I sat in Fiction Writing class, both nervous and excited. Each of us in the class had written a story and given a copy to each other student, and we were taking turns getting our stories critiqued. My story, “August Fog,” would be the third one reviewed today, and as the discussion for the second story wrapped up, I kept anticipating in my mind what people would say about it.
Our stories could be about pretty much anything, and the stories my classmates wrote pretty much were about everything. A guy named Gary wrote about a guy who broke into someone’s dorm room and got caught. He said that he got the idea for the story while thinking about a time his dorm room was actually broken into, and picturing in his mind what kind of loser would do that, so he made the thief in his story a complete pathetic loser toward whom the reader would have no sympathy. A girl named Ariana wrote a tear-jerker about a girl whose boyfriend died in a tragic accident. I sincerely hoped that her story was not inspired by anything that happened to her in real life. A guy named Mike wrote an unusual story where the character just goes about his life, but the point of view occasionally switched to that of various inanimate objects that the character interacts with. I was still trying to wrap my head around that one.
After reading all of these over the last couple weeks, I thought that “August Fog” was pretty good. No typographical or grammatical errors that I could find, and it did not have perspective shifts like Mike’s story that made it difficult to follow. The setting and premise were fairly straightforward; a guy tries to work out his feelings for a girl, and he decides in the end that he is not ready for a relationship. While I was a little nervous to share my work with the class, I anticipated someone saying that I had so perfectly captured the tension of being someone my age with conflicted feelings toward a romantic interest.
“All right,” Serena Chang, the instructor, announced as we wrapped up the discussion of the story before mine. “Next up is ‘August Fog,’ by Greg. What did you all think?” The other students in the class shuffled the papers on their desks to their copies of “August Fog.” Some turned the pages, looking for notes they had written on the stories themselves. I felt a little like I was being put on the spot, but none of this was unexpected, since I had seen twelve other students have their stories critiqued over the last few class meetings.
“I’m a little confused,” said Ariana. Uh-oh. This was not a good sign, if that was the first thing someone said. Ariana continued, “We get all this character development for Dan, he’s kind of awkward and confused, but none of that really explains why he decides not to go out with Allison.”
What? I thought, how is this not obvious? Dan realized that he was not ready for a girlfriend, just like he said. And people who rush into relationships are stupid, so it was obvious that he would not want to be like that.
“I agree,” added another girl, Jenn. “I like Dan. He seems like the kind of character you’re rooting for. He’s awkward, yes, but he’s lovably awkward. The ending just seemed like a letdown to me. I was really hoping he would get his happy ending.”
No, I thought, silently protesting in my mind. The ending was perfect. The right thing is not to rush into a relationship when you still have so many unanswered questions, like Dan does, and he avoids temptation and does the right thing. Where was the letdown in that? Why did Jenn not see this ending as happy?
“I don’t see Dan’s awkwardness as lovable at all,” said Gary, the guy who wrote the story about his room getting broken into. I only knew Gary from this class, but I had gotten the impression all quarter that I did not particularly care for this guy. He wore a sweatshirt with the letters of his fraternity on it, and he always showed up to class looking like he had just rolled out of bed two minutes before. The thief character in Gary’s story, whom he called a pathetic loser in his response to everyone’s critiques, reminded me too much of myself, especially the part in the beginning of that story when the thief was talking to girls in chat rooms and getting rejected by them.
“Why didn’t you think Dan was lovable?” Jenn asked.
“He’s pathetic. He can’t talk to girls. And he’s weak. He knows Allison likes him, and he still won’t ask her out!”
I looked down toward the floor. I did not feel like having all of these eyes judging me so harshly. Of course, Dan was just a fictional character to the others in the class, but with the inspiration for my story so personal, their constructive criticism still felt like personal attacks.
“I do think that Dan is portrayed accurately and consistently,” Tim Walton said. Tim was my friend, I knew him from church and from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, and I very much appreciated that he seemed to be turning the discussion in a more positive direction. “Even if Dan’s motivation for his decision at the end isn’t completely clear, the reader definitely knows who Dan is by the end of the story.”
“I agree,” Jenn replied.
“But I think we need to see the same for Allison,” Tim continued. “We get a little bit of her personality. Friendly and quirky. But there’s so much more we could see with Allison. She’s a really fun character to read, and if we saw more of her, especially more direct interaction with Dan, we might be able to understand the ending more.” Finally, someone was saying something directly helpful. I nodded.
“Yes,” a girl named Christie said. “I agree. But I don’t quite get the title. The whole thing with the fog seemed kind of forced. I can tell why it’s there: the fog is supposed to be a symbol of Dan’s unclear mind, and then it goes away. But there’s no fog in August. So maybe the story needs to be set during a different time of year.”
Since my story was about Dan being home from school on break, I set the story in the summer, when school breaks happen, and in Santa Lucia County, where my own home was. If Christie has never seen fog in August, she obviously has not spent very much time in Santa Lucia County.
A few others continued to weigh in on Allison’s missing character development. I wrote down in my notebook that I would have to add more scenes with Dan and Allison together when I revised the story. I was feeling a little better about the kind of constructive criticism I was getting when Gary, the frat boy, opened his mouth again.
“I did have one part of the story I loved,” he said. “When he gets to Denny’s, and he says a prayer before he eats. That was hilarious! I laughed my ass off!” I looked at him, feeling a little confused, not understanding the point he was making. Gary continued, “But I kind of feel like that kind of joke doesn’t belong in a serious story. Maybe the story needs more humor, so the tone is more consistent.”
I puzzled over Gary’s comments as others added their thoughts. The part that Gary laughed so hard at was not a joke and not intended to be funny. What was he talking about? It took me a few minutes to make sense of Gary’s remarks: he thought that, when I mentioned Dan praying before his meal, I was trying to make a joke about the quality of the food at Denny’s. Gary thought that Dan was praying that he would not get sick from eating at Denny’s. Since the beginning of sophomore year, when I started going to JCF and my social circle shifted so that I was spending most of my time around Christians, I noticed that most of my friends prayed before eating a meal, and I had done so as well pretty much every day of my life for the last two or three years. But the concept of praying before a meal was apparently completely foreign to someone like Gary.
Mike, who wrote the story with the unusual shifts in perspective, said, “When I read this story, I got the sense that the reason Dan decided not to go out with Allison was because he doesn’t want to be tied down. He isn’t ready for a girlfriend because he wants to date around, he wants to party and be young and live his life, and he isn’t ready to give that up yet. I mean, he was on a date with another girl when he found out Allison liked him. Dan probably likes that other girl too.”
Totally wrong, I thought. Dan and Lisa are obviously just friends; that was not a date. And the whole purpose of dating was to find someone to marry. Do other people really not understand that?
“So we need to see Dan’s actions more clearly showing that he doesn’t want to be tied down,” Mike continued.
“I agree,” Gary said. “This guy is an immature weirdo, and the reader needs to see him being immature and weird.”
You will not see that, because that is not who Dan is, I thought.
“But I like Dan,” Jenn said, repeating her thought from earlier. “I don’t think he’s a weirdo! But if that’s the case, we need to see more of Dan and Allison interacting. Because I still don’t understand why he decided not to ask her out.”
“Definitely,” Tim agreed. “And we need more of Allison. Her character development is off to a great start, she’s an interesting character, but I feel like I need to know more about her.”
After a few more comments, Serena closed the discussion, as she had for all of the previous discussions. “Greg, do you have any response to any of these thoughts?” she asked.
I froze for a few seconds, not sure what to say. Eventually I said, “That was humbling.” A soft chuckle arose from some of the other students, and I continued, “This was the first time I’ve ever really shared a story with a large number of people who don’t really know me. I have a lot to think about.” I did not say anything else out loud.
Two more students had their stories critiqued after mine that day. When class was dismissed, Tim and I walked out of the room at the same time. “That was interesting,” I said to Tim, dejectedly. “I feel misunderstood.”
“Don’t take it personally,” Tim said. “You basically wrote a Christian story for a secular audience.”
“Yeah. I guess I did.”
After class, I walked out to the bench in the Arboretum that I thought of as my Bible Bench. During winter break of junior year, I went to the Urbana conference in Illinois with thousands of other Christian young adults, and all of the attendees had been given a plan to read through the Bible in a year by reading a few chapters every day. I had followed that plan, but usually only four or five times a week, so that I was now in my seventeenth month of reading the Bible in what should have been a year. But I was finally nearing the end.
After I did today’s readings, which were supposed to be for December 19, I looked out at the tall trees surrounding me, thinking about what had happened today. I really did see the world very differently from my peers, at least those outside of church and Jeromeville Christian Fellowship. This was not necessarily a bad thing; I knew that the Kingdom of God would win in the end. But having spent most of my socializing time the last few years around Christians, and without ever having had much of a secular social life before that, I was not often confronted with this difference in worldview as directly as I was today when people misunderstood my story. The Bible was full of messages about how God’s people were set apart from the rest of the world. But it was important for me to have experiences like this. If my mission as a Christian was to spread the message of Jesus to the rest of the world, I needed to understand how the rest of the world worked. I prayed about this, asking God to use this experience to teach me something about others, and about where I belonged in the world. If Gary was so flummoxed by the concept of someone giving thanks to God before a meal, I wondered what he would think about me praying now between classes.
A little bit later, I sat in the Memorial Union reading the comments that others had written about “August Fog.” Each student had a copy of my story. They wrote comments on the story as they read it, along with a sentence or two summarizing their thoughts about the story. After we discussed “August Fog” in class today, everyone gave me back their copies of the story, so that I could read their thoughts. Most of the comments paralleled what they said in class.
At the end of Tim’s copy of my story, he wrote, “The reader needs more character development with Allison, because she has a lot of depth from what I see so far. I like this character; she seems like someone I would want to meet and be friends with.” Allison’s personality was modeled after Sasha Travis, whom I knew from church. Tim went to that church too, but I did not think that Tim knew Sasha. Tim’s involvement at church seemed mostly confined to the college group, and Sasha was currently a senior in high school. But Sasha was staying in Jeromeville next year, so she would be part of the college group soon. I wondered if Tim would recognize that Allison was based on Sasha next year, when Tim and Sasha would both be in the college group. But I never said anything, because I did not want to reveal that Allison was based on Sasha, or that I liked Sasha.
We had a second story due in three weeks. We would be doing all the critiquing in one class period, in small groups, so I only needed to bring four copies of that one. I wrote another story about awkward social interaction; I called it “Try Too Hard,” because the character was trying too hard, and failing, to fit in with the cool group of friends. I had much lower expectations for people’s reactions to that story, since “August Fog” was so heavily criticized and misunderstood, and the others who read my story had the kind of reaction I expected. The character in the story dreads seeing his friend because of something terrible that happened at a party the night before. The others who read the story told me that I did a great job of building suspense, keeping the reader wondering what was so awful about the night before, but when I finally told about the actual awkward interaction at the party, it did not justify the huge buildup or the character’s intense frustration.
What I learned the most from sharing my story was not about writing. It was more about seeing firsthand how my perspective on many things was quite different from that of others. I had spent the last three years hearing messages for Christian students encouraging us to be intentional with dating and relationships, not to rush into things too fast, and to keep the end goal of marriage in mind. Most university students did not approach dating this way, so the message of “August Fog” was lost on them. And awkward moments, such as those in “Try Too Hard,” were devastatingly embarrassing to me, given my past, but no big deal to many others.
The final exam for the Fiction Writing class, due a week after “Try Too Hard” was due, was to revise the first story we had written. I took everyone’s suggestions for “August Fog” and expanded the flashback scenes to show more interaction between Dan and Allison. I wrote more humorous things for Allison to say, to establish that part of her personality more clearly. And I removed the line about Dan praying before his meal; the audience of this story did not necessarily consist of people who actually do such things, and that quote that Gary had so grossly misunderstood did not add much to the story.
For the final exam, there would be no sharing with peers; I just turned in one copy to Serena. She said that we could get our stories back, with her thoughts and our final grades, by stopping by her office during finals week. Serena said that in my revised version of “August Fog,” the characters were much more well defined. Dan was still the awkward young man confused by love, but the reader had much more of a sense of Allison’s character, which was missing from the first draft.
Serena’s suggestion for further revision, if I chose to continue developing this story, was to make more tension with Allison, and make the interactions between Dan and Allison more awkward. According to Serena, the information in the story still did not justify Dan’s decision not to pursue a relationship with Allison. The interactions between them seemed perfectly normal for this stage of friendship, so Serena suggested I needed to show exactly what made Dan so hesitant to dive into the relationship. She suggested, for example, making Allison a bit more overbearing, making her loquaciousness contrast more with Dan’s introversion. That makes sense, but that was not the reason I had in mind why Dan decided not to pursue the relationship.
At the end of Serena’s response to my revision, she wrote, “Your writing and your sense of fiction have improved a great deal over the last few months. I hope you continue writing. Good work!” My final grade for the class was an A-minus. I considered this a major victory, considering that Serena had made it clear on the first day of class that this was not going to be an easy class. She said that she had only given one A the last time she taught this class. Also, I had a mental block against English classes that went back to a teacher in high school whose teaching style clashed with my learning and writing styles. Since then, any time I did better than a B in an English class was cause for major celebration, so to me, an A-minus was a success.
I did continue writing, as Serena hoped. Over the course of the twenty-five years since I took that class, writing as a hobby has come and gone from my life, but it never went away completely. I have forgotten much of what I learned in that class, though. My major problem with “August Fog” and “Try Too Hard” was that I did not know enough about social interactions and relationships in the real world to write convincing fictional interactions and relationships. I do not know that I ever consciously improved this aspect of my writing. As I got older, though, I have learned more about others’ perspectives on socializing and dating, which I think automatically helped my writing.
I never did share “August Fog” with Sasha or any of her close friends. Tim said that he would want to meet someone like Allison. To this day, I do not know if Tim ever realized that Allison was based on Sasha, or if he even remembered my story by the time he met Sasha. But they did meet eventually; Sasha ended up married to one of Tim’s best friends, and Tim was a groomsman in their wedding. But that is a story for another time.
Readers: What is something you feel others often do not understand about the way you see the world? Tell me about it in the comments.
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