Storytelling

I’m going to get back to the Writing Works Conference next week because there are a few more topics that I would like to talk to you about. This week, though, we’re going to talk about something else. Last night I went to a reading by George Saunders and Robin Hemley at Ohio University’s annual Spring Literary Festival, and something very interesting struck me as I was listening to George Saunders read.

Both writers, first of all, were fabulously entertaining. Hemley’s new memoir, DO-OVER! – in which he relives painful moments from his childhood, only this time he does the things he wishes he had done at the time – is high on my list, now, of books I’d like to read. It’s George Saunders’s story, though, that brought up in my mind what I’d like to talk about this week: the importance of plot.

Now I didn’t have a chance to attend the lecture Saunders gave at the Lit. Fest. this year, but I’m told one of the things he talked about was his days as an MFA student and having decided that he needed to write in a more “literary” manner. He told a story (I hear tell) about writing a novel and trying to make it as literary and serious and MFA as possible. He realized after completing the novel that A) it wasn’t any good, and B) it just wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted to write. And that realization, it sounds like, was part of the impetus for his hugely successful career.

The story Saunders read at the reading was brilliant on all three of what I consider the key levels of fiction writing: character, language, and plot. The story was divided into sections that were written in the first person perspective of the three main characters. Saunders captured the voice and personality of each character perfectly through each character’s respective narration, so he absolutely hit the character and language side of fiction right off the bat. Partway through the story, though, it became clear that this story was in fact extremely plot driven – I just hadn’t noticed it at first because I was so drawn in by the voice of these characters.

What I consider to be one of the major problems with the graduate level workshop experience is that there tends to be so much focus put on character and language that many of the stories end up having no plot. I’m not exaggerating. I can remember workshopping a story one time where all of the students in workshop agreed that it was extremely boring, but most everybody except for me decided to see that as a good thing because it was a reflection of how empty this character’s life is. Alright, but boring is boring. If a class full of people who have advanced English level educations – people who tend to read more deeply and stick with things longer than the average reader – thinks your story is boring, that sounds like a problem to me.

So often in the MFA world, any sign of a plot gets written off as being “contrived” – one of those workshop buzzwords, like “cliché,” that pretty much loses all meaning about midway through your first semester in grad school. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t want your plot to be contrived (or cliché, for that matter), but good fiction should have a story arc. Good fiction should be about something.

Good fiction should also have well established characters and beautiful language, yes. All three of these important elements are there, I think you’ll find, in any really good story. But if all you’re doing is writing beautiful language or developing a really well rounded character, well, you don’t really have a story to tell, do you?

Learning from Other People’s Mistakes

I’ve talked before about how I believe that the competition is fierce and that most of the work getting submitted to journals – even the tiny ones – is fantastically good. Yes, I know you’ve heard otherwise. I know you’ve read interviews with editors or agents who claim that most of the work submitted to them is terrible, but that is such a load. If that were true than every halfway decent, remotely publishable piece would get snatched up immediately because it would stand out so much from all the rest of the crap, and we all know that doesn’t happen.

A piece of writing can get rejected from a hundred places before it finds a home, and once it does find that home it can then go on to win a Pushcart or get reprinted in a Best American Anthology. I once got a really nasty rejection letter, in which the editor essentially told me my story was terrible and poorly written, and then it later got published (the exact same draft that had been rejected) and was read by an assistant at a literary agency who contacted me and asked me to query the agency. The reason why things can get rejected so many times first is because most of the stuff getting submitted is very, very good, and on top of that, there simply are no objective rules for writing that every single editor, agent, writer, and reader can agree on.

Which means if you want to be competitive you really need to find ways to set yourself apart from the competition. Working at a literary journal gives you a chance to see what other writers are doing and can give you a competitive edge with your own work. Once you get over the shock of seeing how much of the slush pile is great and how often pieces that you would have loved to accept still have to get rejected because there just isn’t room, you start to notice small, let’s go ahead and call them mistakes, for lack of a better word, that are causing other writers to get rejected quickly.

These sorts of mistakes can range from not following professional formatting (using a tiny or strange looking font, say, or stapling the pages together), to coming across like an a-hole in your cover letter (I pretty much immediately want to reject people who seem arrogant in their cover letter and act like they already know their work is going to get accepted), to writing a really great story that gets off to a slow start (these stories, sadly, rarely even get read all the way through because you put them down before you get to the good part), to filling up thirty pages when the story easily could have been told in fifteen. And don’t even get me started on typos and grammatical errors. If you don’t care about your work enough to proofread it, what makes you think anybody else is going to care?

These are sometimes things that writers who don’t understand how the selection process really works will assume won’t end up mattering. I think we sometimes look at the work that’s getting published in books and see things that those writers are getting away with, and we assume that we will be allowed to do that, too. But the difference is that a writer with a book published has probably already won the trust of an agent and/or editor. You probably haven’t. The editors reading your submissions probably don’t have a clue who you are, and they aren’t going to have faith that if they just keep reading, your work will end up coming together in a satisfying way. You’ve got to win them over right away and hang on to them until the very end, and you cannot give them any reason to doubt you.

Seeing what good writers who are submitting good work are doing that’s earning them rejections is more useful, I think, than only reading the stuff that’s getting accepted and published. Reading what’s been published might just teach you that you need to write something good. Reading the stuff that’s getting rejected will teach you to write something good, too, but it will also teach you to avoid any number of pitfalls that writers who are just reading the stuff that’s getting published might fall into.

Some More Benefits of the MFA Life

I have to be honest, I’ve really been missing the grad student life lately. Part of it, I know, is that I’m surrounded by grad students from my husband’s program, and I get to see – but only from the fringes – these grad students doing the things that grad students do. I only get to take part in the non-school related parts of their lives, which is still enjoyable, of course, but it’s not the same.

One of the things I miss the most is the conversations. Talk about writing. Analyzing craft. Reading the same books and discussing them with each other. These sorts of conversations are the heart of any English graduate program and they tend to take place both in and outside of classroom. The problem – for me – is that they don’t tend to take place with outsiders. This isn’t an intentional slight; it’s not like grad students have a clique sort of mentality. But I’m not taking the same classes; I’m not reading the same books and having one-on-one workshop sessions with the same writers-in-residence.

This sort of unified writing experience is very difficult, I feel, to create outside of an academic setting. While it’s possible to perhaps find a small group of writers willing to read the same books and meet regularly to discuss them from a craft perspective, and it’s certainly possible to create the workshop environment – only far more productive, in my opinion – outside of academia, there are still many other things that don’t seem possible (for example, somehow managing to get a string of established writers to travel to your area, read the work of everybody in your writers’ group, and meet with each of you one-on-one to give feedback, after which the members of the group can discuss the experience and compare what you’ve gained).

And there’s the question of money, too. Grad students not only have ample time to write because they are being paid extremely well, compared to what college adjuncts make, to teach only one or two classes at a time, but they also, as a result, have ample time to exchange work with each other and do extended feedback sessions. (This statement, I can already tell, is going to have some readers shaking their heads in disagreement. I’m not saying you make as much as a TA as you would, say, in a full time office job. But you make way more per credit hour – WAY more – than the average adjunct instructor makes. Trust me. I’m an adjunct. I can barely make ends meet off of my salary.)

Grad students also get funding to travel to conferences. Many of the students here, for example, are taking a trip to Denver next month to go to AWP, on their graduate program’s dime. I desperately wanted to go to AWP this year. I almost had an excuse because I was invited to read with a journal that I was published in, but the reading ended up falling through, and I couldn’t justify the $1000 it would have cost between airfare and hotel stay and food.

Which is all, really, to say that I think there are some things that you can gain from a creative writing graduate program that you simply cannot reproduce in the real world. Of course it’s possible to get on the path to success on your own, but creative writing graduate programs give you a pretty forceful shove in the right direction, and they’re pretty enjoyable, too.

The Reading Muse

I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting my writing momentum back up after moving over the summer. For the first couple of months here, I was preoccupied with finding a job, getting unpacked, and learning my way around a new town. Then I was preoccupied (and stressed) with getting adjusted to a new job. Then with adjusting to another new job. Then with quitting the second job. Then figuring out how we were going to scrape by on my income from only the one job. . . .

So for the past few months I’ve been trying different things to get myself engaged with writing. Some of them have worked – well, sort of – like jogging my brain with a writing prompt to get those creative juices flowing and then immediately shifting my attention to another, more important (to me) project. Some of them have failed miserably, like trying to draft in my head while I’m making the hour and a half commute to work, and then expecting that once I get to a computer I will be bursting with ideas that I just can’t wait to write down.

What I didn’t try, and I now realize may have been the most successful of all, was picking out a book that would match the sort of writing project I felt like working on, and then simply reading that book and letting it be my muse.

I’ve been struggling my way through reading a collection of short stories for something like a month and a half – has it really been that long? A month and a half spent reading one single book! It isn’t that the short stories in the collection are bad. In fact, I like the stories quite a lot; I like the writing style; I like this writer’s dry sense of humor, her poetic voice. But I haven’t been in a short story kind of mood. Well, it turns out that my reading mood matches my writing mood. I haven’t felt like writing short stories, and I haven’t felt like reading them, either. That’s why I spent so much time just trying to force myself through one book.

