’s because of genre or whether it’s because of ethnicity, that you lean in. You lean in.
One of the biggest horror writers working right now is Indigenous. Stephen Graham Jones. The Only Good Indians. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is one of the best novels I’ve read in years. The Reformatory is getting so much love, where I leaned more into race than probably in anything else I’ve ever written, you know?
And I don’t think anyone should be swayed by the political times either, because it’s during these political times that I’m getting record sales on this book. So these things, in fact, are not mutually exclusive. I would say, whether or not there are publishers who are actively looking for whatever kind of fiction it is—you write queer fiction, Indigenous fiction, Latinx fiction, Black fiction. I mean yeah, those editors exist, but that’s not why you write. You write to tell your deepest stories. And it’s when you tell your deepest stories that you will create your best work. I mean, period, as far as I’m concerned.
That’s not to say that you should never write the other. If you’re a Mexican and you’re writing an Anglo character or a Black character, hey, all of us should practice writing the other. It’s a beautiful thing. And we can tell powerful stories writing the other. But to purposely shy away because of fear of rejection in general, whether it’s in your workshop group or in the marketplace, that is, I think, doing yourself a disservice, because you’re not going to find that deepest spark within you.
And it’s not that every Black writer wants to write a novel set in the Jim Crow South. Believe me, I didn’t think I wanted to write a novel set in the Jim Crow South! I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t come across the Dozier School. I’m not Toni Morrison. I’m not Alice Walker. That wasn’t my upbringing. I grew up in the air-conditioned suburbs in Miami, Florida. So I had to come to that story. I had to live a little bit and learn a little bit more to come to that story. So there’s no certain kind of story you should be writing from your background. But don’t shy away from your background would be my answer to that.
W4W: One of the questions I want to go back to was about your formal editing process. Do you edit as you go, or do you write as much as possible and revise it later? And to piggyback off that question as well, there’s someone writing about other cultures and backgrounds and stuff. You’ve encouraged it, but do you see a use in sensitivity readers? Do you have them yourself when you’re writing about sensitive subject matter like this particular reformatory school?
TD: I didn’t use sensitivity readers for this one. But when I wrote a short story for—gosh, was it for the Boston Review? Maybe—called “Say Something,” during the era where it’s like, see something, say something kind of thing. My son had witnessed a profiling episode at the park where a Black teenager was handcuffed for no reason.
And I actually complained to our local police chief, who called me right away, which I thought was—she was Latina. So I thought, OK, sister. I got it. But what she said was, a neighbor reported him. And it was see something, say something. And I’m like, but he wasn’t doing—he was just existing.
So anyway, I had to get that out of my system. And I wrote a short story about a white woman who witnessed that same thing and who did stand up and object and talk to the police officer about it. And I let a white writer friend of mine read it because I wanted to be fair to her white sensibility as a character. And she really felt like I was a little too easy on her.
But I am a big, big believer in sensitivity readers, a big, big believer in it. And my one caution would be that if you find yourself drawn to a character who is other, be sure it’s not for tropey reasons. An example of that would be a former student I had who introduced an Indigenous character. And this was a white student, and I could sort of feel some alarm bells going off that the entire purpose of this Indigenous character was to be a spiritual, magical guide and to guide her through the story with his magical ancient wisdom—which we can do, and I’m sure I have done. But a character has to exist for their own reasons. I mean, that character’s purpose is not to serve her.
So make sure he has a life. He has wants and dreams. I mean, make sure that you’re not seeing a Black woman in this role because she’s sassy. You know what I mean? She can be sassy, but that shouldn’t be everything about her. I think we just have to be very careful, because we’ve all been exposed to media. And all of us are subject to stereotyping. And we just have to be very, very careful about why a character is showing up as other in our minds.
In terms of the process question, I definitely am a polisher as I go. I pride myself in turning in very clean manuscripts. And maybe that’s my journalistic training. I was a reporter for ten years. But I think the thing of it is, sometimes, forward motion is hard. It’s kind of a fog bank. And if you’re writing on a quota, which I am now because I have a book due May 1, the way I orient myself into writing my new four pages or three pages, or however many pages I write today, is by reading what I wrote yesterday or reading what I wrote last Friday. And I’m buffing and shining, and buffing, cutting, cutting, cutting. Oh my gosh, why am I using three sentences to say the same thing in this paragraph? Or, why is this sentence at the end of the paragraph instead of at the beginning of the paragraph?
I try to end my paragraphs on power words. And all I can say about that is, it wouldn’t be a word like “were” or “at” or boring words. I’m talking about a power word. So he was bored to death. “Death” is a power word rather than just “he was bored,” although it’s also a cliche. So it’s not a great example, but that’s a whole workshop on power words.
I want to pull myself through my story as much as I hope to later pull the reader through my story. So I’m buffing and shining those paragraphs until the paragraph I wrote last Friday feels as polished to me as that work I’ve gone over from two months ago that I’ve been obsessively buffing and shining.
