Nothing for a month, and now two posts in one day.
I just got back from the Baltimore Book Festival, where I ran into the good folks at the Baltimore Review, who are publishing my first-ever-published story next month. I met some of the editors, and attended a talk they gave on "making the ordinary extraordinary."
I'm kind of cynical about "community" in writing. I don't like cooperative projects. I like to either be given a job or not given it, and if I'm given it, then I want to do it. And I'm not a terribly let's-all-hold-hands kind of guy. But it was sort of nice to feel a sense of a community of writers. It's inspired me to do something I started to do a few weeks ago, and got sidetracked on. I'm going to try to find a workshop to join.
If I'm really the "workshop heretic," I guess that might seem a little hypocritical. I really did dislike the workshops in grad school. You'd have ten kids, eight of whom wrote stuff that was a total mess (I was often one of them.) The kids all had totally different aesthetic senses, most of which we were all still developing. We were all sure of ourselves, which made it hard to listen to each other. But more than anything, we were all BUSY. So busy reading so much, that we really didn't put the effort into really reading each other. The thoughts in a workshop like that are always canned, just something done so you can fulfill your obligation to participate. For all the money you spend in grad school, I'd really rather you just have a few hours one-on-one with the instructor each semester and mostly ignore the other students. Or, I'd have liked to have paired up one-to-one with someone I mostly saw eye-to-eye with, and just exchanged ideas with that person.
I'm hoping that a workshop of amateurs, such as the ones I can find through the Maryland Writer's Association, might have smaller egos and less overall reading workload. I wrote to one a few weeks ago, but the leader never got back to me. I'm going to write to another one this week. I'll let you know how it goes.
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Too much of this and that
It's been a month since my last blog, but that isn't because this has become another one of those blogs that the writer gives up on after a few tries. I've been nose to the grindstone cranking out a few more stories so I could get to 150 page manuscript. I entered it in this: http://www.uiowapress.org/authors/iowa-short-fiction.html
I went to graduate school at University of Illinois-Chicago in writing from 2002-20004, and immediately quit writing afterwards. I was tired of being broke, already in a lot of debt, and realized that there were far more talented writers than the market could support. So I decided to really make a break from writing. I deleted all my work, threw away hard copies. I didn't even read much for a long time, at least nothing that could be called "literature." I focused on work, once I found a grown-up job.
Last October, my work closed for four days. I asked myself what I wanted to do with my life if my job went away. I was surprised to find that the answer was "I want to write," and that it didn't really take much time to think of that answer. So I decided to set aside as much of my free time as I could in a year to write, to study the craft of writing, and to read really good fiction. Since the deadline for the Iowa short fiction competition was September 30th, that seemed like a good end-of-year goal to meet, so I pushed hard at the finish line so I could meet it.
Anyhow, on to the next subject: the potentially negative effects of reading too many "how to do X" fiction articles. There are a lot of people who (often for free to the general public, and seemingly out of a sense of mission) give out good writing advice. An example of the kind of thing I'm thinking about is K.M. Weiland's blog. Every day, there's some new piece of advice, like "the wrong way to write a smart character," or "how to find your character's breaking point." Useful stuff, and I've no problem generally with how she goes about it. There are, of course, tons more examples out there, and everyone has their favorite. I'm not here to pick on or praise one or the other.
There is something about the whole "area of writing to focus on today" method that I think might be dangerous to a writer, though. When I was a teenager, I fell in with evangelical Christianity for a bit. Well, about seven years. I was pretty into it. I went to church Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. In between, I listened to a lot of sermons on the radio. Every one of those sermons picked a Bible passage and delivered some message that was part exposition, part exhortation to apply the passage in our lives.
Funny thing about a new sermon every day is you can end up being all over the place in your life trying to apply them. One day, the sermon is about how we need to think of the world as a valley of tears, and the next day is all about the joy of the Lord. You hear "turn the other cheek" one day and "tolerate no evil" the next. It gets a believer a little discombobulated.
The same thing can happen in writing. If you just read a helpful article about how to imagine scene, you might end up spending far more effort on scene in your story than the story merits. There are a lot of elements to every story to keep in the right balance, and you can easily be misled about what that balance is based on the proximity in time to the last time you read an article on one of those elements was.
Better is to have a general grounding in most of the elements a writer uses, then step back and write your story. If you think one element is really in demand in your story, then gingerly look up good advice on how to handle that element as it relates to your project.
I'd hate for writers to suffer from bad timing, and hear a "the meek shall inherit the Earth" sermon just before meeting the playground bully.
I went to graduate school at University of Illinois-Chicago in writing from 2002-20004, and immediately quit writing afterwards. I was tired of being broke, already in a lot of debt, and realized that there were far more talented writers than the market could support. So I decided to really make a break from writing. I deleted all my work, threw away hard copies. I didn't even read much for a long time, at least nothing that could be called "literature." I focused on work, once I found a grown-up job.
