Half Thought Thoughts on Writing

Representing Reality Versus Interesting Plot

2010-06-03T12:34:00.000-07:00

I've been working on my novella for the past week, and I've made some decent progress (not quite up to my goal, but still I've got some new pages), but I'm struggling with how to motivate my characters' actions. I was reading a writing book recently that commented on how we can always figure out what a character would do in a situation by imagining ourselves in that situation, but I think that's not very good advice. Most of the time, what I would do in a situation would be the most reasonable thing, which is probably not at all interesting.

So I've been working on a scene where two characters are having an argument, and this is really giving me trouble because I don't really know how people have arguments in real life. If I try to imagine what I would do in the situation, I come up with my characters sitting down together and reasonably hashing out their differences so they understand where each other is coming from and see how they misunderstood one another, and then they make up. But that's not interesting for a story. There's no drama there, no tension. But I can't really see why anybody would yell and scream and throw things or whatever. That's ridiculous behavior. There's no way for that to come across as realistic, at least not to me. I don't think I've ever yelled at another person in real life.

But in order to move a story forward in an interesting way, in order to increase the tension, there needs to be conflict. But conflict seems to me to usually be unrealistic. Most of life is not made up of conflict. But most of life is also boring and not worth writing a story about. But if I increase the conflict, the whole thing starts to feel contrived or sentimental, like I'm stretching to come up with something because that thing is interesting rather than because it organically evolves from the situation and the characters. But if I play down the conflict to a more realistic level, the story feels boring or frigid. There must be a very fine balance, but I struggle to find it.

Ultimately, what I want to do with my fiction is to say something about the world, to represent how things actually are. But I also want to write something that's interesting to read. And sometimes those two goals seem to be mutually exclusive.

Goal

2010-05-27T12:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Structure

2010-05-25T08:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Salieri

2010-05-14T07:12:00.000-07:00

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.

On the Other Hand . . .

2010-05-02T06:24:00.001-07:00

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.

Priorities and Stuff

2010-04-25T06:57:00.000-07:00

I just read the post on the MFA/MFYou blog about setting priorities in one's life, which is an issue I've been pondering a lot recently. As I get closer to landing a full-time teaching job, I've been daydreaming a lot about what my life will be like once I'm in that position. I had an interview a few days ago, and questions came up about my view of the term "professional development" and job duties outside of the classroom. I think I was able to answer those questions satisfactorily. I expressed interest in a variety of possibilities, such as serving on committees, working with student organizations, developing podcasts to supplement my coursework, attending professional development seminars, evaluating Advanced Placement exams, and so forth. Since the interview, I've thought even more about these things and have played out various scenarios for the future in which I take additional classes at the local university and complete an advanced writing teacher certification program or maybe another degree. I think of how I can make myself as attractive as possible for advancement and tenure or for other full time jobs down the road.

Now those are all good possibilities, but those are also things that take a lot of time and effort. So the question is whether I want to devote myself to those things at the possible expense of my writing. And this is really tough to evaluate.

One particular issue I've been considering is how I should best use my summers if I get a full-time job. It turns out that at the school I just interviewed, all full-timers are contracted for the regular school year, and any summer teaching is done for additional pay as adjuncts. This means that I could simply decide not to teach during the summer and take that time completely for my own writing. Or I could teach additional classes that perhaps I don't have the opportunity to do during the regular school year. Teaching extra classes would be a great way to expand my experience as well as make more money. The extra cash could go straight toward paying down my student loans or into savings. Choosing to teach extra classes would certainly have a lot of benefits. But I know it will be tough to write much during the school year when I'm teaching full time, so that extra time during the summer could be my primary way of maintaining an investment in my writing. But how do I weigh the various options against each other?

Part of me kind of feels like I need to reevaluate my writing goals significantly, that I need to sort of step back from how I think about writing and myself as a writer. I don't mean that I'm planning on giving up writing, but I sometimes feel like I let it dominate my thoughts too much. I think of myself as a writer. It's a major part of my identity. Therefore, when I don't find time or can't muster the effort to write, I feel like I'm unsure who I am, like I've lost part of myself and am living somebody else's life. Also, when I continue to get rejected when I send out my stories, I have trouble reconciling that failure with my image of myself as a writer, and rather than simply undermining my confidence in my abilities to do an activity I enjoy, it undermines my entire sense of self.

I'm mostly able to counter doubts and fears and whatever else by reminding myself that I'm still awfully young. It's unusual for writers to achieve success by my age. So I often think that the best plan is to allow myself the extra time to continue developing my craft and hope that I can break through in the next decade or so. In general, I think this is a good attitude to take. But the difficulty I face is that in the past, so much of my dreams about the future and where my life will go have hinged on being successful as a writer. This isn't to indicate that I planned on making a living as a novelist (which I know is highly unlikely), but I figured that if I could publish enough to establish myself a bit in the literary world, then I could teach creative writing and likely teach a lighter load as a university professor than the five-five load of a community college teacher and, thus, have more time to write. The teaching and writing would go together and feed back on each other.

Recently I've been facing the notion that such a dream may never come about or that it could be years or decades before it does. And in the mean time, I still need a job. But do I want to have "just a job" or do I want to have a career? I'd like to be paid to do something I care about. That is one of the great things about teaching. Even as an adjunct, I get to do something that makes a difference. And the reality is that I would love to do it full time while making more money and having health insurance and so on. Yet the sacrifice that comes with full-time employment will be less time to write. But that is something I'm willing to trade, I think. I still hope to pursue my writing, but I know that, especially in the first years of a full-time position, it will be hard to find time for anything else. But I think that's a necessary trade off. And more and more, I'm thinking that it might be that I'll really have to set my writing goals aside for a few years, or relegate them more to hobby or side interest status.

I don't know. It's tough to accept that I might not realistically be able to write much while pursuing a teaching career, but I do suspect that that's pretty much the way things will work out. Part of the problem is really the issue of priorities. If I'm willing to slack as a teacher, then I can probably find more time to write, but I don't think that's fair to my students or the school that pays me. I think I should really make teaching a priority, even if it means downgrading writing. But I'm awfully conflicted about it.

Maybe it's still premature to fret over such things. I don't actually have a job offer on the table right now anyway. It's possible that the end result of all my stressing over applications and interviews will be that next fall I'll be doing the same adjuncting I've been doing for the past two years. If I don't get a full-time job, then much of what I've been obsessing over is moot. And maybe that will be truly beneficial. After having thought through the implications of full-time employment, perhaps I can take better advantage of a part-time situation for another year and spend as much extra time as possible writing. At the moment, I've only been offered three classes as an adjunct for the fall, which will mean a much tighter budget but more time to write. Then when the day comes that I have to shift my priorities further toward teaching, I at least will have had more time to work on my writing between now and then.

Submissions

2010-04-18T17:30:00.000-07:00

I keep track of my submissions in a handy Excel file. I have the story, the journal I've submitted it to, when I submitted it, any other notes, and the date it's rejected or accepted. I think something along these lines is a must for anybody who is seriously trying to get published. It's easy enough to keep track of submissions this way, and I can quickly glance at it to see how many pieces I have currently making the rounds.

Right now, I have two stories that I'm sending out to journals. One I've been submitting for a few years. The other I've been submitting for less time. Both of these pieces have received personal responses from readers at various journals, ranging from the somewhat generic "the writing is good, but this isn't right for us right now" to more detailed critiques with explanations for why the journal doesn't want the piece. Both of these stories have undergone substantial revisions over a period of years, and both are, I feel, in pretty solid shape. Yet both also are still being submitted because they have not been accepted anywhere.

Ordinarily, I like to have each piece at about ten places. When I get a few rejections, I resubmit to a few more places so I have a steady flow of submissions and responses coming and going. But lately, I've been really bad about sending out new submissions. The rejections keep coming in every so often, and without new copies going out, my overall submission numbers keep going down. I got a rejection the other day, and when I logged it in the file, I noticed that I'm down to only a few places still considering my work.

It occurred to me, obviously, that I should send out a new batch of envelopes, but I didn't. Sometimes when I've received several rejections in a row, I think it's probably a good idea to review my work again and see if I might want to revise further. I think that's a good idea right now, since it's been several months with the current drafts, and still nobody has accepted these stories. But there's another reason I'm delaying submitting right now, and that has to do with the uncertainty of my future.

I don't know where I'll be living a few months from now. I might be in the same place I am now, or I might be living on the other side of the country. Of course, the post office can forward mail, and there are e-mails as well, but I still think it's easier to submit work with an accurate address. Plus, there are a lot of places that shut down or slow down during the summer months since they are affiliated with schools. So until I know where I'm going to be, I've decided not to submit anything new.

This is a practical decision, but it also has the benefit of allowing me time to go back over my pieces once more and do that additional revision. Clearly, the current drafts are not quite doing it, despite the positive feedback I've already received. So maybe more dramatic changes are in order. For instance, one story has a protagonist who is an English teacher. I've been thinking that perhaps this detail might work against the story's success since many writers are also English teachers, and it's likely that a lot of stories are written by wannabe writers featuring English teacher characters. So maybe making the character another type of teacher would help. He could be a physics teacher, perhaps, or a math teacher. And maybe something as small as that change could lift the story out of the slush where it's spent so much time in the past few years.

Waiting a few months to send out a new big batch of submissions also means that when I start submitting again next fall, I will (I hope) have a new piece or two to send out along with the old pieces. Unfortunately, I've really been slacking the past few months. I had great plans for this semester. I'm teaching four classes, which is a lot, but this is the first time since I've been adjuncting when I didn't have a second job on top of my teaching, so I figured I'd have plenty of extra writing time. I did make some decent use of that time early in the semester. I wrote regularly and made some decent progress on a short story rewrite. Then I left the story behind to work on a writing sample from my novel for a fellowship application. But then by the time I was ready to get back to the story, I was in the midst of the job application process, having been contacted about interviews.

I can't honestly say that preparing for interviews and going through the interview process took all of my extra time, but the anxiety surrounding those interviews sucked a lot of my energy and left with little ability to concentrate the past several weeks. So, basically, I've barely done any writing since February. But my hope is that in a few weeks, I'll know whether I've got a job lined up for the fall, and I can either plan a move or settle back into the life I've been living the past couple of years. And at that point, when the nerves have settled down, I'll return to that story that I haven't touched in weeks. And maybe by September, it will be ready to send out.

Making a Living II

2010-04-10T10:25:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about money recently. Primarily this is because I've been going through the job hunting process. This is the third year in a row I've sent out applications in the hopes of finding a full-time college teaching job. Each time I apply, I think about the difference a full-time position will make to my financial life, and I hope and dream while trying to keep those dreams reasonably in check. This year, however, is different from the past two since I've actually made it beyond the paperwork stage to the interview portion of the process. I take this as a good sign, so I've been letting my daydreams wander a bit further.

And here's the thing: people talk about how little teachers get paid and how worthless a master's degree is. And there's something to be said for those positions. Considering the education required to teach at the college level (comparable to lawyers and doctors), it is not necessarily the best gig in the world. Adjuncts in particular have a tough situation. Depending on the school, they might make two or three thousand dollars per class or only a bit above minimum wage, which is hardly what one would expect for a profession requiring an advanced degree. However, it is still possible to make a fairly nice living as a teacher.

If I land one of the full time positions I'm up for, my income will increase significantly over what I made last year working two part time jobs (a difference of at least ten thousand dollars, plus benefits). In fact, if I get offered the best paying of the jobs, my new income could be close to double what I made last year. So I've been fantasizing about what it will be like to have that much more money coming in. Last year I made more than any year before, but considering I have debts to pay off from grad school, I'm still just getting by. But if I'm offered the best paying job I'm up for, then I will suddenly have enough money to start making considerably higher payments on my loans. In fact, I suspect that instead of taking about a decade to pay off my loans, I could be debt free in four or five years. At that point, I would be making far more money than I would need to just get by. I could then start thinking about larger purchases like a new car or a down payment on a house or laser eye surgery to correct my poor vision.

In the past few years I haven't fantasized much about big expensive things like those. I figured I'd probably live in a small apartment throughout my whole adult life and basically get by comfortably enough but always have to be careful with my spending and always wish I had a little bit more. I figured that without a family to take care of, I'll always do fine compared to those around me trying to support kids, but, still, I'll never be wealthy. But the truth is that even if I don't land a full time job this year, I probably will land one next year or the year after, and by the time I hit forty, I will likely be making quite a nice living. I won't be able to buy a mansion or anything, but I will be relatively wealthy in the sense that I could afford things like nice vacations or a decent car or retirement savings.

Furthermore, teaching has decent job security. When I moved to Pennsylvania a couple years ago, I moved here because I wanted a cheap place to live, not because I actually had a job here. Within a few days of arrival, however, I was offered two classes at the local community college. If I did not have my degrees, I might have spent weeks or months looking for some random office job or a retail position paying minimum wage, but instead I was hired right away. Even though the job isn't secure in the sense of having a long term contract (I don't know semester to semester how many classes I'll be offered or whether those classes will get enough students to go or might get canceled a week before they begin), it's still secure in the sense that there will always be a need for English teachers. And, of course, once I'm a full timer, I'll have one year contract with a high likelihood of having the contract renewed year to year or landing tenure down the road.

Again, compared with doctors and lawyers, teachers are not incredibly well paid, but compared with a lot of other jobs, they are. In addition to teaching, I worked at a bookstore until it closed a few months ago. I'm fairly certain that even as a part-time teacher, I made more than the manager of that store. I know a few people who work office jobs that don't require a college degree, and they make enough money to get by on those jobs, but not as much as I'll probably make teaching college. The truth is that teaching makes a lot of sense as a career not only because it's rewarding and challenging and keeps one thinking about the basics of writing on a regular basis and all those other reasons, but it also makes sense from a purely financial standpoint. I'm thirty-one years old, and the most I've ever made in a single calendar year is about $27,000 (which is still about twelve thousand more than one could earn making minimum wage, assuming one could ever actually get a full-time minimum wage job). But I expect I will make more than that this year and more again next year, and there's a pretty good chance that by the time I retire, I'll make six figures (that's counting on raises and promotions and the ever decreasing value of the dollar). But without my degrees, I would probably be doing the same kind of random office job I had when I finished college, which paid eleven dollars an hour about a decade ago and I'm guessing wouldn't pay much more than that today.

Living Life

2010-04-04T08:04:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking again about the old issue of writers needing something to write about. A friend and fellow writer has touched on this issue recently in her blog and sparked my thinking. She thinks that it's important for writers to live full lives rather than hole up and live in front of the computer screen. This is certainly an issue I've thought about over the years, and it's one I struggle with. The reason I struggle with it is because I fear that if she is right, then I may be doomed to never be a great writer because I'm not a very good liver (I'm a better kidney, ba-dum-bum).

I have a mind that won't quit spinning. I think through various outcomes for situations. I plan out possibilities and analyze things to no end. I have a strong desire to understand the world around me, and my inclination is to believe that if I ponder things enough, I'll improve my understanding. This can, of course, be great for a writer since I can come up with various possibilities for how a story might unfold and what characters might do and what it all means. But this tendency certainly has a downside. I'm not good with a lot of basic interaction. Chitchat is something I struggle with because my mind runs through various possibilities or tries to interpret what somebody is REALLY saying so I can respond appropriately, and by the time I think of something to say, along the lines of "yes, you're right; it was hot today," the appropriate time for a response has passed and the person I'm chatting with has wandered away or the conversation among a group has moved on and I'm still standing quietly in the back. Another facet of my social skills is that I don't pick up on various social clues. I take things literally and misunderstand what somebody is asking or saying. Anyway, the end result is that I don't make friends easily, and most of my social life consists of either communicating via internet with friends I knew from years ago or with people who are related to me by blood or marriage.

When it comes down to what most people think of as "having a life," I don't have one. I go to work. I come home and work. It's not unusual for me to go days at a time without leaving the house because if I'm not going to work, I really have no place to go. I don't understand how or where people meet other people and make new friends. It was a tough thing to do back when I was in school and was among a group of people of similar ages and interests, but now that I'm out in the adult world, it strikes me as a nearly impossible task.

I was in another city this weekend for a job interview, and while I was there I managed to get together with one of my old college roommates, one of my best friends from my early twenties. We have managed to keep in touch a bit over the years, but we tried to figure out when we last saw each other in person and, as far as we could recall, it was seven years ago. So we asked about various issues like what had changed in our lives in that time. He asked me if there were any major developments he'd missed, and I had to tell him that there really weren't as far as my personal life went. Since I last saw him I earned two masters degrees and became a teacher. I put on a bunch of weight and lost it again. I wrote a lot. Much has changed, but when he asked about my social life, there was not much to report. He asked if I missed that, and I had to say that I didn't really miss it. I have had so little experience with that kind of thing that I don't know what I'm missing.

(Also, this weekend of going through an extensive interview process--including a teaching demonstration and interviews with a search committee as well as several campus deans, presidents, and vice presidents--was one of the most stressful things I've ever done. I felt sick with nerves for much of the past couple of weeks, and what it most reminded me of was my dating experience years ago. I've really only had one girlfriend. We dated for about two months right at the end of my senior year of college. And the major thing I remember about that experience was the constant anxiety I felt. I was stressed and nervous and sick to my stomach and just generally pretty miserable. When I think back on it today, I have trouble figuring out why I put up with it. There are some pleasant memories as well I have of that girl. We had some good times, I'm sure. But whatever good times we had are completely overshadowed by my memories of anxiety and stress. If I had it to do over again, I don't think I would repeat that experience. And when I sometimes envy my coupled friends and family, I remember how unpleasant my attempt at such a coupling was and recognize that a life like that just doesn't seem to be a fit for me.)

What I don't understand is what is at the heart of good stories. Stories are about conflict, about drama, about interactions between people, about relationships. And those are things I don't have a great understanding of. Sometimes I hope that will change in my life. I see people around me who are very social or who have close bonds with romantic partners, and I have some envy for those individuals. My siblings are all married, and those relationships seem to bring them a lot of happiness. But I don't foresee anything like that in my life. I think somehow when I was a kid or a teenager or whenever, I missed out on learning some of the basic things about life that most people just pick up on their own. Or maybe I lack some instinct that others have about how to interact with others. So if I lack that understanding, will I ever be able to write stories that people respond to? Or will my pieces always seem odd, the characters unnatural and robotic?

My hope is that through reading widely I can further my understanding of human life, that I will vicariously experience the world. I think that's one of the great joys of reading. But is that enough? Can one learn what one needs to know to be a writer solely through holing up with books? Or am I doomed to be somebody who understands words and sentences and paragraphs and structural elements, who can evaluate a story and write a nice facsimile of life, but, lacking that spark that others have that makes life life, will never be able to produce that spark in my own writing?

