Profiles in Craft: Jessie Roy

About the instructor: Jessie Roy is a fiction writer, teacher, and editor whose work has appeared in American Literary Review, The Journal, and Cream City Review. She holds two advanced degrees in creative writing: an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Among many other awards and honors, Jessie has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her novel Brides took second place in the 2020 James Jones First Novel Fellowship. In between teaching and studying creative writing, she has also worked in libraries, archaeological museums, fashion retail, and various parts of the bridal industry. Jessie grew up in Kentucky and now lives in New York City with her spouse. You can find her online at https://jessie-roy.com/.

For you, what defines good writing?

I like to feel as if there is something in the narration that is just out of reach, something that sparks my curiosity and keeps my attention.

I like to feel as if there is something in the narration that is just out of reach, something that sparks my curiosity and keeps my attention. I love a story where everything seems normal on the surface, but you can’t quite relax because this narrator’s a little too insistent, or this plot point doesn’t quite add up, or you get the feeling you’re being misdirected from something. An intensity that is just barely being kept under a lid until it’s not.

This can be a literal secret—something the narrator knows but won’t say, or isn’t capable of seeing even though the reader can glimpse the shape of it—or a motivation that the character doesn’t want to admit to or doesn’t want to understand. What I love in good fiction is the sense that the story is carrying more layers of meaning than it can quite hold, like a cup so full of water that the surface tension bubbles up and threatens to spill. When I feel that quality of density, that’s when I’m really excited to read something, and I know it’s going to take me interesting places.

What craft advice is most useful to you in your writing?

I’ve always had an issue with cutting out of a story before it’s really done, right before all the tensions can actually reach maximum pressure. And then I always have to go back, weeks or months later, and write the actual ending—this happened with my first novel and it took me about six months to realize it wasn’t actually done. So I’ve really needed to hear, from all the way back to my first writing teachers, not to be afraid of the obvious and the dramatic! Once you’ve set up all the dominoes, don’t be afraid to knock them down. There is such a thing as too much subtlety.

I’ve really needed to hear, from all the way back to my first writing teachers, not to be afraid of the obvious and the dramatic!

One other thing I’ve always carried with me is from my MFA at Syracuse, a diagram that George Saunders drew on the board in the early weeks of our short story craft class. He had taken the story we were studying and broken it down into beats—not just major plot points but anything the narrator specifically took notice of, like the weather changing, an arguing couple drifting into another room of the house, etc. And he traced these beats all the way across the classroom whiteboard not as a single arc, the way we might traditionally look at a story, but as a series of splitting-off points where the story produces multiple possibilities for the reader to imagine. It starts to rain: will the planned car trip be cancelled? Both the characters and the reader become aware of this possible future, whether or not the story proceeds in that direction.

The emotional impact of a great story comes from that tension between what could have happened, and what does happen—the closing down of all those possibilities.

What I took away from that diagram was that as writers, we have access to so much more in a story than just what actually happens. Any decision a character makes creates a ‘road not taken’ that hovers over the story and haunts it. And the emotional impact of a great story comes from that tension between what could have happened, and what does happen—the closing down of all those possibilities.

What craft advice do you feel your students most need to hear?

Every student is different and I think craft advice works the best as single nudges: just the right suggestion for you at just the right moment. One really common challenge for developing writers is letting your own instincts get drowned out in your head by what you think stories are supposed to be like. You’re concentrating so hard on writing A Story, or A Book or A Screenplay, that whatever you write comes out as a performance of “storyness” without its own organic engine—a cardboard cutout of a car that just sits there.

One common challenge for developing writers is letting your own instincts get drowned out in your head by what you think stories are supposed to be like.

The solution to this is usually to focus your attention on details of the real world for a while. I like to give freewrite exercises that ask students to dredge up specific sensory memories and then build on them to create scenes, so that they have to stay continuously grounded in something they heard, saw, physically felt, and the emotional state associated with that. Remember a moment when you were freezing cold—waiting for the bus in January, or that weekend the heat went out in your apartment—and set the scene there. This helps you stay in the bodies of the people your story is about, and access the real motivations, tensions, frustrations of those people to power your story.

Focus your attention on details of the real world. This helps you stay in the bodies of the people your story is about.

What are your favorite craft books, and what did you learn from them?

I discovered Samuel Delaney’s essay collection About Writing in a library in college and it had a huge impact on me—it was the first time I had seen anyone articulate such a beautifully practical, grounded understanding of not just fictional craft but more broadly, how people work. It’s also a very interesting history lesson in the 1960s science fiction world that Delaney comes out of. A more recent title that I liked a lot was Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison, which was useful when I was trying to structure my first novel.

As far as what I recommend to students, I often assign portions of Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern, which is useful for developing writers who feel confident writing a scene or a character sketch, but aren’t sure yet how to build that out into a story where things happen. But I think the most effective way to learn craft is to take a great short story apart page by page and figure out how it works. What does the writer put on the table in the first paragraph, and how does it take shape over the course of the story, change or grow or have its real character revealed by the last paragraph? Some terrific candidates for this process: “The Liberator” by Tania James, “Scales” by Louise Erdrich, “Nemecia” by Kirstin Valdez Quade.

What, to you, are the most challenging elements of writing craft, and how do you work with that challenge?

These days—patience and trusting the process. I tend to be very ambitious structurally, and I will start out writing something full of excitement about how innovative and smart this idea is, and then about three quarters of the way through I’ll lose confidence in my execution and start doubting myself. In a long work like a novel, this happens many many times. And every time I have to remind myself that revision exists, it doesn’t have to come out perfect the first time, and often these rough patches are actually a sign that something fresh and interesting that I couldn’t have planned is coming up next.

Revision exists, it doesn’t have to come out perfect the first time, and rough patches often precede something fresh and interesting.

What pieces of writing most inspire you, or do you most hold as models or inspirations?

There are certain books I get very attached to because of something they do with voice—the prose carries you along like a strange, intense person talking in your ear. I always go back to W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, which is one of those books where you never know why the narrator is saying what he’s saying but you feel this powerful urge to listen anyway. That’s a tremendous accomplishment that I admire so much. Many of Alice Munro’s stories work like that for me too: there are too many great ones to name them all but “The Progress of Love” and “Friend of My Youth” are two standouts.

I also read a lot of poetry and I find that prose poetry especially feels like the next door neighbor of fiction, like I can look in the windows and borrow some ideas for my own work. Prose poems often have their own concentrated version of that quality of voice I love in fiction, the narrator who is throwing their all into saying something almost too difficult to put into language; Victoria Chang’s collection OBIT is deeply moving in this way and I return to it frequently.

What life experiences (events, relationships, personal pursuits…) have most impacted your writing craft, and how?

Writing is a very psychological process for me—not uniquely, I think this is true for most writers—and it will not happen if I’m not decently well-rested, in touch with myself emotionally, feeling pretty stable and safe overall. So almost everything else in my life affects my writing somehow. Difficult periods of life, which make it impossible to write for a while, often end up being material for writing later once I’ve recovered and feel OK again. It’s all food but in different ways.

Writing requires that I’m decently well-rested, in touch with myself emotionally, feeling pretty stable and safe overall.

I try to think of it, not even as a marathon instead of a sprint, but as like crossing a continent on foot over multiple weeks—sometimes the terrain is hilly and you slow way down, other times you hit a flat stretch and the sun goes behind a cloud and you can really book it for a while. You hit a lake, you have to go around, no big deal. Flexibility and optimism are key!