From Short Story Writer to Novelist: An Interview with Richard Chiappone

Many fiction writers want to make the transition from writing short stories to novels. One writer who has done this successfully is Richard Chiappone, whose terrific first novel, The Hunger of Crows, was published in 2021. I interviewed Rich to find out how he made that leap in his career.

Richard Chiappone, author of The Hunger of Crows

Zack Rogow: Before you published your novel The Hunger of Crows from Crooked Lane Books, you’d written mostly short stories. When you got the idea for The Hunger of Crows, how did you know that this would be a novel and not a short story?

Richard Chiappone: That makes me smile because I had no idea that a short story titled “Personal Use” in my second story collection, Opening Days, would turn into this novel. I rushed to complete the story in time for that collection, and I always thought it ended abruptly. So, a couple years later, I picked it up again and said, “Why does it feel like something more is about to happen? What’s next?” What happened next was about ten years of trial and error and error and error, hundreds of jettisoned pages, and numerous gray hairs. Plus, a novel!

 

Q. When you started to write the novel, what adjustments did you make to create a plot that you could sustain over many chapters?

 

A. After thirty years of writing character-driven stories, I realized I knew absolutely nothing about plot. I thought writing a novel might be a good way to learn. One problem I had was the tendency to make every chapter a stand-alone story. The first agent I sent a draft to said, “When I started reading this I feared it was actually a story collection.” (Note the word feared. Agents HATE story collections.) I had to learn that a chapter can’t be complete on its own; it has to move the novel forward. Who knew?

Q. Did the number of characters or subplots increase when you saw the work as a novel?

A. Oh, yes. And it was very liberating. I allowed myself to shift points of view among the characters, something I’ve always avoided when writing short stories. And new plot ideas kept weaseling into the story. So I let them. What a luxury. It was like finding out you were allowed to swim—without wearing handcuffs.

 

Q. What kinds of character development did you add in writing a novel that you would not have done in a short story?

 

A. Actually that was one of my worst problems. I set out to write a simple action-driven crime novel. But free to sprawl, I went nuts. I got so interested in each character I wrote dozens of pages of back story that had to be thinned down. Even in the finished novel, most of the characters have a lot of history. I guess that’s why it’s been called a “literary” thriller. You have no idea how much more I tried to cram in. Thank God for editors.

 

Q. Does the setting play a different role in this novel than in your short stories?

 

A. Setting plays a much larger and more active role. Here where I live in south Central Alaska, in June when the story is set, we have about twenty hours of daylight, and almost no real darkness. (There are midnight softball leagues.) That’s not just some colorful factoid in the novel. The main character, a young woman, Carla, has fled from Phoenix, Arizona, to a small town, 200 miles from Anchorage, where she is hiding from a quasi-military corporation out to kill her. She assumed that the remoteness of Alaska would hide her, but the constant daylight feels like a spotlight shining on her. Then there are the unpredictable and treacherous northern ocean currents, tides, and storms that nearly kill Carla before the bad guys even show up. Atmosphere can be an important character in a longer work of fiction.

 

Q. Are there advantages to novel writing that short stories don’t offer?

 

A. Yes. In a short story there can be very little dramatic physical action. Look at “The Dead” by James Joyce, one of the greatest stories. It’s a dinner party; no punches are thrown, no guns drawn, there’s barely a voice raised in anger. After reading that story, your knees quake.

 

In short stories, what characters feel and think is often more important than what they actually do. But ironically, there’s little room in that form for delving into their lives leading up to those powerful moments of epiphany. That’s something you can include in a novel. I had a good time writing beatings, shootings, boats sinking, sex! But still, I fell in love with my characters and I wanted to spend a lot of time with them. I hope my readers will too.

 

Q. Is there any one thing you were able to carry over from years of story writing and use in your novel? Something akin to your “style.”

 

A. I’d say it’s humor. Sometimes crime novels can take themselves pretty freaking seriously. That’s their author’s business, of course. But some that I admire also have moments of great levity. I’m thinking of Walter Mosley’s stories, and of course, the sometimes very funny Elmore Leonard.

 

My wife is horrified and embarrassed that I laugh at my own jokes, but I’ll go out on that limb and say in my own defense, several readers have commented on the humor in The Hunger of Crows. One of the many revisions was taking out excess jokes. Painful!

