Sunday, March 25, 2012

I haven't written a journal entry for ten days, which is not to say that I haven't done anything, just that I haven't written it down. I've been going to classes even though I'm on spring break and I've been getting a lot done, although as always not as much as I would have hoped.

I have a lot of things to say and not a lot of patience to say them all, so here goes.

I was workshopped on Monday--six days ago--in Shelly's class, and it was terribly interesting. The piece I turned in I had also submitted to my lovely mentor, Lynne, and some of the same and some very different feedback. The piece I turned in counted a lot on a knowledge of the characters from at least the previous story, if not the whole saga I've been building over the past 4+ years, and that was of course the first thing that Shelly rapped me on the knuckles for (and rightly so. I should learn how to create a freestanding short story, even if I automatically tend to lean towards the novel form). I read a book of short stories by Aimee Bender called The Girl with the Flammable Skirt and I really enjoyed it; I guess I always thought of the short story as a half-assed way to go about fiction but it actually isn't, not at all. It's a strange art unto itself and I'm definitely learning a lot about it.

Shelly's second point was about plot, which was also more than fair. I have a very certain way of doing things, a very set process, and in that process I don't usually have a plot before I have characters and themes. I may have an idea of where I want to go, what I want to do, but it's never quite formed until the second draft, when I make my plot charts (which is a new part of my process, and it's irritating but helpful). The piece I turned in was very new and fresh and I hadn't worked out exactly what I wanted to happen yet, although being in the workshop really helped give me some ideas. I now have my chart and a lot of work to do, which I've been doing but at a remarkably slow pace. I'm enjoying taking time to not write but at the same time the itch doesn't ever really go away. So that's that.

On Wednesday, Interior Space is going to be workshopped by Myla's group, which is a totally different dynamic from the one I'm used to. Shelly's class isn't really combative but it's a little more sardonic because it's very young; Shelly herself is pleasant but has a definite edge to her and there's no beating around the bush when she thinks something's wrong. I'm glad I'm not on her bad side but I've almost been there a couple of times and it's no fun at all. She also told me that I'm too young to have a sense of humor in my writing, which I am just trying not to think about. That said, she's very well qualified and very with it. The age median in Myla's class is 25 years higher and for that reason a very different dynamic; there's only two other young people in my class, and the rest could be my grandmother. That is not to say that these are women (there's only one man in my class) who don't have an edge; they're sharp and they can be harsh, but they definitely have a different approach. I appreciate that and I'm excited to see what happens. What ended up making my decision was that I didn't want to have to print 100 pages at home; I'd rather use the Xerox at school. So that was that.

Let's see, what else. I've been learning a lot of really strange things from other people's writing, especially concerning my strengths and weaknesses. Dialogue is especially easy for me, I don't really know why. Or at least I hope it is. I guess I just know my characters really well, which is good because I know my characters but bad because sometimes I have a hard time creating new characters, and then I avoid creating new characters, and I end up writing the same story for years on end. I'm good at showing instead of telling. I'm bad at having a plot. I'm bad at compromising what I want for the reader's best interest, not because I think I know what I'm doing but because I feel like I've been appointed to tell a certain story and I'm not going to take out incest or adverbs because people think they're too much. I'm also not so great at thinking for myself; I like it when Shelly tells me what she thinks I should do.

I went to this really great exhibit on Saturday--yesterday?--that is going to affect my writing, I don't know why yet. It's by Frances Stark at the Gavin Brown Enterprise gallery something something something; I don't know exactly how we found our way there, but we did. You sit in a white room on a white couch and if you're there at the right time you can watch a conversation, literally in words, on the walls. I found a video of it, but you sort of have to be there. http://vimeo.com/38103422 It dazed me for a couple of hours and it's going to work its way into whatever I'm working on.

I have the same problem that everyone has. I just want to do too much. I have trouble focusing on one Word document even though I know that small steps are the only way to the big thing. And I see the same potential in my notes, my notebooks, the little things, the way the words come together, this, even. I guess my real problem is that I feel like I'm not being ambitious enough--not in terms of classes, or in terms of work that can be done, just in terms of what I personally can achieve. I can do more than two short stories, for the love of god. I'm a little frustrated but that's probably a good thing. I don't know.