Last October, my work closed for four days. I asked myself what I wanted to do with my life if my job went away. I was surprised to find that the answer was "I want to write," and that it didn't really take much time to think of that answer. So I decided to set aside as much of my free time as I could in a year to write, to study the craft of writing, and to read really good fiction. Since the deadline for the Iowa short fiction competition was September 30th, that seemed like a good end-of-year goal to meet, so I pushed hard at the finish line so I could meet it.
Anyhow, on to the next subject: the potentially negative effects of reading too many "how to do X" fiction articles. There are a lot of people who (often for free to the general public, and seemingly out of a sense of mission) give out good writing advice. An example of the kind of thing I'm thinking about is K.M. Weiland's blog. Every day, there's some new piece of advice, like "the wrong way to write a smart character," or "how to find your character's breaking point." Useful stuff, and I've no problem generally with how she goes about it. There are, of course, tons more examples out there, and everyone has their favorite. I'm not here to pick on or praise one or the other.
There is something about the whole "area of writing to focus on today" method that I think might be dangerous to a writer, though. When I was a teenager, I fell in with evangelical Christianity for a bit. Well, about seven years. I was pretty into it. I went to church Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. In between, I listened to a lot of sermons on the radio. Every one of those sermons picked a Bible passage and delivered some message that was part exposition, part exhortation to apply the passage in our lives.
Funny thing about a new sermon every day is you can end up being all over the place in your life trying to apply them. One day, the sermon is about how we need to think of the world as a valley of tears, and the next day is all about the joy of the Lord. You hear "turn the other cheek" one day and "tolerate no evil" the next. It gets a believer a little discombobulated.
The same thing can happen in writing. If you just read a helpful article about how to imagine scene, you might end up spending far more effort on scene in your story than the story merits. There are a lot of elements to every story to keep in the right balance, and you can easily be misled about what that balance is based on the proximity in time to the last time you read an article on one of those elements was.
Better is to have a general grounding in most of the elements a writer uses, then step back and write your story. If you think one element is really in demand in your story, then gingerly look up good advice on how to handle that element as it relates to your project.
I'd hate for writers to suffer from bad timing, and hear a "the meek shall inherit the Earth" sermon just before meeting the playground bully.
Thursday, August 21, 2014
"throw strikes" vs. "keep your shoulder back"
When I was twelve, I loved baseball above all things. I was even good at it. I still have a news clipping from my hometown paper that says "Jake Weber pitched and batted the North Canton all-stars to a 15-3 victory over the Massillon National All-Stars." I hit two home runs in that game, and pitched for four innings until we were ahead enough they saved me for a future game. I never got to play that future game; two nights later we got creamed and we were done.
As I got older and the mound moved out to the full 60 ft 6 inches from home, I had problems throwing strikes. In those days, coaches tended to deal with my wildness by offering this really helpful advice: "C'mon, Jake. Throw strikes!"
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh. Throw strikes. If only I had thought of that.
Nowadays, coaches at all levels are better informed. There are lots of videos available, many for free, where even an amateur leader of nine year-olds in Ohio can more or less trouble shoot mechanics issues of pitchers. I had to live with amateur psychiatry instead. I needed "Keep your shoulder back as you come through your motion," but I got "Just relax!"
I compare these two approaches to those used by two well-known books on writing: Writing Fiction, edited by Burroway and Stuckey-French, and Robert Olen Butler's From Where you Dream. When I decided to give writing another try a few years ago, these were the first two books I read.
Butler is the old-school coach, giving advice like "Write from your white-hot center." He meant something like write from your truest, most instinctive, most pre-verbal and sensual self. Great. Throw strikes. HOW do I write from my white hot center? I know that it's what I want to do. Why am I not doing it?
He does offer a few practical ideas. He recommends writing in the early hours, while your brain is still in its addled, dream-like, pre-verbal state. He recommends writing instinctively. Then, later, you go back and edit, and just take out anything that doesn't "thrum." Again--how do I do that? The closest thing he offers to practical advice is his description of considering your scenes like a film director (with an emphasis on the Stanislavsky method). This was something I had also heard alluded to vaguely in graduate school at University of Illinois-Chicago by Gene Wildman. Basically, you imagine your scene like a director. Should the camera be wide-lens? Close-up? Should this be a montage or a slow, real-time study?
That was a little better. It was like saying "You need to keep balance throughout your pitching motion"--a general rule of thumb, but still not precise enough to tell me what the hell I actually needed to do.
The Burroway/Stuckey-French book is what I needed. (I also liked the Gotham Writer's Workshop book, which had a similar approach, but shorter.) It had tangible advice on things like pace, scene, description, point-of-view, tone, and even very specific directions on how to handle quotations and avoid too many "tags." It was humbling, after having an advanced degree in English, to realize I really didn't know how to do some basic things. But thinking back, I wasn't the only one. My graduate school workshops were filled with bad writing.