 

Q. How did you go about finding an agent for your novel?

 

A. In 2018, after working for five years, I thought the novel was complete. I sent it to Jeff Kleinman at Folio Literary Management. I knew that Jeff had discovered Alaskan writer Eowyn Ivey’s hugely successful debut novel, The Snow Child, at the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference here in Homer in 2008. He was an agent who had been to Homer, the setting of my novel. I was sure he was someone with an ear for Alaskan stories. He is.

 

Q. What process did you go through with the editor in creating a finished version of the manuscript?

 

A. Jeff Kleinman liked it, but said it did not feel complete. He turned it over to his associate, Rachel Eckstrom, and for the next two years I completely rewrote the book three or four times before the wise and patient Rachel decided it was ready to pitch to publishers. When Crooked Lane Books bought it in the spring of 2020, I thought I was done revising, at last. Then their editor sent me eleven single spaced pages of “notes” (meaning things that needed to be worked on, changed, or eliminated). Eleven pages! I thought they were rejecting the book. Then I remembered they’d already paid me for it.

 

The editor’s notes were brilliant, and I rewrote the whole manuscript twice more, making massive structural changes. And then it was finally done, after ten years, uncountable rewrites, and hundreds of excised pages zapped into cyber oblivion with the delete key. Nothing to it.

 

Q. How is the novel being publicized or marketed differently from a short story collection?

 

A. Hah! Using the words marketing and short story collection in the same sentence is hilarious. (See above: agents hate story collections.) Why? Because publishers hate story collections! And for good reason: they do not sell. Seriously, how many story collections are on the NY Times bestselling fiction list right now? I'll look. Okay, I looked. The answer: NONE. Only novels.

So, after three decades of publishing short stories, Crooked Lane’s wonderful marketing of my novel has been deliriously encouraging and very much appreciated.

 

Q. Any advice for short story writers who want to try their hand at a novel?

 

A. Yes. Read lots of novels. Many short story writers mostly read short stories. I know, I’ve been a short story junkie for thirty years (and I don’t want to recover. Ever). I have a whole wall of nothing but story collections or anthologies. You can always sneak-read a couple stories secretly. (Hint: Put a story collection on the bottom of a stack of novels on your nightstand. No one will notice.)

 

Not reading novels made it hard to learn to write a novel. I did not have the rhythm of a long work of fiction etched into my brain the way the shape of stories was. Maybe that’s why some of the greatest short story writers never wrote wildly successful novels: Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, to name a few.

 

Q. Were there any “How to” books about novel writing you found useful?

 

A. I love reading craft books on writing. But because until recently I never intended to write a novel, I’ve never read any that are specifically about novel writing. It should go without saying that it helps to have some general writing skills if you’re going to write 300 pages of anything. There are several fine books that I’ve found helpful for myself and for the numerous students I’ve worked with over the years. Here are some favorites (alphabetically):

 

The Half-Known World, by Robert Boswell   

Writing Fiction, by Janet Burroway, et al.

The Art of Fiction, by John Gardner

On Writing, by George V. Higgins

The Fiction Writer’s Workshop, by Josip Novakovich

How Fiction Works, by James Wood

 

One last word to new novelists.

READ LOTS OF NOVELS!

Did I already say that? 

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies.

Zack’s most recent book of translations, Bérenice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris.Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

The Hated English Teacher and Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break”

We all hated our tenth grade English teacher, Mr. Glicksman. In the late 1960s, a time of rebellion and questioning authority, Mr. Glicksman was an old-school disciplinarian. He had taught high school English since shortly before the rocks were placed at Stonehenge. Any violation of his long list of rules incurred points off your grade or a visit to the dean of students.

Bronx High School of Science, where I studied with Mr. Glicksman

Mr. Glicksman had turned the literary arts into a precise science. He gave quizzes on 3 X 5 cards, a piece of white, lined card stock about as wide as your hand and as tall as your thumb. All information was reduced to a series of ten multiple-choice questions that could be answered on one of these cards when it came time for a quiz.

When we studied Homer’s Odyssey, the test questions did not probe the thought-provoking issues raised by an ingenious traveler battling for decades against a hostile god, mythical creatures, and the elements, while yearning to get back to his wife, son, and homeland. Instead, Mr. Glicksman’s quizzes focused on cold facts. One typical question that sticks in my mind (possibly because I got it wrong!) was: “Did Odysseus bend the bow on the third, fourth, fifth, or sixth try?” The answer is the third try, in case you were dying to know.

 

And yet, Mr. Glicksman loved poetry. His favorite was Alfred Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break”:

 

Break, break, break,

      On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

      The thoughts that arise in me.

 

O, well for the fisherman’s boy,

      That he shouts with his sister at play!