I also have no idea what I'm learning, other than a lot about myself. Some about myself. In terms of craft and story, can't I just bring Writing Fiction to the presentation, set it on the table, and tell them to read it? I'm not learning anything I haven't been told; workshops aren't about learning how to do something. They're about making what you already have better. In the process, I've been learning technicalities, but I wouldn't call them epiphanies. I'm not learning anything a panel isn't going to know, and I'm also not interested in presenting something I knew when I was 15 years old. I thought about putting something about how I'm sort of experimenting with point of view shifts, but not actually. I just do that because the story wants me to; I'm not doing it on purpose, and in the second story Shelly recommended that I either find a way to make it work or take it out altogether.

I don't know. I guess I'm on break and I don't have to push myself that hard. And whatever I come up with for the presentation will be fine, will be convincing, might even be genuine. But still.

I guess I should probably put this energy towards writing something that's going to matter.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

This was my first week of having two classes, and I'm pretty tired. My Monday class went very well. We workshopped four pieces (which is killer to do in 3 hours) and as a result we didn't really have time to discuss anything profound from a craft standpoint. Everything I learned was within the context of the pieces we were workshopping. Shelly concentrates very heavily on frontstory/backstory, which is something I've been thinking about as well, and also on point of view, which is becoming more and more the focus of my work (no pun intended) as the semester continues. Both of my pieces have fairly fluid point of view, shifting where they aren't supposed to, and in that way I'm just a tiny bit experimental. I like streamlining points of view as opposed to concentrating on one character, but I recognize that it can (and often does) get out of hand and become very confusing. But that's something I'll know more about after I'm workshopped on Monday, which I'm very excited and nervous for.

My second class was with Myla Goldberg and it's really, really far downtown. So far downtown that to make a 6:30 start, I had to get on the bus at 3:45, which seems a little bit ridiculous considering I'm 20 minutes away from just about everything in the city. Lower Manhattan--and I mean really lower, the last stop on the J train--is quite a bit farther than I'm used to traveling, but it went seamlessly--so seamlessly that I was actually there an hour and a half early. The class is held in a conference room at Hive at 55, which is, as I understand it, a "freelance office space," whatever that means. Myla is the sweetest woman in the whole world, but also very talented, as I understand it. The other students in the class range from 10 to 50 years older than I am, and I recognize many of them from the class I took with Myla Goldberg last fall. Myla's class is eight sessions long, and she plunged right in. She had sent out two stories to be workshopped as well as one published story to read from a craft standpoint, and she didn't waste any time. The first woman who went broke that very concrete rule of not speaking during one's workshop. As I put it quite graphically to my father later, talking when you are being workshopped is the equivalent of going to dinner with the queen, pooping on the table, and eating it with your feet. It's just not done. I've been in a lot of writing workshops, even on a high school level, and it seems pretty clearly understood. This one woman would not stop explaining herself and I actually thought Myla, who is very sweet and soft-spoken, was going to lose it. After a while, the woman got the idea, and chewed on her tongue for the rest of the class. The other woman who was workshopped had written a much stronger story and I enjoyed workshopping her very much.

We also read a short story by Aimee Bender for class today, called What You Left in the Ditch, which is about a man who loses his lips in a war. I'll leave it at that. It's an absolutely spectacular story and I would recommend it in a heartbeat. From a technical standpoint, it's really incredible. Myla called our attention to the way Bender affects all of the reader's senses--even using punctuation to indicate sound, with the extremely creative use of hyphens (to indicate when the husband's plastic lip replacements clack together as he speaks).

After going over the short story, she handed out the two stories to be workshopped next week, as well as the third published story, and then the list of workshops to be handed in. I have to hand in six days from now, next Wednesday, much to my surprise, and she has a page recommendation that's a good 10 pages more than what I was planning. It's not a matter of impossible as much as a matter of compromising my usual ways of doing things. I was going to wait to write until the workshop (seeing as it's the same piece) but I guess if I wait I only have Tuesday and Wednesday to add ten pages onto something that I'm really not quite sure of. That seems a little risky, to say the least. But my other option is even scarier--try to write something new, and hope that I can get fifteen pages up to par in that much time? Assuming that I even had a new idea, which I don't? I can't ask her to switch; her workshop schedule is set in stone. There has to be something I can do that doesn't require me to kill myself on Tuesday and Wednesday, but for me it's quite difficult to turn out a lot of words at one time because of the relative complexity of the words. While some authors pass a lot of time through explication, I'm at a point in my writing where 95% of it is in scene. Scenes are shorter and take longer to write. In general. But I am pretty good under pressure, so hopefully that 15 page recommendation will not go unfulfilled. I would hate to see Myla disappointed, especially because I'm the youngest person in the class by a long shot. In any case, I don't really have much of a choice. If worst came to worst I could submit Interior Space but I feel like that's been workshopped to death, so I'm trying to avoid it. Can someone please tell me why the verb "to workshop" is not actually in the dictionary?

Monday, March 12, 2012

I had a tumultuous week last week. I know I'm supposed to be focusing on what I learned, but I'm going to tell you what I did first, because I think it's important.

On Monday I had a very rude awakening. My teacher announced who was going to be handing out next week (meaning today) and my name was one of them. I was totally surprised; I had written down the wrong date, and apparently I had been wrong. I could have submitted a revision, but I had a feeling I couldn't do it. Interior Space needed to be put to bed and I knew it even then. But I still couldn't disobey one of the central tenants of what I've learned: don't work on more than one thing at the same time.

So I finished the story. Simple as that. In all fairness, I wasn't that far away from finishing to begin with. I recorded a journal entry when I finished, so you've got a time and a date on that. And then straightaway I began the next story, because I basically had four days to finish it.

In the middle of this craziness, I met with Lynne, my mentor, just to talk about what I've been doing and how involved she has to be in it. Total side note - she received a letter that she has to fill out about the Focus project, which we weren't told about, which feels like a pretty big oversight considering there was a sheet of questions attached to it. Aside from that, it went very smoothly. She had a lot of great things to say, which I have in my notes, about Interior Space, about the sort of strange nature of a workshop (in her words, if you submit a story on a Friday, the next Tuesday night you are bound to have a revelation), about the process of writing a story in four days to submit to workshop, etc. It was a very worthwhile meeting. Perhaps her most valuable criticism was about the opening of Interior Space; the way it began was simply not appropriate, in fact out of character, while the rest of the piece was extremely strong.I changed the beginning, just reversing a little dialogue, and haven't looked at it since.

After meeting with Lynne on Thursday, I came home and sat for many hours. I turned out a brand new story, with no notes or anything (not that long, maybe 2,000 words, which is less than half of the maximum length but I think it's quality over quantity in this case) and I was surprised how much I did in so short a time. The story was something that had been fermenting in my mind for several weeks, but almost every word of it was totally new, and when I was finished I printed it out and got ready for pen edits. From this, I learned a lot about the process of the first draft--something Interior Space didn't allow me to experience because the actual first draft of that came so long ago (side note: I went through several of my binders and found more drafts of that story that will be useful in my presentation). I learned that I cannot get attached to anything in the first draft, because almost none of it will end up in later drafts. The familiar rush of the first draft was just as good as it always is; writing for the sake of writing, without editing. I know a lot of people have trouble with their inner editor, but I don't; if something begs to be fixed, I'll fix it, but I have pretty good faith in my ability to edit later on.

On Thursday evening I had a little bit of a breakdown, I will admit. I had been doing a lot, even too much, and sometimes when I spend too much time in my own head not doing anything else it makes me feel a little bit out there, not quite connected with the world at large. Thursday evening was bad, so I took Friday off. I didn't have much to do anyway; I waited to do pen edits for a few days, so by Saturday I was feeling better. I've also been staying away from reading as much as I can, just because nothing's struck me as urgent to read at this moment.

In the first pen edit, I did a lot of work as to individual lines, which is to be expected, and totally changed the beginning. When I first had the idea, I was still immersed in medieval art & architecture (thank you, Mrs. Devito!) but not so much anymore. Instead of a tympanum, I added a television. It makes total sense in context and I was reminded, as I always am, that I cannot get too attached to anything, because I cannot keep it. The backbone of the story remained the same, and so I left it as it was.

I have to get up. I will resume this entry later.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

I finished the story!

Much more later, but I'm proud and tired at the same time. I guess you just sort of know when you're done, and I was.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

I've been told that I have a lot of "what I did" and not a lot of "what I've learned." That's absolutely correct. I won't bother to make the point that what I'm doing and what I'm learning are so closely intertwined that it's almost redundant to write about. I'll just start.

I come from kind of a strange position to this Focus project because I'm not a newcomer, not in the slightest. In the beginning of the year, all throughout first semester, I was in writing workshops, and that's what I did the past two summers, etc. etc. A lot of what is saying is not new to me; I have a copy of Writing Fiction, and I've actually read it. Each teacher has distinctly different language when discussing craft, but the solids are mutually settled upon.

I'm pretty good at solid things. I think because I'm a student, the idea of right vs. wrong doesn't really irk me. I accept that there is a right way and a wrong way to go about writing. I also know that none of the rules are absolutes. Experimental fiction, what I concentrated on in my first semester, concerns itself with breaking certain of those absolutes and obeying others. This is as it may be; I can make no general statements as to which can be broken and what can't, and in many ways that's not what I'm here to learn. That would take a lot more than a semester.

I have learned a lot about craft on a more advanced level from Shelly's class. That much is certain. A very concrete example would be the four kinds of showing (action, thought, dialogue, and the one that nobody can seem to agree on, Wikipedia it for more [and yes eventually I will check my notes on this]). However, I'm lucky. I'm good at showing. If there's one thing that I really catch when I'm writing, it's that I never have a lot of exposition, or a lot of telling. Of course, it can't all be showing--nobody has enough ink for that--but I'm one of those people who sort of has it easy in this department.

I can't say the same thing about point of view. These are the two categories Shelly has discussed the most with our class, and with a few exceptions it seems that everyone is really good at one and not so good at the other. I've always had a hard time with point of view on a very basic level because I don't think writing from my own perspective is interesting. I have written more personal essays than I can count, but creative nonfiction was never my goal, perhaps because at heart I am too old-fashioned and too young. I don't think my story is interesting enough in its own right to merit the kind of work that I'd like to be doing. Maybe it will be, one day. At present, though, I try to avoid the first person as much as I can. The first person to me always seemed like a hazardous choice. On the one hand, I can't imagine anyone else being interested in my own life just for the sake of it being my own life. On the other, how can I separate myself from a character? There are people (Murakami) who can write in the first person so well and so marvelously, all the time, and all of their books are different and all of their characters are tremendous and I admire that, I really do, but it wasn't going to happen for me. I've tried. It's never worked and there's no point in forcing it. On a similarly basic level, the second person is out. not hat I haven't tried it. One of the first experimental novels I ever read--Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins--is exclusively in the second person, and it is wonderful, but that always seemed too gimmicky. The content always has to fit the discourse, that I know. How it's told and what's being told always have to match up, exactly, intrinsically, otherwise the story will feel forced. Second person is the right choice for some people, but not for me.

I decided on third, and this decision took me a while to come to. In the end, it was more of a coincidence than anything else; the one viable story I had was in third person, so I wasn't really about to alter it. And the part of the story that needs to be in first person--a rather lengthy but often interrupted monologue--worked just as well in dialogue as it would have in not-dialogue. But if it were as simple as first/second/third, I wouldn't have anything to learn.

It turns out that perspective, point of view, is more scientific than any other element of creative writing, and I'm not entirely surprised.

I got distracted by the prom dress group, but I'm back.

Specifically under the third person category are numerous smaller categories that aren't entirely clear to me, even though Shelly's explained them a million times. I am planning on doing a little more reading so I can have an idea of what I'm actually in for. There's a difference between third close/limited and omniscient and all of these things seem subtle until you're being workshopped and they're absolutely glaring. I knew that was my issue. I could tell because I have two main characters in my story and I'm not exactly sure whose story it is just yet. I want it to be both, but that's much harder to achieve than I originally thought.

On this subject, Lynne had quite a bit to say (but she has quite a bit to say about everything, for which I love her!):

As for the shifts in point of view and “persons,” I actually noticed them more in this version, than the first. But before you get in any way shook up about that, I want to say that I’m not sure if that’s because I read your blog entry from a while back where you mentioned that the workshop gang had focused some on that. I was surprised about that because I actually didn’t mind it in the first version. In fact, as I was reading that one I was surprised about how your story seemed to take quite a “traditional” form (compared to other works of yours that I’d read when you were maybe a sophomore, say). So when I read along in the first version, I thought, oh, here’s where traditional meets experimental, classic meets innovative—Serena’s not afraid to shift points of view at will in aid of the story. And, since the story was strong and compelling, I found myself happily going with it and not at all bothered or tripped up by it. And I’m still not in this version, but I felt more aware of it. As I say, I’m not sure if because it’s not quite as smooth as the first or it’s simply that because I read the blog and know that others were flagging it, that I was more tuned in to it.

I guess I was extremely comfortable with the shifts in point of view, mostly you alternate them in chunks at a time—at least by paragraphs, but usually longer passages. But occasionally the POV shifts for just a sentence within a paragraph. Maybe that’s when the faint-of-heart traditionalists get a little flustered. The one other thing I can see as potentially rattling the same cages is that major shift from third person to first person in the same, um, I guess, call it the same subnarrative. So we’ve got the story of Carl and Ollie at the cathedral within the bigger story. In the beginning of the telling of that we’re getting it (I think) third person from Rodger’s POV (or is it Carl’s or is it an omniscient narrator?)—

Ollie was fascinated by the rose windows….


Ollie hadn’t washed her hair for three days…


Ollie, though, was no pillar…


Then, later, it’s part of first person dialog from Carl

“We were walking back to the hotel and I could tell something was wrong with her…”


“I thought it might have been the cathedral…”


“We ate, sort of, but it wasn’t really night yet..”


You get the idea. So is it something that has to be “fixed”? Depends on if you think it’s “broken!” The important thing to me is that you have a solid, compelling, sharply observed, well-written story. The mechanics can be changed in any number of ways—should one feel compelled to do so. The reading public at large got all freaked out a while back when a new generation of writers started, seemingly as one and overnight, dropping attribution in dialog. Instead of the constant xxxxxxx, she said/ xxxxx, Pablo replied/, writers dropped those tedious, arguably unnecessary extras and just let the exchange itself signal the reader who was speaking when. So maybe you’re just on a leading edge of breaking down POV rules to go with a more natural shifting that occurs in any dynamic situation between characters.

Obviously she likes my writing a lot more than I deserve, but she's sort of right (and I am one of those people who really like the new dialogue, as opposed to the old. I used to have the current story with no "saids", just all names, if I needed anything. I took a lot of flack for that). I sort of like the way the story slides. That said, I recognize that it has to become a lot smoother before it's anywhere near done. I'm definitely learning a lot about point of view as this goes on, but at the same time I'm trying not to learn too much, which might sound weird and counterintuitive but it's true. I want to understand the technicalities of point of view, but at the same time I don't want to start thinking about them like they're solid, because they aren't. I really do like the idea of third limited, because following one character seems like a much better idea than trying to do everything at once (and a lot more interesting) but I can't seem to figure out which character wants to be followed. They pull me in opposite directions because my two characters have essentially different lives, but both of their reactions are equally important. How do I make that make sense?

In terms of what I actually have to do, and have been doing, it's fairly simple. I went to class last night and realized that I have to hand in to workshop on Monday, which is short for me panicking. I haven't quite started doing that yet, because I have six days left, but I'm pretty close. I don't know how I"m going to have a totally new and fresh and exciting revision done by that time, but I can't imagine having a fully story turned out by then. I know I do my best work under pressure, but it doesn't make it any less painful. I finished a pen revision under some pressure and I started retyping today, but I haven't gotten too far (my project for tonight, I'd imagine). I'm also meeting with my mentor on Thursday and I'm so glad to talk to her. I'm not really stuck just yet, more confused, really. I'm also in a terrible mood, although that has nothing to do with Focus other than that it makes it very difficult to write. 

My next writing workshop is with Myla Goldberg, who I hear is kind of a big name in the literary world, how big I don't know. She's a very nice lady, I've taken a class with her before. We received one of the pieces we are going to have to read for workshop and it's quite long. Shelly enforces a 5,000 word limit, which I think is reasonable, while the first workshopee was already far over that. I can already tell it's going to be a lot of reading and a really rough bus ride. But that's okay. I signed up for that. 

My last note, and I swear to God I don't know why my entries are so long, is that I need a book to read and I've been trying to avoid it. I read another Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart, and it finally started to get a little old. I've got Henry Miller on Writing sitting on my desk and obviously Women in Love has been driving me crazy because our good friend DH is brilliant, but nothing hits me like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. That's not the right way of putting it. I've been contemplating Women in Love for weeks but I don't know what to write about it. I don't know what to write. All I can do is revise and more and more things come out of the revisions. I hope I'm going in the right direction.