I’ve been trying to decide between working on the, oh I don’t know, let’s say one millionth draft of a children’s book of mine and a second draft of a novel. I’ll settle on one, open up the file and try to immerse myself in the story, and very quickly my mind will start to wander to one of the many other things I probably should be doing – I just don’t feel inspired. But any seasoned writer will tell you that it’s not a question of waiting for inspiration. If you wait for inspiration you might never write a thing, or you might write so sporadically that you’ll never really improve.

At any rate, I finished the story collection the other day and decided that I felt like reading a children’s book next. I picked up a book I’ve been dying to read for some time now and was almost instantly sucked into a whimsical adventure story. And you know what else? I started getting excited about my children’s book all over again. Delving, as a reader, into the sort of book that I want to write inspired me to get back to work on my own book.

It makes sense. I mean, isn’t that why we become writers to begin with? Because we are avid readers, and because the things we read inspire us? We don’t create in a sort of vacuum; everything that we read and have read informs each new piece that we write. And the things that we read that really engage us send our minds reeling with limitless possibilities, limitless new ideas just waiting to be written.

Average Reading Levels and Other Forgotten Things

I’m teaching Technical Writing this fall and I came across an interesting bit of information that I can’t help but apply to creative writing. The textbook I’m teaching out of says that it is common for businesses to put out writing at a sixth to eighth grade reading level. The book cites a study that says that while 28% of Americans graduate from college (a very low number to begin with), only about 31% of college graduates can actually read at what we would consider a college graduate level. Simply put, if you’re writing very complex, highly intellectual prose, you’re writing for a very small audience.

While this is more important from a technical writing perspective than from an artistic perspective – you may decide that you don’t want to dumb your art down just so that you can reach more people with it – it still, I think, is worth thinking about. Consider what a higher reading ability your average master’s or doctorate level creative writer has compared with the average, everyday American reading public. Small presses are sometimes willing to put out the highly artistic, intellectual stuff even though it has a low chance of making them any real money, but most of the bigger publishers aren’t even going to consider your work if it can only be marketed to people with English graduate level educations.

And this in my opinion is one of the most legitimate arguments against getting an MFA. The feedback you receive at a graduate level workshop comes from graduate level writers and readers, people with advanced educations, reading abilities, and a stronger than average willingness to work hard to figure out what a text is getting at. They applaud the innovative and unique, the experimental and peculiar, and they deplore things that are easy to follow, straightforward and traditional, plot driven or with a deeper meaning that most readers in the class are able to figure out. In essence, they don’t like the stuff that is actually going to be accessible to a wider audience.

That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with writing for a small audience of like minded individuals. But I would argue that there’s nothing wrong, either, with taking audience into consideration and actually writing at a level that non-writers and non-scholars will appreciate, too. I’m not saying you should write at a sixth to eighth grade reading level – unless, of course, you’re writing books for sixth to eighth graders. The average American who actually reads for pleasure, I’m guessing, has a higher reading ability than the average American period. But I don’t think the average reading American is at a graduate reading level, either. In my writing, I’m interested in writing stories that are well crafted and complex enough that those scholars will consider it passable – though maybe not exceptional, not perfect by any means – and I don’t want to alienate the larger reading public in the process. I think there can be a middle ground.

I believe that a lot of graduate students aim for that higher ground and end up limiting their audience. Yeah, the few people who read their stuff might consider them brilliant. But they will never have more than a few people willing to read their stuff. This, I suspect, is where a lot of the negative MFA sentiment comes from. I don’t even know how many submission guidelines I’ve read that specify that they are not interested in the writing getting pumped out of MFA programs. I think it’s true that MFA writing sometimes seems pretentious and it’s true that a lot of it is not actually enjoyable – you read it because it’s doing interesting things, not because it’s actually entertaining.

I also don’t think that getting that MFA automatically means you will become one of those writers. You can – and should! – pick and choose which of the feedback is actually going to bring your writing to the point you would like it to be, and this is true whether you’re in a graduate workshop or a writer’s group out in the real world. But there’s a lot to be said for studying the books that actually sell instead of only the books that are considered artistically interesting, and of getting feedback from other writers who are trying to write for a wider audience than from writers who value the strange and the difficult above all else.

Inspiration

I’ve heard a lot of talk about how there is perhaps more inspiration for writing material outside of an MFA program, in that fabled “real world” everyone talks about. I imagine this is probably true, and in fact as I’m preparing to move to Ohio in a few weeks I’m going back and forth with what would be better for me: finding a good teaching job at one of the many community colleges in the area, or getting a regular job and stepping away from the very different world of academia for a while.

But I do think there is a lot of inspiration to be had in an MFA program, and for me a lot of that inspiration came from reading the work of my peers and instructors. All the other students in my program at UAF were absolutely amazing writers and most of them had very distinct styles from each other and from me. I think one of the most useful things you can do as a writer is expose yourself to a wide range of writing and experiment around with some of the things you see other people doing. This is different from just reading a lot, since in an MFA program you can then actually talk to and get feedback from the very people that inspired you.

