I was just writing stories because they were short. I had no concept of a collection. I had never read one. I had read a number of short stories, “The First Day” by Edward P. Jones and “How to Date a Brown Girl” by Junot Diaz, individually upon a friend’s suggestion. Then I wrote forty stories of my own and scrapped nearly all of them. I was interested in prose, but was then wooed by Black vernacular. I wanted to write like how brothers on the block talked. I loved the idea of a building of polyphonic voices, the old heads playing chess, the tenant association ladies making their announcements, the young cats cawing out to each other from the sidewalk.
I got the idea for “The Okiedoke,” the first story in Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, from one of my ninth graders. One Monday, I asked him, “How was your weekend?” and he said, “Me and my friends robbed a deliveryman.” I said, “Are you aware that you are confessing to me a crime?” “We ran away, but one of us didn’t come back.” The story stuck in my head. It was some wild shit that you couldn’t make up.
Some young men want Chinese food. They hatch a nefarious scheme to get it and barely escape. That was the story. My contribution was the plot. Why would a group of boys commit a crime, run away, and not all get back home? My answer was one of them felt guilty. The guilty person became Swan, the main character in “The Okiedoke.”
I workshopped it at NYU. People were encouraging, but they had issues. Some said they couldn’t see Swan, like physically. Others felt that I was relying on tropes. Maybe they were right, but that was the story my professor Lorrie Moore defended. That was the story she turned to me mid-workshop and whispered, “Don’t listen to them!” The story that she helped get published in this very journal.
Whenever I’m asked to give advice on writing, I hesitate. The best artists are organic. Lil Wayne doesn’t read craft essays. Jay-Z, as far as I know, doesn’t obsess over verse theory. They just do it. Trial and error. Trial by fire. Don’t get your mind garbled up in theory. Do what feels good. As a public school teacher I’ve heard students tell stories that’ll blow you away. We aren’t doing anything special. We’re not protecting some magical gift on a hill. We are merely commodifiers, archivers of something already in us.
I like to think about craft talk the way the Men in Black think about their witnesses. They interrogate them, pry, discover classified information. Then they take out that neuralyzer and, with a blinding light, erase their memory. Don’t cloud your head with story grammar. Just write and figure it out as you go. What the fuck can you say about storytelling except tell the story good? That’s how I like to think about craft.
And I like to think of short story collections the way I think about hip-hop albums.
Each story is a song that adds to the tapestry. The thematic relevance of the whole is just as important as the goodness of one piece. Of Illmatic, Nas raps “My first album had no famous guest appearances / The outcome I’m crowned the best lyricist.” I’m not the best lyricist, but Illmatic taught me brevity and cohesion. Illmatic is only ten tracks. Each song does its job and is different from the next.
“Young Entrepreneurs,” another story from that collection, took the fewest drafts to write, maybe less than five. I remember my excitement when I finished it. It felt rebellious. It was the very first story I wrote for Tenants. It was also the first time I wrote in nonstandard English.
At the time, I was teaching a high school class—all freshman girls from Brooklyn, and many of them talked like that. That’s OD, Mister. They twiddled their thumbs on their Sidekicks. Mister, you feenin. I was a bad teacher my first year. I couldn’t manage a class and it took me months to grade a single stack of papers. At one point, the girls circulated a petition to get me fired.
Anyhow, I wrote the story and decided to assign it to them. I didn’t put my name on it. Instead, I wrote Gloria Naylor. It was one of a handful of famous writer names I knew at the time. I began to read the first line. One girl stopped me and said, “Mister, you’re reading it wrong. It goes like this.” And then she proceeded to read my own words to me. She thought I was reading words of a real teenager and was messing it up. To this day, that’s the greatest compliment I’ve ever received.
It went downhill after that. Five pages in, they were zapped out of the magic. I was in my own fog and hadn’t noticed. I gave the same story to my juniors later in the day, “What did you think?” “It was all over the place,” said Abisola. I chose to ignore her. What did she know? Then Hugh Sheehan at my Gotham Writers Class said the same thing (“This has no plot.”). I chose to believe him. I hope it wasn’t because he was white. Either way, I learned a cool voice can only get you so far. Everything falls by the wayside if there is no story. Voice reels you in, but shit still needs to happen.
I decided to give the girls in the story conflicting wants. One girl wants to contact the local TV station to boost their candy sales, and the other girl just wants to spend their money on stilettos. Some boys get involved and things come to a head. There’s slang and sass throughout, but the real story is the buildup to the confrontation between the girls and some boys at the lake.
Storytelling is an inherent gift. Everyone has told at least one good story in their lifetime and 99.9% of us have not written that story down. Anyone can tell a story. And anyone can critique a story. Just like anyone can critique a movie. All you have to do is be like Abisola (“that was all over the place!”), or like my wife who falls asleep sometimes when I read a draft out loud (all I need to know). I’ve learned how to find feedback from everywhere. Even from myself. My words don’t always get me hard. I am as harsh on them as my biggest skeptics. For Tenants, I would voice memo the stories and listen to them at my desk or while I vacuumed. Many times they put me to sleep too. But every once in a while there was a bit of magic.
“Rent Manual” took seven years to write. I wrote many, many drafts in the first person. I initially called the story “How I Made Rent That Month.” Workshop said it was fine, but you don’t want people to read your work and say it’s just fine.
The problem was the point of view. It was too conventional. Telling a story about a tumultuous month in the first person came across too safe. So I decided to bite the second-person imperative style that my mentor Lorrie Moore made famous in her collection Self-Help. Second-person imperative is different from conventional second person. Conventional second person is “You wake up. You find that you have wet the bed. You find a wipe to clean yourself.” It’s fresh, but not as fresh as “Wake up. Discover your mess. Find a way to clean yourself.”
I once read a post Danielle Evans put up back in the day about revision. She said many early writers believe that reworking a piece of fiction is cosmetic, you dabble here and you dabble there, cross a t, dot an i, change a word around. A true revision, she said, was “a reimagining.” You destroy the whole thing and rebuild. New structure, new ideas for improvement. It’s discouraging, but that’s what I had to do with “The Rent Manual.” I had to take every first person reference and make it second person. I had to make it feel like Mimi wasn’t telling a story, but giving the reader advice that happened to also be a story.
So a passage like,
I braided all of TiKai’s single braids into two big braids. It took four hours for me to do the little braids first. I sprayed her hair with sheen, my hands aching like there was pepper in my joints.
More or less became,
Put the lighter to both ends of the crowns to close them up.