I finished up my semester last week, and I have two weeks until I have to specifically do anything. At some point in that time, I need to plan for my summer classes, but basically I'm on vacation time, which means I have ample opportunity to get some serious progress done on a writing project or projects. As it happens, the piece that is at the forefront of my mind (which I wrote about last time) seems like the ideal piece to devote about two weeks to.
I think I might actually have a novella on my hands rather than just a short story. I wrote a rough draft last year that was in the ten page range. Then as I reworked it, it expanded, and I didn't finish a second draft because I realized the whole structure and approach needed reworking. So I've been outlining and structuring the whole thing, and I think it's going to be much longer than the initial short story. So I'm close to ready to begin writing what could be considered the third draft of the story or the first draft of the novella.
I've never written a novella before, so I don't know exactly how long it might take, but when I have so much time available to write, I should be able to get a significant amount done each day. The fastest pace I ever achieved was a couple years ago when I wrote a rough draft of a kids book in about three weeks. That was about 60,000 words, which is in the range of a novel rather than a novella. I'm guessing that this novella I'm writing now will be maybe in the 20,000 word range. So if I could write 60,000 words in three weeks, I should be able to write 20,000 in two weeks. That's less than 2,000 words a day, and 2,000 words a day isn't a crazy ambitious goal; I've often kept up that pace. And if I have a solid outline where I know where I'm going and how I want to proceed from sequence to sequence, I think the writing should flow as easily as a rough draft ever tends to flow.
So we'll see how it goes. I feel good about it. I think I might actually manage to produce something solid by the time I go out of town in two weeks.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Structure
I've been working on a story recently and really wrestling with how to put the thing together. I wrote the rough draft nearly a year ago, and I've been playing with a revision for months, but I keep hitting a wall in my progress. The initial inspiration for the story was just a character and a situation, which I let play out in front of me. Then as I rewrote, I figured out more back story, and now I have a lot more material that I want to include, and I think the newer version will be much more interesting and complex than the rough draft where I was just figuring out basic elements of the story. But my current trouble is that I'm not sure how to put all the material into a new draft.
I started rewriting where I began at the same point as last time, just before the big event that sets the present story in action, but as I wrote and wrote, it became obvious that this structure results in a couple of paragraphs followed by pages of flashback before eventually returning to the present story, a structure that doesn't typically work well. Flashbacks are best kept to a minimum.
I could structure the story in the absolute most straightforward way, where I begin with the very first element and then play it out in order. But this would mean starting with the character as a child and then going through years of events until I reach the big scene that was the original inspiration for the story, which also feels like a mistake since it would take pages and pages before reaching the hook, the exciting event that really sets the action in progress.
Another approach would be to start with the hook and then insert mini-flashbacks throughout the whole story, interweaving memories into the present action. But this seems like a set up for a schizophrenic story that fails to ever be quite one thing or another.
Part of the problem is that any of these structures CAN work. Writers have done them well before and will continue to do them well in the future. But they all have drawbacks and weaknesses. And sometimes the pitfalls appear so large that there seems to be almost nowhere safe to step.
So I've been wracking my brain, trying to remember what I learned in grad school about how to find an appropriate structure for a work of fiction, and the sad truth is that I don't think this issue was covered very well. Part of the problem is that the teacher I had for the class that should have covered this material was simply not a good teacher. Instead of learning about structure in the fiction class, I learned about structure in the screenwriting class, and that's now what I'm falling back on.
One major structural point in the screenwriting class was the inciting incident, the action that sets the plot moving, which, in a screenplay with a standard three act structure, comes in the first act, typically fifteen to twenty minutes into the film, after the world of the film has been established. Before the inciting incident occurs, the audience needs to understand the world and who the major character is, so when the inciting incident occurs and the character makes a choice about what is going to happen, we understand what is at stake. I'm not sure a short story necessarily has the exact same structure as a screenplay and whether I can plot out my story in the same exact fashion, but I think this concept of the inciting incident is probably useful to keep in mind.
So the question I've been asking myself is whether the hook, the event I began with as the original idea for the story, is the inciting incident or something else. I tried something to help me sort through the material: I wrote down each separate event, which could be an entire scene or simply a memory that is represented in a single sentence, and I wrote down each one on a note card. Currently, I have forty-two cards. I looked at these events and tried to determine which one has the most potential to be an inciting incident, which one results in the character making a choice that affects his life and sends him down a new path. And I've tentatively concluded that the original spark for the story is actually more of a plot point later. It's a complication from the second act (if I'm thinking of a three act screenplay structure), and the inciting incident is something that occurs much earlier. So what I need to do is not necessarily begin at the very beginning, but begin shortly before the true inciting incident, the action that occurs that sets my protagonist on his path that leads him to where he is when the big event occurs, setting up the final action down the line.
Anyway, I'm still struggling with it. I'm also trying to figure out whether I have a short story on my hands or a novella, so I'll probably write another post here soon where I hash out my ideas on length as I keep working on this.
I started rewriting where I began at the same point as last time, just before the big event that sets the present story in action, but as I wrote and wrote, it became obvious that this structure results in a couple of paragraphs followed by pages of flashback before eventually returning to the present story, a structure that doesn't typically work well. Flashbacks are best kept to a minimum.
I could structure the story in the absolute most straightforward way, where I begin with the very first element and then play it out in order. But this would mean starting with the character as a child and then going through years of events until I reach the big scene that was the original inspiration for the story, which also feels like a mistake since it would take pages and pages before reaching the hook, the exciting event that really sets the action in progress.
Another approach would be to start with the hook and then insert mini-flashbacks throughout the whole story, interweaving memories into the present action. But this seems like a set up for a schizophrenic story that fails to ever be quite one thing or another.
Part of the problem is that any of these structures CAN work. Writers have done them well before and will continue to do them well in the future. But they all have drawbacks and weaknesses. And sometimes the pitfalls appear so large that there seems to be almost nowhere safe to step.
So I've been wracking my brain, trying to remember what I learned in grad school about how to find an appropriate structure for a work of fiction, and the sad truth is that I don't think this issue was covered very well. Part of the problem is that the teacher I had for the class that should have covered this material was simply not a good teacher. Instead of learning about structure in the fiction class, I learned about structure in the screenwriting class, and that's now what I'm falling back on.
One major structural point in the screenwriting class was the inciting incident, the action that sets the plot moving, which, in a screenplay with a standard three act structure, comes in the first act, typically fifteen to twenty minutes into the film, after the world of the film has been established. Before the inciting incident occurs, the audience needs to understand the world and who the major character is, so when the inciting incident occurs and the character makes a choice about what is going to happen, we understand what is at stake. I'm not sure a short story necessarily has the exact same structure as a screenplay and whether I can plot out my story in the same exact fashion, but I think this concept of the inciting incident is probably useful to keep in mind.
So the question I've been asking myself is whether the hook, the event I began with as the original idea for the story, is the inciting incident or something else. I tried something to help me sort through the material: I wrote down each separate event, which could be an entire scene or simply a memory that is represented in a single sentence, and I wrote down each one on a note card. Currently, I have forty-two cards. I looked at these events and tried to determine which one has the most potential to be an inciting incident, which one results in the character making a choice that affects his life and sends him down a new path. And I've tentatively concluded that the original spark for the story is actually more of a plot point later. It's a complication from the second act (if I'm thinking of a three act screenplay structure), and the inciting incident is something that occurs much earlier. So what I need to do is not necessarily begin at the very beginning, but begin shortly before the true inciting incident, the action that occurs that sets my protagonist on his path that leads him to where he is when the big event occurs, setting up the final action down the line.
Anyway, I'm still struggling with it. I'm also trying to figure out whether I have a short story on my hands or a novella, so I'll probably write another post here soon where I hash out my ideas on length as I keep working on this.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Salieri
I did a little detective work yesterday to find out who got the job I interviewed for back at the beginning of April. I knew that the school's board of governors had to approve new hires, so I looked up the agenda for their May meeting. There were three positions at the school, and all three went to current faculty. They have all been adjuncts there for six or seven years, and one has a Ph.D. With that competition, I completely understand why I didn't get the job. The school already knows those people, and they have more experience (and one has more education) than I do. When I looked up that information, I was hoping to find what I did. The odds were against me to start with, and I figure I would have had to completely blow them away with my interview and teaching demonstration in order for them to decide to hire me instead of their local folks, so it doesn't mean much against me that I wasn't hired.
If anything, it's a good sign that I was interviewed at all since I also found out that they had ninety-seven applications. I don't know exactly how many people were interviewed, but I doubt it was more than ten or twelve. So the fact that I made it to the top few out of nearly a hundred seems like a really good sign. They spent several hundred dollars to fly me out there, so they were at least considering me somewhat seriously even if they ultimately decided to go with people they already knew. So the good news is that my application materials must look decent since I'm getting interviews, and I don't feel like I'm doing something major to shoot myself in the foot when I interview (although, obviously, I could have done something better to impress them enough that they would hire me instead of their local folks).
But the bad news is that this experience reiterates how hard it is to actually land a full-time job. After all, the people who got the job had been adjuncts for four or five years longer than I have been before they finally managed to land full-time jobs. For one job posting, there were ninety-seven applications. For another recent job for which I got a phone interview but not an in-person interview, there were 125 applications. (And for the Wisconsin fellowship I didn't get, there were five hundred applications for six fellowships). To actually land a job, I need to be the top choice, not merely qualified or pretty good or in the top ten. I need to be in the top one percent or fraction of one percent. And that's tough.
Growing up, I was a top student. According to GPA, I graduated in the top three percent of my high school class. I'm a member of Mensa, which means I test in the top two percent of the population for IQ. I made it to grad school twice. I had a 4.0 GPA for my time in my MFA program and nearly that for all my other schooling. According to standard measurements, I'm very intelligent and capable, and I'll be a top candidate for various positions throughout life. But my guess is that I look pretty much the same as the other applicants for any of these jobs. One doesn't get into or through grad school in the first place unless one is highly intelligent and capable. Obviously, the school chose to interview me, so maybe I looked better than eighty-five of the applicants. But it's quite possible that I'm never going to be the number one guy, and with this kind of competition, even if I'm number two, I don't get the job.
The same thing is true for publishing. It's not enough to be good or decent. One has to be the absolute top in order to get published. One's story has to be better than the other hundred or five hundred or thousand stories that the magazine is considering. The odds are stacked against ever breaking through. It's not impossible, of course. People get published. People get jobs. And certainly there is the possibility to get lucky. Maybe a magazine will need to fill a few more pages before going to print, so they'll accept something halfway decent just to finish up. Or a school might have their first few choices turn down job offers and hire somebody they aren't quite as impressed with. But to really succeed it's not enough to be in the top ten percent or five percent or two percent or maybe even one percent.
And, of course, the reality is disheartening. When it comes to writing, I feel confident that my writing is good. The fact that I get personal feedback from journals is enough to indicate that I'm not completely deluding myself that my stories are well written. But that's not enough. I'm clearly not the top one in a thousand. Maybe I'm in the top five in a hundred, but so are thousands of other writers, who are also getting rejected. When it comes to teaching, I suspect that if I just keep at it long enough, I'll someday be the top candidate; eventually my experience will build up to the tipping point. But it's tough to think about continuing to work part time and make so little money and have no benefits for another five years.
If anything, it's a good sign that I was interviewed at all since I also found out that they had ninety-seven applications. I don't know exactly how many people were interviewed, but I doubt it was more than ten or twelve. So the fact that I made it to the top few out of nearly a hundred seems like a really good sign. They spent several hundred dollars to fly me out there, so they were at least considering me somewhat seriously even if they ultimately decided to go with people they already knew. So the good news is that my application materials must look decent since I'm getting interviews, and I don't feel like I'm doing something major to shoot myself in the foot when I interview (although, obviously, I could have done something better to impress them enough that they would hire me instead of their local folks).
But the bad news is that this experience reiterates how hard it is to actually land a full-time job. After all, the people who got the job had been adjuncts for four or five years longer than I have been before they finally managed to land full-time jobs. For one job posting, there were ninety-seven applications. For another recent job for which I got a phone interview but not an in-person interview, there were 125 applications. (And for the Wisconsin fellowship I didn't get, there were five hundred applications for six fellowships). To actually land a job, I need to be the top choice, not merely qualified or pretty good or in the top ten. I need to be in the top one percent or fraction of one percent. And that's tough.
Growing up, I was a top student. According to GPA, I graduated in the top three percent of my high school class. I'm a member of Mensa, which means I test in the top two percent of the population for IQ. I made it to grad school twice. I had a 4.0 GPA for my time in my MFA program and nearly that for all my other schooling. According to standard measurements, I'm very intelligent and capable, and I'll be a top candidate for various positions throughout life. But my guess is that I look pretty much the same as the other applicants for any of these jobs. One doesn't get into or through grad school in the first place unless one is highly intelligent and capable. Obviously, the school chose to interview me, so maybe I looked better than eighty-five of the applicants. But it's quite possible that I'm never going to be the number one guy, and with this kind of competition, even if I'm number two, I don't get the job.
The same thing is true for publishing. It's not enough to be good or decent. One has to be the absolute top in order to get published. One's story has to be better than the other hundred or five hundred or thousand stories that the magazine is considering. The odds are stacked against ever breaking through. It's not impossible, of course. People get published. People get jobs. And certainly there is the possibility to get lucky. Maybe a magazine will need to fill a few more pages before going to print, so they'll accept something halfway decent just to finish up. Or a school might have their first few choices turn down job offers and hire somebody they aren't quite as impressed with. But to really succeed it's not enough to be in the top ten percent or five percent or two percent or maybe even one percent.
And, of course, the reality is disheartening. When it comes to writing, I feel confident that my writing is good. The fact that I get personal feedback from journals is enough to indicate that I'm not completely deluding myself that my stories are well written. But that's not enough. I'm clearly not the top one in a thousand. Maybe I'm in the top five in a hundred, but so are thousands of other writers, who are also getting rejected. When it comes to teaching, I suspect that if I just keep at it long enough, I'll someday be the top candidate; eventually my experience will build up to the tipping point. But it's tough to think about continuing to work part time and make so little money and have no benefits for another five years.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
On the Other Hand . . .
Friday I got word from one of the schools where I interviewed. It was four full weeks from the time I flew out there for the interview to the time I finally heard back from them. Four angst-ridden, nerve wracking, sour stomached weeks. And the final word is that they don't want me.
Now I'm down to one possibility left open, but I'm not feeling very optimistic about it. For some reason, I felt better about the interview at the school that turned me down than the more recent interview, and since the one I felt better about said no, that doesn't bode well for the other one. I'm just hoping it's not too much longer before I hear something official from them. Also, I have not heard anything from the Wisconsin fellowship, and their information says that they will contact the chosen few by May 1. That one doesn't really sting since I knew going in it was a pretty long shot. But not getting a job offer after waiting and hoping and daydreaming for so long certainly does.
So I'm thinking that I'll probably be doing the adjunct routine for another year. It's not so bad, of course, and it's great that I made it as far in the interview process as I did (I take that as an indication that I must be doing something right with my application materials anyway). But it's frustrating.
The upside, however, to not having a full-time job yet is that I will have more time to write. At the moment, I've only been assigned three classes for the fall, and they're all developmental writing. Now developmental writing is not easier to teach than composition, but it does take less time because the most time-consuming factor of teaching writing is grading papers and the papers for developmental courses are simpler and shorter and easier to evaluate. I'm estimating that three developmental courses will not merely be part-time employment but will be about half-time, taking about twenty hours a week or so. This will leave me with plenty of extra time to write. I could, of course, seek out a second job as I've had in the past, and that's tempting because the pay from three classes will pretty much be exactly enough to cover my expenses with little or no wiggle room. But I think the better choice would be to devote myself more to writing, to really get a steady routine set much more than I've had recently.
I wrote my last post about reconsidering how much weight to give writing in my life and maybe swinging the balance toward my teaching, but in the wake of my recent rejection, my thoughts are shifting again. Part of the equation is the long-term goal. A full-time teaching position at a community college certainly satisfies an important short-term goal, which is to make a decent living and pay off my grad school debt, but it doesn't really further my long-term goals of writing and eventually teaching higher level courses. It doesn't work against those goals exactly, but it doesn't put me much further down the path. But if I work more on my writing and manage to publish more, that will be the best way to work toward eventually becoming a creative writing teacher. So maybe, even though in the short term it's tough to just barely squeak by paycheck to paycheck, it's worth focusing more on the long-term goals.
There are a few other little things to be positive about at the moment. One, this semester is almost over. It's been one of the toughest semesters of my life, primarily because I've felt so up in the air the whole time about the future. But there were other issues too, like canceled classes because of snow and rain, which then threw off the groove for the semester so it was close to the end by the time anything felt routine.
Two, I'll have about three weeks off once this semester is over. I'm looking forward to this greatly. I will have to do some preparation for my summer courses, sure, but there won't be any papers to get back immediately or anything like that, so it's going to be actual time off. I haven't had any time off like this since I moved to Pennsylvania nearly two years ago; I've been working two jobs most of that time so when I had a break from school I still had to work the other job, so sometimes I worked seven days a week, and the most I ever had truly off was a few days at a time.
Three, I've got the Advanced Placement English Exam reading coming up in June, and I'm excited to do that. It should be fun to travel somewhere I've never been and to network with colleagues and just have an interesting new experience.
Four, my summer classes look like they should both work out. Last year my summer class was canceled at the last minute due to lack of enrollment, but this year one class already has enough and the other is right on the edge, so I'm hopeful that they'll both happen. If they do, that will mean I'll easily make it through the summer without having to dip into my savings, so then if my budget is super tight in the fall with only three classes, I won't have to deplete my savings just to get by each month.
On a whole, things could certainly be worse than they are. And even if nothing works out right now for full-time employment, I got some interviewing experience under my belt, and I should be an even stronger candidate for similar jobs next year. And maybe by then I'll have some more publications on my CV as well.
Now I'm down to one possibility left open, but I'm not feeling very optimistic about it. For some reason, I felt better about the interview at the school that turned me down than the more recent interview, and since the one I felt better about said no, that doesn't bode well for the other one. I'm just hoping it's not too much longer before I hear something official from them. Also, I have not heard anything from the Wisconsin fellowship, and their information says that they will contact the chosen few by May 1. That one doesn't really sting since I knew going in it was a pretty long shot. But not getting a job offer after waiting and hoping and daydreaming for so long certainly does.
So I'm thinking that I'll probably be doing the adjunct routine for another year. It's not so bad, of course, and it's great that I made it as far in the interview process as I did (I take that as an indication that I must be doing something right with my application materials anyway). But it's frustrating.
The upside, however, to not having a full-time job yet is that I will have more time to write. At the moment, I've only been assigned three classes for the fall, and they're all developmental writing. Now developmental writing is not easier to teach than composition, but it does take less time because the most time-consuming factor of teaching writing is grading papers and the papers for developmental courses are simpler and shorter and easier to evaluate. I'm estimating that three developmental courses will not merely be part-time employment but will be about half-time, taking about twenty hours a week or so. This will leave me with plenty of extra time to write. I could, of course, seek out a second job as I've had in the past, and that's tempting because the pay from three classes will pretty much be exactly enough to cover my expenses with little or no wiggle room. But I think the better choice would be to devote myself more to writing, to really get a steady routine set much more than I've had recently.
I wrote my last post about reconsidering how much weight to give writing in my life and maybe swinging the balance toward my teaching, but in the wake of my recent rejection, my thoughts are shifting again. Part of the equation is the long-term goal. A full-time teaching position at a community college certainly satisfies an important short-term goal, which is to make a decent living and pay off my grad school debt, but it doesn't really further my long-term goals of writing and eventually teaching higher level courses. It doesn't work against those goals exactly, but it doesn't put me much further down the path. But if I work more on my writing and manage to publish more, that will be the best way to work toward eventually becoming a creative writing teacher. So maybe, even though in the short term it's tough to just barely squeak by paycheck to paycheck, it's worth focusing more on the long-term goals.
There are a few other little things to be positive about at the moment. One, this semester is almost over. It's been one of the toughest semesters of my life, primarily because I've felt so up in the air the whole time about the future. But there were other issues too, like canceled classes because of snow and rain, which then threw off the groove for the semester so it was close to the end by the time anything felt routine.
Two, I'll have about three weeks off once this semester is over. I'm looking forward to this greatly. I will have to do some preparation for my summer courses, sure, but there won't be any papers to get back immediately or anything like that, so it's going to be actual time off. I haven't had any time off like this since I moved to Pennsylvania nearly two years ago; I've been working two jobs most of that time so when I had a break from school I still had to work the other job, so sometimes I worked seven days a week, and the most I ever had truly off was a few days at a time.
Three, I've got the Advanced Placement English Exam reading coming up in June, and I'm excited to do that. It should be fun to travel somewhere I've never been and to network with colleagues and just have an interesting new experience.
Four, my summer classes look like they should both work out. Last year my summer class was canceled at the last minute due to lack of enrollment, but this year one class already has enough and the other is right on the edge, so I'm hopeful that they'll both happen. If they do, that will mean I'll easily make it through the summer without having to dip into my savings, so then if my budget is super tight in the fall with only three classes, I won't have to deplete my savings just to get by each month.
On a whole, things could certainly be worse than they are. And even if nothing works out right now for full-time employment, I got some interviewing experience under my belt, and I should be an even stronger candidate for similar jobs next year. And maybe by then I'll have some more publications on my CV as well.
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