So yeah, my way of going forward is often to go back. And especially since I’m writing in multiple point of view, going back to the last section or chapter from that character’s point of view, not only to make sure that the voice is consistent and that he’s wearing the same clothes and holding the same objects and all that stuff, but just to find that carrier tone so that it feels like I’m just floating instead of typing, which is the worst.
Sometimes, it just feels like typing. And sometimes, you’re going to finish your workday feeling like everything you wrote was crap, and you’ll have to do it all again tomorrow. But in my case, at least 90% of the time, that voice is lying to me. And it’s actually fine. It’s just not edited yet. And it’s not fair to compare fresh pages and fresh prose either to the writers you love, that you read for pleasure, or the work you did that you polished and buffed and shined already. Just don’t judge it. Let it flow. And that’s my way.
My husband is the opposite. He’s like, whoa, tries to write the whole thing and then goes back. I don’t know how. I honestly get triggered just thinking about that. But that’s what he does. And it works for him.
W4W: What happens when the two of you collaborate on something?
TD: He’s very, very good with the structure and the outline. And when we collaborate, it’s absolutely necessary to have a very strong outline. If I’m going to make major changes, we’re going to have to have a conversation about it. I mean, yeah, you can have freedom in the moment, and characters will surprise you and say things you weren’t expecting. But if it was supposed to end with a train crash and then I decided not to do that, we have to have a conference about that.
So yeah, that is kind of rough because it’s opposite approaches. But I also love his structural mind. He has a great structural mind. I feel like I thrive more in finding the little dainty, pretty words within the paragraph.
But I am an outliner. That’s one thing that I really have gotten from screenwriting, even now. I made a beat sheet to take me to the finish line. It’s due May 1. I’m thinking, I might even get this in on time. I have to write this scene, like a sentence. Like, this is going to happen. And then another sentence, and then this is going to happen from this other character’s point of view. And then this is going to happen. I even made notes from the soliloquy that I want my character to make, just so I don’t forget.
I really, I guess, grudgingly admire people who can just pants their way through it, by the seat of their pants, and just find it. And it’s not that that’s illegitimate. I mean, there are a lot of great writers who do that. There are a lot of great writers who hate outlining. They feel like it’s too constraining.
W4W: Stephen King.
TD: I mean, that’s fine. But for me, I really like knowing where I’m going. And most often, when I get stuck, it’s because I’ve realized I don’t know what’s supposed to happen next. It’s like, oh, this isn’t writer’s block. This is my lack of planning. Let me beat it out. He does this. She does this. And then boom. It doesn’t have to be paragraphs or pages, just, for me, a guideline.
And I would suggest that those of you who feel like you can’t outline, but you’ve never tried it, just try a beat sheet, like just one line, even if it’s just a short story. Because I’ve started short stories that I didn’t finish, and then I come back and I have no idea where I was going with that. If only I had done four little lines explaining what was supposed to happen, maybe I would have finished that short story instead of it sitting in my drawer.
W4W: I think sometimes people get hung up with the idea of an outline because they think it has to be this incredibly detailed and organized structure. But like you’re just saying, a beat sheet, that’s really all you need, right? Just kind of a guideline to tell you, this is the way I should be going.
TD: Very casual. And by the way, feel free to ignore it too. I think, a lot of times, people will feel like, oh, I said I was going to do this. I feel too locked in. Well, unlock yourself. If you’re writing and you see it going in a different direction, unlock yourself. And then maybe beat out now where the direction is taking you.
I have had characters surprise me in scenes even within those constraints. So it’s the scene I said I was going to write, but he’s not acting like I thought he would act. And no matter how much I tried, this character, who was really an a-hole, and you’re supposed to feel this real pleasure from seeing him get his in the scene, now he’s in a 12-step program. He’s all apologetic. I’m like, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? So there’s still room for surprise. And I think we want to feel surprised when we’re writing like we do when we’re reading.
W4W: You’re a screenwriter as well as a novelist. What does screenwriting have to teach fiction writers?
TD: Even if you don’t want to work in Hollywood—and there are a lot of reasons not to want to work in Hollywood—screenwriting is a really good thing, I think, for prose writers to teach you structure, which, at least when I was in creative writing workshops, was not emphasized much at all. Like story structure. And story structure is overemphasized, I would say, in screenwriting.
So there’s a happy middle ground between the two. And then the other big reason would be visual storytelling, visual symbols, and improving that aspect of our work. Lots of stuff happening in the chat.
W4W: Any final bits of advice?
TD: You don’t have to try to contort yourself, at least not this early. A lot of you are just starting out. Figure out who you are as writers before you start reining yourselves in because you think the marketplace is going to reject you. The marketplace is also attracted to a novelty and freshness.
W4W: On that note, I’m going to, with regret, bring our Word for Word tonight to an end. I want to thank our guest, Tananarive Due, for sharing her work with us today. Her books are available at your local bookstore and online. And don’t forget her podcast, Lifewriting, which is full of writing tips and wisdom from Tananarive and her husband, Steven Barnes.
Category: