Conversation with Jacob Baugher

Jacob Baugher is a writer, musician, and an assistant editor for Flash Fiction Online. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he earned his MFA in fiction from Seton Hill University and taught creative writing and composition at a small university in the Ohio Valley. Currently, he works for the public library system and plays in a progressive emo band called Cokeworks. You can find his work in Incensepunk Magazine, Black Hare Press, Radon Journal, Flash Fiction Online, and forthcoming from Abyss & Apex.

Jacob is the author of “Into the Blue” from Issue 10.

Q: Your professional work has spanned multiple realms of the literary & writerly worlds. How has your varied professional experiences shaped you as a writer?

This is such an interesting question, but I’m not sure how to answer it. I think I try to tie everything back to writing—How can I use this experience? What can I learn here? How can I grow? Story drives pretty much everything—from commercials and hard news, to essays, to direct mailers fundraising for a non-profit.

Overall, I think what’s shaped me more than anything is realizing that good writing isn’t writing the best sentence or the most interesting character, it’s connecting with the reader. That’s the whole point of the craft. If you’re not connecting with your intended audience, then what’s the point?

Q: You have an MFA and have taught university writing courses. Has teaching creative writing impacted your own creative process?

Definitely. Teaching writing and actually writing are two different skillsets. Success in one field doesn't necessarily correlate to success in the other. Teaching the craft really made me slow down and ask myself “What am I doing? Why does this or that work? What isn’t working, and why?”

Really, a lot of teaching is breaking complex topics down into easily digestible information that can be practiced and replicated by the student. Take description, for example. Generally, there are four types of descriptive sentences: scientific, sensory, emotional, and poetic. Naming these “types” allows students to practice each individually and helps to build their toolboxes.

Quantifying and understanding what makes certain stories “publishable” and what makes others “not yet market ready” has been incredibly valuable for me personally.

Q: What did you most often see done wrong in the writing classroom?

Teaching fiction is such a difficult subject—both for teachers and for students. I’ve found that my most successful students approached their classes with a measure of humility: they recognized that they’re in the class for the purposes of developing their talent.

When learning is approached from a place of ego, the student suffers, as does the class as a whole. Growing up in athletics, I sort of adopted the philosophy of “Coach, I may not agree, but you’re the coach and I am the athlete, so I’ll try my best.” In my classes, I made a deal with my students: You may not like my critiques, but try to approach them as an exercise. After the class is over, if you still hate it, you can always change it back. You win in the end, regardless.

Effectively teaching the craft is incredibly difficult. It’s not systematized. Most primary school English classes focus on argumentative essay writing, literary analysis, and grammar. Creative Writing is usually an optional elective. There isn’t a graduated textbook/workbook system that gives teachers tools to develop fiction writers throughout primary and secondary education. Sure, there are a plethora of craft books, but often those are written for adults and discuss an individual author’s or editor’s personal experiences, not tested, tried-and-true concepts that can be communicated to students in a class of 20–30.

So, most young authors get to college with little-to-no formal “training” in the craft, and probably one or two bad habits or misconceptions that they’ve picked up from their own research. The professor now has two responsibilities: to teach the basics of the craft andbreak down any (sometimes toxic) misconceptions students may have about the process (an example here being the idea of the “Holy First Draft”).

Now the instructor has a dilemma. Should he focus on poetics or structure? Genre conventions or characterization? Plot? Description? Voice? Perspective? Not to mention the plethora of questions that have been brewing in students’ minds since they decided they want to be a writer. (How does the industry work? How do you develop an idea into a story? Should I pay money to someone to publish my book? [Never!])

The instructor has about three and a half months to cram all this into the curriculum for an undergraduate Creative Writing class and that doesn’t even take into account other forms of writing like creative non-fiction and poetry. Entire courses could be taught on some of the above concepts/questions, but the time allotted for discussion, even in advanced writing classes, is often a day or two, at best. Unfortunately, this may be the only formalized education young authors get in this subject, barring acceptance to a good MFA program or writing workshop.

Unless we have drastic changes in this country, this cycle will repeat itself in perpetuity. In our current education system, the art of writing can’t be taught en masse, but requires close apprenticeship under an experienced and compassionate mentor, with the student’s best interests at the heart of the relationship.

