How to Write Foreign Service Fiction

For years during and after my Foreign Service career, I'd been entertaining people with tales of my life overseas, so I figured it wouldn't take much effort to turn those anecdotes into published fiction. I started to put my thoughts into action three years after leaving the Foreign Service, when I enrolled in a class at Lane Community College in Eugene, Ore. to learn how to write short stories. As is typical of writing classes, it was a writing workshop in which students shared copies of finished work so that we could critique each other.

My first piece was based on a day I spent with the CIA station chief's right hand woman in an outpost on the eastern edge of El Salvador. I jammed spooks, guerrillas, Contras and Navy Seals into fewer than ten pages. Hot stuff, I thought, as I daydreamed about who would play my heroine in the movie version.

Puzzling stuff, was the reaction of my classmates. I had expected them to pepper me with questions about Salvadoran politics and geography. Instead, they wanted to know why my heroine had agreed to accept the CIA operative's glib explanation and make the trip with her? Why was she so surprised to learn that the spook had a hidden agenda, and so on?

My heroine's behavior didn't make sense to readers. Her motivation was fuzzy, so the story wasn't believable. Never mind that I'd stuck to the facts as I remembered them. I'd come up against the hard truth of fiction writing: veracity doesn't automatically confer verisimilitude. When I'd related the same events aloud, my listeners knew I was talking about something that Really Happened, and gave me instant credibility. Readers, I learned, are harder to please.

Readers don't care about what really happened if a story is not written to fulfill their expectations. They expect main characters to be changed in credible and convincing ways by events. When a character undergoes this type of change -- usually referred to as an "epiphany" -- readers are convinced that the emotional life depicted in the story is real, which is more important than whether the details of that life are accurate. Even in genres like mystery and science fiction where there is more emphasis on plot, editors are looking for a character-driven fiction. In short pieces, character alteration can be subtle. In his book on writing, Esquire magazine fiction editor Rust Hills calls fiction with faint shifts of attitude "come-to-realize" stories. By the final page of the story, because of what happens to him in the story, the hero "comes to realize" a truth of which he was previously unaware. If he were sent back to page one to repeat the initial scene, it would not play out in precisely the same way. Applying this test, my first effort wasn't fiction, but was "a slice of life in El Salvador." Because the characterization was muddy, the piece lacked a satisfying conclusion.

I needed more readers willing to give me honest feedback. Luckily, I wasn't alone. A half-dozen of us from that first class formed a support group and began meeting on alternate Thursday nights for in-depth critiques of each other's work. Seven years later, we're still meeting. I credit these painstaking "first readers" with teaching me where my Foreign Service experience works as story -- and where it doesn't.

One of the benefits of living overseas is becoming intimately familiar with a foreign setting. The challenge for an author is to use those intriguing details effectively. In The Art of Fiction, novelist and renowned teacher of writing John Gardner argues that it is the writer's job to create a vivid and continuous dream in the reader's mind. The writer makes the dream believable by piling up concrete images and authenticating details. Except, as I learned, that pile can't be too big, or readers get confused and overwhelmed.

Mystery novelist James Lee Burke showed me one way to handle the problem.

In his detective series set in Louisiana, Burke's hero lunches on boudin, admires an improbably colored sky, smells rotting tropical flowers with peculiar names, takes his family out to a crab boil and crunches to a crime scene over a road surfaced with crushed shell. Descriptive material is larded throughout the story in one- and two-line bursts. The sights, scents and sounds of Burke's Louisiana remain in the background so that readers can follow the plot without knowing what boudin looks like or how crab gets boiled. The resulting atmosphere is both exotic and mysterious. Still, despite the untranslated expressions, the reader always knows what's going on. Quite an achievement -- one I work hard to emulate when I write about places where my readers have never been.

My critique group also demanded that description do more than catalog what the main character looks at. They weren't satisfied when my heroine drove by a McDonald's Restaurant in San Salvador and saw a teenage guard with an M-16 beneath the Golden Arches. They wanted me to show -- not tell -- what she was feeling. I didn't really understand their criticism until I reread Joan Didion's famous essay, "In El Salvador," from the November 4, 1982 New York Review of Books. Didion also noticed the ubiquitous, gun-toting Salvadoran guards, but she saw them fingering their triggers, clicking their safeties on and off and taking aim "as if to pass the time." Her edgy images went beyond my snapshot and conveyed an oppressive sense of menace.

Another aspect of setting is peculiar to Foreign Service fiction. If the characters are State Department or other government employees, the writer must include accurate information about the way the U.S. government operates abroad. Despite -- or maybe because of -- having worked in an embassy, including these kinds of details effectively was far more difficult than I imagined.

Six months into my new career, I took a second class on writing book-length fiction. I hoped to pull my story ideas into a novel set at my first post, El Salvador. To guarantee accuracy, I made my heroine a vice-consul, just as I'd been. My classmates were intrigued, but they didn't understand consular work. The harder I labored to answer their questions, the more questions they asked. I showed my heroine in action, interviewing nonimmigrant visa applicants. I showed her complaining to her friends, being scolded by her boss and trying to explain immigration law via telephone to an irate caller. I wrote pages of prose conscientiously portraying the daily tedium, stress and illogic of my heroine's job. I was accurate, but I was also boring. And not one page I wrote was essential for the story I wanted to tell. Choosing to write what I knew best had gotten in my way.

I tried to avoid that mistake when I started another novel. I gave my heroine the kind of budget-and-finance job I could summarize in a few lines. And I kept her moving around inside the embassy, carrying on high-energy dialogues with a paranoid security officer, a hormonally charged Marine, a slimy CIA type and a talkative communicator. In 1995, that second "practice novel" won first place in a contest sponsored by the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. Yet, it didn't win the heart of a publisher. As one put it in a rejection letter, "Your novel needs more dramatic tension and momentum; it's handicapped by your attempt to realistically portray the responsibilities of your main character." I knew this critic wasn't looking for an unrealistic story. State Department procedures have to be correct. If readers spot mistakes, they'll lose interest in the story. But to hold reader attention, the writer has to choose authenticating details that are fresh, intriguing and compelling. Alas, my own undramatic career was top heavy with information about packout, language training and EERs. I could make those details accurate, but I couldn't make them interesting.

I was starting my third novel by then and I realized that the time had come to cut my heroine loose from the specifics of my own experience. I assigned her to the Secretary's Counterterrorism Office, where I'd never worked. I gave her a job tracking terrorist threats against American personnel -- the kind of sexy work that somebody ought to be doing at State. I lifted most of the authenticating detail I needed from State Magazine's "Bureau of the Month" department, where every word is unclassified. When I finished that manuscript, I sent it to a New York literary agent. She suggested a few editorial changes, including a new title. In November 1996, ten days after putting 12 Drummers Drumming on the market, I not only sold it, but also sold an unwritten sequel.

I also managed to publish my thoughts on that long ago day-trip in El Salvador. After a half-dozen attempts to turn it into fiction, I finally re-wrote it as a first-person anecdote. It appeared on my publisher's web site as an essay entitled, "I Never Worked for the CIA." So that's the end to my happy story? I doubt it. Even now, in my writerly heart, I don't want to believe what I know to be true: Real life often stubbornly refuses to become good story. Instead, you have to make it up as you go along.

Diana Deverell, an FSO from 1981 to 1989, served in San Salvador, Warsaw and Washington D.C. She's published two novels and short stories featuring FSO Katherine "Casey" Collins. Her first novel, 12 Drummers Drumming, is available in paperback. The sequel, Night on Fire, was published in July 1999.