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

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

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

“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.