In my program there were two people in particular whose work I was just blown away by and who as a result really inspired me to push myself to step out of my comfort zone and see what would happen if I tried this or that. (That’s not to say that I was only blown away by the work of two people; there were many people in the program whose writing really impressed me. But there are two in particular who really inspired me to experiment around with some of the things they were doing).

One was a fellow student, who is in my opinion the best writer in the program (or at least whose writing is my personal favorite) and who has this incredible ability to meld fantasy-type genre stories with absolutely amazingly well crafted, literary writing. The first workshop I had with her she submitted a story that everybody just fell in love with, myself included. It had a touch of magic and fairy tale-like fantasy but also very strong character and voice, and I was super inspired to try to experiment around with magic realism in my own writing – which has been very fun and I think has helped me move to the next level as a writer.

The other is an instructor in the program, award winning writer David Crouse, who in the very last workshop I took at UAF actually submitted his own work to be workshopped alongside the students. Not only was it super cool to get to workshop such a successful writer’s work at the same time as our own work, but I felt really inspired to push myself to be less, well, obvious in my writing. I’m well aware that my number one problem as a writer is that I’m often heavy handed and come right out and say things that it would be better to let the reader put together for him or herself, and when I saw how much it can work to, as he says, “withhold” more, I made an effort to try to work more on that in my work.

This is a different sort of inspiration, yes, than what people talk about when they say there is more inspiration in the real world than in an academic program. But it’s inspiration nonetheless and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Oh that’s SO Cliché!

One thing I noticed a fair amount of when I was teaching Creative Writing last semester was the tendency students had to refer to each others work as “cliché” or “stereotypical” or “unoriginal.” It’s something I remember experiencing for the first time when I took my first graduate level workshop – being cliché wasn’t something I had ever been accused of as an undergrad, for some reason, but my first semester in grad school I grew to loath the word cliché. Oh they tried to say it nicely, mind you. Things like, “This is funny in a totally clichéd way – I assume that’s what you’re going for, right?” or, “Your narrator seems like sort of an idiot because he speaks and behaves in a totally clichéd manner – is that intentional?”

I’m not going to bitch and moan about how much it hurts to be told that your writing is clichéd (a lot) or how it hurts even more to realize that (GASP!) the things your peers are telling you are true. I look back on my first graduate level workshop as one of the most painful but also most useful experiences I have ever had in my life, and while some of those comments still sting a little bit (they remind me, you know, how little actual talent I have because any ability that I do have has come from a whole lot of hard work) I feel I have improved drastically because of them.

But what I want to talk about here is my experience looking at it from the other side this past semester, as a teacher. I did have one incident during the semester where one student’s feedback was so over-the-top cruel (saying that the entire story was just one giant cliché and that it could not possibly be revised and should be thrown away altogether) but overall most of the students were trying to be constructive when they repeatedly accused each other of being cliché, and in fact, most of them were essentially right (of course, I still encouraged students to come up with more constructive feedback than “this is so cliché”).

Though a majority of the writing coming from that class showed promise (and some of it I believe will be publishable if the student keeps working on it), I would also say, if looking at it from an objective manner, most of the stories that were written for that class contained elements that were not particularly original. While some of the stories were certainly less original than others, it did seem to be true that most of the students were inadvertently falling back on ideas that most of us (who are perhaps more well read than a class full of undergraduate Intro to Creative Writing students) would say we’ve seen a thousand times before.

But here’s the trick. In general, the reason why things become cliché is because they’re effective. This is true on the sentence level (how many cliché metaphors and similes can you think of that would just shock you with their beauty and truth if it wasn’t for the fact that it was a cliché?) and it’s true on the larger scale, too. Characters often have this or that personality trait because it successfully tells you something important about them. We’ve seen this or that plot twist so many times because it works. See? Most clichés becomes cliché because, in truth, they’re excellent examples of writing.

What’s that you say? But a good writer comes up with his or her own good writing? Here’s the thing: I’ve come to realize that, at the early stage of writing, many excellent writers use clichés not because they’re not good enough to come up with something for themselves, but because they haven’t read widely enough yet to know that this is a cliché. It may well be (and I think often is) an idea that the writer came up with on his or her own, it just happens to also be an idea that tons of other people came up with too.

This is part of the reason why I think reading A LOT is essential to success as a writer. You have got to develop a broad knowledge base of what’s been done already and what hasn’t. Of course, there are a number of other good reasons why you should read a lot, but this is one that I think gets forgotten sometimes. And the other important thing I’ve taken away from this is the belief that writing really clichéd stuff early on – when you’re still learning how to write – does not necessarily preclude you from developing into a very good writer. It may well even be a sign of developing ability – you’ve figured out this thing that works, you just don’t have enough knowledge in your field yet to know that somebody else figured it out before you.