Just as the student’s ego cannot supersede the pursuit of knowledge, the instructor’s ego cannot supersede the student’s success. There is no “one way” to teach the art of story. The student’s pursuit of knowledge is often a journey of self-discovery—a mirror to the classic story arc. The instructor’s mentorship therefore, cannot center around their own experience, but rather it should be driven by the question: How can I make this concept resonate with this particular student?

Q: Can you tell us a bit about your Substack project, The Archetypist?

The Archetypist sort of grew out of the pandemic when I lost my teaching position. I had a bunch of former students contact me, asking for resources that I’d developed for my classes. I decided to make those resources available to the public—first through the podcasting medium (we had a season back in 2021 on Spotify under the same Archetypist brand) and then we switched to the Substack format, as both myself and my co-host had young children, and finding quiet time to record audio and have a real conversation was becoming near-impossible.

I personally believe that all knowledge should be public knowledge. Charging people for classes/access to knowledge just doesn’t make me feel super great about myself. I understand that people need to live/pay bills/eat, but also that model “reserves” knowledge for the elite (much like the University system does). We try to strike a balance of providing free content and paid editing services/critiques.

Currently, my co-host is doing a series of craft book reviews. I’ve been taking a bit of a step back in the first half of the year because my personal life is heating up with two young kids, my own writing, editing clients, and working for the public library and assistant editing for Flash Fiction Online. I do have a few articles planned for later in the year: I want to do a total plot breakdown of the Andor series on Disney+, re-start my Beginnings are Hard series, where I break down the first 500 words of successful novels using a highlighting system, and I have an idea brewing for a series on anti-fascist literature.

Life is busy, though, so we’ll see.

Q: “Into the Blue,” uses frequent second-person narration that feels like a defining feature of the story. What did the second person allow you to explore here that fully first or third person could not?

I really wanted this story to feel personal, like a letter written after the fact while the character processes the events of the story. But it’s not an epistolary story. I also wanted the focus to be how Eli helps Florence and not on Eli’s triumph as a character or overcoming his fear of flying.

I had the privilege of being with my grandmother during her final days back in 2021, and helped administer a lot of her pain management and other hospice care. That experience directly influenced this story, I think.

My grandmother was the best person I knew. She helped raise all of us grandkids, volunteered at the local hospital, broke my cousin out of a scientology building in New York, raised another of my cousins after my aunt (my grandmother’s daughter) died unexpectedly, and so much more. She had done so much for everyone in her life and I (and everyone else helping) wanted to give back to her, help her peacefully pass on. This necessitated a sort of “dying to oneself.” My sister, cousin, mother, and I took shifts so, if she passed, she wouldn’t be alone. We all put off our personal comfort and desires so we could be there for her.

I’d be lying if I told you that writing this story in second person was an intentional choice . . . but I think it was an instinctual choice because of that experience.

I debated adding in another section at the end, a sort of epilogue or wrapping up where Eli processes the events of the story. After my grandmother died, I remember walking up to a bedroom, sitting against the wall and just sobbing, letting it all out, and feeling like the world was somehow darker or worse simply because she wasn’t in it anymore.

Ultimately I cut that scene. The point was to get Florence over the finish line. It was a story about love, self-sacrifice to help someone else, and the lengths we go to for the people we care about. It wasn’t a story about grief, it was a story about overcoming.

To sum up, I felt 3rd or 1st person would center Eli’s experiences, but Florence drives the story, and the 2nd person centers her.

Q: Without spoiling too much, skydiving becomes a powerful metaphor in this piece. How did you land on skydiving as the vehicle for themes of surrender and freedom?

Again, I’d like to pretend it was all planned, but the idea to include skydiving came to me fairly quickly as a “cool thing” and not an intentional thematic choice. I had the idea for the technology—a machine that uses synthetic hormones, VR, and AI to create novel experiences for hospice patients so they can feel fulfilled. I toyed with a lot of different ideas of what Florence would want. Some of them made it into the story as ideas she’d discarded/what other people have chosen. Ultimately, I settled on skydiving because it’s so far out from what you’d think an “old lady” would want to do.

Also, I think that in our own lives, there’s so much technology. We go from our smartphones to podcasts in the car to work computers to smartphones to music on the way home from work, to Netflix after dinner to personal computers for paying bills and personal projects, to smart phones, to bed. Then we wake up and do the whole thing over again five days a week. Like—really—when’s the last time any of us have truly felt “alive” like we did when we were kids?

I wanted Florence to be keyed into that. Back in high school I worked in food service at a nursing home, usually in the Assisted Living wing, but also in the Health Care Center and the Complex Care/Memory/Dementia ward. To my eyes, very few residents were happy there. They felt abandoned by their families, ignored/dismissed by nursing staff, totally out of control of their own lives. This isn’t to say it was a “bad” nursing home, but the residents there were going through a lot of complex emotions, all while facing down death and that they’re sort of on the back nine.

Skydiving seemed to me to represent the antithesis of the rigid structure those residents had, a callback to the thrill of childhood, and a conceptual experience the average person would relate to. You won’t catch me jumping out of a plane—I got anxiety just calling around the places in Baltimore for research—but it’s something most people have thought about.

Theme and “Message” to me is something that arises naturally from a piece, and is really sharpened during revision, not something that is written to in the first draft.

Q: What was the hardest part of this story to write?

This was actually one of my easiest pieces to write. I freewrote about four pages and wrote the original flash-fiction-length draft in one sitting, sent it around to beta readers, and submitted it. It made the final round at the contest I’d submitted it to, but was ultimately rejected. When I sent it to Radon, you all asked for me to expand it into a full short story. I was thrilled, but I’d written the story in, like November, and got the R&R in early-mid March. To me, the hardest part was jumping back into a piece that was “done” in my head, and taking it from 1,000 words to ~3,500.

Q: What do you look for when finding your next sci-fi read?

Right now, I feel most drawn to stories with a strong voice or stories that do narratively interesting things. The slow creep into 2nd person in Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang, the incredible narrative depth of Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, and the very fun point of view twist in Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Q: What was your MFA experience like?

I had a great experience at Seton Hill’s “Writing Popular Fiction” MFA program. It’s a low-residency program, so most of it was online and we stayed at the campus two weeks out of the year (once in January and once in June). The program consisted of a thesis project, which, for me, was a High Fantasy novel, various genre reading courses, and craft classes. It’s mentor-driven, and I was lucky enough to be paired with Paul Goat Allen, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Blue Ink, Barnes & Noble, and Timons Esaias, who has published too many short stories to count and whose work appears in Analog, Asimov’s, the Year’s Best SF, and many other publications.

I started the program right out of undergrad and it was sort of a trial by fire. I’d never finished a novel before and I was just getting my feet wet in the writing world. I wish I could go back and do the program again, now that I’ve matured as a writer. I feel like I’d get so much more out of it a second time around.

I used to tell my students, though, that you get out of it what you put into it. The program won’t make you a bestseller, it won’t make you a published author. It will give you access to the experiences and critiques from incredible mentors, and all the tools you need to develop yourself into a professional writer. But it’s hard work. If you don’t put in the effort, you won’t get any results, like most things.

Finally, I’ll say this: You don’t need an MFA to be a good writer. In fact, unless you want to go back to school and you want to be able to have the credentials to teach creative writing at the college level, don’t get one. There are plenty of other ways to develop yourself without taking on more student loans and entering into a 2.5-year program. I personally had an incredible experience, but it’s not for everyone.

Q: How has your experience working with Flash Fiction Online been?

Overall it’s been great and incredibly helpful. Seeing publishing from the other side, seeing how editors approach stories as opposed to writers—I’d rate the experience as nearly as valuable as getting the MFA—because it’s real-world industry experience.

I’ve been reading for FFO on and off since 2015 or so. Recently I’ve had the privilege of being an assistant editor—basically that means I make guideline checks (making sure a story is, in fact between 500–1000 words, and isn’t way off from our theme/vibe as a press) and manage a team of slush readers and cast the deciding vote on whether or not a story advances to the next round of consideration.

I’d recommend that anyone who wants to seriously publish short fiction to try and get on a read team for any of the SFWA qualifying markets. The insights I glean just from reading slush have been invaluable—like “Oh, I’m seeing a BUNCH of tooth faerie stories” or “I’ve read a lot of stories about memory exchange this year, better not write one like that for a while” or “there have been a lot of horror stories where the main character dies in the end. How can we approach that differently?”

It’s really freed me up creatively, because I can hold an idea up to the stories I see in slush and decide if it’s truly original or just the same tired trope.