Writer's Fallout Shelter

As has been previously mentioned, among other things, I'm a grad student in an English lit program. I've been studying William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow in Postmodern Fiction this semester. For those unfamiliar with Maxwell, he was an editor for The New Yorker, a prolific writer, and won many, many awards for his fiction. The professor teaching this course is the definitive expert on Maxwell. She not only wrote his biography, but also visited with him several times to discuss his fiction before his death in 2000.

So Long, See You Tomorrow is a cross between a memoir and a work of fiction. At its simplest level, it is the story about two boys coming of age in the Midwest in the first part of the twentient century, memory, and regret. It is told using an omniscient narrator, shifting between first person and third person POV. The first person POV is always the author-as-character, but the third person POV shifts between multiple individuals. In the latter part of the book, the third person POV is written through the eyes of one of the boy's dog. We see and know what the dog sees and knows.

Because she is an expert on this author, the professor had some query sheets -- what we would now think of as crits -- between the author and two editors at The New Yorker. In them, it becomes quite apparent that the editors did not like the scenes using the dog's POV. They indicated that it strained credibility and that no one would believe the scenes. From the tone, it was obvious they thought the notion was absurd and asked him to change it. While Maxwell conceded and negotiated with other suggestions, he held firm on using the dog's POV.

While discussing this book in class, several individuals commented that they cried during the dog's scenes and found them to be the most emotionally powerful moments in the book. The scenes worked.

When all is said and done, we, as writers, need to do what works for the story we are telling. Conventions and rules have a purpose and we need to know and understand them, but we should also feel free to move within them and push against the boundaries in order to tell the best story that we can.