Susan Breen's Blog, page 2

about my obsessions

One of my favorite writing exercises relates to obsessions. (Faithful readers may remember I mentioned this in The Fiction Class. Just saying.) The exercise is to make a list of your five obsessions.

Recently, I was discussing this with my Intro to Fiction class, and I made a list of my own.

1. Dogs. I am obsessed with dogs and will read anything relating to dogs, unless I know for a fact the dog dies at the end. My first novel had a Golden Retriever in it; the one I'm working on now involves a cockapoo. There's something about the very name cockapoo that sets me off.

2. Illness. I am obsessed with illness and will read anything related to illness, unless I know for a fact that the person dies at the end. (That last part isn't true. What is true is that I will develop symptoms of any illness I read about.)

3. Family. I love stories about the way family members interact with each other, whether it be mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, and so forth.

4. Writing. I'm fascinated by writers and how they work. For that reason, and others, I love reading memoirs.

5. That's personal. There's got to be one thing I won't write about.

How about you? What are your obsessions?

about The Old Curiosity Shop

This month I've decided to jump into the fray and take part in the Dueling Authors: Austen vs. Dickens Tour (http://classics.rebeccareid.com/).  With no disrespect intended to Jane Austen, I had to cast my vote with Charles Dickens. He had such passion. He wrote to change the world. His writing makes me laugh and cry, often on the same page.

For this particular contest, I was assigned to write in support of THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP, which is a tricky novel to write about because it's very sentimental. Little Nell, the main character, is a female version of Tiny Tim. She suffers, suffers, then dies. Oscar Wilde famously said one would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears…of laughter.

Bah! Humbug! say I.

For me, the power of this novel is that Dickens' passions shine through so ferociously. I feel closer to him with The Old Curiosity Shop than any other of his writing. He wrote this novel fast. The pages came out in monthly and sometimes weekly installments over the course of 1840 and early 1841. He didn't have time to separate himself from the writing. There's an unfiltered, raw, vitality to these pages that speaks to the joy Dickens must have felt writing them. You sense his mind at work. You also must be touched by the passions that animated him.

"I am breaking my heart over this story," he said to a friend during his writing of The Old Curiosity Shop. The novel forced him to explore feelings of grief that were already raw. Only a few years earlier, just as he was becoming famous, Dickens' beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, died suddenly at the age of 17. Mary influenced the way he wrote about women; there's a reason so many of his women are gentle and pure. His feelings of loss helped him write about grief more beautifully than any other writer. Anyone who has mourned will recognize what Dickens is writing about when he describes the "weary void" that comes with grief, "the sense of desolation that will come upon the strongest minds, when something familiar and beloved is missed at every turn—the connection between inanimate and senseless things, and the object of recollection when every household god becomes a monument and every room a grave."

But perhaps you are not looking to be depressed.

That's all right, because THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP is also a very funny book, with much more laughter in it than tears. For one thing, there's an evil dwarf who pursues Little Nell and wants to make her his wife. Daniel Quilp is one of Dickens' most vivid characters. Some of my favorite exchanges are between Quilp and his mother-in-law, Mrs. Jiniwin, who lives with him "and waged perpetual war with Daniel; of whom, notwithstanding, she stood in no slight dread."

 The novel's plot is fairly simple. Nell and her grandfather, a gambler, are evicted from their home and forced to leave London and seek shelter.  They are pursued by Quilp, who enlists a host of vivid characters, among them a villainous attorney, Sampson Brass, and his masculine sister Sally. On the road, Little Nell and her grandfather have a series of adventures, many of them moving testimonies to what life was like in England in the 1820s. (The novel is set some years before Dickens wrote it.) One of the most poignant scenes comes when Nell and her grandfather find shelter with a man who lives and works at a furnace, and spends all his time watching the fire. "It's like a book to me," he said, "the only book I ever learned to read; and many an old story it tells me. It's music, for I should know its roar among a thousand, and there are other voices in its roar. It has its pictures too. You don't know how many strange faces and different scenes I trace in the red-hot coals. It's my memory, that fire, and shows me all my life."

