Joshua Henkin

		Joshua Henkin is the author of the novels Matrimony, a New York Times Notable Book, and Swimming Across the Hudson, a Los Angeles Times Notable Book. His most recent novel, The World Without You, will be out in paperback in April and was named an Editors' Choice Book by The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune and is the winner of the 2012 Edward Lewis Wallant Award and a Finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Awards. His short stories have been published widely, cited for distinction in Best American Short Stories, and broadcast on NPR's "Selected Shorts." He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and directs the MFA program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College. www.joshuahenkin.com Jhenkin@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Humming Fiction

A graduate student of mine recently asked me, "Can you ever have a character named Fred?" This wasn't an idle question. I'd been urging my students to read their work aloud. When you read your work aloud you hear things you wouldn't otherwise notice: clunky phrasing, misplaced rhythms, alliteration, internal rhymes. Hence the question about the character named Fred. What does one do about dialogue tags? "Fred said"? "Said Fred"? Both options call attention to the rhyme and make obtrusive what should be unobtrusive. The prose feels peppy when peppy might not be what you're looking for. You get what I like to call inadvertent Dr. Seuss-isms. Whatever you decide about naming your characters Fred, you should always be aware of the sound of the words because fiction, as Flannery O'Connor noted, is about the senses above all else. You need to hear the work. You need to feel it, touch it, smell it, taste it. A writer I know once said that, given the choice between the word with the right sound and the word with the right meaning, she would choose the word with the right sound. I agree. I have a home office that I share with my wife, and not infrequently she will look up and say, "Josh, you're humming." It's not a tune I'm humming but the words themselves, more a drone than a tune—I'm listening to the words as I type them on the page. Reading your work aloud also makes you slow down; it allows you to see the excess. It helps you cut things, which is one of the most important tasks of revision. A student of mine once said that a story should start at the last possible moment and end at the first possible moment. I agree. And this student wasn't even addressing everything in the middle, all that connective tissue that can be cut with a scalpel. Make your story so tight you think you can't eliminate another word. Then force yourself to cut twenty percent more. The work will be better for it.