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.

Flip-Flop-Free:Fall Break

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

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.