Things to include in next story to make it REAL FICTION:

1. At least one character smoking cigarettes
2. Some form of weed
3. Possibly recreational drug use
4. Main character having massive amounts of sex
5. Infidelity
6. Cancer
7. Eggs
7.5. Egg parties
7.5.1. wtf are egg parties? Read more »

I didn’t have a post-MFA slump. Not immediately. I took about two weeks off writing and then began work on a long short story. When that was done, I tackled my novel. I didn’t necessarily write every day but by the November after graduation, the 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo didn’t seem hard to reach. I was unemployed and didn’t have much going on in my life; I had nothing but time.

Then I got into a play. Two plays, actually. At the same time. It turned out that developing two separate characters for the stage drained my creative reservoirs, and so I gave myself a break on the writing front. If it happened, it happened. If not, more time to memorize lines.

The work resumed when the play ended, but with a little hobble. My novel characters seemed distant–I’d forsaken them. I had new ideas about shape and style that required massive rewrites. I spent my writing time producing outlines instead of prose.

We moved. I finally had an office of my own. I had a creative surge and then–I got pregnant. I told myself I’d finish the novel before giving birth, no matter what. Except that didn’t seem feasible. People told me it wasn’t feasible. People smirked. I got depressed, and since I was growing a tadpole inside me, nauseated. I spent a lot of time on the couch with 1930s horror movies and library books, though browsing the stacks always made me dizzy. When I started feeling better, I started hauling my laptop to a local coffee house once a week, hoping the change of scene would magically imbue me with creative drive, but generally ended up having coffee with a friend who was on maternity leave and her cuter than cute baby girl. Okay, so I’d do NaNoWriMo. Except my husband and I bought a house, and the deal closed in November, and we moved, then almost immediately flew to California to spend a week with my family for Thanksgiving, then came home to unpack and host a packed lineup of dinners introducing our friends to our new home. Now I’m out of town, back in Pullman, because my husband’s company wanted him to attend a holiday party this weekend, and why not teach a couple training classes while you’re out here? Next week I’ve got neighbors coming over for cookies and cocoa on Monday (if they got the cute invitations I stuffed in their mailbox and actually feel like meeting us), then on Wednesday we’re hosting a 30-50 guest office party in our new home (for the office where my husband works day to day–tomorrow’s is for his “group” which mainly works from the Pullman office), then both my parents and my in-laws fly in for Christmas, giving us overnight company for a total of seven days, and I’ve got a couple of fairly complicated homemade gifts to finish before they get here. Whew.

I’m sure very few of you have stuck with this post this far, wading through my slough of excuses. Read more »

Conservative politics and fiction-writing workshops rarely converge, but over at Slate, Rachael Larimore invokes a lesson learned at her writing program to claim it doesn’t matter what Obama meant, when he uttered the infamous, “You didn’t build that,” line.

The most important: “It doesn’t matter what you meant. What matters is what you conveyed.” In the context of class, that meant when we were sharing our work and listening to feedback, we couldn’t butt in and say that we’d meant something else. We needed to take ourselves out of our own head and try to understand what our readers had heard.

It’s a little too easy to point out that Obama was not, in fact, reading a story from his linked collection in an independent bookstore, but rather, giving a political speech to a crowd of supporters. Surely Larimore knows that what works in fiction-writing don’t necessarily apply to rhetoric. At least in theory, readers, whether in a workshop or at home on the couch, come at each story unbiased. In politics, everyone is biased as Larimore herself explains:

I can’t think of a starker difference between the liberal and conservative worldviews than the Life of Julia slide show.  Liberals look at that video and see a woman aided by a social safety net. Conservatives look at it and are creeped out by the fact that liberals think the very-capable-seeming Julia can’t do anything without government help.

Since roughly 96% of Americans have received government benefits, it seems liberals have a view more consistent with reality.  But point being, different people saw the same video and had vastly different reactions. Different people heard Obama’s speech and had different reactions. Read more »

Maybe it’s our incessant writing about Beauty (with a capital B) or the fact that we spend most of our time wandering lonely as a cloud, but the MFA-or-not debate tends to lack specifics.

As you can probably tell, I like data, so I want to see if we can rectify this, if only a little. (Dear Math: I was wrong about you!)

So I hereby propose a short survey for MFA-grads. Of course, I’ll keep all personal information anonymous, and once I process the results, I’ll graph them. (As a shout out to our pals at VIDA, I’m thinking pie charts will do the trick.) Of course, as this is a self-selected survey, the data will be skewed somewhat. Only the folks who really care one way or the other will respond, but I’m hoping to get a range of responses nonetheless.

Read more »

Non-Fiction’s tether to the facts has always been frayed.  And we’re just now getting nervous about it?

A federal judge in Montana has saved the non-fiction writer’s proverbial ass.  (Not really!)

He has, for the foreseeable-future, allowed the authors of memoirs, essays and sundry ‘aboutnesses’ to ostensibly do what novelists and poets do all the time.  That is, tell little fibs.  That is, craft big ones through which we can see, but the gist of which we want to believe so desperately, we pretend there are no holes.  That is, fabricate the truth.  That is, construct a world in which the center may not hold.  That is, present the narrator as the legendary hero he, or heroine she, always imagined him or herself to be.

Yes, we have Sam Haddon to thank for the barrage of mythic forays to come.  The U.S. District Gavel-Swinger has thrown out the suit filed on behalf of a million (alright, four) non-fiction readers, a suit that may have required author, Greg Mortenson, to pay damages to those who understood his Three Cups of Tea bestseller to be entirely factual (and cough up $15 per disillusioned reader), a suit initially brought to bear by another writer, Jon Krakauer in Three Cups of Deceit… (Boo!  Hiss!  What a party-pooper!).

And so, where do we go from here?

I, for one, am not going to take this lying (down).  To my credit I have an entire half of a graduate course with Natalie Kusz, and the topic of embellishing on the events and adventures of our lives has been raised every Tuesday.  Tonight we’ll do it again.   We’ll say that we can’t make stuff up.  But what puts the Creative in the genre of Creative Non-Fiction is how we beautify the gory details of our fragmented days, weeks, months and years.   Then, of course, someone will wrinkle his brow and it will be assumed that in streamlining the crap of our experience we, as writers, have made everything up.  This is as it should be.

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After astutely pointing out for the fourth straight week that my story or essay neglected to include much physical description of my characters, a member of my writing group asked why exactly I had trouble doing that. I mumbled a joking response about needing to work on it, but not until the drive home did I really start to consider why I shied away from physical description.

It’s not like I’m unaware that description is important. I’m sure every workshop leader has mentioned this fact, along with the apocryphal axiom: use all five sense by the end of the first page.

Over Saturday brunch with my mom, she suggested (in a nice way) it’s because my head is a bit in the clouds. “Like me, you don’t really pay attention to what kind of clothing people wear.”  True enough.

And, if I may play a small violin for myself, I was also classified with a minor learning disability as a teenager: poor visual memory.  So that could be part of it.

But I think the main reason is that when I read, I tend to skim over physical descriptions of characters and instead, form my mental image of each character based on his or her actions, thoughts, speech-patterns, etc, as found in the text.

Then I read this disturbing Jezebel article about kids being upset that the characters in the Hunger Games were correctly cast as dark-skinned. Read more »

Q: What do you have to say about the competitiveness in the writing world today?
A: Welcome to the jungle.

Q: How do I make my cover letter stand out?
A: Don’t be a rainbow in the dark.

Q: What is your revision process like?
A: Roll with the changes. Keep on rolling. Keep on rolling.

Q: How to you maintain a positive atmosphere in a workshop setting?
A: Love is a battlefield.

Q: What character in literature has inspired your work the most?
A: Tom Sawyer.

Q: What kind of work do you publish? What kind of writing are you looking for?
A: I want to know what love is. I want you to show me. Read more »

I popped into a coffee shop a few nights ago while waiting for my husband to pick me up from rehearsal, and it happened that one of my former creative writing students was leading a writing group. I didn’t recognize him right away. I didn’t notice him at all until, over the general chatter, I heard his deep, distinctive voice. He and his group were discussing the best way to get their stories to each other. Gmail, one group member said, was notorious for stealing content, and email in general lacked security. Someone suggested Facebook, and a discussion about the thieving Mark Zuckerberg ensued. Another suggested exchanging pieces via flash drive, which was quickly vetoed because flash drives could have viruses. They discussed exchanging addresses and using the postal service, but again, there was the concern that their stories might be stolen, plus there was the cost and environmental impact. This led to a general discussion of the problems with paper, and how the chemicals used to treat it are a much greater problem than deforestation, etc (we live near a paper mill here–the smell alone could make one want to go paperless).

Maybe this makes me a jerk, but I chuckled a little at their concerns. They had worried the small issue of exchanging stories into a major problem. And while some of their concerns were valid, I was struck by their copyright paranoia and the fear that their work might be stolen, especially because when their group leader was in my class, every piece he turned in had a giant copyright notice at the top of the page, even after I told him that it was not only unnecessary, but slightly insulting, as it insinuated that he thought his classmates or I might steal his work. I told him, if he was concerned, that he should put his name in the header or footer, by the page number, and that that would suffice. Apparently that didn’t ease his concerns. Read more »

Sledding on Monroe Street near 14th, 1952. Apparently sliding around Spokane's South Hill was much more fun in the 1950's.

Last night, I lived through two events: 1.) A large writing workshop led by Debra Gwartney (awesome author of the memoir Live Through This) during which a small nonfiction piece I had written was workshopped, and 2.) being stuck in my minivan on the icy South Hill in Spokane until I thought I might burn all of the rubber off my tires, burn out my transmission, or slide back down the hill, like freefall, until I came to be smashed by an up-and-coming 4X4 Dodge Ram.

On the icy hill on Stevens Street, I revved and spun my wheels for what felt like an hour (at least five solid minutes) just ten feet away from the entrance of a parking lot where I knew I could get myself turned around. I surely sat on a 60 degree incline. The hill was steep and near murder for my minivan any given day. It was sheer stupidity that led me to tackle the hill on the iciest night of the season thus far. I had at least managed to get myself out of the flow of those badass 4-wheel-drives bebopping up the hill like they were being pulled by Santa’s flying reindeer. As I sat stuck, I thought hard about calling for help.

Read more »