So write your clichés if you must. Eventually you’ll have to move past them if you want to be considered good by anyone but your mom, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that all writers who write in clichés are inherently bad. Maybe all it really means is that they still have a lot left to learn, and really, don’t we all?

Reading by Choice

Last week I had a sort of exciting revelation: not being in school is going to mean that I have time to read things that I choose to read! I know, I know – that’s obvious. But I hadn’t really thought about how much that really means until I got totally involved in – and inspired by – Stephen King’s newest short story collection.

That’s right. Stephen King. Can you think of a less MFA approved writer?

My required reading for workshop – the only class I’m taking this semester – was finished and with my thesis done, my comps exam behind me, and all of my lit credits already in the bag, I didn’t have any papers to write or any books that I needed to read. So I had time during a semester to read a book that I didn’t have to read for school – a very rare occasion indeed.

No, it’s not the best book in the world – it’s not even Stephen King’s best book – and if you’re looking at craft issues it’s nowhere near as well written as the stuff we’re required to read for school. But it was a freaking enjoyable book even so. I got totally sucked in, to use that old reading cliché, and one of the stories in particular (a story called “The Gingerbread Girl,” one which I highly recommend and which I would argue is well crafted and worthy of being studied in an MFA program) really inspired me as a writer.

I won’t say too much in the hopes that you might actually read the story yourself, but there’s a very high tension point where, based on the way a certain thing is described, an image flashed into my mind – a very disturbed image of something that one of the characters could have done to the other. But it didn’t happen; something else happened instead, which made perfect sense for the story, of course, but I couldn’t get my idea of what she might have done in that situation out of my head.

I was so engaged with the story that I wanted to remain in that world even after I finished it. I wanted to see what would happen if the character had done what I had, for that one brief moment, expected her to do. So I started writing my own story. No, it isn’t like fan fiction. It’s not the same world, not the same characters, not the same story in any way. Just a new story about a woman who finds herself in a similar situation and she does what I wanted her to do.

I just wrote and wrote and wrote. And I felt more inspired and more into what I was writing than I’ve felt in a long time. My story is so different from Stephen King’s that I can’t imagine anybody would even see what the two have in common, but the important thing is that I picked a book off my shelf, one which I felt in the mood to read (a luxury we absolutely do not have when we’re required to read X book on X week in school), and I ended up totally inspired to write something new.

It made me really excited about the fact that I won’t be a student next year. As much as I love school, and I love discussing the required reading with others, there’s a lot to be said for choosing what to read for yourself. Of course personal taste comes into play, and your receptiveness to a particular book at a particular time can be greatly altered by whether you happened to be in the mood for that sort of book, and ultimately I feel that reading something by choice can be a much more fruitful experience than reading something because you have to. And so I’m actually starting to feel that (as much as I praise and praise and praise some more the value of MFA programs) I’m likely to grow a lot as a writer in the near future by not being in school anymore. Hurray for the silver lining!

Back to the Basics

This semester, I’ve been given the honor of teaching Introduction to Creative Writing – Fiction, a class that grad students in my program aren’t usually allowed to teach. I should add that my being offered to teach this class was largely based on luck, a right time right place sort of thing.

Already in the first half of the semester I’ve gained so much from teaching this class that I now firmly believe that teaching creative writing should be a requirement of all MFA programs. Not only is it much easier to teach than academic writing (and I actually believe that the regulations on who is allowed to teach academic writing should be much tighter, at least at my university – come on, these classes are essential for these students’ future success in college and a lot of TAs don’t take it seriously at all, but I digress) but you also learn A LOT as a writer from being on the other side of the desk. After all, the best way to learn is to teach.

I’m sure my teaching experiences will be a frequent subject in my blogs for the next few months because there are numerous interesting and useful things that I have learned (and probably will continue to learn) by teaching creative writing. Perhaps the best place to start – and probably the most useful thing I’ve gained so far – is how useful it’s been to go back and revisit the basics.

That’s right. The basics. Working from an introductory level textbook that focuses on the fundamentals – plot and conflict, tension and resolution, revising and re-imagining – I’ve been reading about things that I haven’t thought about in years – since I was an introductory student, myself, and it’s funny how much some of this stuff has sort of slipped into the back of my mind as I’ve been taking more advanced workshops and forms classes.

I had an epiphanic moment (that’s right, epiphanies do happen in real life) when I was doing the reading and planning my lesson a few classes ago. There’s a story that I’ve been working on recently where I was focusing all my attention on exploring certain themes and working out the main character’s voice. Since all my attention was going into some more advanced techniques I was working with, I inadvertently allowed a sort of basic, beginner level mistake to seep into the writing. The reading that I had assigned for my class addressed the very same mistake, laid out in concrete terms why this doesn’t work, and talked about some alternative techniques that can be used instead to greater effect.

At first I felt like an idiot. Here I was teaching creative writing and here was this stupid mistake that I myself made in a recent story. I finished planning my lesson and then went back and revised my story. Even though when I wove the problematic technique into the story I had very specific reasons for doing it, the story is better off without it. As with most experimental writing (in my opinion), it was a cheap and easy way to try to get at the character’s voice when it’s actually much better – much more difficult to write and therefore more rewarding to read – if I get at the character’s voice through more traditional methods.

Going back to the basics is something that I think many MFA writers could benefit from. The textbook includes what has probably become my new favorite writer-on-writing quote. Flannery O’Connor said that as a writer, “you can do anything that you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.” While many of us like to believe that it’s only by breaking the rules that you can achieve genius, I think the rules are there for a reason and while now and then breaking or bending one or two of them doesn’t hurt, totally abandoning the basics by the wayside is really just sort of arrogant and pretentious, and it isn’t likely to impress more than a handful of arrogant and pretentious readers.

So I’m excited to be taking a refresher course at the introductory level – by teaching it. Already my writing has dramatically improved by going back and restudying some of these things that I learned so long ago.

Comps

All the second years and even some of the thirds out here are scurrying to get ready for the Comps Exam. Many and maybe even most MFA programs require students to pass an exam over a lengthy reading list – ours is forty books long, although I’ve heard of programs that have as many as two-hundred and some that have as few as twenty.

I took my Comps last year and I can remember the anxiety of the days leading up to the exam and I can certainly relate to how many of my fellow MFAers are feeling right now. I started reading from my list the summer before I started in the program. Forty books isn’t really that many, if you think about it, and I was actually originally planning on just trying to get it out of the way my first year. I read about a quarter of the list before I started the program and then during my first semester here, between teaching for the first time, getting used to how different grad school was than what I had expected it to be, not to mention adjusting to life in Alaska, which is pretty much just as strange as you might imagine, I sort of let the reading slide and decided I would take the exam my second year, like you’re supposed to.

Another full year to finish the list? That seemed like no problem! But my first summer out here I began excitedly working on the first draft of my thesis and once I had that together I started revising and revising and revising it . . . By the winter before my Comps date, I still had close to half the list left to read and the overwhelming feeling that I was not going to pass this test.

I figure out what I had left to do and planned out which books I needed to read by which dates. I knocked out three to four books a week during the winter break, but once the semester got back in (and I was teaching a sophomore level class that I had never taught before), my more immediate requirements got in the way and I found myself, a couple weeks before the exam, having to accept that I couldn’t possibly finish all of the books and instead I needed to figure out how best to familiarize myself with the few that I would not have time to actually read.

Sound familiar? If you’ve ever taken a Comps Exam it probably does. I’ve come to find out that most people don’t actually read every book on the list. They try their best, but you have a lot on your plate as a grad student and if you’re actually making sure to write a fair amount on the side, you may find yourself having to pick and choose which things you simply do not have time for.

But it turns out that Comps is all about doing the reading. Acquainting yourself with a wide range of texts in your genre. Once I took the test I was surprised at how easy it was. It was clear that the test itself was just a means to expose us to the books themselves. And I felt relieved, because it meant that I would pass even though I hadn’t read every single book, but I also felt sort of guilty, because the point of the whole thing was to read every book and I hadn’t done that.

The other day I was talking to a friend who is about to take comps next weekend and he mentioned that while he doesn’t think he’ll be completely done with the list in time for the test, he plans on finishing the few that he only read partway through as soon as he has time after the exam. I think that’s a smart move. After all, the Comps Exam is no different from anything else in a school environment. You get what you give. Passing the test doesn’t mean you gained what you were supposed to have from the experience.

I never did get back to my Comps list but I plan to, even the one that I didn’t finish reading because I hated it (sorry William Faulkner . . .) There are certain books it’s just good to have read, partly so you know what other people are talking about and partly because, as a writer, it’s good to step outside of your normal range of reading. Even the ones you don’t enjoy can teach you something (even if it’s simply techniques you’d like to avoid at all costs in your own writing). And in my experience, a large majority of the books are extremely enjoyable, anyway. So get reading! If you want to improve as a writer you’ve got to be willing to put all the necessary work in.

Yeah, It’s a Good Idea, but Can You Write It Well?

So I read a book last week that, in spite of how much I want to leave it behind and get the bad taste out of my mouth, is worth talking about because it sheds some light on the great MFA/MFYou debate. This book, whose title and author I will politely leave undisclosed, was absolutely terrible.

This was the first novel by a science fiction writer, an MFYou. She’s very public about her writing process and as someone who is fascinated by learning about other writers and how they do what they do, I was interested in reading a first novel by someone who’s writing process I already knew a lot about. It was published by a small press, who apparently didn’t edit it very well because the book is full of typos and grammatical errors, but that aside, the book was very poorly crafted.

This is clearly not a writer who pays much attention to craft. Her focus, I can tell, is on plot. And the plot alone was quite engaging. A fun and funny approach to a classic genre of stories. While there were a few inconsistencies, which she tried to smooth over as best she could without actually going back and rewriting the offending details, the plot was pretty well done.

The craft side of the book, though, was horrible. There didn’t seem to be any thought put into how to tell the story, what perspective to be in, which details to include and which ones to leave out (I’m not all that interested, for example, in the elaborate section where the main character tries to remember whether or not she can go home because she may have locked her front door, only to remember at last that she has a key to her own apartment - it is, after all, her own apartment! And does any of this end up having to do with anything? NO!).

It reads like a first draft, one that has promise, one that you can imagine will be good, one day, but has a long road of revision ahead of it (like any first draft). The problem is, and I should have known this going into it because I did already suspect that she doesn’t understand the difference between revising and editing, that it seems she wrote a first draft, did some “edits,” as she calls it, which seem to be just surface level proofreading, and then considered it done.

But there was a lot more that needed to be revised. She needed to consider the voice of the narrator; she needed to think about perspective; she needed to think about what details we need and what details we don’t; she needed to think about how to describe things (outside of her rampant use of adverbs, we get hardly any description at all); she needed to think about how to tell us the important bits of exposition that we need to know; she needed to think about how to fully develop the characters. . . Essentially, she needed to learn to step beyond what happens in the story and to ask herself how to best express these things that happen and these people that they happen to.

It’s an interesting change from having just read Yesterday’s Weather by Anne Enright the week before. That book was still good; I enjoyed many of the stories and would have considered it worth reading even if I wasn’t picking it apart to find the difference between her older stories and her newer ones. But Enright’s trouble, in my eyes, was too much playing around with craft, not enough attention paid to plot.

This other writer has the opposite problem, but it seems this problem is more inexcusable. This book, even though I liked the plot, was not worth reading. And even though she was able to get it published, I can’t help but wonder about this small press, who put out a book so full of typos many of the lines don’t even make sense (and I haven’t even mentioned that some of the pages are printed crooked and the picture on the cover is fuzzy at the edges, like it was taken with a really crappy digital camera).

But again, it all comes down to that the best sort of writing pays attention to both craft (which I consider the MFA side of writing) and plot (which I think of as the MFYou side that MFAs often forget entirely about).

The Balance Between Story and Craft

Last week I talked about Anne Enright’s short story collection, Yesterday’s Weather, and how it shows the importance of personal experience in writing. This is a difference between her earlier stories and her later ones that Enright herself noticed and referred to in her introduction. The stylistic shift that I noticed is more subjective and it may not be one that other people would agree with me about.

Enright has a very unique style: her stories are heavy on exposition and the narration tends to shift back and forth quite frequently from the “now” moment of the story itself and the characters’ pasts. There is also a certain vagueness to the storytelling, which is, I think, an attempt at subtlety that in my opinion often goes too far. I would almost call her writing experimental.

I noticed that, while there are certainly exceptions, I generally liked the more recent stories better. When I tried to put my finger on what it was about the more recent stories that I liked, I realized that many of them used this expositional shifting and vagueness far less than the older stories. A lot of them even had a normal amount of exposition, though some of them still had more than most stories would. And the vagueness, while it was still often present in these stories, was much more in line with what I would consider skillfully placed subtle hints about what it all means and what’s going on. The more recent stories seemed less like experiments and more like stories by a writer who has found her voice and has found the right balance for her voice.

It’s interesting, though, that many of the older stories reminded me of the sort of thing you see a lot of in MFA workshops. Writing that seems to focus more on doing something different than on telling a good story. I often think that one of the main differences you see from MFA writers and non-MFA writers is the attention paid to craft. I think a lot of non-MFA writers think more about the story, the plot and what events will take place. Whereas many MFA writers focus more on how to tell the story, what techniques should they employ and how should they structure this piece.

Ultimately, I think you have to focus on both for a story to be very good. More and more literary journals these days include in their submission guidelines that they aren’t interested in the sort of writing that gets manufactured in the MFA machine. Writing that pays little or no attention to plot, the story part of the story, and instead focuses entirely on employing artistic techniques that often leave the story completely incomprehensible unless you read it several times, extremely closely. Something that few readers and no editors will be willing to do. Really, only other writers have any interest in reading this sort of writing.

