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Welcome to the Tuesday Telegrams, a semimonthly newsletter from award-winning author Naseem Jamnia. You're currently reading a writing-related Telegram, where I update you on projects, offer behind-the-scenes looks, delve into craft, and other publishing and writing topics.

This past weekend, I attended a three-day workshop retreat for professional novelists, hosted by Cat Rambo's Wayward Writers but taught by literary agent Don Maass and editor C.C. Finlay. Each morning, Don and Charlie gave us a craft talk related to issues that were common across our work to dig deeper.

On the first day, the topic was on points of connection in our opening paragraphs. I wrote about "thesis statements" in fiction a few newsletters ago, but this craft talk focused on how an opening can emotionally ground us in place and make us want to keep reading.

Don said that when we bring a story alive for a reader, it's not (only) because we've put words down on a page. Rather, we've reached into our reader's memory banks and brought forth a visceral connection to someone's own life. He said we do this primarily in two ways: visual (and other sensory) cues and emotional cues. Both of these rely on a reader's experiences.

If your story begins with a scene of crashing waves upon a shore, it relies on someone's experience at the waterfront. For Don, who grew up on Long Island Sound, water didn't crash upon a shore, and it smelled of garbage. But, he said, when he went to Hawai'i, he understood what it meant for waves to crash upon the shore and the briny smell of the sea.

The second thing that helps a reader exist within a story are emotional cues. If a character gets slapped across the face, you might lift your hand to your cheek and feel the sting of a dodgeball that hit you in fifth grade gym class, with the burn of shame in your throat as your classmates erupted into laughter. Is it the same thing? No, but it's a way to bring up experiential emotions in our readers to make them feel invested.

Everyone chooses a moment to open our stories: to meet our characters and the situation they're in. What fewer openings do, Don and Charlie argued, is ground us in place sensorially and emotionally, using a narrative perspective specific in its own experiences that then can trigger our own memories.

I asked Don and Charlie to throw my opening up on the board for a novel I've been working on for over a decade. While there was intrigued in the opening paragraphs, and skill in the prose (thanks, Charlie!), what it lacked was emotional connection. The opening of this novel is incredibly distant—purposefully so—but there is nothing to emotionally ground us to the child it's focusing on. Charlie then contrasted it to the opening paragraph of my first point-of-view character, which gave us strong imagery and emotional connection (minus one metaphor that was vague in its language) of not wanting to disappoint a mentor.

Of course, experiences are cultural, temporal, and individual. You can't have an imaginary of water on a shoreline if you've been landlocked your whole life. (In that case, your experiential understanding is likely based in whatever media you've seen and how that has commonly been portrayed.) If you've never had something smash into your face and felt the unique sting across such thin skin, then you may think a slap feels the same as someone smacking your arm.

I'm sure those of you who have been Telegrammers for a while will know where I'm going with this: What happens when your entire life is an unknown context for someone else? In the essay collection Ex Marginalia: Essays from the Edges of Speculative Fiction, Suyi Davies Okungbowa writes about the "exposition tax" that marginalized writers in particular face. "This is the thing every reader must understand," he writes:

So, me being me, I raised my hand and pointed out that experiential "relatability" with the reader is often weaponized against marginalized writers. I cannot tell you the number of rejections I've gotten that have complained that the editor didn't "connect with" the characters or story.

There's no doubt that there are editors who weaponize "relatability" against marginalized creators, consciously or not. On the flip side, every story takes us to a place that is not new, but every story also takes us emotionally to places that transcend specificity (though specificity is what brings it to life in our pages) and encompass a larger human experience. An Egyptologist client of Don's explained how in a papyrus trade ledger, where the trader wrote a note to their buddy the other trader, they lamented that their son has no ambition.

So Charlie reframed the idea as "points of connection." It's a fair thing to guess that just about everyone has walked into a place and felt either immediately at ease or immediately on edge, or have had feelings about not wanting to disappoint someone who has high expectations of you. It's not that you're changing what you're writing to reach a so-called "broad" audience. It's that you're bringing to light the emotional moments behind the specific situations that you can assume many people understand, with their own specificities flavoring the understanding.

When Steven Barnes was one of the guests of honor at the World Fantasy convention a few years ago, he mentioned something similar. As a Black man, he was writing genre fiction at a time when few Black writers were allowed in the room, and so he had to "write beyond race" in order to get his stories out there.

I think we can reframe this to appreciate and center that race (in this example) is something that colors the specificity of our experiences to say: Yes, and underneath that experience, there is also that of personhood. Walking into a room in Tuscaloosa in the early 1960s as a Black man where everyone else is white is not necessarily an experience a non-Black reader can understand. But many people understand what it's like to walk into a room and feel unwanted.

In some ways, this can be reductionist thinking, because our particularities and positionalities absolutely change how we experience a situation. That Black man likely wasn't just feeling unwanted, but unsafe, the threat of bodily and psychic harm palpable. But if we can make the reader go "Oh yeah, I know what it's like to realize you're not wanted in a space," we can then bring them along to the experiences they cannot relate to and make them feel invested and grounded in what they do.

Upcoming Events

I'm going to World Fantasy in Oakland at the end of October! Will I see any of you there?

​Solidarity Corner​

After discovering Lnk.bio, I've finally migrated my personal Linktree there! I currently in the midst of migrating my Solidarity Corner and updating those links.

I do want to share Telegrammer Eva Roslin's GoFundMe to keep them safely housed so they don't have to return to their abusive family. Eva is such an enthusiastic member of the spec fic community who is constantly uplifting others, whether that's via their stories or their mutual aid requests, and could use our support.

Plus, if you donate at least $10 and send me a copy of the receipt, I'll enter you to a giveaway to win a signed and personalized copy of either of my books!

If you have organizations, causes, or mutual aid requests you'd like me to spotlight here, please send those links my way. We get through these things when we do so together.

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