Workshop

The Side Door Cracks Open:The First Day of Class

2091-08-28T11:11:00.000-04:00

"The side door cracks open."

My first Intro to Fiction class at Susquehanna University started like the first line of Tom Bailey’s short story “Snow Dreams.” We were in a little room in the library on a Tuesday afternoon, me and 14 other writing majors all sitting around a large oak-veneered conference table. The room filled with excitement as we waited for our first writing class to start.

I’d been waiting for Dr. Bailey’s Intro to Fiction workshop since before I mailed my Common Application to Susquehanna University, since I left Susquehanna’s annual weeklong Writer’s Workshop for high school students two summers ago.

I attended the workshop the summer before my senior year of high school, and I loved it. It really gave me a feel for what it would be like to go to college, what it would be like to live at Susquehanna. I stayed on SU’s campus for a week, lived in a college dorm, ate college dining hall food, attended writing classes ("workshops") led by a college professor (Dr. Bailey), and spent the rest of the week making friends with other young writers and falling for Susquehanna’s beautiful campus. In fact, four other writers that I met that week also enrolled at Susquehanna. Three of them are in my Intro to Fiction class.

“The side door cracked open,” and Dr. Bailey entered the room and flashed us a grin. He wasted little time with the syllabus and started teaching.

“Fiction deepens feeling,” he began. Then to prove his point he read Isaac Babel’s short story “Crossing Into Poland” out loud, and everybody around the table was spellbound, transfixed, completely focused on listening to his energetic interpretation of the work.

That’s how Tom Bailey is. Whenever he starts speaking about writing his eyes light up. His passion for writing is big enough to fill a room and everybody in it.

I left Dr. Bailey’s class feeling like I could write eight novels and then walk over to Deg to grab some dinner. It’s a good feeling to have since Dr. Bailey has already assigned us a writing exercise (in the third person, write about yourself writing) along with two short stories and an essay on writing to read (John Updike’s “A&P,” Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” and Francine Prose’s “What Makes a Short Story?”). Even so, I’m still looking forward to Thursday.

Short-Shorts Should Be Short:A Mock Workshop

2085-09-06T11:17:00.000-04:00

On Thursday, Dr. Bailey asked us to read some “short-shorts,” really brief pieces of writing, a paragraph to a page, that just capture the essence of something. Then he asked us each to write a short-short of our own.

On Tuesday, we discovered our short-shorts all failed pretty miserably, including my own three-page not-so-short-short about an old woman playing the piano. It was more of a short story than a short-short, and this became obvious as my piece went through a sort of mini-workshop. As I read the thing out loud for the class to comment on, it became clear my short-short was two pages (that is, three times) longer than everyone else’s, and I felt naked.

My classmates were polite, though, and they pointed out some of the strong descriptions I had in the piece. Then Dr. Bailey quickly singled out the paragraph that held the essence of my story, the paragraph I have to go chisel out and shape into my second draft. The rest of the details were all right, he explained, but they were just too much for a short-short.

I have a pretty clear picture now of what a short-short is and an even better picture of what a short-short is not. I guess you learn from your mistakes. I think that’s something the whole class found out Tuesday. There were one or two other short stories hiding among our short-shorts, and in general we discovered as a class that our writing tends to suffer from flat characters and vague details.

Don't Use The Shotgun Approach:More on Short-Shorts

2074-09-06T11:13:00.002-04:00

Dr. Bailey started class today by apologizing for “roughing us up” on Tuesday, for acting like one of his son’s football coaches, the big guys who bark and shout so they can “make men” out of ten-year-olds. Then like any good coach would, Dr. Bailey launched into something like a pep talk to keep us from dwelling on our defeats and get us focused for the big game coming up (that is, the next short-short he assigned us for Tuesday).

“There is no reality on the page,” Dr. Bailey began. “It’s all the trick of reality. It’s all the dream of a reality.” As writers, he explained, we can’t assume a reality exists for our stories. We can’t have vague details and generic people in our stories and assume the reader will fill in all the blanks. We have to carefully construct a world on the page, and these worlds are built from strong specific details.

“You can’t make it up!” Dr. Bailey is always saying.

Then he grabbed a piece of chalk and scribbled a shotgun and a goose on the board. In large capital letters above the barrel he wrote “KA-POW!” and then he peppered the board with shot that killed his poorly drawn goose. This was not how a short-short should work, Dr. Bailey explained.

Then below the shotgun, he drew a rifle firing into a bull’s-eye. That was how a short-short should work, he said, like a bullet. Most of us were having trouble with the short-shorts because we were employing the shotgun approach, firing all over hoping to bag all sorts of ideas. A short-short should be like a bullet shot out of a rifle, tightly focused on one target, one idea.

I Hate It When Bailey's Right:My First Conference

2068-09-19T17:45:00.006-04:00

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.

Broken:Getting Workshopped Part I

2063-09-26T18:22:00.021-04:00

At the end of class last week Dr. Bailey asked me and Theresa, a writing major who lives just down the hall from me, to e-mail our short stories out to everyone in the class. We were going to be the first ones to get workshopped. Everyone else in the class would print the stories out, read them, mark them up and write us critique letters. Theresa and I would do the same with each other’s works.

I’d been workshopped before while I was at Susquehanna for the summer workshop, but I was nervous anyway. Since I’m actually a real writing major now, I felt like this one really counted for something.

Besides, the last time my work came up for review, my three-page “short” short, it had tanked. So this time around I didn’t let myself become too emotionally attached to my work, or at least to my first draft, anyway. I tried to remain distant from the story so I could look at it objectively and make the changes necessary to make it a better story.

Monday night I made some last-minute revisions on my story, “Broken,” and I sent it out.

Broken:Getting Workshopped Part II

2057-09-26T18:31:00.003-04:00

Theresa was up first. When you’re getting workshopped, you can’t talk. Your work has to speak for itself. So Theresa sat and silently took notes while the rest of us sat around the table and discussed her story, talking about things like the relationships between her characters, the distinctive voice of her narrator, and the plausibility and implausibility of various aspects of her story. Dr. Bailey played referee, making sure our comments were clear, specific and rooted in the story. You can’t just say, “I thought there were way too many short sentences in this story." You have to provide examples from the text and explain why you feel the way you do.

Then I was up. “Broken” got a better reception than I’d expected. Everyone seemed to like the voice of my narrator, a carpenter named Alan Martin, and the story's specific woodworking details — details I picked up from working in my dad’s workshop for the past four or five summers — really seemed to add authenticity to the story. Someone remarked that they liked how Alan accepting a glass of lemonade from Mrs. Miller (the meddling old woman he’s working for) revealed the “duality of his personality,” because it showed that even though Alan was bitter and in a hurry to get the job done, he still had a heart.

It was only a rough draft, though, so of course there were lots of things to improve. I learned I needed to move key information up toward the beginning of the story instead of lumping it all in at the end — details about Alan’s divorce and his spirituality and the fact that the old woman is a widow. “So the reader knows what’s at stake,” Dr. Bailey explained.

Dr. Bailey emphasized how important it was for me to really bring out how Alan’s divorce impacted his life. “This guy’s in a world of hurt,” he explained. I really needed to show that on the page. He also noted that my title “Broken” was weak. It tied the story up with too nice of a ribbon. Too obvious, too vague. I agreed, but I haven't thought of anything better yet.

Also, everybody (it felt like everybody) pointed out one particular micro-mistake I made. It was just an instance where I was careless with my words. Instead of clearly indicating that Alan draped the old woman’s arm over his shoulder (because Mrs. Miller falls and breaks her ankle on page 8), I left out the word "arm" and wrote that Alan draped the old woman over his shoulder and accidentally created some King-Kong-like imagery.

All in all, the workshop was a really positive experience. I left class with a crystal clear picture of what I’d done right and what I’d done wrong. And I feel confident. After so much constructive criticism, I’m sure my next draft will be a much stronger version of Alan’s story.

Don't Use Words You Can't Pour Gravy Over:Tom Franklin Visits Susquehanna Part I

2046-10-04T12:51:00.005-04:00

I finished reading Poachers, a book of short stories by Tom Franklin, last night while sipping hot chocolate at Charlie’s Coffeehouse. The book was so good the pages seemed to turn by themselves. It's a book that really pulls you into its world, that “vivid continuous dream” built out of the author’s imagination that Dr. Bailey's always talking about.

Franklin’s world is backwater Alabama, and it’s full of vivid characters you have to despise, pity and love all at the same time. The characters really drive his fast-paced stories. My favorites were “The Ballad of Duane Juarez” and “Dinosaurs,” but the whole book was great. So good, in fact, that I even recommended it to a business major who lives on my floor and she finished it before I did.

These past two fiction classes we took a little bit of time away from workshopping to read and discuss Poachers in preparation for Tom Franklin’s visit today. Every year Susquehanna brings six accomplished authors to campus to give readings and to speak to students. Tom Franklin is the first writer coming to campus this year as part of the Writers Institute’s Visiting Writers Series.

Today right after fiction class ended, my classmates and I headed over to the Seibert Faculty Lounge for a writers-only question-and-answer session with the author. Franklin introduced himself by telling funny stories about growing up in southern Alabama (not just Alabama, southern Alabama). He talked about how his parents got kicked out of their Baptist church when he was a kid for speaking in tongues, how they started their own Pentecostal church in their living room.

Franklin’s reading this evening was really great too. He read two short stories and the opening chapter of his new novel, Smonk. Afterwards he signed my two copies of Poachers (I bought an extra copy for a friend back home). He wrote his name in each book and then drew a little picture of an armadillo below his name, the only animal to survive all the poachers lurking around the backwater Alabama that exists in the pages behind the cover.

Don't Use Words You Can't Pour Gravy Over:Tom Franklin Visits Susquehanna Part II

2040-10-04T12:45:00.001-04:00

Dr. Bailey had encouraged our class to ask Franklin lots of questions and not to be shy. “He’s here for you guys.” Even though most of us went to the Q&A just to listen, we ended up asking a lot of questions.

I asked Franklin a question I’ve been trying to decide for myself since I started Intro to Fiction — Should you know the ending before you write the story?

I’ve always found I have to know the ending or at least have to have a goal in mind in order to write a story. I’ve always felt like that kept the story focused and moving, but in class Dr. Bailey’s really been stressing to us that good stories are not driven by plot. They’re driven by character. I guess not knowing the ending forces you to let your characters drive the story.

Dr. Bailey says he never knows the endings to his stories when he starts writing. In fact, he says he can’t write if knows the ending, though he always concedes that some writers, like his colleague Susan Parabo, a writing professor at Dickinson, always have an ending in mind when they begin a story.

Franklin agreed with Bailey. “Endings are better if you surprise yourself,” he said and then went on to explain how Flannery O’Connor, while writing her story “Good Country People,” surprised herself so much with a twist in the plot that suddenly came to her that she wrote in the margin of her first draft: “Oh my God, he’s going to steal her leg!”

Don't Use Words You Can't Pour Gravy Over:Tom Franklin Visits Susquehanna Part III

2035-10-04T12:38:00.005-04:00

“Endings are better if you surprise yourself.”

I jotted that down in the little writer’s notebook I’ve started to keep. I wasn’t the only one scribbling things down while Franklin spoke. After the Q&A session Liz, a friend of mine I first met at SU's summer workshop, compared her notes with mine, and we swapped Tom Franklin quotes. Here are my favorite pieces of writing advice from the Tom Franklin pages of my notebook:

“Write till you get to the end.” No matter how awful your first draft is, you have to finish it before you can start fixing things in the second draft.

“Writing is revising.” You’re not going to get it right the first time.

“Don’t use words you can’t pour gravy over.” Avoid abstract language. Use concrete words that readers can really picture. Franklin’s example went like this: You can’t pour gravy over “hate,” but you can pour gravy over a hateful face.

“Character and plot are the same thing.” That sounds really deep, doesn’t it? But it makes sense. Like Dr. Bailey’s been saying, character-driven stories are the best. Franklin’s example was that a gas station holdup story starring Clint Eastwood is going to be very different from a gas station hold up starring Woody Allen.

Flip-Flop-Free:Fall Break

2029-10-17T13:15:00.007-04:00

I’ve just gotten back from fall break, a nice little vacation from marking up drafts and writing critique letters (that’s all I seem to do anymore). Not that the stories weren’t good. Before the break we were workshopping three drafts per class, and I was just starting to get tired of watching all of us make the same mistakes — plot-driven rather than character-driven stories; unrealistic, unbelievable, flat characters; implausibility; etc.

As the workshops have progressed, we’ve all really started getting a good grip on what makes good writing, on how to “read like writers,” as Dr. Bailey likes to say. We’re all paying closer attention to details, expecting characters to act like real people, and, I think, starting to make more insightful criticisms than before. He's probably going to assign us our second big short story sometime this week, and since we’ve all learned so much these past two months, I’m eager to read all the new drafts my classmates are going to write.

Dr. Bailey highly encouraged us to revise and rewrite over the break to save ourselves a headache during finals time at the end of the semester when our portfolios are due.

It was really great going home and doing the things I’ve really missed (seeing my family, hanging out with my friends from high school, sleeping in my own bed, eating my mom’s cooking and showering without having to wear flip-flops), and the break also gave me a chance to really sit down and work on “Broken” in a comfortable, familiar place where I could really focus. I spent a lot of the break kicked back in the big swivel chair in our basement with a cup of coffee (mostly cream and sugar) doing a rewrite and watching Alan become more alive on the page. His voice became clearer and more distinct as I filled in the gaps in the details of his life.

I’m actually really excited to have this draft workshopped or at least critiqued by Dr. Bailey because I feel like I’ve made some big improvements to it but it could still be a whole lot better. I can sense that it’s not done yet but I couldn’t exactly tell you why, so I'm eager for some feedback.

1 Corinthians, Iraqi Poetry, and the Year 1937:Too Much Homework

2018-10-26T09:56:00.006-04:00

This week I’m exhausted.

I have a three-to-five-page, single-spaced(!) essay and a presentation on 1 Corinthians both due Tuesday in my New Testament class, a three-to-five-page, double-spaced draft of an essay on exiled Iraqi poets due Monday in my Honors Thought class, a presentation and a final draft on the Iraqi poets due Friday and a new short story due Tuesday. This new short story is supposed to “extend,” to go beyond the relatively simple one-scene stories we just did. Dr. Bailey encouraged us to “be ambitious with this one.”

So I am. In the midst of all this work (I’m not going to know what to do with myself next Friday afternoon after everything’s turned in), I’m writing a short story set in 1937 that will be told from two different first-person perspectives. The characters are based on two musicians I studied in my Jazz History class here at SU: Artie Shaw, the first white bandleader to hire a black singer, and Billie Holiday, the first black singer to perform with an all-white band.

I'm in over my head. Since I never actually experienced the year 1937, this story requires about as much research as my Honors Thought essay on Iraqi poetry. It's all the small things that trip me up. What did the dance halls and clubs look like? Where did bands rehearse? What songs were popular? How did people talk?

That’s not to say I don’t find the research interesting. I love jazz music. The problem is, whenever I sit down to write this thing, I always spend more time digging through Wikipedia for background information than I do actually “hammering the keys” (Tom Bailey’s prescription for writer’s block, something he doesn’t believe in). It’s just difficult to write about a real place that you’ve never experienced and still make it feel real.

Ripped Up:Another Workshop

2012-10-26T15:15:00.003-04:00

My latest draft of my first short story "Broken," which is now “Ripped Up” and might be retitled “Earthly Tents” (Dr. Bailey’s suggestion), was workshopped again yesterday.

I’m glad my story was one of the revised drafts that came up for workshop because I felt like I’d hit a ceiling: I’d revised it as much as I could but I knew it still needed work. “You’re close,” was the way Dr. Bailey put it after class yesterday.

For this draft the workshop was less about believability and what works and what doesn’t and more about how things were working in my story, what was working well and what wasn’t working so well, and the feelings and impressions it left with the reader. Dr. Bailey tried to get the class to look at it in a different way, to look at my characters like real characters (plausible and developed) and to talk about how well my story accomplished the things short stories are supposed to accomplish (like the feeling the ending left the reader with). It was really exciting stuff.

My ending is still weak. Based on what everybody said in class, I’ve decided what I really need to do is rehearse more for the ending earlier in the story, move up the details about Alan’s religious life and add more about his relationship with his wife to bring out how lonely he is. Dr. Bailey told me he wants to conference with me before I do anything else to the story, and I’m eager to hear what he has to say. This story’s “close.”

Just Down the Hall:Living with Writers

2007-10-31T10:25:00.007-04:00

Sometimes being ambitious isn't very fun. Late Monday night as my fingers were frantically punching the keys of my laptop to get a first draft hammered out for class Tuesday, I was beginning to think maybe I’d taken Bailey a little too seriously when he said "be ambitious."

But I got it finished in time for class, a 14-page rough draft of a story set in the swing era, told from two points of view: a white band leader and the young black singer he hires to sing in his band. I spent more time going back through my jazz class notes, flipping through books on jazz from the library and searching the Web for information on jazz ballrooms and 1930s slang than I actually did writing.

Thankfully class yesterday was only a peer review and not a full-blown workshop. I was partnered with Theresa, and we traded stories and marked them up. Class ended before we were done discussing the stories with each other, so Theresa just came to my dorm room after class since she just lives down the hall from me. We sat cross-legged on the floor and talked about our stories for while.

I really like being around so many talented writers, other people my age who take writing seriously. They're people I have a lot of respect for.

I live in Hassinger Hall, a small three-story dorm with the offices of the English Department in the basement. Three other writing majors live just down the hall from me, so it’s really easy to just walk down the hall and get some feedback or bounce an idea off Thersa or Dan or Liz. Some of us are even working on converting the business major in room 306 into a writing major.

Rob, a friend of mine from the summer workshop, and I actually swapped some of our old (poorly written, we now realize) short stories the other day. We gave each other the weirdest ones we’d ever written because Rob was somewhat dismayed about not being able to write science fiction (Tom Bailey likes only realistic fiction. No sci-fi. No fantasy. No horror. He once told us he likes to feed elves to his dogs).

Which reminds me. Tonight is Halloween. I put together a scary-story reading for tonight at 10 with some other people on my floor. I’m real excited. Garth, an English Lit major, is going to read some Poe, Theresa might be reading “The Lottery,” and I’ll be reading Stephen King’s “The Moving Finger.” It should be great.

Stop Breaking Her Ankle:Revising and Workshopping Part I

2001-11-09T12:29:00.004-05:00

We’re still workshopping first drafts in class. Four per class. It’s a lot of reading to get done (plus writing the critique letters to go with the stories), but it’s not so bad. The stories are interesting. They're never perfect of course (I keep realizing more and more nothing’s ever very close to perfect on the first try or the second try), but for first drafts they were really good. Everybody's pieces seem to have lots of potential, and they all have great things working in them already. For instance, I felt like Rob’s story didn’t really have an effective climax yet, but it did have some really great realistic-sounding dialogue and a lot of interesting tensions between his characters.

I like seeing how everyone’s drafts reveal how creative we all are. One of the drafts featured a hardboiled detective. Another was really creepy, told from the point of view of a stalker. One of my favorites was Theresa’s new story, the one I got to peer-review last week. In hers, Theresa used this present-tense omniscient voice to describe a slightly dysfunctional and very hilarious Thanksgiving dinner. With that omniscient voice she portrayed the dinner from the perspectives of just about everyone in the house except the family dog, Shotzie.

Meanwhile, my own drafts are starting to come along. “Someone to Watch Over Me,” the swing story, got workshopped last Thursday. I already knew there were a lot of mistakes, well, not mistakes exactly, but weak points in the story that I knew were there and I knew I needed to fix.

For instance, since I was in a hurry to get a complete story drafted, I summarized and glossed over a lot of scenes I could have dramatized and shown just so I could get to an ending. Actually, the current ending is another weak point in the story. It’s slightly implausible and melodramatic; the black singer, Mae Bellport, is suddenly shot while singing on a stage in Georgia (Dr. Bailey has joked that when writers can’t dream up a good ending to their stories they usually start killing off characters).

So I thought the workshop would be pretty useless and a little bit embarrassing (because people would just be pointing out mistakes I was already aware of), but that wasn’t exactly the case. People did pick up on the weak points I knew were there, but they also pointed things out I hadn’t realized or started to think about yet.

They pointed out that the alternating voices in my story sound too much alike. “I’d like to be able to open up the story and just read a sentence and know who’s talking,” Collin commented.

That was a really good piece of criticism, I thought. What really helped was that they were specific about it. Antonette pointed out sentences in Mae’s perspective that she felt sounded more like things Danny, my other narrator, would say. The criticism really gave me some more important things to focus on in my rewrite, things I would not have caught so soon on my own. This workshop may have saved me from a rewrite or two.

Stop Breaking Her Ankle:Revising and Workshopping Part II

1990-11-09T12:17:00.006-05:00

“Earthly Tents” (or the story formerly known as “Ripped Up” and “Broken”) is coming along. One of the most important things I’ve learned recently is not to withhold key information about your main characters from your readers. Details like a character having been divorced really affect the way a character acts and perceives the world and, just as importantly, details like that affect the way the reader sees and understands that character.

That’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned recently, probably because it’s one of the biggest problems that exists in “Earthly Tents.” The reader doesn’t discover anything about Alan’s spiritual life until about page 11. The reader doesn’t learn a lot of details about Alan’s divorce or his kids until about pages 9 and 13 (and this is only a 14-page story). This is a problem because Alan’s children, divorce and spiritual life are his main motivations throughout the story, and the reader gains a deeper understanding of Alan through his words and actions during the story if they know those details up front.

Dr. Bailey taught us that it is usually good to somehow incorporate a thread of the story’s conflict into the very first paragraph of the story. In my story the main conflict is Alan trying to cope with the loneliness and pain of his divorce (which we don’t even know about until page 6).

I have to admit, though, this has been a fun problem to fix. On Monday I sat down on the floor of my dorm room with Scotch tape and scissors and a copy of the latest draft of “Ripped Up” (Draft 7, the seventh time Mrs. Miller has fallen off that stool in her kitchen. Rob’s told me I need to stop breaking that poor old woman’s ankle). I started cutting out paragraphs and rearranging the details in my story, and I created a new draft. I’m going to use this draft to do a rewrite, smoothing the transitions between the scissored sentences, adding extra details and basically just revising the piece again. The process is really exciting because once I get done with this rewrite, the story is going to be noticeably better.

Tryptophan May Cause Procrastination:Return From Thanksgiving Break Part I

1984-11-30T15:03:00.008-05:00

The Tuesday afternoon before Thanksgiving break, I shut myself in my room and worked on “Earthly Tents.” My goal was to get the story pretty close to done — that is, good enough to include in my portfolio that’s due at the end of the semester. That way I could focus completely on “Someone to Watch Over Me” (which is now titled “All of Me”) over Thanksgiving break.

I accomplished half my goals. I'm really pleased with the way “Earthly Tents” shaped up (though I volunteered to have it workshopped again this coming Tuesday, just to be sure), but when I got home for Thanksgiving vacation, I was on vacation.

Thanksgiving break was five days long, Wednesday through Sunday. The week before Thanksgiving break this sounded like mountains of time to spend with my friends and family and to get work done, but Saturday afternoon when I was only beginning my rewrite of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t already churned out several manuscripts fit for The Best American Short Stories.

Maybe it was the tryptophan that got me. Or the last-minute Christmas-tree-selection trip my family took Sunday afternoon. Whatever it was, it left me frantically typing on my laptop scrambling to rewrite my 16 pages of story as my dad drove me back up Sunday.

I finished my new 26-page draft Monday night (or rather Tuesday morning as I finished sometime between midnight and 2 a.m.), and though afterwards I was awfully tired (and still am even as I type this), I was really pleased with the new draft — except for the ridiculously implausible shootout I tacked on to the story to end it.

Tryptophan May Cause Procrastination:Return From Thanksgiving Break Part II

1984-11-30T15:00:00.005-05:00

Over Thanksgiving I did do a little work. I read and took notes on a jazz musician’s firsthand account of a musician’s life and the music business in the ’20s and ’30s, and I found a lot of good historical details that give my story a really authentic feel. I’m also really pleased with the way Danny Ressing and Mae Bellport are starting to develop distinctly different voices and the way they are both deepening as characters.

My big problem is plot. I really need to stop having people get shot at the end of this story. Those are cheap, easy, 1:30 a.m.-the-night-before-it’s-due endings. The ending to this story and the whole plot need to arise naturally from the characters in the story. I’m having a conference with Dr. Bailey on Monday to get some help straightening all this out.

I need to get it straightened out soon. We only have two fiction classes left — one week of classes — and then it’s finals week. At the end of finals week our portfolios are due (in writing class there is no final test, our portfolio of the writing we did this semester is our final). I have a fair amount of work to do on “All of Me” to get it ready to hand in, but the good news is that since I already have my short-short and my first short story basically complete, I can focus all my attention on “All of Me.”

The only other things I have to focus on are an essay on genetic engineering I’m writing for Thought class (which I already have a good start on), a final in my Jazz History class (which shouldn’t be too hard for me since most of the test will involve listening and identifying different songs and elements of jazz music) and a final in my New Testament class (in which I already had a strong A before I handed in an extra-credit assignment yesterday). So I really will be able to focus a lot of attention on fixing up “All of Me.” I’m eager to hear Dr. Bailey’s suggestions on Monday, because I think the characters in the story and the beginning and the middle of the story itself are all shaping up very nicely. Hopefully Dr. Bailey can help me get all my ending problems worked out.

And then after all that work is done, I get an entire month off for winter break before second semester begins. Over winter, considering all that time I’m sure I’ll have, I am quite certain I’ll be able to churn out at least three, if not four, Pulitzer-Prize worthy manuscripts...

What Wants to be Written:The End of the Semester Part I

1979-12-07T14:54:00.007-05:00

It snowed the night before my last Intro to Fiction class, and I almost considered wearing the boots that my mother had insisted I bring to campus with me after Thanksgiving break. Our last Fiction class was going to be a “secret field trip,” except it was the same secret field trip Dr. Bailey had taken my summer writers workshop class on two years ago, so I was in on the secret. We met in the library like usual on Thursday and then walked to downtown Selinsgrove to the used bookstore, D.J. Ernst Books. I wore my sneakers and nothing bad happened to me on the walk over.

At the store, Dr. Bailey bought each of us two books, two well-written books which he either picked or approved. No sappy romance novels. Nothing about aliens. For me he bought The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and a collection of short stories by John Updike. Because I've never been able to walk into a bookstore without buying something and because paperbacks were only 50 cents, I ended up buying about six more books. I bought two James Baldwin novels, several more Barbara Kingsolver novels (I’ve never read any of her work before, but half the class assured me she’s an excellent author. Kristen, one of my classmates, nearly knocked me over when she thrust The Poisonwood Bible into my arms).

I also bought two Christmas presents for my mom (maybe because I was feeling guilty about not wearing those boots): a pristine-looking copy of The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Hannah Green, a book about a girl struggling to overcome schizophrenia I read in my high school modern fiction class.

After our class was finished cleaning out the book store, we crossed the street and had coffee in the Kind Café. It was a nice way to end the class, sipping coffee and reading John Updike with the friends I’ve made in class this semester.

What Wants to be Written:The End of the Semester Part II

1973-12-07T15:00:00.007-05:00

Of course, I’m not technically finished with the class because I have yet to turn in my portfolio. On Tuesday, before we began our final workshop, Dr. Bailey gave us some instructions on how to put together our portfolios, which we have to hand in by next Thursday. The portfolio should contain one or two short-shorts we wrote at the start of the year and both short stories we’ve worked on all semester, and we need to get at least two copies bound at the Print Shop on campus. One copy Dr. Bailey will mark up and comment on. The other will end up in the library.

I’m a little nervous about the portfolio, partly because I volunteered to have my “Earthly Tents” story workshopped one last time. I felt like “Earthly Tents” was getting pretty strong and I wanted to know how I could make it a little bit better before I turned in my portfolio. Or I thought I wanted to know how I could make it better.

Extend. That’s not a word you want to hear with barely a week and a half left before the semester ends ands your portfolio’s due.

Every time you get workshopped it peels back another set of eyelids you didn’t realize you had shut and you see your story more clearly. Each workshop shows you how clear of a window into the world you’ve imagined that your words create. Sometimes it’s just your words that need to be fixed, and other times you have to go back and fix the world itself, make it bigger, deeper, more real. You find that you have to extend.

That’s what I found out at my last workshop. As close to done as I thought I was, as fully imagined as I imagined Alan’s life to be, I still need to extend. To really show how meaningful Alan’s change of heart is at the end of the story, to really let my reader feel that change, I have to extend.

In workshop Dr. Bailey and my classmates pointed out they still don’t truly know why Alan got divorced. The answer in the story is that he got divorced because he and his wife couldn’t see eye to eye about money. But that’s not a detailed, fully imagined answer (probably because I have had very little experience with divorce).

The newly deepened answer currently incubating in my brain right now is that Alan and Jodi did not divorce merely because they disagreed about money. They disagreed about time and money. Alan spent lots of time working to earn money to provide for his family. He loves his family. But Jodi didn’t see it like that. She felt like Alan was a workaholic, and she wanted him to take a higher-paying, less time-consuming desk job. She doesn’t understand that Alan loves being a carpenter.

But extending means more than just offering up this explanation. There’s a lot of emotion that goes with it. I may actually have to create a scene that shows some of this, a scene with Jodi physically present in it. I may actually have to imagine (one thing I’ve learned this semester is that imagining takes a lot more effort than you’d think) what Jodi looks like and how she talks.

Other areas in which I need to extend: Alan’s financial status, Alan’s relationship with his kids (I may actually have to imagine them too) and Alan’s relationship with God before and after his divorce.

It’s not that I don’t want “Earthly Tents” to get better. On the contrary, I want “Earthly Tents” to be as good as I can possibly make it, as close to perfect as it can be. I’d ask God to proofread it if I could. I’m just a little stressed because making “Earthly Tents” as good as it can be is going to take lots more time and effort, more time and effort than I’ll be able to fit in between now and next Thursday, which is my portfolio deadline and the end of the semester.

Sometime between now and then I not only have to extend “Earthly Tents,” I have to revise “All of Me” as well. “All of Me” is in even more desperate need of extension. Dr. Bailey gave me some great suggestions on how to cure the story’s ailing ending, but it’s going to take time to get the story as good as I can possibly make it, time I won’t have before the portfolio is due.

Of course, I’m not too worried about my grade in the class. I’ve put in a lot of hard work on these stories. They’ve improved immensely this semester, and I feel like I’ve really begun to grow as a writer. We’re required to write a self-critique letter to preface our portfolios, and in mine I’ll be able to note all the ways my stories could still be further expanded and lifted up a little closer to the ungraspable heights of perfection.

The last bit of advice Dr. Bailey gave us after our final workshop gives me some comfort. As he was explaining to us the importance of extending, he said one of the most valuable lessons we could learn this semester was that “it’s not what you wrote, it’s what wants to be written.” Those are exciting words for me to reflect on as I look forward to continuing to learn here at Susquehanna and continuing to grow as a writer.