Rivka Streicher: character, statements, and the hammering action toward growth
Just out, On Paper is a short story collection featuring imaginative stories about contemporary characters discovering themselves and finding unexpected connection. The stories are intriguing and atmospheric and feature unique settings that transport the reader on a journey through the soul.
Rivka Streicher is a fiction and nonfiction Family First contributor and instructor at The Summer School of Writing. In addition to On Paper, she published Song of the Sea, a teen novel.
Most of your stories are character based, with the action taking place inside the character’s mind. You use unique characters and settings to keep things interesting. How do you pull together the recipe and balance the elements?
Most of these stories were written for Mishpacha’s Calligraphy, for which they want plot-driven stories. Meaning that although we’ll have developed characters in the stories, and we’ll see character growth, the plot has to be compelling in its own right, there has to be a lot happening. To me, what’s in a character's head is almost the whole story. So I've really had to work a lot on making things happen. In the story By Design in the past Sukkos’s Calligraphy, two sisters were worrying about their mother and it turned out she’d become a stewardess. That was definitely ‘things happening’, and an out-of-the-blue plot twist at that. But it all goes back to character because the story is in the protagonist’s reaction to it - with judgement or not, what she ultimately did etc.
The collection is made up of stories that have been featured in Mishpacha, some of them years ago. What was the experience of looking back at your old writing like, as you compiled the stories? Where do you see your growth as a writer? Were there things you wish you could have done differently?
This collection spans almost ten years, and I only put in the stories I was okay with, I dropped some that didn’t feel quite right. I think I started writing with a fair amount of presumptuousness and when I went back to reread, some of the stories just weren’t sensitive enough. Looking back, there was clear improvement on the writing side of things, but more than that, life experiences make you think differently and that development is reflected in the writing. I did enjoy going back and delving into old stories again. It was a joy to meet old characters and find some pretty good lines. So there was both clear growth and appreciation for my earlier work.
Together with Rochel Samet, you give writing courses, The Summer School of Writing. In your work coaching writers, what do you see as the biggest difference between a lame story and a great one?
There has to be a clear story arc, a beginning, middle, and end. I don’t mean a full circle, because you don’t have space for that in a short story, but at least a half-circle. Think of an arc going from East to West; sunrise to sunset. The sun moving, the day passing, that’s your plot so to speak, but we’re just as interested in your character and how they ‘moved’ in the story.
Sometimes you can have a bunch of things happening in the story, but no growth on the part of the character. When they shift towards some change that’s when it’ll feel like a satisfying story, even if it’s far from being tied up with a bow. This is definitely something writers need guidance with, and we learn to put it into the planning and structuring stages, and then follow through with the writing.
Scion, about the new father grappling with his past as a Rebbe’s son, is such a great example of one of your stories that doesn't wrap up with a bow, because we don't see a family unification. All we see is the character acting on some kind of internal shift, and we only know the internal shift happened because he starts to take action.
What I often do to show that an understanding, realization, or shift has happened within the character, is to hammer that home with an action. It could be the smallest thing. In that story, the character, Aron, “follows the signs to Jerusalem.” From that you understand that he was going to his father for a bracha for his child’s health. I was actually grappling with this story’s ending. In a way, I very much wanted to have a scene where he reunites with his father, but it was already a very long short story. We’d seen enough. What was left was for him to take the first in a series of actions that would lead to the resolution the reader was rooting for. An epiphany itself wouldn’t have quite done it, we needed the ‘hammering action’ of him getting in the car and driving to Jerusalem.
I’m a subscriber to your great email newsletter, in which you and Rochel Samet share writing tips, with lessons often drawn from other literature. You draw from a huge range of secular fiction, from classics to pop fiction. How do you think understanding writing techniques, and looking out for them, affects the average reader's experience?
I would say that it broadens and deepens the experience. It thrills me to see what the author’s doing, and at the same time, it doesn’t take me out of the story. Somehow I’m still being taken on the journey the author intends. I’m thinking about Jodi Picoult because I shared a bunch of snippets of her work lately. Her writing has incredible metaphors, and I love the images she creates with words. I'm not analyzing as I’m reading, what I do is register that it’s something fabulous and that’s where I bend the page to go back later to figure out “What did they do here to make it hit me in that way?”
Your emails generally feature a method or technique for enhanced writing. Some of your recent emails focused on techniques like advanced metaphors and opinionated dialogue. When looking at these techniques as tools in the toolbox of writing, it can seem like writing is all a bunch of lego blocks stuck together. Where do you think the art is, and where is the science?
Some of the techniques I share are very advanced, butI share them because I love to share beautiful writing, they broaden our ideas of what could be done. For me, the science and formula come in during the planning, and maybe also the editing. I plan the settings, what each scene will be, the growth, the epiphany etc. Once I've done that, I'm in art mode. And my gut speaks up as I'm writing, when I’m in a scene. If you think about a story, everything happens within the context of a scene, like a movie where you go from scene to scene. You're not just doing paragraphs of thoughts or dialogue outside of the scene. It’s all strictly within. So you have five or six scenes to play with, and then you cut after each one. Cut, cut, cut. Getting into the scene is where the art is.
This summer Mishpacha writers did a development course with Bassi Gruen which was perhaps more ‘scientific.’ She had us think about theme in our stories. She said each story has a theme that could be a phrase. I’m writing a Pesach-themed story for Family First now about a mother and her son. They have a difficult relationship, and now that she's retired, she's trying to work on it. The theme would be: “Real connection is hard, but worth it”. It’s a statement.? For me, it’s helpful to identify theme like that because I'll often overwrite. And if I know my theme, at the end I can go back and ask, is this playing into my theme? For example, in the story, my protagonist had a conversation about perfectionism which was insightful, but at the end of the day, it was extraneous. It had nothing to do with the theme. If I had infinite space, no problem, we could meander, but I don't, so that would be a clear thing to take out.
A number of your stories have people who are solidly in a stage of life reaching across their stage of life to experience something that the world might think isn’t for them. And it shows the fragility of our stability, where everything is all set up to work as long as everyone keeps their place. But then someone steps out and things happen. The singer’s mom, the discontented grandmother… what do you think about the interplay between a plot that you’ve chosen and the character’s stage of life you put them in?
The classes on theme with Bassi made me realize that maybe all of my stories could be distilled into five themes, or maybe even just one if you really get down to the essence. I’d say my stories look at “connection, even when…”
What you’re talking about here plays right into that. If the end goal is connection, I’ve set up a natural barrier. To look at the stories you mentioned, we have a mom who has little to do with her celebrity son who doesn’t consider her part of his circle, and a grandmother who has little in common with her struggling granddaughter, I’ll often have the character defy expected norms in order to lead back to the connection.
In the case of the older mom, she pretends to be a fan. The grandmother, she gets her ears pierced. Yes, both of these challenge stereotypes and accepted norms specifically for the age/stage/type of character.
Sometimes life is invisible until there are these surprises or unexpected dynamics that let us hone in on what’s going on.
The title story, On Paper, is powerful and unique. What was your inspiration for the story’s very surprising premise? And can you walk through how you went with that to construct the story?
My ears and eyes are open. So whenever I hear or see something that sparks my interest, I'm like, "Okay, could this be a story?" The story, On Paper, came from hearing about a way that people play the system, divorcing on paper in order to get more government social benefits. I was like, Hey, what if somebody did this and didn’t have a great marriage? How might that play out? It took me all the way to a woman who might have wanted to ask for a divorce so many times before. And what I wanted to explore in the story was, how could this paradoxically bring the couple closer? The story was in the making for a while, though especially with all the legal bits.
You write and teach together with Rochel Samet, sort of a dynamic duo. How did the two of you meet? What is the biggest difference between both of your writing styles?
We met at a Soferet writers’ Chanukah party in England. I was living in London, and Rochel was living in Gateshead. We just started talking shop and became friends. And now we both live in Israel. We started writing for Mishpacha around the same time. Rochel is a more structured writer than I am, she’s much clearer on the ‘science’ - the building blocks of a story. I’m more of an art girl and can get hopelessly lost with a metaphor, for better and worse, I suppose, and I definitely have what to learn from her!
You haven’t written a full-length serial story or novel in years, but last Fall, you ran a six week installment mini-serial in the Family First, Impressions. You’ve now just started another teen one. Compared to full-length, what are the challenges and opportunities this concise format presents when planning a story?
It’s an extension of the short story, just with a bit more scope. Obviously, you can't do everything that you could do in a serial. And that has pros and cons. With a proper serial, you would have another viewpoint, you can't tell a whole serial from one person's perspective. And that essentially gives you two stories, because each main character comes with their own set of families, dynamics, and challenges. Those storylines - sometimes there are more than two - have to intertwine. It’s just a much bigger project. A mini-serial is like my happy place right now. It’s not as complicated or complex. I do want to write another full-length serial though one day. That’s definitely a dream.
You’ve written many nonfiction articles for Family First and Mishpacha, the true accounts of individuals with fascinating life stories that read like fiction. How do you infuse creativity and bring a story to life when working with hard facts of someone’s real story?
I love writing people’s stories. I get as much detail as I can from them and work with that. At the end of the day it’s their story, their experience. What I add is a little imagination, the emotions behind those details. If someone tells me they moved a lot in childhood and how unstable that felt, I imagine what that experience was like: cardboard boxes, suitcases, always feeling unsettled. I try to build the emotional experience around the details. Usually, I’m not far off. People have told me they’re in tears after reading their own stories,
It’s a very interactive process. When I write real stories, we go back and forth. I send it to the narrator, they review it, and we tweak the parts that don’t quite fit.
In general, they give me the hard facts, and I build from that, bringing the experience to life. It’s still creative, but it doesn’t require quite as much as fiction. Fiction is wonderful—but exhausting.
If you could write a sequel or a more fleshed-out version of any of the stories in the collection, which would it be?
Almost every time I write a short story, I think it may as well be a serial. I know the characters so well and put so much into it. Really any story could be expanded, particularly the ones with a lot of backstory, like the first story, "Scion". I’d love to go back and write the story that led to this one.
What have you read recently that you’d recommend?
Within frum literature, Shortchanged [out of print] is one of my favorite books. I love Etka Gitel’s writing in general, and in that book found the characters absolutely lovable, plus I really enjoyed the immersion in the Depression era. Another great book is Promise Me Jerusalem by Chany Rosengarten which offers a window into Jerusalem 50–60 years back, and a strong sense of, not just the historical, but the cultural divide. It’s beautiful writing and really makes you think.
In secular literature, I’d say that Kristin Hannah is a fabulous writer and she really puts us into time and place. Her book, The Great Alone is set in Alaska andstands out for its sense of setting and place. Maggie O’Farrell is probably one of my favorite authors. Shout out specifically to Hamnet and The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox. She explores characters who are a little different, perhaps today they might get labeled ADHD or autistic, or they just think a bit too much, but how back in the particular societies she explores, Shakespeare’s time, or even just a few decades ago, they could face enormous consequences for their difference.
With both of these authors, you aren’t guaranteed fully happy endings, but the books are deeply human, despite the farthest reaches of time and place, and are beautifully written.