Junot Diaz is unlike any author you've read before. A Dominican born artist raised in New Jersey, Diaz graduated from Rutgers and is now a professor at MIT. His style is so Postmodern yet also in a league of its own; a style that wraps around you and strangles you with pleasure as you strangle his book in a wild attempt to finish it as quickly as your eyes and brain will let you. I am here today to help guide you down the path to writing like this literary maverick as best I can, as I am not a modicum of the author he is.
1. Write what you know.
Before you begin character creation or world building or even fleshing out your plot you will already fall short if your aren’t writing what you know. This may seem common sense, but in writing like Diaz you NEED to write from experience. His voice is that of two friends sharing a beer in a bar (A). Diaz is telling you a story that happened to him: every detail fits because it’s real and it suspends you in the narrative because it flows so well.
2. Pick your character/narrator wisely!
They don’t need to be the main character, sh*t, they don’t even have to appear in the story until halfway through, or even until the end, but this character is so important. They should be street wise to a degree, they should know how the world works, even if they don’t fit in, but they should also have their head shoved up their own a**, so while they know how the world works they are too stupid to save themselves from their own shortcomings, which they should have in spades. Seriously, if your character is a country, f*ck ups should be their chief export. It’s important that most, if not all of them, shouldn’t blame themselves for their sh*t, even when it is so apparent that it hurts to read their bullsh*t. Make a motherf*cker who is a Voldemort, but who thinks he’s a Harry; or an Umbridge who would swear up and down the Quidditch field that she is Hermione.
3. (This rule flows into the last one) You need to stick hard to your narrative voice/embrace the voice.
The narrative voice should be a person in your story, a person as described above who will stop the narrative to tell you that they aren’t a bad person, who needs to justify some sh*t to you to be able to go to sleep at night without crying themselves into a shriveled mess. They will somehow know what everyone is thinking: Don’t worry about how this could be possible, just make it work. Take any racial slurs associated with your character, take everything that was meant to hold your character and their people down and reclaim it as your own. I’m Italian, so I’d make a character who isn’t suave, pale as a ghost, call him a Goomba motherf*cker, call him a greasy pepperoni, take everything negative and embrace it to death. Your narrator should be proud of their race, but also a little resentful to everyone not included under the umbrella arm of their race/region. Everything should allude to their race, to the old country. People should be fat Capones or crafty Gottis (B). But be warned, never insult the reader for their ignorance, take the high ground.
4. Mix intelligent speech with colloquialisms.
Talking about someone who is conservative with drinking? Say the dude drinks like Elliot Ness on a Sunday, then in the next sentence call him a little b*tch. This blend of “high” and “low” speech will draw your reader in. On top of all the merda your character goes through that will resonate with your reader, this blending of speech will make them comfortable, will keep their interest even when your narrative slows down for extra detail or while the proverbial action is lulling.
5. Manipulate your timeline.
Introducing a tertiary-tertiary character? Tell us how homeboy dies in 53 years. Start a narrative, interrupt it with an aligning story, then get back on course. Finish the action and then tell us what happens to them years later. Preferably, race past the final point and come back to it in a flashback for effect.
6. Final gimmick.
You need something else to make your piece stand out (C).
A. Dude says some sh*t that will make you piss your pants, like that time your friend told you on that trip to the aquarium in second grade, when he wasn’t paying attention when he was at the urinal thinking instead of that cute girl who sits next to him that he hopes on forming the first semblance of a “relationship” with, and ends up pissing all over his pants. You can’t make that sh*t up!
B. Because that’s all we are to you right? A bunch of criminal meatballs or murderous, conquering rapists. Overlook that five minutes of Italian-American history your 5th grade American history book was so generous to allow us the space for. Forget the fact that, despite extreme prejudice we faced coming to this country, we worked our a**es off to build New York and Chicago among other cities into what they are today, forget the fact that we have some of the greatest athletes and musicians and actors of all time. That’s cool. We are ok with being your villians.
c. I don’t know what. Maybe footnotes