Why? Because grad school was all about emotional support and nothing about the guts of how to fix your shit. Writing programs weren't alone; in academic literature courses, we always tried to jump right into some high-level analysis of a text based on some sexy theorist before most of the class had understood the base text's denotative meaning. We were trying to throw curve balls when we couldn't throw fast balls. We wanted to delve into the white hot center without figuring out where the door to the center was.
Maybe in five years, when I've knocked off a dozen short story credits and my first novel, I'll return to Butler and find inspiration to write a magnum opus. For now, though, I'm still working on keeping my shoulder back.
Next up: The dangers of too much "how to" or an analysis of the short story "Bagram" by Tom Paine from the Spring/Summer edition of Glimmer Train.
As I got older and the mound moved out to the full 60 ft 6 inches from home, I had problems throwing strikes. In those days, coaches tended to deal with my wildness by offering this really helpful advice: "C'mon, Jake. Throw strikes!"
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh. Throw strikes. If only I had thought of that.
Nowadays, coaches at all levels are better informed. There are lots of videos available, many for free, where even an amateur leader of nine year-olds in Ohio can more or less trouble shoot mechanics issues of pitchers. I had to live with amateur psychiatry instead. I needed "Keep your shoulder back as you come through your motion," but I got "Just relax!"
I compare these two approaches to those used by two well-known books on writing: Writing Fiction, edited by Burroway and Stuckey-French, and Robert Olen Butler's From Where you Dream. When I decided to give writing another try a few years ago, these were the first two books I read.
Butler is the old-school coach, giving advice like "Write from your white-hot center." He meant something like write from your truest, most instinctive, most pre-verbal and sensual self. Great. Throw strikes. HOW do I write from my white hot center? I know that it's what I want to do. Why am I not doing it?
He does offer a few practical ideas. He recommends writing in the early hours, while your brain is still in its addled, dream-like, pre-verbal state. He recommends writing instinctively. Then, later, you go back and edit, and just take out anything that doesn't "thrum." Again--how do I do that? The closest thing he offers to practical advice is his description of considering your scenes like a film director (with an emphasis on the Stanislavsky method). This was something I had also heard alluded to vaguely in graduate school at University of Illinois-Chicago by Gene Wildman. Basically, you imagine your scene like a director. Should the camera be wide-lens? Close-up? Should this be a montage or a slow, real-time study?
That was a little better. It was like saying "You need to keep balance throughout your pitching motion"--a general rule of thumb, but still not precise enough to tell me what the hell I actually needed to do.
The Burroway/Stuckey-French book is what I needed. (I also liked the Gotham Writer's Workshop book, which had a similar approach, but shorter.) It had tangible advice on things like pace, scene, description, point-of-view, tone, and even very specific directions on how to handle quotations and avoid too many "tags." It was humbling, after having an advanced degree in English, to realize I really didn't know how to do some basic things. But thinking back, I wasn't the only one. My graduate school workshops were filled with bad writing.
Why? Because grad school was all about emotional support and nothing about the guts of how to fix your shit. Writing programs weren't alone; in academic literature courses, we always tried to jump right into some high-level analysis of a text based on some sexy theorist before most of the class had understood the base text's denotative meaning. We were trying to throw curve balls when we couldn't throw fast balls. We wanted to delve into the white hot center without figuring out where the door to the center was.
Maybe in five years, when I've knocked off a dozen short story credits and my first novel, I'll return to Butler and find inspiration to write a magnum opus. For now, though, I'm still working on keeping my shoulder back.
Next up: The dangers of too much "how to" or an analysis of the short story "Bagram" by Tom Paine from the Spring/Summer edition of Glimmer Train.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Genesis
All modern fiction opening lines are unrealistically catchy, thought the stripper holding the fish between two tongs made of her dead cat's thigh bones...
For the longest time, I thought I'd call this blog "Failed Writer" when I finally got around to writing it. Now that I'm at last giving this a go, there are two reasons I've decided on a different title. First, I actually got a notice this week that the Baltimore Review is publishing my short story "American as Berbere" in their fall edition. So I'm not really "failed." I'll soon have one whole fiction credit to my name, to go with the three (I think) that I had as a poet about 13 years ago. Secondly, it seems the name was already taken by someone who hasn't updated the blog in over a decade.
This is a space for people who fit certain criteria. You may like it if you fit one or more of the following criteria:
1) You're someone who has tried at least a few times to publish something "creative," like fiction or poetry, and been rejected.
2) Even if you've occasionally been accepted, you have seen stuff get published that you think isn't as good as what you wrote that got rejected. Not always, but sometimes. And you're pretty sure it's not just sour grapes, but you're not totally sure, because no matter what they say, it's really crushing when you get a rejection.
