Hannah Smart & Andrea Caswell • Craft Chats

Andrea Caswell
A CRAFT CHAT WITH HANNAH SMART

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Andrea: “The Detriment of Doubt” (Issue 44) is such a clever and creative piece. How did the idea for a 911-type call that’s not exactly a 911 call originate?

Hannah: I developed the concept for this story first. I knew I wanted to write a piece that questioned the nature of truth, and I knew that in order to do that, I’d need a scenario with lots of built-in assumptions about truthfulness. My fiancé and I were throwing around ideas, and one of his suggestions was a 911 call. Since 911 dispatchers are required to take callers at their word, I immediately knew it was the plot-grounding form I’d been looking for.

Andrea: You’ve written this story using only dialogue. Was that an original constraint or parameter, perhaps related to a prompt or exercise? If not, at what point did you decide to write it as a dialogue-only text?

Hannah: The story wasn’t in response to a prompt, but it did develop from the concept I mentioned above. I intended it to be all dialogue before I even started writing, because I figured that was the best way to literalize the idea of fictional unreliability. Nobody expects narrative prose to lie (and many readers feel a bit cheated when it does), but everyone knows people can lie, so putting narrative prose into someone’s voice allowed me to concretize narrative unreliability without tricking readers. I really wanted readers to contemplate the fact that every story is being told by someone, even if we don’t know who that “someone” is.

Andrea: “The Detriment of Doubt” includes multiple characters, and ultimately a nesting-box narrative structure, in which we discover a story within a story within a story. Tell us about that structure, and the challenges you encountered as a result.

Hannah: I’ve always been fascinated by metafiction, aka stories within stories. Metafiction is perhaps the main art form that allows creators to move throughout levels of narrative awareness and engineer parallels. That’s probably why writing metafiction is so exhilarating to me—it makes me feel like God. In a story whose whole premise is that things that present themselves as honest are often not, metafiction felt especially appropriate. I wanted the revelation that the purported “main story” was not even “real” to raise questions about the respective “realness” of the other stories too.

The main challenge I faced, which stemmed from the combination of metafiction and all-dialogue, was managing transitions between layers of storytelling. In traditional metafiction, one can simply break the fourth wall and inform readers of a transition, but the all-dialogue structure presented setbacks. I eventually decided on a scene-break, even though the new layer wasn’t technically a new scene.

Another challenge pertained to the ambiguity of who was speaking at any given time. Two-person back-and-forth dialogue is easy enough to manage, but once you add more characters to the mix, it becomes difficult to know who’s talking. I made a somewhat unnatural decision in the story’s latter section to partially deal with this (now that you’re looking for it, you’ll likely notice it while reading), while also leaning into it by giving most characters gender-neutral names. Due to the story’s themes, the decision to keep a bit of ambiguity ended up being the best choice.

Andrea: I’m so intrigued by the title. This phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in the story, but the experience of doubt is ever-present for the reader. Was this always the story’s title, or did it have other “working titles” before you decided on this one?

Hannah: I tend not to come up with titles until after I finish writing stories, and this one was no exception. However, certain titles come more easily than others. “The Detriment of the Doubt” came to me because as I was writing and editing, I kept thinking about the idiom “the benefit of the doubt,” and how readers who give these characters the benefit of the doubt will have their expectations subverted. From there, I decided to invert the idiom, and asked myself what the opposite of “benefit” might be. That question led me to this title.

Hannah Smart (who has previously published under the name Ambrose D. Smart) is a fiction writer and literary/pop culture critic. Her short stories have been published in or are forthcoming in West Branch, The Harvard Advocate, Puerto del Sol, The Rupture, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others, and her essays have appeared in The Boston Globe, Potomac Review, and The Sunlight Press. She is the founder and editor in chief of experimental journal The Militant Grammarian, a three-time presenter at the International David Foster Wallace Conference, and a writing studies professor at the University of Southern Mississippi. Visit her website.

Andrea Caswell runs Cleaver’s Short Story Clinic, offering detailed feedback on fiction up to 5500 words. Whether you’re wondering how to improve a story, getting ready to submit one to a lit mag, or preparing an MFA application portfolio, editorial feedback will be personalized to help you reach your fiction goals. Writers may also schedule a conference with Andrea as a one-on-one workshop to discuss their work further.