Today I’m teaching my first fiction class to the high school students at the Structured Alternative Confinement school. I’ve been doing poetry with them all year, which they seem to love, but I stupidly asked them last week if they would be interested in trying out other genres.

Rule #11: I am Kanye West

I’ll be honest: I know nothing about writing fiction. Which is why I decided to take a fiction workshop this quarter. It’s interesting (and slightly appalling) to me that I am in a graduate school creative writing program and still didn’t understand the term “objective third” until recently, simply because my focus is in poetry. I think we should all know a little bit more about each other’s crafts.

In the interest of learning everything I can about fiction, I’ve been diligently copying down rules and proclamations that my classmates and my professor, the esteemed Sam Ligon, have handed down during class, and that is what I plan to teach my SAC students. Listed below are some examples of rules I’ve learned, followed by the way I, as a newcomer to the genre, have come to understand them:

Rule #1: Never use adverbs.
What I learned from this: Fiction writers don’t like description.

Rule #2: Don’t use the word “towards.” Only British people say “towards.”
What I learned from this: Fiction writers are jealous of British people, probably because their words automatically sound pretty when they speak. Read more »

I’ve heard a lot of writers say that when they’re working on a novel, their characters are always with them. Their characters ride around on their shoulders, whispering in their ears until their stories are down on paper. It’s a good reason, they say, to make sure you’re writing characters you won’t mind living with for a few years. Even when you’re not expressly working on the book, they’ll be at the corners of your mind. I’ve often doubted this would be the case with me, I suppose because I imagined this kind of absorption as a constant longing for the pen or the keyboard, an unending flow of ideas. I’d written a “novel” before–a disastrously autobiographical string of words written by the enforcement of quotas and deadlines that is now in a box under my bed where the cat has most likely puked on it–and I never felt that way. I had to force myself to write more words, not because the story needed them, but because I was determined to write a book-length work. My characters were my family members, thinly disguised, and the only one who seemed to follow me around was, predictably, based on me.

Now that I’m a more experienced writer and committed to a novel that is 100% fictional, I understand what those writers mean. Read more »

Occasionally, at a party or a bar or some other situation that requires engaging with strangers, someone will tell me, “I don’t read fiction.” The statement is tragic enough by itself, and it becomes more so when the person offers the inevitable justification: I prefer reading books that teach me something. Instead of going on a rant about fiction expressing truth, rather than mere facts, or waxing philosophical about the human condition, I usually just nod politely and wander off to find someone more interesting.

fiction probably makes you happier, too!

It’s not that I’m deeply offended by someone rejecting my chosen genre as a writer. It’s more that I find myself incapable of addressing the implicit question: What’s the point? To me, asking what’s the point of fiction is akin to asking what’s the point of poetry or music or sculpture or anything, really. In the moment, it never occurs to me to ask those who dismiss fiction whether they’re opposed to all imaginative works. Are documentaries the only movies they watch? Do they restrict their TV viewing to cooking and history channels? Are their walls adorned only with utilitarian objects? Do they see no value in beauty at all? Read more »

In no particular order, here are my current top ten favorite short stories.

1. Amy Hempel: In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried

2. Alice Munro: Chance

3. Ernest Hemingway: Hills Like White Elephants

4. Joseph Salvatore: Reduction

5. Stuart Dybek: Pet Milk

6. Siobhan Fallon: You Know When the Men are Gone

7. Matt Bell: The Cartographer’s Girl

8. Lydia Millet: Chomsky, Rodents

9. Sam Ligon: Drift and Swerve

10. Stacia Saint Owens: Viv Thraves Goes Missing

Yesterday, while in the car on my way to my grandparents’ for Mother’s Day, as my mother and I were driving by old farmhouses, family-owned grocery stores, and rundown old buildings, I got to thinking about place. My mother comes from a small town, one with a lot of history, with community. And I realized that there are certain places that exude a sense of place. Small towns are obvious, of course, but the more I thought the more I realized that it’s more than that. It’s New York City, its Midwestern rural life, it’s the French Riviera. What it is not—to me—is a place like Haslett, Michigan, where I grew up.

Haslett is a wholly un-notable suburb. It’s small (it was described to me once as a zip code with a post office), but more than that, it’s overshadowed by East Lansing, Michigan State, Lansing—all of which are within about ten or fifteen minutes of where I grew up. But it’s not quite small enough, being pushed up against various other suburbs as it is. People don’t know each other’s business like they do in my mother’s hometown. I can walk into the local grocery store (or I could anyway—it shut down last month) without running into anyone I know. People are interested in local sports, but mostly only if they have kids involved with some team. In a word, it’s unremarkable, though it seemed like anything but while I was growing up. But now that I’ve left and come back—heck, even when I moved down the road to MSU—it began to look different, began to fade from view and memory.

I don’t write about place in my fiction. Often, I make a conscious attempt to avoid it. I’m uninterested in it. I say that I like the idea of my stories happening anywhere within a given culture (read: America, though I’ve got some ideas on how I can expand this particular horizon). But now I think it’s because I don’t really have a good idea of what it means to be from a certain place, from a strong community. Perhaps this is just an excuse, perhaps this is just a crutch I need to learn to do without, but I can’t help thinking that I’ll need to live in a strong place, to participate in a strong community before I’ll be able to overcome this particular difficulty of mine.

Or, I suppose, I could just make it all up, fiction-style, and write, write, write.

I spent most of my time at AWP walking the bookfair or staffing the Willow Springs table (where I met four of the fiction writers we’re published since issue 63, which was awesome), but I also made some time to go to a few of the panel sessions offered. My Smart Girls and Ambition panel was interesting but not all that useful, and the Pleasures and Peculiarities of Literary Editing was a few steps beneath my skill level (though it inspired an idea for a panel for next year), but the one that stood out to me was All-Around Bitch: The Challenges of Writing Unlikable Female Protagonists.

Take a piece like “Hunters in the Snow,” said the presenters, and try to picture those characters as female instead of male. Often, strong female characters are labeled as unbelievable, and fewer people want to read stories about bitches than they do assholes. Now, the presenters recognized some books that have succeeded with “bitch” characters, but there is still a bit of a double standard in literature (which I’d guess stems from the double standards in real life, but that’s a post for another time and another blog). Read more »

I’m always wary when someone starts talking about the rules of writing, because I strongly believe that there are situations in which it’s better to throw all rules out the window. But I also believe that we need to start from some sort of base, that we need to understand these rules (or, let’s call them guidelines) before we start breaking them. Maybe it’s the grammarian in me, but I’ve never felt that ignorance is a good excuse to do whatever you want (such as demonstrated by the kill the apostrophe people).

So I was interested when I came across this link over the weekend. It’s a compilation of fiction rules as defined by a wide variety of writers, including Atwood, Franzen, and Gaiman, and it’s amazing how no two lists look even remotely alike. Some flat out contradict each other, such as on how widely you should read, or if you should use a thesaurus.

I found myself having strong reactions to some pieces of advice, and being turned off to some writers (Moorcock, I’m looking at you). And I wonder, looking at some lists, how the advice translates to the work, and what I think my list would look like. Read more »

this image has nothing to do with anything except being awesome.

if you ignore every other link in this post—cool.  but you might wanna check out this archived studs terkel radio interview of bob dylan from 1963.  because what’s cooler than that?

there’s been much ado on the interwebs this week about roger ebert’s profile in esquire.  read it.  then read his response.

the millions made up some wacky idea about dave eggers taking over the paris review.  but, personally, i like the best american non-required reading/826/mcsweeney’s man right where he is. (p.s. if you missed it, the real timothy mcsweeney passed away last month.) Read more »