O, well for the sailor lad,

      That he sings in his boat on the bay!

 

And the stately ships go on

      To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,

      And the sound of a voice that is still!

 

Break, break, break

      At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

      Will never come back to me.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)

When Mr. Glicksman read that poem aloud to our class, he revealed a rare personal emotion, telling us that those lines recalled for him the death of his own brother. He took off his glasses for a second and wiped away an uncharacteristic tear. We were shocked, but also, having suffered under Mr. Glicksman’s harsh penalties for any minor infraction, the students were ready for revenge. After class, the sophomores mocked him for his soft-hearted response: “Can you believe the way Glicksman almost cried at that corny old poem!”

Not long ago, I was walking by the Pacific Ocean at Sea Ranch in California.

Sea Ranch, California (photo by Esta Brand)

The sky was spread with clouds; waves were fracturing against the rocky coastline. I couldn’t help thinking of the lines Mr. Glicksman had read us:

Break, break, break,

      On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

 

I soon reread Tennyson’s poem, and it moved me, for the first time. It was partly that deeply felt sense of loss that the tides of the ocean pulled out of me that day, and partly the sheer music of the poem’s words.

At first glance, Tennyson’s sixteen lines seem to have a somewhat mechanical plan, with predictable rhymes such as sea and me, and play and bay. But the closer I looked at the poem, the more unconventional it seemed. The first line in stanza 1 has only three syllables, and the same word appears three times in a row. That’s a sharp contrast to stanza 2, where the initial line has eight syllables and no word repeats. The powerful stresses in every line constantly shift the rhythm, from anapestic to iambic to spondaic, evoking the strong but unpredictable swirling of the sea. Tennyson uses mostly monosyllabic words to create pounding beats, and masterfully inserts polysyllabic touches to change up the cadences.

 

Maybe more surprising than the poem’s structure is the fact that the speaker is addressing not a lost loved one, but the sea. The poet says he is unable to “utter/The thoughts that arise in me.” His sense of loss is so jagged that he can barely express it. He can’t even name what or who he’s mourning for.

 

Nothing expressed for me so vividly the feelings the ocean evoked for me that day at Sea Ranch as the poem our teacher had recited to our class, a poem that had lodged in my synapses for 54 years. And I suddenly felt gratitude for that crotchety old Mr. Glicksman, and a sense of loss for “the sound of a voice that is still.”

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies.

Zack’s most recent book of translations, Bérenice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris.

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Types of Closure in Poetry, Part 2: Ending a Poem with a Resonant Image

For me, one of the most effective ways to achieve closure in a poem is to end with a resonant image.

The temptation when you are ending a poem is to try to tie up every loose end. You want to tell the reader exactly what it is that you’re trying to say, what you’ve been building up to for the entire poem. That strategy is very likely to put the reader off. Why? Because no one likes being lectured to. Least of all, fans of poetry. The chances are, if you’ve written the entire poem with a particular emotion or idea in mind, the reader has gotten the message by the time the poem is almost done.

So, don’t end a poem by hitting the reader over the head. Instead, expand the horizons the poem has explored. Finish with an image that lingers in the reader’s thoughts and echoes other elements in the poem. Ending with a particularly vivid and haunting image changes the tone so that the poem has closure at the end.

The best way to explain this is to give an example. The classic instance of this is John Keats’s sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Basically, the speaker of this poem is saying that he’s read a lot about Homer’s Greece, but he never really got it till he read George Chapman’s translation of The Odyssey. Now he understands the beauty and majesty of Homer’s poetry and the world he describes.

John Keats

But instead of saying that flat out, in the poem’s sestet, or final six lines, Keats gives us two seemingly unrelated images. The first is an astronomer discovering a new planet when it “swims” into view (you gotta love that verb, “swim”!). The second is the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, leading an exploratory party to a cliff in Panama, where for the first time, Europeans gazed on the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, from the Americas.

More than any didactic conclusion, these two images give a sense of the incredible wonder that Keats felt when he read Chapman’s translation of Homer. That last image, of the ocean that was undreamed of by Cortés and his men, just rolls on and on in the mind, like a long chord, as vast and inspiring as the Pacific.

What provides the closure here is that we have switched from Homer to another realm, but one that vibrates with Keats’ feelings about discovering Chapman’s version of The Odyssey. The poem has shifted, but is still in the mode of awe, in fact, deeper in that mode because of the resonant image. The image Keats chooses is so much more expansive than someone sitting in a library reading a translation from ancient Greek. The image also reflects on how amazing a reading experience can actually be.