3) You don't really always agree or understand with the advice in writing "how-to" books, such as the well-known Burroway text or Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream or similar fare. Not that you are an unteachable ass who out of hand rejects all advice and just wants to use your natural genius unfettered by so-called "wisdom," but because you are honestly engaged with the advice in the texts and with the literary tradition you love, and feel that not everything you are being told is helpful.
4) You spent (or borrowed, and are still paying back) a ton of money to go to a writing school, and don't feel you learned much of use there. You think most of what you were told in workshops was half thought-out junk that some overworked grad student with three jobs just said so he/she could prove he/she participated while waiting for his/her turn to be read. You wondered if you were the only one who thought that the workshop was a fraud, as well as your grad school writing "program."
5) You think a lot of fiction is being written that's really good, but a lot of it also seems to look similar to everything else that's being written. You wonder if this is because of writing programs. (And yes, you know that like a million people have already made this point.)
I did once suggest to my adviser in grad school that I didn't think the workshop was a great idea. She laconically replied that if I didn't like it, I should leave grad school. I stayed, because I was already in debt and close to a Master's, so I stuck it out for a piece of paper. But the experience did leave me feeling that I was something of a heretic.
So this blog is about the experience of writing and trying to become a better writer, while also being skeptical about those who purport to help me to become better. There is a lot of good, even great advice. There is also a lot of junk. There's probably a lot that might be good for you, bad for me, or vice-versa. This blog is about the struggle (I hate the word "journey") to improve while resisting what doesn't make me better. I hope to find a few kindred spirits.
I'll blog about my reactions to writing books, articles, and blogs. I'll blog about fiction being published now. I'll blog about what I'm writing and how I'm going about making it better and getting it out there. I'll even blog about workshops--I'm hoping to join one soon, just not one made up of grad students. I'll blog about being humble enough to learn and strong enough to stick with what you think works.
Next entry: general thoughts on Burroway and Butler.
For the longest time, I thought I'd call this blog "Failed Writer" when I finally got around to writing it. Now that I'm at last giving this a go, there are two reasons I've decided on a different title. First, I actually got a notice this week that the Baltimore Review is publishing my short story "American as Berbere" in their fall edition. So I'm not really "failed." I'll soon have one whole fiction credit to my name, to go with the three (I think) that I had as a poet about 13 years ago. Secondly, it seems the name was already taken by someone who hasn't updated the blog in over a decade.
This is a space for people who fit certain criteria. You may like it if you fit one or more of the following criteria:
1) You're someone who has tried at least a few times to publish something "creative," like fiction or poetry, and been rejected.
2) Even if you've occasionally been accepted, you have seen stuff get published that you think isn't as good as what you wrote that got rejected. Not always, but sometimes. And you're pretty sure it's not just sour grapes, but you're not totally sure, because no matter what they say, it's really crushing when you get a rejection.
3) You don't really always agree or understand with the advice in writing "how-to" books, such as the well-known Burroway text or Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream or similar fare. Not that you are an unteachable ass who out of hand rejects all advice and just wants to use your natural genius unfettered by so-called "wisdom," but because you are honestly engaged with the advice in the texts and with the literary tradition you love, and feel that not everything you are being told is helpful.
4) You spent (or borrowed, and are still paying back) a ton of money to go to a writing school, and don't feel you learned much of use there. You think most of what you were told in workshops was half thought-out junk that some overworked grad student with three jobs just said so he/she could prove he/she participated while waiting for his/her turn to be read. You wondered if you were the only one who thought that the workshop was a fraud, as well as your grad school writing "program."
5) You think a lot of fiction is being written that's really good, but a lot of it also seems to look similar to everything else that's being written. You wonder if this is because of writing programs. (And yes, you know that like a million people have already made this point.)
I did once suggest to my adviser in grad school that I didn't think the workshop was a great idea. She laconically replied that if I didn't like it, I should leave grad school. I stayed, because I was already in debt and close to a Master's, so I stuck it out for a piece of paper. But the experience did leave me feeling that I was something of a heretic.
So this blog is about the experience of writing and trying to become a better writer, while also being skeptical about those who purport to help me to become better. There is a lot of good, even great advice. There is also a lot of junk. There's probably a lot that might be good for you, bad for me, or vice-versa. This blog is about the struggle (I hate the word "journey") to improve while resisting what doesn't make me better. I hope to find a few kindred spirits.
I'll blog about my reactions to writing books, articles, and blogs. I'll blog about fiction being published now. I'll blog about what I'm writing and how I'm going about making it better and getting it out there. I'll even blog about workshops--I'm hoping to join one soon, just not one made up of grad students. I'll blog about being humble enough to learn and strong enough to stick with what you think works.
Next entry: general thoughts on Burroway and Butler.
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