Anything Can Work: Writing Advice from Brian Evenson

Award-winning fiction writer Brian Evenson has written more than a dozen books.  Recent titles include Baby Leg, Fugue State, Last Days, and the forthcoming The Open Curtain.  Evenson’s fiction has a way of slipping past your defenses, getting in your head and staying there long after you’re done reading.

In addition to fiction writing, Evenson translates French literature into English and is the director of Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.  The advice he offers below comes from many years at the craft and in the classroom.

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What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve received?
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Brian Evenson:
Anything–any gesture, any plot shift, any technique–can be made to work as long as the writing is good enough for readers to accept it.  Some of the very best stories are the ones that don’t follow conventional wisdom about what a story should or shouldn’t do.
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What’s the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received?
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Brian Evenson:
There’s a whole series of maxims that get deployed about writing that people repeat like mantras in creative writing classes and handbooks.  I could choose any of those.  For instance:  “Show, don’t tell.”  All fiction, because it is made of words, is telling: it either hides the fact of its narration or doesn’t.  Either of those modes can be done effectively as long as the writing is good enough.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher.  He is the staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly.  He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.