One contemporary poet who has mastered the art of ending on a resonant image is Joseph Millar. Millar has a way of finding a final image that engages the reader, brings together threads in the poem, but opens the door to deeper emotion or contemplation. 

Joseph Millar

In his poem “Labor Day,” for instance, Millar describes all the ways that labor is not being done on that holiday. The speaker is celebrating all those who have earned a day off because of their hard work. Instead of winding up with this theme, though, he ends with a cinematic image that encapsulates and expands the poem’s ideas and emotions:

the tuna boats rest on their tie-up lines

turning a little, this way and that.

This last image is a symbol of Labor Day itself, with the boats docked and not in use (and you know tuna boats see some serious fishing!). But that image also lets in another range of ideas and emotions, because of the restlessness of the boats in the water. This motion might suggest that Labor Day may be a time of repose, but it also highlights unresolved issues about those who work with their hands, and those who manage or profit from their labor.

Types of Closure in Poetry, Part 1, Part 3, Part 4

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Poets Are Rockin’ Out

Every poet has fantasized about starting a rock band and becoming the next Bob Dylan. Poet Cornelius Eady didn’t just dream about it, he went out and found some great musicians and a sweet-sounding back-up singer (the poet Robin Messing) and cut a double album he calls Book of Hooks. 

Cornelius Eady

He also published a double chapbook to go with it, so you can read his lyrics like poems. His topics run from the moving and serious “Last Known Address,” about an eighty-year-too-late pardon for a black man wrongly executed in Maryland for the murder of a white woman, to “Bed Bug,” a hilarious song about the critters in your sheets in the Big Apple:

Mama sighs, and shakes her head

But mama don’t live in New York City

Eady isn’t alone among serious poets who are turning to performance to find a wider audience for their verse. Poet Kim Addonizio shows up to her readings with a harmonica. 

Kim Addonizio

I attended a reading Kim gave at the low-residency writing program I teach in at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and a dude with a beard like a porcupine stood up in the middle of the reading and shouted to the whole audience that he was heading after the event to the Tap Root bar for a blues jam, and who was coming with him? Kim was the first to volunteer. Not only did she close her poetry set that night with a song she wrote that included a harmonica solo, she played a mean blues harp with the band at the Tap Root afterwards.

Hey, poetry started as a performing art, right? Homer’s epics were chanted to the lyre, the closest thing to a folk guitar in ancient Greece. Greek drama was written in poetry and performed in an amphitheater with a chorus. What’s this fetish about poetry only being on the page? I’m not talking about spoken-word poets, who are sometimes great performers, but often talk faster than the guy reading the fine print at the end of a radio ad for a car lease, so I often wonder what these poets’ work would look like if it was slowed down enough to read it. But “page-poets” are turning to performance now, too.

So next time you hear a song you like, you might actually be hearing poetry.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer

Working with a Writing Mentor, Part 3: When Should You Trust Your Mentor?

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The one person whose advice you should listen to absolutely without question is your mentor. Now, just by coincidence, I happen to be a mentor. Mentor is a word that comes from ancient Greek and means someone who has made endless mistakes over an entire lifetime. I’m joking, but it is true that over the course of decades in the arts, a mentor has made almost every possible error that a writer can make.

The reason this is good news for you, is that your mentor can perhaps prevent you from repeating some of those mistakes yourself.

In reality, the goddess Minerva in Homer’s Odyssey took the form of the character named Mentor to guide Telemachus in how to deal with those pesky suitors, who were hitting on his mom, Penelope.

Sometimes you don’t understand why your mentor is recommending certain changes in your work. Feel free to ask if you don’t see why your mentor is suggesting something. But at some point, if you are a creative writing student or a new writer, you sometimes have to take it on faith that your mentor is guiding you in the right direction. As the words of the spiritual go, We will understand it better, by and by.

That isn’t to say that you should follow your mentor without question. You should be particularly attentive to your mentor’s blind spots, and the places where your mentor’s aesthetic may not coincide with our own. Your mentor could be from an older generation. Things that make sense to your generation might seem odd to your mentor. Your mentor may be of a different background in terms of class, race, gender, sexuality, etc., and that might create areas of aesthetic disconnect.

That doesn’t mean your mentor’s advice is wrong, but it might mean that you have an area where your taste does not overlap. In those areas, just politely agree to disagree with your mentor’s opinions. But make sure you’re not doing that out of laziness about questioning your own assumptions or naiveté. 


Other recent posts about writing topics:
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka