I had my first one-on-one conference with Dr. Bailey yesterday. He had a little table and two chairs set up by the bookcases in the corner of his office so he could conference with students about their work. The shelves were crammed tight with books like The Things They Carried, Lonesome Dove, The Road, and a lot of Hemingway, books with cracked, creased spines fattened from having been read—not like the crisp, sharp-spined books I've got on the bookshelf in my dorm room.We discussed my first attempt at a short-short, the three pages about the old arthritic woman who loved playing the piano. He had long black slashes and notes I couldn’t read all over the draft (in class Dr. Bailey told us one of his students at Harvard said his handwriting was like Sanskrit).
He turned to the third page and started talking. “This is the story,” he said as he bracketed in my final two paragraphs. “It just took you a while to get to it.”
Then he pointed out a sentence that said “Her knuckles began to cry” and suggested using a word more specific than “cry.” “Creak, crack, complain?” he quickly jotted on the paper. Overall, though, he said it was good. It would look nice in my portfolio once I got it revised.
My second short-short, one about a boy looking at a girl, didn’t fare so well. The voice was too “writerly” Dr. Bailey explained. I could get away with it in the first one but not the second one. The tone of the narration has to fit the character. He encouraged me to reread Damian Gessel’s short-short “Short Skirts” and to rework mine as an exercise in voice — because the first short-short would work for my portfolio, but the next assignment for class, a short story in the first-person perspective, would need a strong narrative voice.
After the conference, I headed back up to my dorm and very reluctantly cut over two pages of piano story. Then I read what was left, smoothed a few details out, and decided I hate it when Bailey’s right.