While Enright’s early stuff still managed to get published, I would argue that she has improved immensely over the years in large part because she has found a good balance between craft and story. I wonder if this is in part because she went and wrote several novels inbetween and you have to learn to pay attention to plot if you want to write a novel. Even writers looking for artistic inspiration are unlikely to bear with you for 300 pages of no plot.

In contrast to Enright’s collection from last week, this week I read a downright terrible book that has the opposite problem from Enright’s earlier work. I’ll talk about that next time.

A Question of Experience

Anne Enright’s short story collection, Yesterday’s Weather, compiles stories from her 2008 book, Taking Pictures, her 1991 book, The Portable Virgin, and two stories that appeared in 1989 in Faber’s First Fictions: Introductions 10, a British anthology of new writers. A friend of mine did a presentation on Yesterday’s Weather in workshop last semester and I borrowed it from her to read over the break, thinking it would provide some interesting insight into how we progress as writers.

Anne Enright earned her MA from the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing program (incidentally the same place my thesis advisor Gerri Brightwell, author of The Dark Lantern, earned her MA before coming to UAF to earn her MFA, and for that matter, the University of East Anglia is the place many acclaimed British writers earned their MAs). In her introduction to Yesterday’s Weather, Enright says that she chose to organize this collection in reverse chronological order, where the more recent stories appear first, followed by the 1991 stories, and those early First Fictions stories finish the collection.

Enright says she organized the collection in this way in part because it is funny for her to see how much her view of the world has changed over time. Many of Enright’s stories are about being a mother and being a wife – two topics Enright openly admits she knew nothing about when she started as a writer.

Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of this shift can be seen when you compare two of Enright’s stories on the same topic: a story about a woman who realizes that her husband has had an affair. Actually, this theme recurs quite frequently in Enright’s stories, but for the sake of comparison we’ll look at one that was from the 1991 set and one that was from the 2008 collection. In the story originally published in 1991, the woman reacts by dying her thinning hair blond and stealing another woman’s purse at the salon only to drown it in the river. So. She goes a bit nutty, in other words. In the story published in 2008, the woman’s struggle is not so simple and the woman herself seems far more bothered by her husband’s infidelities . . . and yet, she is somehow also more accepting of them.

The more recent story feels realer to me. It deals with the issue in a more complex way and even though the feminist side of me (though I would never identify myself as a feminist!) is frustrated with both characters for not simply leaving their husbands, I believe the newer story (it’s actually more believable than my fantasy that the wife would just leave) and the story is laid out so that I feel I understand the character’s reaction. The character's reaction in the 1991 story is a little too dramatic in my eyes. In Enright’s defense (or at least, in defense of the writer she was 17 years ago), I’m simplifying the 1991 story dramatically; it is certainly still a complex story, but compare it with the 2008 story and I think you’ll see what I mean.

Looking at these stories in this way is intriguing since many of us get really serious about writing before we get really serious about life. That is, we lock ourselves in our rooms and write, write, write, the only problem is we’re spending all of our time at the computer and, consequently, have very little to actually write about. And some common life experiences (you know, those seemingly insignificant little ones that the ordinary reader will have experienced for him or herself and will, then, be able to tell if you’re speaking about something you don’t understand) just don’t really happen until you get a little older, have a little more perspective.

There is also an interesting stylistic shift that I noticed in Enright’s stories but I’ll talk about that next time.

Lit Seminars, a Necessary Evil

I’m bogged down these last few weeks of the semester with what feels like an uncomfortable load of reading to do (of course, a fair amount of my stress comes from the fact that I’ve been spending too much time on my thesis and workshop stories and so, now that the semester is almost over, I’m realizing how much I have ahead of me to get my final paper ready for the lit seminar I’m taking --- poor time management is what I call that). It brings up an interesting issue related to MFA studies – literature coursework.

When I started my MFA program, I was actually a little surprised to see how much of the program was involved with not only studying and practicing the craft of creative writing, but studying and analyzing literature. That’s not to say that studying writing isn’t also part of it, of course there are workshop credits, thesis credits, forms credits. . . . And I suppose I expected, in a back of the mind sort of way, that getting a master’s degree in English would involve advanced levels of literary analysis, but I think I thought that it would be a minimal part of the program, that most of my time would be spent on creative writing.

What I’ve realized is that you gain an awful lot, as a writer, from analyzing and reading literature, too. While a lot of the ability to write well boils down to how much practice you put into it, I think a fair amount of improving as a writer comes from just reading as much as you can and analyzing it not only for craft, but in the same way that non-writers are going to analyze your work – as a work of literature.

So, while on some level it’s frustrating to look at my next few weeks and have to tell myself I probably shouldn’t be spending time on my fiction right now (and I know full well, even as I write this, that I’m going to spend time creative writing anyway and kick myself later when my final paper isn’t as good as it could have been…) at the same time, I know that I get something out of this other coursework – the non-creative writing part of a creative writing program – as a writer.