Writing Sample II

2010-02-26T14:19:00.000-08:00

I sent off my fellowship application for the Wisconsin fellowship today. It's amazing how long it takes to put together a packet like that. I wanted to make sure my writing sample was as strong as possible, obviously, so I spent many hours over the past couple of weeks working on it. I got some feedback from trusted early readers to help me decide which sample to use. I was leaning toward the current beginning of my novel, which I feel is some of the strongest writing I've ever done, but I knew that I was way too close to it to evaluate it properly, so a couple of other people looked it over and, sure enough, agreed with me that the new beginning to the novel is in good shape. I got that feedback several days ago, but I still wanted to go over the material a couple more times. Plus, I wanted to include the second chapter as well, which still needed a bit of tweaking.

So I continued editing and polishing the sample. Yesterday I typed changes into the second chapter off of a marked up hard copy and then read over the entire thing today. Just this week I lectured my classes on the importance of polishing their work before turning it in, doing that final read through (preferably aloud and preferably off a hard copy instead of just on the computer) before declaring their work complete. So I did that today, and sure enough found a bunch more little things I wanted to tweak: a phrase here, a preposition there. I read the whole piece out loud, marked with my trusty red pen, typed up those final changes and then printed everything out. I've probably spent twenty-some hours on this writing sample in the past couple weeks. But I got it in the mail today, and I feel really good about it.

As I did the final read-through today, I couldn't help feeling that my work is at a great place. I've grown so much in the past few years that I think I'm either reaching or on the edge of reaching a new level. If I keep producing work at the quality that I'm currently producing, then I think it's really only a matter of time before I break into some significant journals with some stories and maybe even wind up finding a place (a small press or contest perhaps) for my novel in the next few years. Or if not this novel, then maybe the next one.

It's nice to be at a point where I feel genuinely positive about what I'm doing and confident that I am actually moving forward and not merely spinning my wheels or deluding myself.

Writing Sample

2010-02-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've been working on multiple projects at the same time, or rather I'm going back and forth between projects. I've got a story I'm working on that I started last summer. I wrote the rough draft and then have been tossing it about in my head and jotting down notes on where I want to go with it for months. Now I'm writing the next draft of it. Then I'm also in the process of revising my MFA novel again. That's a similar situation. I wrote it years ago, of course. I defended it as my thesis, continued to revise for months afterward, thought I was done, did more revision, really thought I was done, started into the query process, thought maybe I wasn't done, and so on and so forth. I've been jotting down additional notes and planning out a revised structure for the novel for a while now and slowly sitting down to rewrite. I'm tackling the opening of the book first because that's where the most substantial changes are coming in. Some of the new beginning is coming from previous drafts and simply being shifted from later in the book to earlier, but some of it is brand new. So, anyway, I had been working on the novel for a while and then felt more like tackling the story, and I worked on that for several days, but then I felt obligated to work on the novel again.

Obligated is not the right word there. It's not that I feel like I should work on the novel and it's a hassle or something like that. I want to work on the novel. But at the moment I'm thinking about a fellowship I'm going to apply for. I have to get my application packet in this month, and, of course, a writing sample is the major component of the application. And I'm stuck on what to include as my writing sample. If I land the fellowship, this novel is the primary project I want to work on during the fellowship year, so I think it would make sense to include an excerpt from it as my writing sample. Yet which part should I excerpt? The obvious answer is the beginning, but that's the section of the book that is in the most disarray right now because I'm completely reworking it. But if I send a later section, that might indicate to those evaluating the applications that I don't feel confident in the beginning of my book. I've read several places that when querying agents and such and including sample pages, one should include the opening of the book rather than a section from the middle for that very reason. However, applying for a fellowship is not the same as querying an agent; the assumption here is that I have a project that I will continue to work on, not that I have a finished manuscript ready for publication.

Another option is to forget about including an excerpt from the novel as my writing sample and just use a short story (the application doesn't indicate that the writing sample has to be from the project I would be working on). That would show what my writing is like as well as be a complete piece. That might be to my advantage because it's often difficult to judge a part of something by itself. I used to bring in chapters of my novel to workshops in grad school, and a good deal of the time it seemed like my peers didn't know how to comment on it because they had no idea how this one section fit in with the larger story or really what that larger story was. Sometimes when I read the fiction published in the New Yorker I have that problem. They publish short stories, but they also publish excerpts from forthcoming novels, but they don't clearly identify which a given piece is, and sometimes I'll read it and then feel a bit baffled because it was well written but doesn't feel complete at all; then, later I discover that it was the first chapter that wasn't supposed to work on its own. So, for a fellowship application, would it be wise to try to entice them with a slice of something larger or to give them something complete so they can get a better sense of my ability to not just write a nice sequence but to write an entire story?

Anyway, what I've been doing the past few days is working on the beginning section. I figure that if that comes together really well and I feel confident in it, then that would be the best thing to send. But I only have a couple of weeks before I need to send the application off, which is not much time to get a new piece of writing into polished form. So in the likelihood that the opening isn't ready, I have to decide what else to send. I'm leaning toward an excerpt from the novel that works on its own as a story. But that leads to one more question. Do I refer to it as a novel excerpt or as a story? If sending a novel excerpt, I can include up to thirty pages, which would be about two chapters. If sending a story, I can only include one story. I think maybe I'd be better off sending one story by itself (again, that way there are no issues of trying to figure out how the excerpt works in terms of the larger piece), but that means I'd only be using half the amount of space available to represent myself. Would they look down on my application if they only get fifteen pages instead of thirty? Or do they really know after two pages whether they like the writing?

I'm probably over thinking this and would be better off just picking a piece I think is good and representative of my abilities and sending off the application already.

Routine II

2010-02-14T06:47:00.000-08:00

The past couple of weeks have been kind of lovely. I now only work one job, and I'm finding the additional time to be fantastic. I only have to go to campus to teach two days a week, and the rest of the week I can do prep work and grading from home. So that means most of the time I have a very flexible schedule. I wouldn't go so far as to say I've developed a solid routine yet, though. It's really too early in the semester to declare that, but I have managed to get some good writing in.

Mondays and Wednesdays I leave the house about six in the morning and get home about six in the evening. Waking up early, driving a long commute, and then teaching four classes back to back wears me out and by the time I'm home in the evening, I'm pretty much ready to just watch a movie or something, so not much writing happens on those days. But the other days, I've been managing to get some writing done first thing in the morning. I get my coffee going and sit down and write for a couple of hours. Then later in the day I prepare for classes and do grading and so forth. It's been working out really well so far.

There are a couple of issues that could throw a wrench into the gears, however. One is that it's simply too early to declare this officially a routine at this point. It's been a nice couple of weeks; that's all I can really call it now. But a bigger issue is that I'm at the point in the semester now where I'm going to start collecting papers to grade, so that will take up much more of my time. In the early weeks of the semester (especially this semester when classes have been canceled a couple of times due to weather), the prep is pretty straightforward and there's little yet to grade. But in the coming week I'll have stacks of rough drafts to go over and comment on. I'm hoping that I'll still manage to develop my routine. I think I can still devote mornings to writing and then worry about grading later in the day, but we'll see how it works out.

Routine

2010-01-24T07:51:00.000-08:00

One of the things I've found is effective for me as a writer, and just in life in general, is having a routine. The most productive I've ever been was a couple years ago, shortly after grad school before I started teaching as an adjunct. Two major things I had going on at that time were getting into shape and writing. And I was able to develop a routine for both, exercising regularly, reading, and writing each day. I think my ideal day would go something like this: get up around eight or nine, drink coffee and read for two to four hours, eat, read some more, exercise, write, eat again, and then write or read or maybe watch a movie later in the evening, and in bed by midnight or so. What a life that would be. And I pretty much had that for a few months, and in that time I lost about thirty-five pounds of extra fat, did substantial rewrites on a novel, worked on some stories, worked a bit on a screenplay, and wrote an entire rough draft of a children's novel. It was a fantastic life. But, of course, the need to actually pay rent, to buy food, and to pay back the debt I acquired while in grad school required that I get a job.

For the past year and a half, I've had a much different life. I've been working two jobs, teaching and retail. Some days I would work both jobs back to back, leaving at seven in the morning and getting home at ten at night. Other days I would grade papers at home before going to the store in the evening. And while my classes were on the same schedule for a semester at a time, my retail job required me to work a variety of hours each week. I still somehow found some writing time, but not nearly as much as I'd like, and I could never develop a solid routine. If I wanted to make Friday a writing day, that might work one week, but then the next week I'd be at the store all day. Often I worked seven days a week and then when I'd get a day off I just wanted to completely zone out in front of the TV. The lack of a consistent routine really makes finding time to write a challenge.

But I'm beginning a new stage right now. The bookstore is closing down. Tuesday is the last day it will be open, and by Thursday, it will be completely empty. Although I'm sad for the people who are losing their jobs, this works out perfectly for me. I had been considering quitting for a while since I started teaching more classes and making more money from the college. This semester I got a raise and will now make about as much just from teaching as I made last semester from the two jobs combined. And the thing I'm most looking forward to about only having the one job is that I can now develop a steady routine.

I will only be teaching two days a week this semester, Mondays and Wednesdays. I have four classes back to back and then office hours as well as my hour-plus commute to campus, so they will be long days. Then, of course, I'll have to prep for classes and grade papers at home during the rest of the week. But I can now schedule my time much more accurately since there won't be an unpredictable variable anymore. So I plan on devoting the extra time each week when I had been working at the bookstore to writing. I can schedule my time myself and set aside the same regular hours. I can develop my own routine. Of course, it takes a while to get into a groove with a routine. The store is only now closing, and I plan on visiting family soon before I'm too bogged down in the semester to take a weekend off. But starting in a couple of weeks, I plan on instituting a new routine, setting specific goals for my time, and using this semester to full advantage.

One final thought on this subject: I found out recently that I'm going to get to go to the Advanced Placement English Reading this summer to evaluate AP English exams. It's one week in June and pays an honorarium equivalent to one of my regular teaching paychecks. That extra money, on top of what I intend to save throughout the semester, should be plenty to get me through the summer and up to the point where I'm paid again in September even if I have no other source of summer income. So that means that if I don't teach a summer class or get another part time summer job, I could devote about three months this summer to writing. I could have the ideal life once again, get a solid routine in place, and be incredibly productive. What a lovely thought that is.

Another Fellowship

2010-01-01T19:38:00.000-08:00

I recently found another fellowship opportunity that looks awesome. This one is for people with an MFA or PhD in creative writing who haven't published a book yet. It is a one year deal to teach a creative writing class each semester and work on a book, and it pays $27,000 for that year. This is the type of thing that would be a huge boost to a CV in helping to land teaching jobs down the road, it would provide a lot of time to write, and it would provide creative writing teaching experience. This one is almost more appealing than the Stegner Fellowship I applied for because it involves teaching creative writing, which I really want to do, it's in Wisconsin, which seems more like my kind of place than California, and I'm betting it's less competitive because it doesn't have quite as big a name and is probably not as geographically appealing to a lot of people. Anyway, it looks awesome, so I'm definitely going to get my paperwork together and apply for it. I'm in the process now of applying for full time teaching jobs for the coming school year as well, and I feel very hopeful that maybe I'll manage to land something great this year.

My Name in Print

2009-12-26T08:55:00.001-08:00

This week I finally got a copy of one of the journals where my work is appearing. It's funny how things work out. I've been working seriously on fiction for about a decade and have also dabbled in nonfiction and poetry, producing one piece each of those forms. Both of those pieces are now seeing publication while my fiction continues to be rejected. The nonfiction piece was written a few years ago, revised over a period of a couple years, and submitted to journals; one held onto it for a year before accepting it, and now several months later, I finally expect my copy in the mail any day. The poem was written one day a few years ago when I felt oddly inspired to put my thoughts into that form. I pretty much didn't touch it for about three years. Then last summer, I pulled it out, revised it, and sent it off. It was accepted to the first place I sent it, and now it's the first of my writing to actually see print. What an odd, odd process. I must say I am quite proud of this poem. I think it's damn fine, and I don't want to play down the accomplishment, but it's just so odd to achieve a bit of success on what is essentially my first effort when I've yet to truly taste that success on the work I've devoted thousands of hours to.

Anyway, this post isn't about the differences between fiction and poetry. (However, I do have one quick side note on that issue related to a previous post; I had earlier guessed that perhaps fewer people submit poetry, and since poetry takes up less physical space in a journal, more can be included; therefore, perhaps a higher percentage of poetry is accepted. Recently I read a statistic from one prominent journal: annually it receives about 800 poetry submissions and 3,200 prose submissions. Certainly that is only one example, but it again raises the question about acceptance rates among the different forms.) What I want to write about here is the quality of work that is out there being published in these tiny journals.

I must admit that after my poem was accepted so quickly (literally, the first place I submitted it wanted it), I started to wonder if perhaps that was a comment on the journal itself. If they wanted to publish ME, then maybe they weren't really very good. Maybe they had no taste and didn't recognize how crappy my work was. Maybe rather than working in my favor to demonstrate that I can write, being published at this journal would be a total waste of time because they're not legitimate. They're a joke, and putting this publication on my CV will show that I'm a joke, too.

So I got the issue in the mail this week. The first thing I did, of course, was turn to my poem and look at my own work in print. But shortly thereafter, I read through all the contributor's notes to see who else this little journal was publishing. Was it as I feared, that it was full of junk? I was stunned to read the bios of my fellow contributors. Most of them had published fairly widely, many in top tier literary journals. There were writers whose work had been in print for decades, authors of full length books, tenured professors, the 2010 Texas Poet Laureate. Clearly this is not a tiny little insignificant journal that will publish any crap that is mailed to them in a manila envelope. And, yet, it is fairly small. I suspect it has few subscribers and is only sold at the school bookstore at the university that publishes it. But even so, accomplished writers are publishing in this journal.

Then again, perhaps writers who have achieved success at more prestigious journals send off their lesser work to smaller places. Maybe this is the place to throw away stuff that otherwise isn't good enough to be published. As I've read through the issue, I haven't found this to be the case. I'm very impressed with the quality of writing. Although small, this is a fine, fine journal. And I'm proud to have my work appear beside such fantastic writing.

The conclusion I come to then is this: even the very small journals you've never heard of are publishing truly great work. Established writers are not too proud to send their pieces to a wide variety of places, which means that when beginning writers are submitting their work, the competition is incredibly fierce. We don't simply need to be better than the other beginning writers. We need to be as good or better than the writers who have been publishing for decades. This experience reinforces my view that it is amazingly difficult to break in. But it also cements my understanding that getting published at all, having any small journal accept one's work, is quite meaningful. There are many, many great writers out in the world, and to be able to have one's words appear in the same place as those other writers is really a comment on one's abilities.

Saying Something

2009-12-11T08:03:00.000-08:00

Once again, I'm contemplating the purpose of writing fiction. I think fiction should primarily entertain. I don't remember which book it was (Stein On Writing by Sol Stein or one of John Gardner's books?) that made the observation that reading a piece of fiction should provide an experience more interesting than not reading it. Or something like that. And I agree. I think there's nothing wrong with simply entertaining. In fact, if a book isn't entertaining, then no matter how much it plays with form or touches on important subjects, it fails. For me, one of the great examples of this problem is Toni Morrison. Of course she's a best-selling writer and a Nobel laureate, and Beloved was voted by a group of publishing professionals to be the greatest American novel of the end of the twentieth century/beginning of the twenty-first. I have read two or three Morrison novels, and although I can analyze them for a literature course or admire the innovative way she tells a story, I simply don't enjoy reading her work. It's an entirely intellectual exercise for me with no emotional connection; the work doesn't resonate and excite me the way reading Hemingway or Roth or Salinger or Carver or so many others does. Of course, this is where the largely subjective nature of the whole thing comes in, and I recognize that regarding Morrison, my opinion is in the minority.

Anyway. The first objective is to engage, to entertain, to provide a dream that is superior to sitting around not reading. But that isn't necessarily enough, unless one is writing genre fiction. Simply being entertaining is fine for a mystery or an adventure story, and even in those cases, I think the best works have some additional resonance, some thematic elements that raise them above merely being a diverting way to spend several hours in another world. For example, The Shining is about the effects of alcoholism and abuse on a family; The Silence of the Lambs is largely about feminist ideals. But if one is writing something that is realistic, that isn't driven by high conflict or enormous events, if one is dealing with the small, the mundane, then I think by necessity the work must offer more than the experience of reading; it must have a lasting impact, leave the reader contemplating ideas. Right?

Here's part of my thinking. I wrote a story years ago about a lonely man who encounters a girl in a coffee shop and the experience affects his life; I brought it in to a grad school workshop, and my professor was able to succinctly express why it wasn't a great story: "Salinger did it first and did it better." Within the past year or so I received a rejection from a literary journal for a story about a young man contemplating having an affair; the rejection itself was a personal note rather than a form rejection slip. The editors informed me that although they wouldn't be publishing the story, they liked my writing and would happily consider more work from me. The problem with the piece I submitted is that it didn't "contribute anything new to a familiar situation." And, like my professor, these editors were exactly right. My story was well written, but it's nothing unique.

I'm not especially interested in experimenting with form and doing anything wildly different. So how do I make my work significant? How do I add something worth paying attention to? If offered a choice between my story and Salinger's, I would recommend that a reader pass over mine in favor of the master's. I'm also not interested in writing plot-driven genre fiction. So, if my work isn't gripping because of the high tension and it isn't reinventing what a story does, why should a reader bother with it? I think the answer might lie in having something worth writing about, some observations about the world that make a reader feel like perhaps they've experienced what it's like to be somebody else or to reconsider experience from another perspective. I think I have to have some sort of intellectual angle or theme that elevates my fiction.

And that is the challenge.

I've recently been working on a short story that I began last summer. When I started it, I had no idea what it was "about." I just had an image of a character in my head and then something happened, and then something else happened; another character came into the scene, and eventually I had a rough draft. I've reconsidered and reevaluated and reconfigured the plot and characters, and I'm at the point now of rewriting the story so that it will likely have little resemblance to the initial version I wrote a few months ago. But the issue I'm struggling with is this: what the hell is the thing is about? I think I've got some interesting plot details and some reasonably engaging characters, but I'm still not sure that the story has anything to say. I have some rough themes that the story touches on--death, loneliness, attempting to make connections with others, the unceasing progress of life--but I'm not sure that I'm actually saying anything about anything. Touching on a theme is not the same as actually having a position. Is it? I remember Stephen King commenting in his On Writing that theme is overrated and tends to come on its own without the writer having to stress over it too much. I suspect he's right, but he also had the advantage of writing plot-driven high tension pieces where theme can elevate the piece but isn't necessarily required to give it its purpose.

So what I wonder, what I've been wondering about more and more for the past year or two, is whether I have anything worth saying to the world. Maybe the best I can hope for is that I'll write stories that others before me have written better. Maybe I'll have one decent story that's basically a Salinger ripoff and another that is a pale version of a Carver story. Is that enough? Can one ever truly hope to add anything new? Is that a completely unrealistic goal that is best abandoned sooner rather than later? I used to shake my head at fellow students who talked about being original because I long felt it was an unattainable objective. I also felt, and still do, that having the goal of making a difference, of changing the world or changing people's minds through one's art is ludicrous to the point of nearly being delusional. Yet somehow, despite knowing that for a long time, I'm still struck by the difficulty of facing that reality. If I truly accept that I can't contribute anything new, then what am I actually trying to do? Is it enough to do something old and do it well? I hope so, but I don't know.

Fellowship

2009-12-01T15:50:00.001-08:00

I went ahead and applied. Today was the deadline, and I waited until this afternoon to finally make up my mind. The sixty dollar application fee was enough to make me hesitate, but finally I figured I might as well do it; I'm fortunately at a place in my life now where I can actually afford to toss away sixty dollars (not regularly, though). I know going in that I have a greater than 99% chance of not getting it, so my hopes aren't too high. But you never know until you try what could happen. I'm sure some of the 1,400 applications are really not very good, although I'd wager that many, many of them are excellent. And I know my work is at least decent. I have the degrees. I'm being taken seriously enough by top tier journals to at least earn an encouraging note now and again. So most likely I used up a bit of time applying, made my bank account a little lighter, and won't gain anything tangible from it, but possibly in a few months my whole life will change.

Making a Living

2009-11-29T06:38:00.000-08:00

One thing that I suspect many of us don't fully appreciate when we head off to grad school to study writing is how difficult it can be to actually make a living. I knew that it would be tough or unlikely that I would manage to pay rent and buy food and essentials solely from writing, but I more or less assumed that once I completed my graduate degrees I would be able to land a full time teaching job. Even when I was directly told that wasn't necessarily the case, I don't think it fully sunk in. Now I realize just how difficult it is. I've read statistics that even a majority of folks with Ph.D.s in English cannot find full time professorships. As I look for jobs, I realize that I don't even meet the minimum requirements for most full time positions.

At the university level, they want substantial publication credits, which I don't have yet, or a Ph.D., which I don't have. Many universities require a Ph.D. even to teach the basic composition courses. At the community college level, they want experience. I'm currently in my seventh year of teaching, but the first five years were in grad school, which I've come to understand doesn't count for much. The key number at the community college level seems to be three to five years, and I'm in my second year at the community college. The notion that I will someday have a full time job is not unrealistic. I suspect it's within the next five years. But that's much longer than I expected it would take when I was in grad school.

I remember a professor in grad school who was talking about being a professor and what a noble calling it was and how nobody should pursue that life just for the money because there are so many other jobs out there where one can make much more money. I thought at the time he was full of it, and I still do. Those of us who spend years in grad school essentially don't have other marketable skills. Sure, I can work retail, but that pays far worse than teaching. It's not like my MFA qualifies me to work on Wall Street. The reality is that many of us who earn MFAs need to teach for a living because we don't really have other reasonable options.

But the nice thing is that even though I don't have a full time job and adjunct teaching doesn't really pay a professional wage in proportion to my level of education and experience, it's still a decent paying part time job, or at least it can be (I guess I'm lucky enough to have landed a position that pays toward the high end of the adjunct scale). For 2009, I will have made more money than I've ever made in my life. My taxable income will be about double what it's ever previously been. So that's not all bad (of course, I've essentially been on or below the poverty line my entire adult life). But even so, it still feels like I'm getting a bit ripped off. I teach four classes a semester. Full timers at my school teach five. If I had a full time position, I'd make close to double what I make now, plus I'd have benefits like insurance. That's a ridiculous difference. Plus, there's the factor that I'm technically part time, but teaching isn't like other part time jobs. I have to take my work home with me. I'm emotionally invested in the progress of my students. I work weekends. I stay up late at night grading papers. But the reality is this: what other choice do I have?

I think there are a couple of ways to think about this pickle. One is to realize that my efforts now will (I hope) pay off in a few years. It often sucks to be an adjunct. But in a few years, when I land a full time job, I'll be in a much better position. If I were to abandon teaching in favor of a better paying low-level office job, I could do that and probably make more money right now. But there wouldn't be much future in that. If I were to get a $10 an hour job filing paperwork or answering phones, I'd be okay, but ten years from now, I'd still only be making $11 an hour or something. But if I put up with the hassles of being an adjunct for a couple more years, I could be making double what I make now, maybe triple or quadruple. My professor was totally wrong: it does make sense to get into teaching for the money. Although the money isn't great now, I'm sowing the seeds that will grow in the future.

The second thing I think I have to consider is that it might be useful to reevaluate my efforts. I'm working a part time job. A full time professor at my school is expected to teach five classes, advise students, attend faculty meetings and so forth. I'm only expected to teach four classes. So if a full time position is forty hours per week, then my job should be less than thirty. I'm at school in the classroom or office hours about eighteen hours a week. So I shouldn't reasonably spend more than about ten additional hours grading papers or doing prep work. If I spend more time than that, then I'm really a bit of a sucker, working on my own time rather than the time I get paid for. But that is how I've regularly worked. I ordinarily spend much more time than that because I care about my students and I want them to succeed, and how much they get out of my class depends on how much work I put into the class. But is that fair? Should I care? Is it reasonable to expect me to put out that much effort for the amount I'm being compensated? I honestly think I should do less work. Maybe what this means is that I should collect fewer drafts of papers so I have less work to do at home. I should write fewer notes on students' work and adopt a simpler rubric for grading, where all I have to do is check a few boxes. The advantage to me would be obvious, yet I feel like my students would suffer. But then again, If I reduced my efforts I think my students would probably get a comparable experience to what they get from other teachers. I've often had grateful students say how nice it is to get such detailed feedback from me, which leads me to believe they aren't getting that elsewhere, and I've had students say that in their other writing courses, the teacher's expectations seem to be nothing more than that a student hand in a paper that is typed, that the quality of thought and skill are not full evaluated. If I lowered my standards and made my life easier, I think I would then be a fairly average teacher. Maybe being average is fine. After all, I'm not being paid to be above average.

I don't know. I can probably do some of that, streamline my process a bit to make my life easier. But I don't know if I could ever fully detach myself from my students. I really wish I could. It would be nice not to think or care about them. But I do care.

Anyway, back to the main point. The need to make a living is a giant obstacle that has to be overcome. The greatest thing a writer needs is time to write, but when one is trying to pay bills, it becomes tough to find enough time. Maybe the issue really is just that I have to put up with the unfortunate situation now and things will be easier down the line. If I can manage to publish enough in the next few years, then maybe I'll actually land a full time creative writing professorship some day. And then I'll be able to teach fewer classes, make enough money just from teaching where I won't have to worry about additional income in the breaks between semesters, and basically it will feel like I've got tons of time to write. But actually reaching that point is tough.

I think one of the toughest things for me to accept about the dreaded real world that we all must enter when we leave school is how hard it is at the beginning. I always figured it would be easier at the start and would get harder as one went throughout life, but I actually think it's the opposite. When one is young, one still has all the expenses of an adult life, but one has less ability to make an income that will fully cover those expenses. I figure my basic needs won't substantially change in the next ten or twenty years, except that I have loans to pay off now that will be paid off then, so basically I need more money now than I will need in ten years. Yet my earning ability will likely be far higher in the future than it is now. Right now I'm barely scraping by, but if I have a full time professorship in ten years, I'll have more money than I need. It just seems unfair that I can't swap out my situations and make that money now and then comfortably live on less then.

Journeyman

2009-11-27T07:11:00.000-08:00

My thoughts at the moment are along the same lines as several previous posts. I've been reading short stories recently. In part I've simply been in the mood for short stories for the past six or nine months or so, but also I've been quite busy with teaching and grading and working and commuting; I've had less time to sink into a full novel, so it's easier to pick up shorter pieces that I can read in a single sitting. I've been dipping into collections, reading Raymond Carver, John Cheever, J. D. Salinger, George Saunders, and others. I've also recently picked up the latest O. Henry Prize, Best American Short Stories, and Pushcart Prize collections. What strikes me about these stories is that--and this is certainly a "duh!" statement--they are really, really good.

When I read stories by these artists--Pulitzer prize winners, MacArthur Genius grant recipients, writers with decades of experience, and some publishing their very first story--it hits me that I'm plain and simply not that good yet. I don't abandon hope or anything. I plan on being that good someday. But at the moment, I'm still struggling to find my own voice, my own style; I'm in the process of figuring out what exactly I want to say with my fiction. I have a couple of themes I keep returning to, but I also have ideas for stories that I haven't yet figured out what they're really about. Sometimes I manage a beautiful set of sentences followed by some awkward prose that completely disrupts the flow of the piece. I have a couple of stories I think are nice, but many more that are still far too rough to even seek feedback on.

Essentially, what I'm getting at is the notion that I am at the journeyman stage of my career, at least I think I am. I find it a useful metaphor to think of grad school and that period of formal education as an apprenticeship, a time of study under a master craftsman (or several master craftsmen), learning and improving and developing. But now I'm out on my own, and yet I'm not yet a master craftsman myself. I'm a journeyman. I have the basic knowledge and experience to be on my own, but I have yet to prove myself.

I sometimes find it frustrating when I'm looking for full time employment that there are jobs out there for creative writing teachers, but I don't yet meet the minimum requirements. I came across a great position recently for a one-year visiting writer instructor position specifically geared toward writers at the early stage of their career, and I have the education and teaching experience to qualify, but not yet the publication credits. There are many opportunities for small steps into the academic world, but before one is able to take those steps, one must publish and have a demonstrated mastery of the craft. Or, in other words, one must be further along the journeyman path than I am right now.

But I find it oddly comforting to think of myself as a journeyman and to read the work of masters. If I genuinely felt that I was their equal already, that I was an unrecognized master, then I would be endlessly frustrated by my lack of advancement. But instead I can try to continue learning from them, honing my own craft, pursuing my efforts, and hope that soon I will reach their level.

Rejection

2009-11-14T11:42:00.000-08:00

I got another rejection today. I know that rejections are an inevitable part of being an aspiring writer. There are many reasons a piece can be rejected, and it's a bit foolish to take them too personally. There's no way around them, and the old notion that those who succeed are those who don't give up is certainly true. However, that doesn't mean that it isn't frustrating when work is rejected.

I'm willing to admit that not everything I've written is amazing. In fact, most of what I've written is not that good. Part of the learning process is improving and being able to look back somewhat more objectively on past work and see where it is flawed. I think that despite writing seriously for the past several years, I have up to now produced only a small handful of work that is good and hundreds of pages of work that isn't especially good. But that small handful of good work is genuinely good. I swear it is. So it's frustrating when I continue to send it out into the world in the hopes that some editor out there will agree with me that it's good and have it keep boomeranging back.

Sure, it's nice to get the handwritten notes or personal e-mails telling me that, while my writing is good, this piece wasn't a match for that journal. Those notes buoy my spirits. But come on already, world. Please, please, please, with sugar on top, can I get one of my stories accepted?

Part of the struggle, I think, comes from the pure subjectivity of literary writing. Unlike genres, which have certain conventions, literary stories can be about pretty much anything and have almost anything happen or not. Characters might grow and change or they might not. Epiphanies may occur or they may not. One reader will say that a character has to change or else why bother reading the story. Another will say that it's a cliché to have a character change, and such a convention is outdated and unrealistic. Some editors will want work that has little plot but experiments wildly with form. Other editors will want traditional forms but plots that are unlike what has been seen before.

I've been reading literary stories for years, picking up journals and collections to see what is being published. Most of what I see I don't particularly care for. Much of it is simply boring because not much happens, or what does happen is so minimal that it's left mostly up to the individual reader to figure out why the events of the story have any significance. But I will admit that the stories are well written from a basic craft standpoint. The language is solid. The prose works effectively. Sentences and paragraphs construct a living dream. But beyond that, there are no real standards as far as I can tell. There doesn't have to be anything in particular that a story does. There doesn't have to be a catharsis or a moral lesson or a dramatic climax or a commentary on society or an interesting twist or a character that represents reality.

Actually, let me pause a bit on that last point. I think that one might be the real kicker. I think that the subjective nature of fiction lies largely in whether or not an individual reader connects with the characters and ideas, and creating a piece that connects with an individual reader or editor at any particular magazine seems to me to be largely up to chance. Experts advise new writers to read all the journals (and there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them) to get a sense of what they publish. From what I've seen, there seems to be no consistent vision or style for individual journals beyond the subjective tastes of the editors who happen to be there at the time; so, honestly, I don't see that reading all the journals accomplishes much. At least I've never been able to detect any real standards that differentiate one journal from the next. And as far as creating characters that will resonate with an individual reader goes, again, I think it's pure luck. I remember having wildly divergent views from people in my workshop classes. For instance, one particular story once struck me as being uninteresting in part because a character seemed so unrealistic, so irrational, that I suspected that the character must be insane, and I didn't understand the appeal of reading about insane characters if they are presented as if they are ordinary; yet others in the class loved the story, feeling that it accurately depicted the world as they knew it. I can think of other similar situations where viewpoints on stories simply diverged. And these were well written stories as far as the basic issues of craft are concerned. The language was strong. The situations were explained and the plot moved from point to point and so forth. But if we can't agree on what a realistic person is like, we simply aren't going to agree on whether the story is appealing or not.

So if it is indeed the case, as I believe it is, that having a story accepted is largely a matter of chance, of sending it to the right place at the right time where the right person happens to somehow find the characters and situation relatable and interesting, then is there ever any end to the frustration? I think it comes down to perseverance, I guess. The old saws are true: one must stick with it; not give up; try, try again. Once a writer has a reputation, I think editors start to ignore the issue of whether or not they personally find the piece appealing because it has already been established that the writer is good. In fact, journals will seek out established writers to send them pieces, and I'm fairly certain that a journal won't solicit a story from a well known writer and then reject it because the editor doesn't care for it. But getting established, having those first few people acknowledge that one is good is a frustrating endeavor.

A final note: Maybe this rejection today is hitting me harder than many do simply because of when it arrived. I'm a bit stressed at the moment because I have stacks of papers to grade this weekend; I have to work at my retail job tomorrow, which eats into my grading time; and the final weeks of the semester are going to be incredibly busy. And when I get stressed, I tend to get a bit depressed. I feel a bit frustrated in general with my life at the moment. I'm in my thirties without a full time job. My plan B is to teach, and even that isn't fully working out since I can't actually land a full time position, and it's often frustrating because many of my students don't care or don't try or really should not be pursuing a college education in the first place. And the dream I've been pursuing for years continues to elude me. It might be easier if I had some of the other things in my life that make life enjoyable for many people, like fulfilling relationships, but I don't. Apart from my immediate family, my only real friendships are with people I see in person only every few years because they live thousands of miles away. I feel like my entire life, my identity, is wrapped up in my dream to become a writer, and the reality is that that dream may never come true. And there isn't anything else in my life that makes me want to keep going day to day. Each day I sustain the hope that maybe today will be the day that I get that big acceptance. I check my e-mail obsessively in case a journal has sent me a notice that they'd like to publish me. So it's tough when that dream keeps getting dashed.

When Are You Ready?

2009-11-04T14:14:00.000-08:00

A piece of advice I've read several times in writing books and writing magazines is to wait before sending out one's work. I've read interviews with editors who complain that young writers in MFA programs don't ask them questions about craft or characters or style or plot, but instead ask about submission guidelines. These editors feel like the young writers they encounter really need to focus on honing their abilities before worrying about getting published.

This makes sense. Before feeling like I'm ready to put my work out into the world, I should really take a long time to work at it and get good. Absolutely. And yet, it's tough because so much hinges on getting published. If I had no other concerns, I think I'd be happy enough to spend the next few years simply honing my craft, working on applying all the lessons I learned in grad school, developing my skills more, and then sending out some amazing, polished work when I would be at a point of really being ready. But I do have other concerns, such as making a living. Right now I'm scraping by with two jobs. I'm busy all the time. I have stacks of freshman essays and developmental writing to grade. This leaves me little time to work on my own writing. But if I'm good enough to publish and can build up those credits, then I can land a better teaching job, where instead of teaching four classes at a part-time pay scale, I can teach maybe three at a time with a full time salary and benefits and the expectation that continuing to work on my own writing is part of the gig. So simply out of necessity, I feel like I have to send out my work in the hopes that some of it might be good enough already. Once I move up the career ladder, I can spend more time on my writing, but I have to spend the time on my writing first before I can move up the career ladder. It's a tough bind to be in.

So related to this point, I've been thinking about contests and submissions and so forth. I came across a fellowship the other day that is incredibly attractive and would be a life changing opportunity to land, the Stegner Fellowship through Stanford University. Numerous major writers were fellows there, so the prestige alone would be enough to make a CV more competitive. And the fellowship itself pays a stipend of $26,000 a year for two years with no teaching requirement or any coursework beyond a regular writing workshop and attending visiting writer events and such. The goal of the fellowship is really to provide a writer time to write and hone his or her craft. How perfect would it be to be selected for such a fellowship? But of course it's incredibly competitive. According to their website, they get about 1,400 applicants each year for the ten slots (five in fiction, five in poetry); that means fewer than one percent of the applicants land a fellowship. So my first thought is that there's no way I'm at the level where I'd stand a chance since I'm barely even published, and the $60 application fee is hefty enough that I don't want to simply throw that kind of money away on a dream. And yet . . .

I can't help thinking that maybe I could stand a chance at something like that. Who's to say that I wouldn't be one of the chosen few? I won a fiction contest before that was on a small scale but still against some strong fellow MFA student writers. I've received some handwritten notes complementing my fiction from some prestigious journals, including one that I rank in the absolute top tier. And my work is getting better all the time. If I take my two best, most polished pieces, my absolute highest quality work, and I do everything I can to make them as good as they can be, well, would I necessarily be in the rejected 1,390 applicants? Probably, but maybe not. There's always that chance that I would be one of the ten.

I think about one of my professors who won a prestigious contest for a story collection. How did he know he was at the level where he stood a chance of winning? He had published fairly widely by that point, but he was still a struggling writer, sending out his work and (I'm sure) still collecting rejections. Did he know that his stories were finally at the level where he would win? I'm sure he didn't. But he thought maybe he was there. Maybe that batch of stories would be selected that year. And he won.

So is it better to follow the advice to simply stop sending out work until I've improved even more and gotten that much better? Or should I aim high and try for dream fellowships and submit to dream journals? Each time I go over an old story, I see new ways to improve it, which means I'm getting better constantly, and the fiction I send out now is superior to what I sent out a few years ago, so probably if I wait longer, my work will be that much better next year or the year after. But maybe it's good enough now. But I won't know until I submit it and see what happens.

Will I risk $60 of the money I work two jobs to earn? Should I wait on something like that fellowship and apply next year when I've got one more year of experience under my belt and maybe a few more publication credits? I don't know. I haven't made my mind up about that one. My rational brain tells me not to waste the money. But if I always lived according to my rational brain's suggestions, I wouldn't be pursuing writing at all.

Further revisions

2009-11-01T07:36:00.000-08:00

I have in front of me a story manuscript with many slashes and new words written in red pen as well as some others in blue. On my computer desktop is an open file with a copy of this story and the number "nine," as in the ninth saved draft. Now, I don't always save every new draft as I revise. I try to only save substantial changes as completely new documents. I like to be able to go back occasionally and see previous versions, but it seems excessive to save every adjustment as a new file. So, although this is now the ninth draft, it could well be the fifteenth or twentieth thirty-eight time I've reworked this story, and that's not counting all the drafts from before I separated the piece from the surrounding novel to see if it can stand up on its own.

So I sit down with my marked up manuscript and go to type up changes. Although I only have a few marks indicated on my hard copy for the first sentence, I'm not satisfied with the sentence as I read it over. It's not bad, exactly. But it doesn't flow. It doesn't pop. It suggests a bit of what the story is about, but it doesn't resonate. So I start a new sentence. I begin with a new first word. I change the order. I try three short simple sentences instead of one complex sentence. I alter that again and try two simple, one complex, and a compound sentence. I fiddle and twist. I replace words that seem dull and lifeless with others that have multiple connotations. I consider the story's themes and try to insert phrases or terms into this first sentence that will subtly suggest the themes immediately, or if a reader doesn't pick up on them right away, they will be there on a second reading. I delete and rewrite. I add and subtract. I cut and paste. Finally, I'm a little bit happier. I think there's something reasonably decent there. I have a start to the piece that might encourage a reader to keep going, to think, "maybe this will be interesting; I want to see where this writer takes me."

Twenty minutes, and I have a stronger batch of sixty-four words. Now all I need to do is continue on to the other four thousand, nine hundred. And then return to these sixty-four to find I don't much care for them anymore.

I wish that I knew what I know now . . .

2009-10-27T08:59:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking again about the old question of the value of the MFA, whether it's the best approach to becoming a writer or if other paths offer greater benefits. Although I certainly wouldn't say I regret getting my MFA, I think I would do things differently if I were to live the past several years over again with my current understanding and knowledge.

It's not that I wouldn't still want to go into an MFA program, take those classes, go through workshops, study for a comps exam, and all that. I would still want to do that. But I think I would have gained even more from the experience had I waited longer first. I remember reading a memoir by John Irving where he describes his experience studying under Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut told Irving that the lessons he was teaching were nothing that Irving couldn't discover on his own, but by studying them in an advanced program under the guidance of an established writer, the learning process could be streamlined. I think this is really the great benefit of a formal program, and yet I also think there is a lot to be gained through the trial and error of figuring things out for oneself. Finding the appropriate balance is the tricky thing.

When I finished college, I was twenty-two. I had a BA in theatre with a performance emphasis and no intention to actually become an actor, which is what I thought I wanted to do when I was eighteen. Instead, the four years of college had taught me that I was not a great actor, that instead my greatest talent was writing. Furthermore, I discovered that the most satisfying experience for me was writing. So I planned at age twenty-two to take a one year break from school and then go into grad school to study playwriting. A year later, I applied to a few playwriting MFA programs and made it all the way to first alternate in a good program, so if any of that school's first choice students declined their admission, I would be in; but, alas, they all said yes and I had to figure out what else to do with myself. I regrouped, considered my options and decided that what I really wanted to do, what would be a better fit for me anyway, was to leave behind the theatre and pursue prose writing. That had indeed been my first love.

But in my four years of college, although I took a playwriting course and many courses that involved writing essays, I had actually never taken a single class offered by the English department. I considered myself a serious reader and a good writer, but my credentials to go into a graduate program in English were limited. So I returned to school to fill in some of the gaps in my undergraduate course list. I took some literature survey courses and a creative writing workshop. Then, as I completed those, at age twenty-four I applied to graduate programs in English. I was admitted to an MA program with a creative writing emphasis and offered a TA position there. This seemed like the perfect fit. I could continue to fill in the gaps in my background by studying literature at an advanced level, but I could also work on my creative writing. Then, if I decided to continue on after the MA, I would be well prepared for an MFA program.

So I spent the next two years getting my MA. At this point I wouldn't really change anything. If I could do it over again, I'd probably keep things more or less the same up to this point in my life. But the next step I would do differently.

When I completed my MA, I wasn't burned out on school. I loved being a grad student and wanted to continue that life for a few more years. So I applied and was accepted into an MFA program. It went well, and two and a half years later, I had that degree. But doing the two Master's degrees back to back feels now like a mistake. I grew and developed as a writer during the first program, and I grew and developed in the second, and I continue to grow and develop now. But I think a lot of the growth and development I'm experiencing now on my own would have been useful a few years ago. Had I taken a break, say two to five years, after my MA, I could have taught composition, worked on my writing, and honed my skills on my own. Then, when I'd reached a point where I was far along--not necessarily as far as I could possibly go on my own, but something like that--I could have entered an MFA program. If I were a better writer when I began my MFA, I think I would have ultimately gained more from the experience. If I had more years of working things out on my own, the lessons of the formal program might have sunk in faster or clicked more readily.

One advantage to this alternate route would have simply been financial. I didn't yet have a ton of debt when I finished my MA, and had I taken a break at that point, I could have survived handily on an adjunct's paycheck, paid off my student loans, and entered an MFA program perhaps with a little savings, whereas instead I added more debt throughout the second graduate degree that I'm only now beginning to pay down. So rather than easily surviving on my meagre adjunct's pay, I'm instead working two jobs. Furthermore, if I spent the latter part of my twenties studying writing on my own, submitting, improving, and working hard, and then I got the MFA in my early thirties, I think by the time I completed the MFA, I would be at a more advanced stage in my abilities, and perhaps I would already have enough publications and experience to more quickly land a better teaching job than I currently have or can expect to have in the next couple of years.

Maybe this is in part coming from a certain sense of dissatisfaction with my current situation. Perhaps in my early thirties, I'm looking back on my twenties and wishing I could go back and relive some of those experiences. Maybe it's merely that I'd rather be a grad student right now than a teacher, and if I had done things according to this alternate plan, I would now be entering into a grad program rather than having it my past. I'm not sure. And, of course, pondering these issues doesn't change anything. I am as I am right now and can't really change it. And maybe in a few years I'll look back at this time and consider it the perfect path for my life. But at the moment, I kind of wish I'd made some other choices a few years ago.

And Now For Something Completely Different

2009-10-01T09:01:00.001-07:00

I'm getting another piece published, and this time it's something totally unlike what I normally write. I think of myself as a fiction writer, primarily as a novelist. I worked hard on one nonfiction piece that came together and is soon to be published. But I also wrote one poem that has recently been accepted for publicatoin. Apart from a handful of poems to fulfill a high school English class requirement, I don't think I've written any other poetry. But a couple of years ago, I had an idea for a poem and sat down and wrote it. It seemed halfway decent to me, but what do I know? I'm not a poet, and I don't read a lot of poetry, so I never bothered to submit it to journals or anything. Then this summer, I decided to pull it out and look at it again. I rewrote it and decided I might as well send it out. On the off chance that it got accepted somewhere, it would be nice to have an exra credit on my CV. Plus, unlike with my fiction, I didn't have much at stake in the submission process. If it got rejected, it wouldn't much hurt my feelings because I know I'm not a poet. So I sent it out, and it got accepted.

Of course, I'm thrilled to have one more thing published. This will be another credit on my CV, and publishing in multiple genres could help me get teaching jobs as it demonstrates that I am qualified to teach a mixed workshop course without completely alienating those writers interested in poetry. And when I looked over the poem again, I must admit that I think it's pretty good. The language is carefully chosen, there's a nice rhythm to it, and there's some alliteration that I think really helps the whole thing resonate. But having this piece of writing accepted while I'm still waiting for acceptances for my fiction, which I've worked much harder and longer on, leaves me wondering if I can draw any conclusions from this experience.

One thing that I've decided about this--one great, wonderful, positive thing--is that I do in fact have an ability to use language well. I've long felt that, as a writer, beautiful writing is not my specialty. I've read a number of stories in workshops over the years where I have greatly admired the writer's ability to put words together into beautiful sentences even when I didn't much care for the actual story the writer was telling. I've seen this same thing with published stories as well. Literary journals are full of beautifully written, boring stories (this is often what I think about when I hear criticism of MFA style writing). And while I admired my peers' abilities, I accepted that I wasn't so naturally gifted. But I've worked hard to hone my language skills. I try to pay attention to my diction and to the rhythm and flow of my writing, and I think my prose is much nicer now. So having a success in the world of poetry, which is so much more about one's ability to use language than it is to convey meaning or be clear, well, that tells me that I have been successful in developing my skills there. So, well done me.

But there's another conclusion I draw. I'm hesitant to bring this up because I fear it will seem derogatory and I don't intend it that way. I have admiration and respect for poets. I fully acknowledge that I am not one of them and apart from this one instance of dabbling in their field, I cannot do what they do. But the conclusion I draw is that it may actually be easier to get poetry published than to get fiction published. And what I mean by this is not that it's easier to write poetry or that the standards for poetry are less vigorous. I mean that purely from a numbers standpoint, there's more room for journals to publish poetry. I was glancing at a few journals the other day and counted up the different types of work. From my extremely limited survey I concluded that many journals publish in a typical issue perhaps four or five short stories, two or three essays, and twenty or so poems. This, of course, varies greatly. Some journals will publish dozens of stories. Others publish no nonfiction at all. But of those journals that publish both poetry and fiction, it is highly likely that while the number of pages dedicated to fiction in a given issue outnumber the pages of poetry, there are more actual poems than there are stories.

I also imagine (and again, this is pure speculation) that there are fewer poets out in the world submitting their work. Because it is something that many view as specialized and difficult and almost magical, many writers are reluctant to attempt poetry. But many of those same people assume they can write a story because it's the same kind of language they use everyday when writing e-mails. Any literate person knows how to write prose, so why not a piece of fiction? So I would guess that there are more aspiring fiction writers than aspiring poets in the world and more writers submit fiction than submit poetry. But even if I'm wrong there and the numbers are even, that still means that a journal could recieve a hundred poems and a hundred stories and find space in an issue to publish twenty percent of those poems and in the same number of pages only two or three percent of the stories. So while all of those poems may be wonderful, it's quite likely that some wonderful stories are rejected at the same time because there simply isn't enough space for all the good ones.

It's possible (or likely) that I have no idea what I'm talking about and this is all wild speculation, but I'd guess that on a whole it is statistically likelier to have a poem accepted than a story. Once again, let me emphasize that I don't intend to show disrespect for poets and what they do; however, when I finally get a story published, it will feel more significant to me than having this poem published.

What It's About

2009-06-22T06:35:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking recently about the difference between craft--that is being able to convey things well and interestingly through good diction, style, structure, etc.--and actually having something to say. In particular I was reflecting on the benefits of studying writing in a formal program and what one learns there compared with what one doesn't learn there. I feel that my experience in graduate school was useful in developing my craft abilities as a writer. I have no doubts that I am a better writer today than I was five years ago. And, in a strange way, writing is harder for me today than it was then because I know of so many various factors to pay attention to now (when I'm rewriting, I can spend a couple of hours and only get through a paragraph). I've studied craft and, I think, become a decent craftsman.

However, one thing that isn't really addressed, and I don't know if it's possible to address, in an MFA program is content. It's great if one can write well, but if one has nothing to say, then what's the point? And I think that's one of the problems I'm encountering at the moment. I feel like I can write well (of course I've still got more to learn and more developing to do, but basically I write well), but I'm increasingly unconvinced that at age thirty I have anything worth writing about. When I start to develop the ideas I have, I usually become excited about a new prospect and start to think through the implications of the idea only to become discouraged because it's nothing very original or different. Now I don't think this is strictly a problem that I have. I think most writers probably have this basic problem. Great writers have been producing work for so long, how can we, now, add anything new to the discussions? That isn't necessarily a problem. Approaching something old from a new angle can work. Or even doing something old, but doing it well, can be solid. The problem for a young writer, though, is that sometimes the ideas that seem fresh are actually old. Or if I recognize that an idea is old, but I think I can still do it well, that might not be enough. Why would an editor want to publish some old idea from some young nobody? I recently received a very nice letter accompanying a rejection. The letter said that my story was well written, but essentially takes on an old idea and adds nothing new. And I couldn't disagree with their critique.

I read a blog today about a similar issue, and that is whether one gains better experience from the "real world" than from the academic world. In essence, that's part of my concern. I'm thirty years old. I spent my entire childhood up to age twenty-two in school. Then after only a short break, I returned to school for almost the entire remainder of my twenties. Now I'm out of school as a student but still in that world as a teacher. Most of my life experience is from that world. I like that world. It's a good world. But it does leave me feeling limited in my understanding of humanity. When I interact with my students, who are largely from very different socio-economic, cultural, and intellectual backgrounds than me, I feel perplexed by their attitudes and behaviors. Likewise, I feel that I might not be able to properly imagine other situations and lives. I've heard that a writer doesn't need any real experience because it's all about imagination, so the great writer has learned everything they need to know about humanity by age seven or so, and from then on it's a matter of making up stories. This contrasts with the other view, that a writer would be better off spending years on a failed marriage than on an MFA. My sensibilities lean toward the imagination camp, and yet I'm not sure if that actually works.

The difficulty for me is that I fear my own views of the world, or something about the way my mind works, might be different enough from the average that my work doesn't quite resonate with others. On more than one occasion I've written fiction where characters were created from my understanding of how people think and act, and the reaction of my readers was puzzlement as to why the character acts and thinks as he does. Or I've had the reverse experience as a reader, where I read a story and find the motivations of the characters completely baffling, but the others around me see those characters as everyman types that anyone can relate to and understand. Maybe it's a matter of life experience, that I simply haven't done enough to understand the world around me as much as I'd like to. Sometimes I think that the best plan of action would be to sort of set aside the immediate goals of publication and so on and to simply live life for a while longer to try to come up with something worth writing about. I could continue to work on my craft to keep my skills up, but maybe I simply won't have any stories worth sharing with the world for another ten or twenty years, if then. I don't know.

The downside of a plan like that is that, essentially, I've never felt that I was very good at living life. Many of the basic experiences that people have and that then produce the inspiration for good writing are beyond my experience or understanding. And I don't know that there's any way to have those experiences merely for the sake of having them. I don't think life works that way. When I was younger, I sort of attempted such a thing. I had never really dated before, and I suspected that it would not be a good idea to date this one particular girl who was interested in me. However, part of what convinced me to do it was that it would provide good life experience for me as a writer. The relationship ended as I always knew it would. I've long felt that the anxiety of the experience while it was happening followed by the depression when it was over was plenty of reason to avoid the experience to begin with and I should have followed my rational brain that told me not to do it. But at least I now had this life experience that is a rite of passage for most people. I had experienced a young romance and could now write about it. But it turns out, the way I experienced that was not similar to how most others experience such a thing. I wrote about it, and people felt like my character was an enigmatic freak.

I don't know that there's any way to overcome this obstacle. My inclination is to hope that continued living will somehow magically transform me into someone with greater understanding and more significant ideas to put into my writing, but I also suspect that there's a lot of truth to the notion that one learns the essentials by age seven, and somehow I just never quite learned them the way others do.

Acceptance

2009-04-26T08:27:00.000-07:00

I finally got an acceptance this past week. For the past couple years, I've been submitting to magazines. Since my main interest is in the novel rather than shorter pieces, I don't have a lot that I've been sending out. I've written a handful of stories over the past decade or so, but only one of them do I consider to be very good. I have a chapter from a novel that I feel works as a short story, so I've been submitting that for a few months. And I had one other piece, a personal essay I began writing in the nonfiction class in grad school, that I felt pretty decent about. The essay had received perhaps the best feedback of anything I ever brought into workshop, and following many revisions, it seemed strong. When I started sending it out, I quickly got hand written notes on my rejection slips. One journal even sent me a full letter with a critique of the piece, explaining why they didn't feel it was quite right despite being strong writing. I continued to rewrite the piece and resubmit, rewrite and resubmit. More notes, but no acceptance. Then a few months ago I was going over the piece again and just felt like it wasn't coming together. I saw new problems I hadn't noticed in past drafts, but I couldn't figure out how to solve the problems. So after a couple years of submitting it, I retired the piece. I felt like it was generally strong but not quite working, and I didn't know how to fix it. Those journals where the essay was still being considered sent me rejections, and I stopped thinking about it.

Then this past week I got an e-mail that a journal wants to publish it. This was the only journal I had not heard from; they had been considering the essay for nearly a year. Of course I was thrilled to finally have a piece accepted. But there was also ambivalence there. After all, this was a piece that I already decided wasn't working. Did I want it published at all if I'm not quite happy with it? For a moment I considered sending a reply to the journal, saying I'd rather pull it from consideration. But I couldn't. The editor wrote that she enjoyed the piece and it stood out from the stack of submissions. Maybe I'm simply too critical about it when I feel it's not working. And, ultimately, I need to get published.

On the one hand, having my work published is a great boost to the ego. No matter how many times my mom says I'm a good writer, it's nice to get some affirmation from another source. But beyond that, I need to get published for the sake of my career. I'm now finishing the last weeks of my first year as an adjunct teacher. There are definitely things I like about the teaching, but on a whole it can be frustrating and I feel that I can't do it forever. I can't work with beginning students for the next thirty years. I'll burn out. But in order to do something else, to teach creative writing, I need to publish. And to increase my chances of publishing, it's useful to be published. Having the stamp of approval from one editor could tip the balance in my favor when my work is being considered by another editor. So, of course, I wrote back saying I'd love to have my essay published.

And maybe it's better than I think it is. Maybe I'm looking too critically at my writing and seeing flaws that others won't notice or that aren't necessarily even there. But the bottom line is that I have two options. One: have it published, get the credit on my resume, possibly boost my chances of publishing more, and increase my credentials for full-time teaching positions. Or two: let the essay sit untouched on my computer.

So I'm getting published.

Writing = Meaning

2009-04-05T12:01:00.000-07:00

I just read somebody else's blog about the sense of meaning that comes from writing, which is something I was recently thinking about as well. If you subtracted writing from my life, then I'd still have a reasonably full existence. I work plenty. One of my jobs is easy and sometimes even a bit fun. The other is often frustrating but also often rewarding. If I were to teach for the next thirty years, I'm sure I'd have what most people would consider to be a full life and maybe I'd even make a difference in the lives of some of my students. But I don't think it would really be worth it.

I was thinking the other day how tough it is to find time to write and how, despite writing and submitting my work for years, I have yet to make much headway into publishing my fiction. It occurred to me that I often feel frustrated with my schedule since I work two jobs and then think of writing as being my third job. I feel a certain amount of pressure to keep at it, but then when I write I think how I should really be grading papers instead. So the thought crossed my mind that maybe the best course of action would be to ease up on the writing, to put it way on the back burner and just think of it as more of a hobby that I fiddle with occasionally, but to face the reality that I might not ever get anywhere with it. But that thought was too depressing to consider for long. Writing is what gives my life meaning. Without it, I just feel like I'm some schlub who fills his time working a job that doesn't make a whole lot of difference to the world. There's nothing wrong with that kind of a life if a person is satisfied with it, but it isn't what I want. It would be easier, certainly, but what would be the point? What's the value of a life like that? I don't know. I'm sure many people are content with that type of life, and I can imagine there's plenty of pleasure there, but I don't know . . . it just seems pretty empty to me.

Writing is Easy!

2009-03-11T07:48:00.000-07:00

What's that old quote about writing? It's easy: you just stare at the blank page until drops of blood form on your forehead. Something like that. I could look up it, but I'm lazy. Anyway, the idea is clear. Recently I've grown a new appreciation for the difficulty of writing. It's weird that this should come to me now, since I've been writing seriously the past several years. It's the one thing I've been devoting the majority of my adult life to, and yet it seems harder now than it used to. Maybe it's that old thing about if one really knew how difficult it is, one would never attempt it in the first place.

I don't even know that hard or difficult or tough or whatever is exactly right. The thing that has struck me most recently is simply how long it takes to write well. How slow it is. I've been rewriting my kids book, and, admittedly, some of my slow pace in proceeding through the pages comes from not spending as much time bleeding from my forehead as I could. Instead of writing, I do other things: I watch TV, I work in a bookstore, I read, I grade papers, I prepare quizzes about punctuation, I apply for full time jobs, I do things related to writing like sending out stories to magazines or applying for grants. Sure, all that stuff eats away at my time and some of it is unnecessary or could be eliminated from my schedule so I write more. But that's not even what I mean when I mention that my writing is slow.

When I am actually sitting down working on my novel, I move at a slower pace than I remember in the past. I take more time sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. The result is good. I think the new draft of this book is coming together really well. When I finish this second draft, I think it will be closer to the strength of a third or fourth or even fifth draft of my past work. I'm now focusing more on the issues of language, the specific details that make the story pop. Perhaps part of the reason I can do this already with my first revision is that I pretty well worked out the story in the rough draft (which was the fastest I've ever written), and now I don't have to go through and sift out the actual story from the mass of material to quite the extent that I often do after finishing a rough draft. This isn't to say that I'm not also doing this. I know there are things that need to be cut or added. I know that some chapters go on too long or end in the wrong place or that characters come and go haphazardly. But as I read through and rework what I have, I feel pretty confident that much of the piece, the skeleton, is strong and solid and will hold up. So rather than moving around major items and transplanting passages of text, I'm doing the cosmetic surgery already and analyzing the language in detail and attempting to convey the story as efficiently and effectively as I can. And that is damn slow going.

I sit and stare at sentences and think about how I can put images and sounds and smells into the reader's head. I try to eliminate clichés or alter details that are vague. I read over paragraphs to see if the words flow, if I'm repeating myself, if the sequence is solid or if I'm forecasting events that should come further down the page. I'm concentrating on what I do at every moment (or at least as much as I can). And although I'm so far quite pleased with what I'm producing, I wish I had more pages in my file marked "Draft 2."

Reading Habits

2009-02-19T07:26:00.000-08:00

As everybody knows, it's essential as a writer to read in order to gain a greater understanding of how language works, how novels are constructed, how characters are created, what works and what doesn't. Sometimes it's kind of annoying though. Not that reading is annoying. I love reading. But sometimes I wish I could completely submerge into a book and not analyze it at all. Not think like I'm a writer trying to deconstruct. Okay, so it would an exaggeration to imply that my mind is always working like that. Sometimes I do get sucked in and forget about analyzing craft at all. But usually, at some point in a book I have this commentary going on in my brain that is about how it's written rather than what's going to happen next in the story. But the advantage of that is obvious. I feel like I'm always gaining new appreciation for writing that I hope I can then apply to my own work.

When I was a kid I never understood how my dad could read more than one book at a time. He always had a handful of books with bookmarks sticking out of the top. They sat next to his bed in piles. He read often, but what was the point? How could he "get into" a book reading that way? And now I've become him. I haven't counted up the number of books I'm in the middle of right now, but it's probably in the double digits. Some of that is due to the variety of things I read. For instance, I've read some stories from a collection, marked how far I am, but then not returned for a bit. Does that count as being "in the middle" of a book? Or how about a collection of essays? Then there are science books about theories on the brain or addressing big questions of nature versus nurture. Dipping in and out of that over time isn't the same as setting down a novel in the middle, right?

But, alas, I also have several novels I'm in the middle of. Part of the issue is that I don't feel the same obligation to read a book to its conclusion that I felt when I was younger. For the first twenty years or so of my life, I almost never put a book down unfinished without returning to it. If it was boring, well, I had to plod through. If it was interesting but I wasn't quite in the mood for it, too bad. I had to finish that one before I could start another. Now, however, if a book fails to hold my attention, I feel little guilt about setting it down and picking up something else. The problem, however, is that I often am interested in a book, want to finish it, but it's not absolutely compelling me to read, so I set it down with every intention of picking it up only to start another book. So at the moment I'm probably in the middle of a few novels that I plan on finishing, but for whatever reason they weren't holding my interest every second.

So, back to the issue of learning from writing. I've been thinking that it's a good idea to read more widely than I've always done in the past few years. In grad school, they tell you to read widely, but then that's not really what they encourage you to read in classes and for the comps exams. You pretty much stick to "classics" and "literary" stuff. I like a lot of that, sure, but what about the majority of what people actually read. I work at a bookstore, and not only do we only carry a handful of the type of book I studied in grad school, but what we do have, we rarely sell. In fact, the store has probably sold more of that since I started working there than in the previous year because I keep recommending stuff to customers or buying stuff for myself. So when professors tell us to read widely, do they actually mean to read as widely as possible, or do they merely mean we should read both James Joyce and Italo Calvino?

One problem with only studying classics or literary stuff is that it's often difficult to get much from those as far as learning what those writers do. I was reading a Philip Roth book last fall, and rather than thinking, "Ah, here's how he puts this stuff together; I need to try that myself," I kept simply being stunned by how good it was, yet completely unsure why it was so good since he seemed to be breaking a whole slew of the craft rules I learned in workshops. I'm actually not sure how much can be gained by studying the masters. They might simply be so far above the rest of us that they're untouchable.

However, I think we can learn a lot from writers whose work actually sells to normal people. For one thing, there's the major question of why does this appeal to the average reader? That's an issue that is pretty much never addressed in grad school. All the discussion of craft and character and language, and we never really think about what the average paperback buyer is looking for when they choose something to read on the plane. And sometimes, I fully admit, it's easy to dismiss what is popular as "bad" writing. I've picked up a few bestsellers and read a few pages only to shake my head and wonder how anybody can get through this junk. And yet more people are interested in that, so there must be something there, right? I wish my grad school experience had devoted some time to looking carefully at popular genres to deconstruct what is so appealing to so many. About the only time a class touched on those issues was the screenwriting class, and I still feel that class may have been the most useful course I took in grad school. One of the main things we discussed was the need to not bore the audience, which didn't seem to be much of a concern in the workshop courses. Or there was the class on "Forms of Fiction." Rather than thinking of different genres as taking on different forms, our only concern was literary fiction, often classic stuff that (in my view anyway) bears little relevance to twenty-first century writing. I mean the techniques that were cool and innovative two hundred years ago are simply clichéd now, and you can't get away with that.

This post is probably going on too long, but I've got something specific I want to mention. I was working at the bookstore the other day, and it was slow, so I grabbed the nearest book off a display by the register and started reading. As you might guess, the prominently displayed book was a big bestseller, and in this case the cover featured an image from the movie that was just coming out based on the book. All right, I figured, I'll see what the big deal is with this book, why we sell so many, why they made a movie of it, why this writer is rich now. The book was Confessions of a Shopoholic by Sophie Kinsella. So while the store was nearly empty, I read the first few pages. And you know what? I wound up buying the book that day. It is hysterical. And there's a lot to be learned about craft from it. Not only does it present a clear lesson on the value of humor, how that can compel a reader to keep going (I laugh out loud probably every couple of pages and even more often I smile laugh on the inside), but it's also a fine example of irony. A writer studying the use of the deluded protagonist-narrator who doesn't see the world as it is and is constantly at odds with that world in an effort to protect herself from its challenges could do much worse than studying this book. I'm sure Confessions of a Shopoholic would be dismissed in a graduate "forms of fiction" course. In fact, I once spent a whole class listening to my professor try and fail to explain why Jane Austen is not chick lit because Austen is so great and wonderful while chick lit is stupid fluff (apparently Austen is funny and uses irony well to comment on society, which as I've now seen is exactly what Kinsella does, only more successfully in my opinion).

Anyway, I'd say I've gotten off track a bit, but I'm not sure I was ever on a track to begin with. So here's the thing: Not only am I fully engaged with Kinsella, but I also feel like I can learn something about how to write effectively, how to appeal to a reader. Roth, on the other hand, engages me, but also leaves me completely awed nearly to the point of paralysis because I can never do what he does, or if I can I haven't figured it out yet. Not to suggest that I'm on the level of Kinsella at this point, either, but she seems attainable.

I realize that some of my thoughts here seem to be in direct contradiction to my previous post about high concepts. After all, Kinsella's book is about a financial journalist who is completely out of control with her personal finances. It's utterly high concept. And that's the case with so many genre works. But maybe there's something valuable to learn from them still.

Youth

2009-02-16T15:55:00.000-08:00

I was thinking the other day about youth and inexperience. Mainly this was in regards to my novel about twenty-somethings. I was trying to figure out how to compose an engaging query letter that will snag an agent's attention, but it just seems like an impossible task. Is this because my book is simply not that good? I don't think so. Although I imagine it's not the greatest book ever or the best thing I'll ever write, I still feel pretty pleased with it. I've gotten good feedback from trusted readers. Even when it was at an earlier stage a few drafts ago, I got good responses. A couple people had the same major issue with it in their critique, which was simply that they wanted more of it, to spend more time with the characters. Hurray, right? But how do I distill what is decent about it into an engaging hook? There doesn't really seem to be a hook. Every time I tried to figure out what the conflict is at the heart of the book, what the major struggles are for the characters I was left feeling like it doesn't sound all that interesting. It's partly the high concept issue I discussed last time, but there's something else there, too. And that, I think, is the problem of youth.

I've written a book about twenty-something characters struggling with twenty-something problems. My hope is that those issues translate to other readers, that older folks could read the book and remember back to when they were younger. But maybe they wouldn't care much. They're past that stage of life and would rather move forward. Or another way of thinking about it is that for young characters there's an inherent lack of high stakes. Although the conflicts and struggles are very real and important to those characters experiencing them, they might not matter to an older reader. I'm not so many years removed from my characters, and already I'm starting to think that. I'm sure another ten or twenty years down the line and I'll have even less interest in young people. I remember a girl at the bookstore where I work was telling me why I should read the Twilight series of books. She said they aren't simply about vampires, but they're more about teen angst and young love. And I thought that was the perfect reason for me to not read those books. I might have some interest in reading about vampires, but teen angst and young love rank pretty low on my list of things that engage me.

So is my book then doomed? What interested me about that story when I started it a few years ago seems less significant to me now. But there's a good chance that my newer ideas will stay interesting to me for a while. Really, the kicker came when I was trying to come up with a hook opening line for a query, and I was thinking about what it is that my main character really wants and what the challenge is for him. He's a young writer who hasn't experienced enough life yet to have much worth writing about. But if that's the case, and the book is a metafictional work that he is writing, then doesn't it follow that there's not much worth reading there? Not entirely. By the time the character starts writing the story, more has happened to him. Yet, I can't quite crack how to explain that in a snappy few sentences. I just kept getting into the mind of an agent and reading a query letter that describes a novel by a young novelist about a young novelist with little life experience struggling to write a novel. How could that be anything but an automatic rejection? Even if it's good (which I think my book is), it seems so clichéd and self-referential. The chances of that kind of book being very decent and having much appeal to a wide audience seem pretty remote. If I can't imagine me requesting the manuscript as an agent, how could I expect an actual agent to want to look at it? But that's not to suggest writing it wasn't valuable even if nobody else ever reads it.

So when it got me thinking about youth, I started reflecting on young I still really am. I dreaded my last birthday when I hit 30. That seemed so old to me. It was depressing to reach that point and have so little to show for my life, to not even have a full time job. But when I think much about it, thirty is awfully young for a writer. How many writers do much that's any good by that age? Sure, there are the handful of Hemingways and Shelleys out there, but most don't get going until much later. Even Philip Roth, who made a splashy debut in his twenties, didn't hit hit his stride for about another decade, and then he arguably didn't climax for another three or four decades. It takes so much practice to get good at writing that the chances of getting in enough practice by age thirty are pretty slim. So for now I'll keep practicing and living, and eventually I'll have plenty to write about and the skills with which to write effectively.

High Concept

2009-02-13T11:44:00.000-08:00

It seems the trick to writing a publishable book is to write one that is "high concept." I keep encountering that idea in articles on writing and information about how to land an agent. That's what sells. It's what people want to read. Sure, you might write a character-driven literary novel (that may be redundant; I once heard "literary fiction" defined as fiction that is character-driven rather than plot-driven), but unless you have a high concept, nobody cares.

I don't mean to sound bitter. Honestly, I'm way too young to be bitter yet. Give me another ten or fifteen years, and then maybe I'll be bitter. But I don't care for this whole high concept thing. You have to put a twist onto your idea or combine genres or whatever to make it something new. What's wrong with simply having interesting characters and engaging writing? Not to suggest that my writing is the best out there or anything. It's possible my book is still nothing but crap, but in general, does anybody even publish anything that isn't high concept anymore?

I was working today on getting some new agent queries together. I haven't sent out any for a while because I'm not very happy with my query letter. I just don't know how to express what my novel is about in a few sentences so an agent might actually want to read it. When I think about what my book is about, I'm forced to acknowledge that it's simply not high concept at all.

So I was looking through this blog where an agent goes through queries and offers critiques. I hoped maybe I'd learn something valuable about how to put together a solid synopsis that would hook an agent's interest. Many of the queries were so bad as to be comical, and it was fun to read the agent's sardonic criticism of those. But then there were the queries that the agent liked and suggested she would request the manuscript if she received that query. And those successful queries all struck me as dumb. They described the kinds of books that certainly get published--I work at a bookstore and see books that I wouldn't want to read come in all the time--but they didn't actually sound interesting or like they would be very good. They seemed like soap operas because they all had such crazy high stakes or big twists.

Now maybe this is simply an issue of that agent's taste differing from mine. It's harsh and judgmental for me to say that those are dumb or bad books when all I mean is that they don't appeal to me. But it strikes me that it is more than simply a taste issue, that the trend in publishing is so much in favor of high concept that something else doesn't even stand a chance. Unless a book is written by an already established author, it can't break in without that something extra. And my problem is that sometimes books that I like suffer (at least in my opinion) from their high concepts. I'd rather read low concept stuff, but it's not even out there.

For instance, I read Tom Perrotta's Joe College last year. I liked it. I thought it was about eighty-five percent great. But then it had this high concept plot diversion that seemed like a complete distraction to me. The story is primarily about a young man from a working-class background in his junior year (maybe senior year) at Yale. There's a bunch of stuff going on that make it an interesting story. The character is drawn to two different women, one unattainable, the other not so desirable once she's attained. He's stuck between two worlds--that of Yale and the townies--as he's pulled between the two women. And then he goes home for spring break and drives his dad's lunch truck. I'm totally engaged up to this point. But then there's this whole side plot involving pseudo-mafioso characters fighting over lunch truck territory. That part of the plot makes it (in my mind anyway) veer into the territory of high concept, and I think the book would have been better off if all of that were cut out.

Another one that comes to mind is Michael Chabon's Mysteries of Pittsburgh. It's a similar story in that it features young characters struggling with romance and identity. But again there's a mafia side plot as well as a character suddenly discovering he's gay even though he's lived for twenty-two years without ever noticing that about himself before (I'll admit I might not be remembering the details quite accurately since it's been a number of years since I read the book, but the way I remember it is that the gay subplot felt tacked on and artificial, but maybe it's a difference in the way homosexuality is understood today compared to twenty years ago). Anyway, if the story was simply about a character struggling to figure out what to do with himself after college, I'd be completely with it. Add in those high concept plot elements, and I get turned off.

Hell, even those new Pirates of the Caribbean movies go off track by getting too high concept. What's wrong with a good ol' fashioned pirate movie? Why do they also have to be ghosts?

So as I kept looking over sample query letters I felt less and less confident that my book will ever be able to attract any agent interest. I think my only hope will be to enter it into contests or send it to small presses that publish literary rather than commercial fiction because my book isn't high concept, I don't think I can disguise it as high concept, and I don't want it to be high concept.

Maybe my only course of action is to continue moving forward with my next books and let this novel gather dust for awhile. I'm revising my children's book, and it's closer to high concept since it's a fantasy story. Then my next literary book that I'm in the early stages of generating material for is also more high concept than what I've previously done. I think I'll stand a better chance of coming up with a one sentence hook, anyway. Then maybe if I land an agent or publishing deal with those I could pull out the old low concept novel and sneak it onto the agent's desk.

Comedy

2009-02-06T07:31:00.001-08:00

Okay, so I've been thinking more about comedy. I haven't really fleshed out all my thoughts, but since writing is a way to discover one's thoughts rather than merely a method of putting down thoughts that are already fully coherent (as I keep telling my students), I'll go ahead and ponder a bit here.

I previously commented on the role of empathy in comedy and how it can deter. As much as I think this is true, I also think it's totally wrong. I remember reading Neil Simon's autobiography years ago, and he describes his experience as a young playwright struggling with his first play. He received feedback indicating that one of his characters wasn't very likable or sympathetic. He replied something to the effect of, "So what? Characters don't always have to be sympathetic, do they?" To which, his buddy replied, "They do if you're writing comedy." So which is it? Do you need to like the characters and sympathize/empathize or should you have distance from them so you can laugh at them without feeling bad for them? Yes.

When I think about it, I can come up with few examples of successful comedy without sympathetic characters. Basil Fawlty and Blackadder come to mind, but the very fact that they seem so exceptional indicates how rare this is. Similarly, I've known people who can't stand The Office because of this very problem. Rather than standing back and laughing, they cringe at the situations. They empathize too much and feel embarrassed for the characters. Personally, I love The Office. The British version is on my list of top television programs ever, and I also am a fan of the American version. In part I love The Office so much because I do empathize with the characters. It achieves something amazing because I both laugh at them and cringe with them.

Or what about Arrested Development, another wonderful show where the characters are hardly likable? Or, going back to my example from last time of the type of book I'm aiming for, how about A Confederacy of Dunces? Ignatius J. Reilly is such a bizarre character that he isn't exactly likable. Do we empathize with him and laugh because we see ourselves in the situation or stand back at a distance and laugh at him?

Maybe the trouble is in the balance. I'm not sure it's possible to accomplish both a great deal of empathy while also laughing. I once saw a play that was ninety percent silly farce and then the final moments aimed for heavy drama. I considered the play a complete failure. I laughed at the humor, but then felt totally thrown off when I was supposed to care about the characters' fate at the end. I didn't care about them because I hadn't been encouraged to care. But if the play had introduced the balance earlier, and let me see greater depth of character initially, perhaps it could have hit that balance. I don't know.

Maybe it's on a spectrum: there's the ridiculous farce end and the highly dramatic end, and you can never span the entire thing. But if you move closer to the middle, then perhaps you can hit both sides. You can like the characters, laugh at their plight, see yourself in their situation and chuckle, and still be emotionally moved. Maybe the reason this seems so difficult to me is that it is difficult. Move too far in either direction, and the whole thing fails. Or to an extent, it depends on the audience. As I mentioned, I think The Office is brilliant. I laugh, but there is a part of me that feels so bad for David Brent. If I had to conclude whether I find him despicable or pitiful, I'd lean toward pity. But that pity doesn't keep me from laughing.

Hmmm . . . I'll have to keep pondering this issue.

Some Disconnected and Random Thoughts

2009-01-30T06:44:00.000-08:00

1. Once again, I've been evaluating the essay I was working on. After many more hours reading it, editing, reorganizing, composing new material, cutting out old stuff, and so on, I'm still dissatisfied and unsure that it will ever be quite what I want it to be. I've concluded that writing creative nonfiction is incredibly difficult, much more so than I had originally appreciated. There's such a freedom with fiction to manipulate the characters and situation to make it all work, but nonfiction is limited by reality. And reality is messy and without clear themes or conclusions. I had envisioned my essay as having a sort of pivotal epiphany moment, but that's simply not how things happen, at least not for me. Life isn't full of epiphanies. Life is a slow process; changes happen slowly if at all. So condensing that process into a ten or fifteen page essay is a daunting prospect. When I steer the facts--including some details and leave out others--I feel like I'm being dishonest and turning the facts into fiction. I don't know. Maybe that's what all nonfiction writers do. I suppose truth is an impossibility.

2. My next novel has been pushing its way more and more into the forefront of my brain. It's an idea I came up with a few years ago and started a couple years ago as a short story, but after writing it I realized I really wanted to continue on and discover what else happens, where the characters go from the point I'd left them at the end of the story, and that this would wind up as a complete novel idea for me. I had planned on writing this one after my MFA thesis novel, but then I became more interested in writing my kids' book, so I did that first. But now I'm still really early on in the kids' book process--I have a complete draft but have barely started on an initial revision. So I'm left with this question: Do I put the kids' book on hold while I move on to a story that is more pressing on my mind or do I leave the new book alone to keep working on the kids' book? Well, unable to quite decide between the two of those choices, I've opted for the middle ground. I'm going to begin drafting the new one while rewriting the old one. I'm not sure yet whether this is a smart move, but I'll give it a try and see how it goes. My fear is that I won't fully sink into either world and I'll end up doing both poorly, but who knows?

3. With my new novel I'm proceeding in a different manner than I have in the past. Typically I have a basic story idea in mind and start writing even if I'm unsure where exactly it's going. I make a lot of notes as I draft and usually before I'm very far along I have some sort of rough outline of the entire project so I can see where I'm heading even though the route changes as I go and find detours or shortcuts. With my MFA thesis I began writing out of order, originally composing one piece as a short story then another as a separate story until I concluded that rather than a series of linked stories I really was writing a novel. It turned out the early pieces wound up (in rather different forms) as the end of the book. But by the time I had drafted the first few chapters I had a very rough form of the entire book outlined.

Right now I'm lacking that clear vision of my new book, but rather than beginning with chapter one and seeing where it goes, I'm starting before the beginning of the book. I'm doing character sketches that are more extensive than I've done in the past. Previously I've jotted down key details of characters so I can keep them straight as I go or whatever, but I haven't worried too much about fleshing out their pasts and motivations and so forth since those things tend to come up as I write and I know I'll discover those details by the time I get through a couple of drafts. But now I feel like I won't be quite sure how to proceed with each new section of the story until I have a solid understanding of each character and why they are motivated to do the things they do. So I've written several pages about the lives of the two main characters and have yet to reach the point where the book actually starts. It's really fun to explore the back story like this, and I'm hoping it proves helpful as I move forward. In part I felt compelled to do this because the first big plot point relies on a somewhat absurd turn of events, and I feel like I have to justify those events in order for the story to work. That was one of the problems with the short story version I attempted a couple years ago. I didn't have enough time to make the unlikely event seem plausible. So I need to really understand the character in order for his bizarre action to seem like something he would genuinely do under the circumstances.

Another significant factor with this new novel (that I've commented on before here I believe) is that the story and characters move much further away from my own experiences and characteristics, which in part means I don't have as thorough an understanding of the characters and their motivations. My first novel, my MA thesis, drew heavily on my own traits for the main character: he thought much like I do, had the same tastes and interests, and so on. I didn't have to worry too much about how he would react to different situations because I could simply imagine how I myself would react. My second novel, my MFA thesis, moved further away from myself but still had a lot of me in the characters. While the first book had a stand-in for me, the second one used different aspects of me in different characters, an exaggerated version of characteristic X here, characteristic Y there. None of the main characters were me, but I still felt like I understood them fairly intuitively, that it wasn't a major shift to step into their shoes and discover how they would react in different circumstances. The third book, the kids' book, was a whole different thing, so it doesn't really enter this discussion. With the new novel, though, I don't think any of the characters I've come up with so far have a whole lot in common with me, so it's going to be more of a challenge to figure out exactly how and why they do what they do and then to also make it seem reasonable to a reader that these characters would indeed do what they do. It's fun and exciting to take this new step away from what I've done before.

4. Comedy. I've been reflecting recently on comedy. It's weird, I used to be pretty good at comedy. The major piece of writing I did that convinced me I definitely wanted to devote my life to writing was a one-act farce. I wrote it in college and it was accepted into a festival of one-act plays on campus. Seeing an audience laugh so hard at my words was thrilling. But since that point I've become less and less comic in my writing. I see my new novel as being highly comic. In my mind it's on the lines of A Confederacy of Dunces or Candide, a sprawling episodic novel, maybe picaresque, where a number of characters pursue different goals and keep falling flat and perhaps there's a bit of Camus's absurd thrown into the mix where things fail to turn out as the characters expect. I have a strong sense of the feeling I'd like the novel to have, but I'm a bit doubtful that I'll be able to achieve the right balance. And I realized that the major obstacle in my way is a weird one: empathy.

What's that? Empathy? Why would that be a problem? Well, here's why. I've heard a definition of the difference between comedy and tragedy attributed to Mel Brooks: "Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die; tragedy is when I get a paper cut." There's definitely something to that. Comedy has a distance between the audience and the characters so we feel fine laughing at them. Yes, we often like the characters, but I think we still don't fully empathize. If we did, would we be so callous as to laugh at their misfortunes? Dramatic stories are all about empathy, feeling that torment of the characters. And I feel like over the past decade or so I've shifted somewhat in my level of empathy with my fellow human beings. I formerly identified myself only half-jokingly as a misanthrope, and with a misanthropic view of humanity it's easy to laugh. But more and more I feel a sense of the basic worth and individual suffering and joys of every person, and with that kind of connection, it becomes harder to laugh. So then when creating characters for a story, I want them to be real, to be empathetic, to have people care about them, but then how can I also make them funny? I don't know. I haven't sorted it all out yet. I've heard comedy is all about the head and drama about the heart, and I think my heart has become a bigger part of me than it used to be.

writing is rewriting is rewriting is rewriting

2008-12-19T07:33:00.000-08:00

Almost three years ago I began a short personal essay for a class. It turned out okay. It satisfied the requirement for the class and I earned an A, but I knew it had more work before it was something really good. So I set it aside and came back to it months later. I extensively rewrote it and submitted it to a workshop course. There it received some of the most positive feedback of anything I submitted during my time in the MFA program. I rewrote again and entered the new version in a contest at the university. It came in third. I rewrote again. I started submitting it for publication to journals. Although I've been submitting things for years, this was the first piece to receive regular personal notes instead of only form rejections. Most of the notes were simple hand-written comments along the lines of "please consider submitting again in the future" at the bottom of the form letter. However, one journal actually included a full letter with specific critiques explaining why despite the essay's strengths they didn't feel it was quite right for them. So even though I was getting consistently positive feedback, it still wasn't accepted, so I took another look at it and rewrote again.

Months went by with no change. Encouraging comments, but no acceptances. So again I decided to look it over and try to see how else I might improve it. And unlike my past evaluations of it, I didn't think the essay was that good. It had definite strengths, but it also had what now struck me as glaring weaknesses. The momentum of the piece fell flat about halfway through, so the essay itself simply didn't work. I thought about it but couldn't figure out how to fix the problem. So more than two years after I first started writing it, and more than a year after I began submitting it, I set the piece aside and decided to stop submitting it until I could solve its structural problems. I did this suspecting that the essay was simply a failure, something that comes close without ever quite working right.

Another couple of months passed, and I picked it up again, curious if I might see anything now that I missed the last time. And sure enough, some new ideas came to mind. The essay's faltering momentum seemed as evident as before, but now I could envision a new structure, a complete renovation, that might fix it. I'm not yet done with this new rewrite, but I feel excited about the essay again and think it might finally reach its potential.

Advice On When To Move On

2008-11-02T06:46:00.000-08:00

The topic of finishing, knowing when you're done, is something I've obviously been thinking about and wrote about last time. So to help me consider the issue, I've been reflecting on advice I've received from teachers over the years.

I've studied under some good writers who have given different types of instruction and advice. Perhaps my favorite writer I took a class with had a process very different from mine. He spent months thinking about his stories. He would jot down notes, but basically do draft after draft in his head until he had figured the whole thing out and even polished the language. Then he would write it down, and essentially the first written draft was the final draft. I could never work that way. I simply couldn't keep it all in my head. Also, this professor was a great short story writer and not a novelist. I doubt his process would work on a novel due to the larger scope and the difficulty of keeping so much in one's head. Basically the way he ran his workshop classes was to examine the pieces students submitted, to look at the structure, the techniques, and analyze them. We often got into abstract discussion of about how literature works and why, but often that came at the expense of specific critique of the pieces themselves. Although I feel I learned some things in that class, those things were larger theoretical concepts, and I'm not sure the stories I submitted benefited a whole lot. Probably my professor didn't have much to suggest for how to change a story because once his were written, they were done, so he wasn't much for changing them after that point.

Another professor I studied under was an accomplished novelist. She had published five or six novels and many short stories over the years. One of the specific pieces of advice I remember from her was directly in response to the question of knowing when you're done. She said that is, of course, one of the toughest questions to answer and her best take on that issue was to quit rewriting when she felt like she was starting to make the piece worse. It's been a few years since she mentioned that, and I still reflect back on it as I rewrite, and the tricky thing is that when I approach a piece I haven't looked at for a while, I usually spot things to improve. I have one story I've been working on for over four years, and I revised it again as recently as a month ago, and I think I was still improving it. So on the one hand I think I should continue to work on it since I haven't started completely messing it up yet, but on the other hand I think at some point I have to move on, retire it, and work on future pieces. I don't know that I've reached that point yet with this particular story. Most of the stories I've written over the years ultimately were nothing more than learning exercises, but I still feel this one is good and will be published eventually.

I asked another professor about his thoughts on the issue of when do you know you're done. I suggested that maybe you can tell you're finished when somebody finally publishes something. And he said that even then, it's not that clear. He was at that time editing a short story collection. The stories had previously been published in magazines, and the collection had been accepted for publication. Even so, as he went back through it, he found some stories he still wanted to rework beyond simple edits. I recently read an interview with Tobias Wolff about his new story collection, which includes revised versions of stories he published years ago. And he's certainly not the only writer to keep returning to the past and revising it. So I don't know. I guess the difficulty is to avoid winding up like the writer in Albert Camus's The Plague: he keeps rewriting the opening passage of his novel, trying to get it perfect, and since he never moves on from the beginning, he never completes anything.

I guess I'd rather move forward and accept that some of my past work isn't as good as it ultimately could be, but in the end produce more. If I wind up writing a great novel, but it's my seventh novel and the first six were learning experiences, I still think I'd be happier with that than if I spent twenty years to produce one novel that was ultimately great.

In part my desire to move forward comes from some other piece of advice whose source I don't remember. I think it's important to move on when the passion dies. This is a difficult continuum, however. There are writers who write a passion-fueled rough draft, can't stand to rewrite and so they quit there. That doesn't seem like a good way to go. But if I write, rewrite, revise, rewrite, revise, edit, polish, rewrite, edit, etc., etc. and I've gotten the piece far, but I've reached the point where, despite liking it as a story and feeling it's good, I'm getting sick of it, well I think that's the time to move on. If I'm at that stage with one piece and another piece is taking over my mind more and more, I think it's best to move on to that next piece. Now it's certainly possible that the earlier piece will force it's way back into the passion part of my brain and I'll return to it down the line, but still, it's not necessarily the most productive to rehash the same thing forever.

One final thought on this issue is closely related to that previous idea: as I improve as a writer, I think my ideas get better. I wrote my first novel between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-six. I have no regrets about writing it. I learned a lot from the experience of drafting, rewriting, submitting it to workshops and a writers' group, and ultimately defending it as my MA thesis. But the basic story was not necessarily the most interesting thing in the world. As with many first novels, it drew heavily on my own experiences, and it had the kind of plot that might simply be too minimal to ever be of much appeal to most readers. If I were to continue working on that novel until it reached the level of being a great novel, I suspect it would have to change so much that it would barely resemble the original. So if the final version is going to be so different, why not actually do something different? Rather than being burdened with that history, it's better to start fresh. My second novel moved further from my own experiences, but still has some limited scope. I think this book is good, and I hope to see it published, but I know the story is limited and will not appeal to many readers. But I have other ideas for future novels that have the kind of premises that I think have much more potential to bloom into something great. And I think it's because as I head into my thirties, my views of the world are larger and more interesting than they were when I was in my early and mid twenties. So that's one more reason to keep moving forward, to progress to the next piece instead of rehashing the old ones forever.

Finishing: Yeah Right

2008-10-25T07:06:00.000-07:00

So I set a deadline for myself to have an additional revision done in time to enter a contest. I need to have my manuscript finished and in the mail by November first. I've been doing revisions on the computer, printing out the new pages and then going over them once more with a red pen in an effort to catch all the little issues. Last night I got all the way to the end of my book, and so I'm ready to print out the remaining pages and do the final read through and then input the additional edits. I still have a week before the contest deadline, and it definitely looks like I'll make it in time. And the timing couldn't be better.

Unfortunately, my life is squeezing me so I'll soon have even less time to work on my writing. I'm being promoted at the book store, which is great in that I'll make an extra twenty-five cents per hour (Hooray! My income this year might even hit five figures!) and will even soon be eligible for some minimal health care benefits, but I'll also be working more. Rather than being at the book store twenty to thirty hours, I'll be there thirty hours a week minimum. On weeks when I don't have student papers to grade, I'll still be working about fifty hours a week. When I do have papers to grade, it'll be sixty plus hours. This coming week I'm working seven days. And that means the little time I currently find to write will be even scarcer.

Anyway, the sound of violins behind me is distracting. Where was I going? Oh, yeah. Finishing yet another revision. I don't know if I'm actually done. Is it ever possible to be done? I'm sure there are improvements I could make. My newest draft is the tightest, and shortest, version of my book. The length concerns me a little bit. Although it's still a three hundred page novel, double the minimum length for what would be called a novel as opposed to a novella, it's still not a long book. And I have had a few of my early readers who felt like they wanted more, that they would like to spend additional time with the characters. That, of course, is one of the greatest compliments I could hope for, but it also makes me wonder if it should be longer. Basically I have three separate story lines following three major characters, so although the book is one cohesive piece, it's in a way three linked novellas. So I can understand that a reader might want more of each. I have a few ideas for additional chapters I could include, but I'm reluctant to keep writing more. For one thing, I've been working on this for years already and just want to move on. But, more importantly, I feel like the book is tight. Even though it's not a plot-driven book, the major plot points work together pretty succinctly without major digressions and insignificant details. I'd like to think I've got on my hands the type of novel somebody might pick up and feel compelled to keep reading and finish in a couple sittings.

But anyway, I think I might have begun writing this post with some sort of point in mind, though I'm not entirely sure what that point was. It might have had something to do with the old issue of having trouble finishing. I'm pretty sure it was something like that. And the final thought for the moment is this: although I'm sure I could keep working on this book, keep writing new bits and pieces, keep editing for the clearest, most engaging prose, reconsider and evaluate every decision I made along the way, I'm not going to. I'll enter this new version in that contest, look for other such contests, check into small presses who might be interested in a first literary novel, query agents who probably won't be interested in a first literary novel, and move forward with the next novel.

Many times over the years I've had students approach me asking if they could revise a paper an additional time after the final draft in order to improve their grade. For my own sake, I can't keep grading draft after draft; I obviously don't have the time for that. But for their sake as well, I recommend moving on. Instead of trying to juggle one more revision while also writing the first draft of their next paper, it's better to learn from the previous essay and apply those lessons to the next one. And that's what I need to do as well. It might be that my book still isn't where it needs to be, isn't tight enough or long enough or whatever enough to get published. But rather than spending another year on it, I'd rather move forward. I'm a better writer now than I was when I started this book, and the next thing I write should be better than this one. It's possible (although depressing to dwell on) that I'll have four or five novels written before one makes it out into the world. But that's how it is.

Finding Time

2008-10-21T07:24:00.000-07:00

As I'm sure any amateur writer can relate, it's tough to find time to write. Not to suggest that my situation is tougher than other people's, but my situation is tougher than other people's. Just joshing. Actually, I think it's in some ways easier to find time to write now than it was back in grad school. It's weird. In grad school, I was there to write. That was the whole point, and yet there were so many other things going on. I was teaching and tutoring, reading and studying for classes, reading and studying for the comps exam, reading and commenting on other writers' work for workshop, grading papers, preparing for classes. With all of that going on at once, it often became a struggle to find spare moments to actually do the thing that supposedly was the point of being there. I mean I still did. I wrote a whole novel and rewrote it and workshopped parts of it and revised and showed it to faculty and revised and defended it as my thesis. I did a lot of writing, more than many of my fellow students in fact. But it still felt hard.

Now I'm in a situation that could also be described as tough to find writing time. I teach as adjunct faculty at a community college, and I work at a bookstore. I'm either in class or in office hours about eight hours a week, plus I spend probably another ten or so at home doing prep work, and that's when I don't have papers to grade or in class assignments to read over, which most of the time I do. So my teaching job is probably somewhere in the range of a twenty t0 thirty hour a week part time position. Then I also work at a bookstore twenty to thirty hours a week. So basically, although I don't have a full time job with the better pay and benefits that come with such employment, I work at least forty hours a week, usually more like fifty or sixty hours a week. Plus, both jobs require a half hour plus commute from home. I sometimes manage to have one day a week where I don't actually have to GO to work, but then even if I stay home, there's teaching stuff to take care of, so it's not really the same as a real day off.

Yet, despite all this, as I wrote above, I feel like I have more time to write. The trick seems to be in using the time I have. For instance, today I taught in the morning, had office hours, and then I have a couple hours before working an eight hour shift at the bookstore. So in that break, I'm obviously writing this blog, but then when I'm done I'm going to sit and go over my novel with a red pen. I've been squeezing in a bit of revising on the computer in the evenings or on afternoons before or after teaching, whenever I have some spare moments and I'm actually at home. Then I print those revised pages and take them with me so I can do even just a few pages at a time on my half hour lunch break. When I take advantage of that free minutes, even when they're few, I can still get work done.

I set the goal for myself to have my novel revised once more by the end of the month. I'm more than two thirds of the way through now, so I think I'll meet that goal in the next few days. It's a tough life, but whose life isn't? Part of what helps me plow through is the thought that time spent writing isn't merely something fun I do for myself (although it is), and it's not only a dream of achieving something that might connect with people (although it's that too), but on a pure practical level, it's a way to advance my career. Right now I'm working this hard because I don't have much option in the way of full time employment. I can't get a steady job, so I have to do what I'm doing. But if I work hard on my writing and get published, new doors will open for me, and I'll be able to land a good full time teaching job that currently I'm not qualified for. So it can be hard to sit down after a long day of working two jobs, or after spending hours grading freshman essays, or simply after sitting in my car driving through freeway traffic, but if I want to be in a position in the future where I don't have to do those things, I have to sit down and do the extra work now. So far I'm doing it. Here's hoping I can keep it up as long as it takes.

As Always: Revision

2008-09-28T19:09:00.000-07:00

So It's been a busy few weeks for me that involved not much writing. I moved cross country, settled into my new home, succeeded in finding two part time jobs that provide more hours with less pay than full time work and no benefits. So I have not made a ton of progress toward getting my newly drafted YA fantasy into the next stage. However, I did manage to revise a short story for the nth time, making it that slight bit better where I hope it will now go from getting hand written notes on the rejection slips to actually getting acceptances. I also did my initial read through of the fantasy novel, and I feel although it is of course rough, it has a solid base to it. The skeleton of the story is working, and now I'm ready for the hard work of fleshing out the characters further, making the world pop, and doing all the other stuff that takes so much time and effort but can't be ignored. However, before I get to that, I have something else that I've moved to the front burner again.

I finished what I thought was the final revision of my previous novel several months ago. I'd been working on it pretty steadily for about two years when I defended it as my MFA thesis. From there I moved into working on an additional revision, then all the nitty gritty polishing stuff for three more months or so. I had it where I felt it was ready to put out into the world and even started querying agents. Then I had one of my trusted early readers take a look. She hadn't had the time to read a draft up until that point. And fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, she had some great notes for me. For one thing, she found a number of small typo errors that I could have sworn I'd eliminated but somehow still survived. But also, she had some really good suggestions of some places to tighten, some scenes that were redundant, some questions that arose about certain characterizations and so on. Anytime I get good feedback I'm grateful to the person who provides it, but it can also be discouraging because it means my work isn't over. So after talking with her I knew I needed to attack my manuscript again, but I just couldn't seem to find the energy and force myself to sit down and do it. After all, I'd already spent years and reached the point where I was supposed to be done. But one of the differences between being a guy who enjoys fiddling with writing in my spare time and somebody who truly is a writer is in the ability to sit down again and again and find more things to improve.

So I knew I had work still in front of me, but I put it off. I knew I wasn't ready to send it out to more agents or anything until I addressed the new concerns, but I also lacked the heart to do the hard work. But finally I've kicked my butt into gear and said, "Self, you need to do this." But how to motivate myself. After all, it would be more fun to start in on rewrites of the new book. Plus, the old one is a challenging literary novel that even if I succeed in making it great has a limited chance of ever being published while the new one is more marketable and might be possible to actually become something other than a file on my computer or a stack of pages in my room. After some thought I decided I needed something specific and concrete to motivate me, some set deadline by which to finish the revision. It's easy enough to say I won't query any more agents until I fix these little problems and then simply never query any agents. So I decided the best motivating factor to provide a strict deadline for this (hopefully) final revision would be to find a nice contest to enter. And sure enough I found one. I'm planning on entering the novel in a contest for beginning writers who haven't previously published a book. The deadline is the beginning of November, so I have about a month to get it ready.

I don't really expect to win this contest. If I do, that would be great. Not only does the prize include a publishing contract, but the prestige would likely be enough to launch my academic career away from adjuncting and into full time work with a bit of security. But the important thing isn't to think about winning, but simply to think about making my book as good as it can be through one more draft. Then I can query more agents, send it out to small presses, and submit to more contests. And with a deadline hanging over my head, I think it should happen. I've spent many hours the past few days hacking through some problems in the book's opening, and now I've managed to address a number of issues in the first four chapters (including cutting out the false start that was the previous chapter one). I feel confident that even though I'm working twenty-some hours a week at a bookstore, have about forty student papers to grade and two classes to prepare for, I'll have a well-polished manuscript in the mail to that contest before the end of October.

Finished

2008-07-29T10:53:00.000-07:00

I just finished the first draft of my YA fantasy novel. It took me almost exactly three weeks to write, and this draft came in within a few hundred words of the 60,000 mark, three pages shy of the 200 page mark, so there's no doubt it's an actual novel-length work, which I feel damn good about completing in three weeks. I've never done anything like this so fast, so that feels really good.

As far as the actual draft goes, I don't have a clear idea yet how good it is or will eventually be. I haven't gone back and read over it at all. I barely glanced back at previous chapters to make sure I had details right. Partly I had less need to do this since I was going so fast and kept a lot of it in my head as I went. But also, I kept notes on character names and traits so I could reference that quickly as I went instead of looking back and trying to find them in the earlier chapters. Also, I kept making notes as I went on things that need to be addressed in the rewrite, plot points that come out late in the book that should be set up earlier, character traits that need more emphasis, places where the foreign world can be explored in more detail, etc.

On a whole I suspect this draft is not especially good. There are many places where I simply inserted place filler stuff that I knew was a bit cliche or not too interesting or whatever simply because I couldn't immediately come up with something better. Or there were places where I finally understood a character in the last chapters and knew I had to establish that character better in the early chapters. But those things are inevitable with rough drafts. What I feel good about is that the basic skeleton of the story is in place. The major events, the plot turns, the characters: they all have now been established. So my job when I go back to it to rewrite is to make all of those things as good as can be, to strengthen elements that are currently underdeveloped or weak or don't quite work, but the story as a whole now exists as it didn't three weeks ago, so I now have a base point from which to make adjustments. Although I consider the rough draft to be only the starting point of an overall piece--maybe a quarter
of the total amount of work being completed at that point, maybe less--it still feels good to have that accomplished.

The next step is to not look at it at all for a while. This should be easy enough for me at the moment. I'm moving, so this week I have to keep getting boxes of books shipped to my new home and preparations made for my trip. Then next week I'll be on the road driving thousands of miles cross country. Then once I get there, I have the tasks of unpacking and settling in, getting to know my new community, and biggest of all, finding a job. I won't be in a state of mind where I can sit down and look over my novel and begin evaluating how to proceed with revision for at least a few weeks, which is great. And since I've got so much going on between now and then, I won't be thinking about it too much hopefully, so when I return to it, I should have as fresh eyes as is possible considering I'm the one who made it all up.

The other news I have at the moment is that I got a rejection yesterday in the mail. It was for a story that I consider to be my best, but has yet to be accepted anywhere despite making the journal rounds for a couple years. Now getting rejected is not at all unusual for me, and I basically take it in stride now and don't have hurt feelings or whatever, but I do feel encouraged when somebody at the journal has taken the time to jot down a few words on the form rejection slip. The incidence of this happening has gone up for me in the past year, and at the moment I have two pieces making the rounds, both of which are regularly coming back to me with hand written notes. It feels good every time, but yesterday felt especially encouraging because the rejection with a note came from one of the major journals, Zoetrope: All-Story. Of course they still didn't want to publish my story, but for them (who in my mind rank right up there with The Paris Review and The New Yorker) to go to the trouble of jotting down a little PS telling me to keep them in mind for the future when I'm submitting, well that feels pretty good. Whereas a few years ago I sent out stuff that got rejected and saw nothing but form letters, now it seems as often as not I get some kind of personal response. So although I still have a ways to go to actually break in and achieve any success, it feels like the goal is much closer than it ever has been.

Pushing that little bit extra

2008-07-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

About a year ago, I realized I had put on some weight. It wasn't the doctor's visit that convinced me. After all, how accurate can those scales be with patients stepping on them all day long? Plus, I had my wallet and keys in my pocket, so that surely accounted for the thirty pounds I didn't remember gaining. And yes, my old pants didn't fit anymore, and I even had to buy a new belt, but really that's not enough information to conclude that I had put on weight. What changed my views, however, was when my parents saw me at my sister's wedding. I hadn't seen my folks in a couple years, and they were shocked at the belly on their son. They kept saying things like, "It's not that you're fat, it's just that I think of you as slim and you don't look like you." Or, in other words: "wow, you got fat."

So I figured the sugary sodas and regular consumption of Ding Dongs combined with my sedentary lifestyle might not be the best route for optimal health. I cut those out and just tried to keep on eye on my eating. No big deal. In a few months I'd dropped fifteen pounds. But that was all that was coming off. My old pants still didn't fit. My new belt was still bigger than I felt ideal. So I decided to actually work at it and try to lose the extra weight.

Now, as my parents said, I've been slim most of my life and never had to worry much about stuff like this before, but fortunately, in the past three months, through maintaining a healthier diet and bumping up my exercise, I've shed another twenty pounds and am back close to where I was when I got out of college. I realize I'll never be as thin as I was in my teen years, but then again I don't really want to look like that now. Nearly thirty, about 150 seems okay.

But what does this have to do with writing, since that is the subject of this blog? Well, I noticed something in my efforts to lose weight that I feel has a strong connection to writing. It's easy to act like I'm trying to lose weight, but not really do anything about it, to claim it would be nice to get back down to where I was several years ago, but to only put in the minimal effort. And when that's my approach, I only get to a certain level, and then nothing else happens. But when really focusing and working hard on it, I accomplish more. Pretty basic, I know, but still valuable I think.

The biggest analogous aspect of losing weight for me comes when I'm riding the exercise bike. It's tiring, my legs start to ache a little, and my body basically wants me to stop doing it after I've barely warmed up. But I can decide how much more I'm going to do. When I don't think I can go on for much longer, I can say, okay five more minutes. Or, the one that I've noticed the most is when I switch up to a higher speed for a couple of minutes. I'll set my book down and keep my eye on the clock. I want to slow down; my legs are tired. Thirty more seconds. Come on, this is long enough. Twenty seconds. Okay, I can do it, maybe. Ten, nine. eight. And so I push that extra little bit and wind up burning more calories and losing the weight.

The same principle is true of writing. It's so easy to claim that I want to write, but then never squeeze in the time. But there are opportunities to make it happen. If I set a goal and push through to achieve it even when I'm tired and ready to quit, then I'm making progress. With the fantasy novel I'm currently writing, I've been setting goals for myself to do at least 2,000 words a day and 4,000+ if I can manage it. More often than not, I can squeeze in those extra words. This might mean that if it's late at night and I'd just as soon go to bed or read a book somebody else wrote and actually published, I keep writing instead. Simply staying up a little later, and not quitting for the day until the goal is met can make a huge difference.

Right now I'm three quarters of the way through my novel, and I only began writing it seventeen days ago. And I think one of the major reasons for that is because when I'm ready to set the computer aside and do something else, when I'm feeling tired and want to go to bed, when it's been a long day and I want to give myself a pass on writing for the evening, I sit down and do it anyway. If it's ten PM and I haven't written a word, well I better get cracking so I can get to bed at a reasonable hour because that goal can still be met.

Current Project Part II

2008-07-21T09:45:00.000-07:00

I made my decision to go ahead and begin working on my young adult fantasy novel a couple weeks ago. Part of what's exciting about it is the idea of working much faster on something than I'm used to. When I'm heavily engrossed in a project I like to set a daily goal of 2,000 words. This is absolutely manageable, and it keeps me going at a good clip. At this rate, I can do an entire first draft of a 90,000 word novel within a couple months, and that's even allowing for days when I don't meet the goal or I tack a weekend off completely or whatever. But with this fantasy book, I saw it as a bit different. Partly because it's aimed at younger readers, I saw it as being a bit shorter than what I've written in the past. Instead of 90,000, a book of 60,000 words seems about right. Also, since the idea has been bouncing around my head for a while I started writing knowing for the most part where I was headed. Of course I still had large holes that needed filling, but I assumed those would come as I discovered the world and grew to know the characters. So I set out with the goal of completing a rough draft within a few weeks. Basically I'm moving soon, and I don't want my progress to be disrupted during that time.

So I broke it down and came up with a daily word count goal. If I did 2,000 words a day, then I could have 60,000 at the end of a month. 4,000 would result in a draft in 15 days. So I figured that somewhere in between was the appropriate daily objective. The chapters for this book are working out to each be in the 4,000 word range. So my basic goal is to write a full chapter each day if I can manage it (4,000+ is lovely), and if I can't get that much done, then to at least hit 2,000 words. This way I'm steadily progressing even if I don't always get as much as would be best.

I began two weeks ago Sunday, and for the first four days, I wrote a chapter a day. Then I slowed a bit and was still hitting the 2,000 word a day goal, but was taking a couple days to finish a chapter. Then I sped back up again, and then slowed again. Anyway, at present I have hit at least 2,000 words every day for the past 15 days with only one exception, and that day I came in around 1,600 words, so it wasn't too bad. Right now I'm halfway through chapter 11 of what I expect to be 15 chapters total. I have about 42,000 words of that 60,000 word mark, so I'm getting close. I fully expect to finish the draft this week, making it by far the fastest I've written anything of this length.

It's been fun to tackle a project like this for several reasons. One: speed. I've read about writers just plowing through books in a week or whatever and wondered how that could be possible. I think Stephen King wrote The Running Man in a week (those claims must only apply to the first draft, however). Or there's the famous case of Keruak writing On The Road in a matter of days, typing the whole draft onto that giant scroll of typing paper so he wouldn't have to slow down to change sheets. And I've discovered there is something energizing and exciting about moving so quickly. I have no delusions that what I've come up with is brilliant. I already know I have tons of corrections to make as far as inconsistencies go in plot details. I've made a bunch of notes about things choices I made later in the story that have implications earlier on. And that's not even considering the rest of the rewriting process that would happen with any book.

Two: plot. As I mentioned in a previous post, I used to read a lot of fantasy, but about a decade ago I moved on to other things. The majority of my reading in recent years has been what might be termed "literary" in the sense that it's about normal people dealing with regular life stuff. That's what I most enjoy, and that's what I've been writing for the past few years. So to switch gears has been like a great vacation since most of my other stories don't hinge on plot. There's that old adage, which I suppose has some validity even though, like most such maxims, it has exceptions and doesn't necessarily stand up to careful critique, but anyway it asserts that plot and character are on a continuum, and when one goes up in development and importance, the other goes down. So basically, a heavily action oriented story doesn't have time to develop the characters into fully three dimensional people, and the stories that most fully explore the inner lives of characters and reveal them as complex humans have little actually happening. In most of what I write, I like to have something going on, but the events take a back seat to the characters and what they're thinking about and how they interact with each other or whatever. But in this fantasy story, I have way more plot. My protagonist is transported to a world of magic, and the world is in the midst of a war, and there's a prophecy concerning his importance, and there's kidnapping and an evil wizard and and and and and . . . So that's fun. I suspect one of the major things I address in rewriting is to carefully go through and make sure that the characters are coming alive in the way they need to, that I haven't slid so far into the plot side of things that I neglect my characters because, after all, if I as a reader don't care about the people in the story, then what difference does it make what crazy stuff happens to them?

Three: rediscovering the fun of stories for younger readers. I wrote previously about not having read much fantasy in recent years, but I realized the other day that the one area I have actually continued to read in that genre has been children's books. In the years during which I don't think I've picked up more than two or three adult fantasies, I've reread or listened to audiobooks (or both) of the Chronicles of Prydain (still one of my all time favorites), Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter, and others. So I wasn't as unprepared as I initially worried I might be to tackle such a writing project. But in order to further understand what I'm attempting, I began looking at some books that are currently on bookstore shelves in the genre, and that has been so much fun. There are some great books out there. I am absolutely in love with the Spiderwick Chronicles. Artemis Fowl was fun. There's one called Erec Rex that is a blast.

Four: being engrossed. The major reason I write is because I love doing it. Ultimately, yes, I hope to publish. If I could actually make a living at it, that would be awesome. Not because I want to be a famous writer or anything like that, but simply because it would mean that I could do for my job something that I would do for fun anyway instead of doing something that always felt like work. I know writing is hard work, but it's more fun than it is frustrating, wheras jobs I've had are on the reverse of that. But as much fun as writing is, it's not always on the same level. During the last stages of my previous novel, it was definitely leaning toward the hard work and not too fun side of things simply because I was at the point of going through and trying to fix grammar and typos and little things. It was tedious and didn't transfix me the way earlier stages of the process can. But now again, for the past two weeks, I've simply been having a blast as I sit down to write, and during the rest of the day when the story plays out in my head and I solve the puzzles of how to continue forward and how to bring everything together in a satisfying conclusion.

Five: publishability. I didn't begin writing this book with thoughts of publication, but as I've continued on, the idea has occurred to me more. In general genre writing is easier to get out there than literary stuff. I hope I can find an agent for my literary novel and then get it to a publisher, but I don't know. I think it's strong, but the market is so tough, it might never happen. And not to say that getting this YA fantasy published will be a cinch, but it seems like I'll face fewer of the difficulties than with an adult literary novel. At the moment I have no plans for additional fantasy stories. I don't especially see this one as the first of a series, although I'm sure it could be possible. But if somehow I hit it big with this and fell into the possibility of a career writing this kind of book, I would love it. That wouldn't be my top choice since I'd still rather write literary stuff, and I have more ideas for those novels at the moment. But it would still be far more preferable than the kind of day job scenario I see for myself for the next thirty years.

Current project

2008-07-17T08:43:00.000-07:00

So I ended last time without actually getting to what I'm working on now. As I wrote before I was floundering after finishing my previous novel and having trouble really sinking into something new. I bounced around a little bit, but for one reason or another, I wasn't ready to begin on a few of my other novel ideas. But I had one left. While most of my ideas are more in the realm of "literary" fiction (although I'm not necessarily a fan of that term and it's pretentious associations), I had one idea for a fantasy novel. This idea began building in my head a few years ago, and maybe a year or so ago I thought about the possibility of making the main character younger and thus, it could be a young adult fantasy instead of straight fantasy.

Now I have nothing against fantasy. I'm not one of those MFA types who looks down on genre fiction as less worthy or significant. It's all just entertainment, and whichever appeals more to you, that's just fine. As it happens, I simply prefer stuff in the "literary" mode, where it's about real characters in real world situations, where nobody's been murdered, and there's not a terrorist attack about to happen in a matter of hours if our hero can't prevent it. Even as I write that, I realize there's a bit of a snarky tone there, which I don't really want. I have gotten into some of those types of stories before (I've read everything Thomas Harris has published; I've stayed up late into the night to finish a James Patterson novel). The one genre that I have been most attracted to in my life is fantasy. Between the time I learned to read and the time I finished high school, probably the majority of my reading time was spent on fantasy novels. However, at some point in there, I'd say the change occurred in my late teens, I just sort of lost interest. My tastes changed. I didn't lose any respect for the art, but I didn't want to spend my time on it either.

So, that brings me to the point where I am in my late twenties contemplating writing a fantasy novel. A few things stand in my way. One: I'm not sure whether I'll have the excitement and interest in the project to work on it for the necessary length of time required to produce something good. After all, I spent years on my first two literary novels, and it's not fair (I guess I see it as disrespectful to the genre) to think I could just bang one out without putting in the same kind of hard work rewriting, revising, editing, etc. But would my passion be sufficient to keep me going through all those months of work on a genre that I am no longer in love with? Two: I haven't read a fantasy novel in years. Sure, I've seen the Lord of the Rings Movies and Harry Potter. I've even listened to the audiobooks of Harry Potter (read by the amazing Jim Dale), but it's been about a decade since I was actively part of that literary community, where I consumed many books and had a good understanding of its conventions and tropes. I'm afraid that if I tried my hand at this genre, I would unknowingly produce a story riddled with cliches that fans of the genre would abhore. I believe it's important to do one's research and to know about the kind of story one is writing. I'm sure if I tried to write a mystery, for example, I would produce something that didn't go beyond the conventions of the earliest type of mystery story. Sherlock Holmes would laugh at my pathetic clues, Sam Spade wouldn't even leave his desk to solve my case, and whoever the current champion detectives are would scratch their heads and wonder if I could possibly be serious with my offering. Because I don't know that genre. In the world of "literary" fiction, I feel comfortable with a story idea that even if it's a simple plot it hasn't been done quite the way I'm doing it, or there's enough room for another story along these lines because of the unique voice or character combinations I'll present. But I don't have that background any longer in fantasy, and I don't want to presume that because I've studied writing and have an MFA I could whip out something great because, "well, it's only fantasy, how hard can it be?"

After considering those reservations a few months ago, I pretty much set the project aside. I figured maybe at some point down the line I'd start tinkering with it, maybe do a chapter here and there and have a slowly expanding file on my computer, but I no longer thought it would be something that I would feel compelled to write. And then I reached the point I described earlier of lacking a project. So I'm in a situation where I need something to get caught up in, but I don't want to start my next literary novel because I know I'll be picking up and moving in a few weeks, so I don't want to disrupt that process. But I'm also not working, so I have plenty of time. It's possible I could pound through something fairly quickly and finish a draft before my life goes into upheaval. So, alas, my thoughts turn more and more to this fantasy idea. As a young adult book, it would likely be shorter than my previous novels (I'm thinking in the range of 60,000 words as opposed to the 90,000 range I've done before), and I have most of the story mapped out in my head and even written down in a set of notes I've compiled earlier. The final factor was simply that more and more this idea is what was occupying my brain. I wasn't thinking about the next literary novel, I was wondering how I could make the fantasy world work, what trials my hero might face and how he would overcome them. So I sat down and began.

More details next time on how it's coming along.

Starting

2008-07-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

My last post was about finishing a big project and resulting anti-climax that comes with the absence of this thing that was such an important part of my life for so long. I suggested that a good way combat the resulting funk is to begin something new. Unfortunately, this is not always as easy as it seems, at least for me.

I've read about writers (Stephen King comes to mind) who work on shorter pieces immediately after finishing bigger works. This seems like a great way to use up the energy that still is inside as well as to combat the anti-climax of being done. However, I've come to realize in recent years that deep down I'm not a short story writer; I'm a novelist. I admire short story writers and appreciate when I read a great piece that manages to tell a good story in such a small space, but the truth is I probably read more novels than short stories, and sometimes I read short stories and feel that they're okay, but would be better as novels (stories by E. Annie Proulx and Alice Munro come to mind). And beyond my taste in reading, it just seems that when I have an idea, it's for a longer piece. Even when I have the initial inspiration of a single scene or a simple event, I'm not satisfied with leaving it at that slice; I want to know what happens next and after that. Currently I have ideas for a few novels that I want to write in the next number of years, and two of those began as what I thought could be short stories, but I wrote the short stories and realized I was deeply unsatisfied with them although I still loved the original ideas. The problems were due to the failure of the ideas to fit into the short story frame. In order for those pieces to be explored in a satisfying way without turning to sentimentality, cliche, or whatever, they have to be larger. I need to know the characters more fully, to explore where they came from and where they go after the scene that was the initial inspiration. So as far as shorter pieces go, although I've been working for the past several years at the craft of writing and I've written a handful of stories in the process, I feel I have only produced one that is any good along with one personal essay that is also strong. Possibly I have a couple novel chapters that might be able to stand alone, but writing a short story may be more difficult for me than writing a novel, so turning to that avenue as a way out of my post-completion funk doesn't typically work well.

I finished revisions of my second novel a couple months ago. I tried to fight off the blues through getting involved in the hunt for an agent, but of course that's not the same as actively writing. Although it takes a lot of time and an essential part of becoming a professional writer with published books, it doesn't satisfy me at all. It's just hard work, and the more I think about the difficulties of actually landing an agent and getting my book out there, the more I'm likely to sink into the depression that comes with having finished my novel. So clearly, I needed something else, another creative project. But what?

I decided to try my hand at screenwriting, not expecting to really produce anything that will make me a Hollywood success or anything, but just to gain more experience of another form and to give myself something to work on. I took a screenwriting course in my MFA program, and for the final project of that class I wrote the first act of a screenplay along with an outline of what the rest of the story would be if I finished it. So I decided it was time to return to it. So that's what I did. I absorbed myself in screenplays, reading more of them to refresh myself on the form, and I sat down and worked day after day. It was fun for a while, and it provided some of the distraction I was looking for, but ultimately I lost steam with the project. Essentially my problem with it came from a basic uncertainty with the story at the heart of the piece. I wasn't convinced the characters were really working and that I could conclude the story in any satisfying way. In part, I wasn't sure what I actually believed was the "right" thing for the character to do in his situation, and so I was left with choices of a standard Hollywood happy ending or a cynical finish, neither of which felt honest or satisfying, but I couldn't come up with anything else, any middle ground either. I suspect the entire thing needs substantial alterations much earlier in the story at the very heart of the characters before an ending will be possible. So I sputtered and floundered and was left in the same position I was in before, only now instead of merely the anti-climax of finishing a novel, I was in the added funk of attempting something and failing. Of course failure is an unavoidable part of the creative process, and I still have hopes that some day I might return to the screenplay and be able to figure it out, but in the mean time, what do I do to satisfy this deep urge in me to write a story?

Well, I tried to do a short story, which as I wrote above, is not my forte. The story was one that had been needling away at my brain for a few years. I wrote an unsuccessful version of it a few years ago, which due to a computer crash a few years ago is now completely lost. So I thought I might be able to write this story now and avoid the problems I had with it back then. But it wasn't working either. I sat down day after day with it, and produced only a few pages, including two separate and very different openings and a number of notes that haven't yet become the key to solving the story's failings.

Let me clarify one thing here before continuing. I don't want this to seem like I'm complaining. I fully understand that failure is part of the process. Most of the paths I take will be dead ends. That's simply the nature of writing. That's why writing is a process and not merely a single step. Furthermore, every time I attempt something and produce a version I'm unhappy with or I abandon a project three quarters of the way into a draft, it's still a valuable learning experience. I like to think of it as analogous to painting: a great artist doesn't doodle his first sketches and produce masterpieces, but that doesn't mean that every crap drawing or flawed painting wasn't a valuable part of the process that eventually led to great work. Hopefully in the future I can anticipate some of the problems I hit in the past and avoid them, or I can see why I went wrong and do something else instead. Time spent writing is worthwhile. Period.

However, as great as it is to learn and see problems that can be overcome or to simply try new things and add that experience to the sum of what I've done, it's not the same as being actively involved with something I love.

So after unsuccessfully trying a couple of routes to get into a new project following my novel I decided a new novel was probably the best option. As I mentioned above, I have a few ideas for novels that I want to try in the next few years. One I'm sure I'm not ready to write simply because it's too serious and dark, and I feel I need at least a few more years of living before I will be the person who can write it. Another one will require extensive research about a historical time and place, so I'll have to do substantial work on that before I can actually begin writing anything. Then there are two others. One of them I'm excited about. It's one of the ideas that I thought could be a short story, but now I feel has to be a novel. For about a year or more I've thought in my head that it will be "my next novel." However, life issues prevent me from beginning it at the moment. Or, I suppose I could start it anytime I want to, but I don't feel the timing is quite right. I'm in between things as far as a job and a place to live, and I know everything will be in upheaval in a few months as I move. So for the sake of continuity and momentum I don't want to be smack in the middle of this novel when I have to pick up my life and transport myself. I'd rather start this novel in a couple months when I'm settled and can work the writing into my new routine.

So that leaves one other possibility for a novel to work on. And once again, I feel like this post is dragging on and on, and if anybody ever actually reads this, I imagine they're getting anxious for it to end, so I'll leave the details of my current project for next time.

Finishing

2008-07-14T08:48:00.000-07:00

It's always a bit tough when I'm not absorbed in something. I find that my typical response when I reach a finishing point, whether it's completing a draft of a novel, a major revision, final polish, or graduating, my next mood tends toward the depressed. I work hard, put in a ton of effort, and then there's such a strong anti-climax at the end. I've felt this when I did theatre and would direct a play: weeks were spent rehearsing, and then opening night arrived and I had nothing more to do with it. But probably the greatest example of this is with a long writing project. After all, at least when one graduates from school, there's a level of social understanding that something worthwhile has been accomplished (okay, maybe nobody thinks that about getting an MFA). But if I've spent two years working on a novel, and now I've finally completed the absolute polish, what has truly changed? I went from doing something by myself at my computer to not doing that. I'm not suggesting I want sympathy, I'm just tossing this out there as a sort of odd experience. For me although it's exciting to know I've done something, it's also a bit depressing.

A large factor in this anti-climax is due to how much I like writing. When I'm really caught up in it, it's absolutely the most fun thing to do. Even when it's more of a struggle, it's an exciting struggle, like trying to figure out a complex puzzle. Personally, I don't really get Sudoku, but I appreciate why other people would enjoy it because I like that aspect of creating a story where I have to be precise and get everything to work in the exact correct way or it won't hold together. So going from actively being absorbed in something I love to not having that in my life sends me into a bit of a funk for a while. So I find the best solution to this is to dig into the next thing.

Between finishing my first novel and beginning my second, I was busy with other things, so after the inital blues of not having my first novel constantly in my thoughts I noticed the absence of writing a bit less than I sometimes would. I packed up my life in Maine and traveled across the country, spent weeks visiting my family in California, including my then two year old nephew and newborn niece, and then I drove north to Alaska to begin an MFA program. These things worked as distractions fairly well. But Also during this time, I was thinking about the next book, which at the time I envisioned as a collection of inter-related short stories. And before I began working on the new novel as a novel, I had begun some of those stories and I tried to figure out how the others would work together. Then I also tried to do some other stories, hoping to compose something that I could publish in a literary journal, boost my resume and start getting a name for myself.

My experience in recent months has been a bit different. I finished my MFA with the novel as my thesis, but I knew I had more work to do with it. Whereas my first novel was a great learning experience, I have no plans to attempt to publish it, but this new one is different. It's a better book, and I felt that with a few more months work, I could get it to the polished stage it needs to be in order for somebody in the publishing world to be interested. So I was out of school, and decided to take a few months to work full time on the book without the distraction of a job or basic life responsibilities (A gigantic thanks to my parents for letting me stay at their cabin, which made this option possible). This worked amazingly well, and I think I probably managed to get more time in additional revisions than I could have if I spent another year working on it while also working full time. But this left the problem of having nothing else on my plate when I finished. The anti-climax came big because I had no other major distractions, and so I went from many hours a day spent on this novel to nothing. From the perspective of an outside observer I'm sure it doesn't seem that different. I was an unemployed guy who sat at a computer fiddling around, and now I spent less time at the computer. But for me, it's a tough transition to make. The driving force in my life is one day no longer there, and I have to figure out what to do with myself.

So the logical solution is, of course, to start something new. But, alas, that isn't always so easy. But since I see this post is getting a bit long, I'll let something new wait for next time.

My Basic Process

2008-07-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

So here's my first blog about my process. As the title of my blog indicates, what I write here will most likely be half thought out and subject to change. Although I think about this stuff a lot, my views shift regularly. Furthermore, there's a decent chance I won't always bother to check these posts for grammar, typos, etc. After all, these thoughts are only half thought out, so if they're a little rough, so be it.

To begin I'll simply outline my basic process, and in future posts, I'll get down to what I'm specifically working on at the moment.

PREWRITING: Typically a story idea has marinated for months or even years in my head before I set it down, although sometimes I get an idea and then begin writing it that very day. The length of time thinking about it tends to correlate with the length of the project. I toss a novel around for years before setting anything down on paper whereas a flash fiction piece might go straight from idea to a draft.

DRAFT 1: Once I have notes and some good idea what the overall scope of the piece is I start writing. When I have the time, I like to go regularly and shoot for 2,000 words each day, but I can't always manage the time if I'm busy with other things in my life. So I might go well for a week and then not get anything for several days. Or I might go straight for two months hitting my daily goals. Anyway, once I have a first draft I put that aside and let it sit so I can get some perspective on it.

READING: After a few weeks or even a few months I return to it and try to read the whole thing as quickly as possible. For a full length novel, it will probably take a couple of long sessions over a couple days, but I don't want to read it the way I might read other things--a chapter at a time, or a few pages on the toilet, or whatever. I make minimal notes as I go through it, but not on the small things like grammar or spelling; those wait until the end. This read through is to get an idea of whether the story works, if it flows, if it even makes sense. From here I take a small step back and let it return to my brain for a bit, so I can just ponder the whole thing some more.

REWRITING: Then I make more notes and I do a complete outline. I find that outlining at the rewriting stage is even more useful than outlining from the beginning. It's a way for me to see the whole scope and how chapters fit together and if the basic arc of the story is coming together. This outline begins with what I actually have in the first draft, but then it evolves into what I want it to be in the revision. So the outline itself goes through multiple drafts as I continue to rewrite. Now is when I begin actually creating a second draft. This involves going through a hard copy with a red pen. I cross things out; I write in new things. Sometimes I'll hand write multiple new pages or X out whole chapters. This is not even revising. This is REWRITING. By the time I'm through, the hard copy is so marked up that I don't even attempt to update these changes on my computer. I go through and I retype the entire thing. This way, I not only include those changes I wrote in by hand on the hard copy, but I also make additional changes as I go. I almost think of this as two separate new drafts, the red ink hard copy is draft two, and the new document on my computer is draft three. By the time I have a full new version, a few more months have passed, and I'm ready to set it aside and hopefully gain some more perspective and then return to the reading.

REVISING: When I return to the rewritten draft, I want to get the same sense I aimed for after the rough draft: Does the story flow? Are there glaring errors? Do the characters make sense? Etc. But I also want to focus on the language and precision. Am I going onto tangents that are unnecessary? Is there repetition that can be trimmed? I have a tendency to expand in the initial rewriting stage, and here is where I tighten. This draft is about trimming the fat.

EDIT/POLISH: Finally, once I've been through the above steps, perhaps circling back multiple times and repeating them, I am ready to just edit. This is the tedious step. I love the other stages of the process, but here is where it comes down to putting in the hard work that will hopefully make something publishable and ready for the world. Again I print out a hard copy and pull out the red pen. I go through the entire thing sentence by sentence. Some places might jump out at me that need larger revision, but typically the story is solid at this point and it's simply a matter of finding errors, fixing awkward phrases, and making sure that it flows, not only from the scope of the overall story, but in the actual paragraphs and sentences. It's a pain, and I can never catch absolutely everything, but it's unavoidable.

I've written two novels using basically this process each time, with some variation. And I didn't mention in here showing the work in progress to others, workshop classes, writing groups, teachers, friends, but that happens as well. It looks pretty straightforward the way I have it described in this blog, but in practice it took me about a year to generate the first draft of my first novel, and then two years to finish the final draft, at which point I decided it was a great learning experience but not anything to attempt to publish. The second novel was at one point conceived as a collection of interlinked short stories, and so I began working on sections of it years before I started drafting the whole thing as a novel, but from the point I began in earnest, I probably wrote the first three chapters or so during a busy spring semester and then completed the rest of the first draft over the summer, so about six months total. Then I took the next two years to rework it. I currently have a draft that I felt was done, but then I got some good suggestions from one of my early readers, so it now has a few additional changes to undergo, but it's close. Unlike the first novel, I hope to publish this one, and I'm seeking an agent for it.

There's more to write here, of course. I haven't mentioned anything about what I'm doing currently, or the unease I feel when I'm not solidly in the middle of a project, but that will have to come later.