Similar words could be used for Dickens. He shows us all the passions that make up all our lives.

about guilt and libraries

Yesterday my son told me he had just renewed a library book on line. Had he told me he discovered the cure to migraines, I couldn't have been more dumbfounded. I couldn't believe such a thing was possible. Immediately I went on line to my account, called up my name, which, of course, had the word Delinquent stamped next to it. I renewed my book, and the delinquent sign went away. I was incredulous.

Since I was a child I've been in possession of an overdue book. When you have an overdue book, there comes a point at which you have to troop down to the librarian and pay the fee. Yes, you can stick the book in the return slot, but still comes the day, when you want to take out your next book, that you have to make amends. You have to go to the librarian, she takes out the calendar and totes up the days late you are. She's always perfectly pleasant, but she looks disappointed. Then you take out the change and she takes out the metal box, which, when she opens it, reverberates throughout the library. Patrons lift their heads and they know.

The last book I've been reading has been causing me a particular level of agita. It's Joseph Lash's biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and it's easily 1,000 pages long. I love it, I read it every day, but no matter what I do, I can't speed up my pace. I'm halfway through and the book is a month overdue and I've been in a quandary. I figured if I went to renew it, they'd take it away from me. So I decided I'd soldier on, finish the book, and pay the fees when I was done. But knowing I'm paying five cents a day is taking pleasure away from reading. Plus, I assumed I couldn't take out any other books until I resolved this one, which was cutting back on research for my novel. (This is why I don't write blogs more frequently. Because I'm preoccupied with things like this.)

What a miracle then that I could renew Franklin and Eleanor on line. Turns out, it didn't matter that it was overdue, so long as it wasn't $25 overdue. I was so thrilled I immediately put five other books on hold. This is going to end unhappily. I feel sure of it. In two months time I'll be sitting around with six overdue books and I'll only be halfway through World War II. But thank you Westchester Library System. You've brought me great joy!

about revision

Normally I start the semester with a discussion of opening paragraphs, which seems a sensible place. However, in an exciting break from my own routine, I decided to begin this semester with a class on revision, a topic I don't usually get to until week 9. By then everyone's usually thrashed their way through a number of critiques. The last class is always about publishing and I know people want me to finish nattering on about revision so we can get to the good stuff. So I'm usually rushing through revision myself.

For this semester I decided to take a different tack. I decided to separate revision out from publication and put it at the start of the class. My hope is that not only can my classes discuss it, but we can also embrace it. Specifically I want to move past the notion of the idea of revision as being "fixing errors." I want a more holistic approach to revision. I want students to view it not as a necessary evil but as an opportunity to explore their manuscripts and bring out deeper meanings that may have been dormant in early drafts. I want to get past the fear!

Of course, the only problem is that it's hard to teach. I can tell you what a good opening paragraph looks like, but a good revision is much harder to quantify. A good sign is if The New Yorker agrees to buy it, but even an unpublished story can be successfully revised. There are some things, however, that can help.

1. Have a title that works. Almost always, if the title's good, the story's good. The reason is that an author with a title knows what the story's about. So challenge yourself to come up with a good title.

2. Retype the story. From the beginning. Novels too. Don't try to squeeze every little correction into the draft. Take a bold approach and start from scratch.

3. Cut out a quarter of the words. You don't need them. Trust me.

How about you? Do you have any tips for revision?

about problems with novel classes

I teach Beginning and Advanced Fiction for Gotham, but the trickiest classes I teach are in novel writing. The classes tend to be large (for Gotham), meaning they have from ten to fourteen people, each one in the middle of writing a novel, which means lots and lots of pages to read and discuss. But that's not the problem.

The scope of the critiquing is more difficult in a novel writing class. Not only are we reading the pages under submission, but we've got to consider them in the context of what came before and what should come after. If we're discussing chapter four, for example, you really need figure out how that builds from chapter one, which we read probably three weeks ago. Given that I have difficulty remembering the day of the week it is, this global viewpoint requires a bit of effort on my part. However, even that's not the problem.

The problem, at the moment, is that one of my students suggested it would be interesting if, on top of the classwork and lectures, I added in a discussion of Jonathan Franzen's big book, FREEDOM. The idea's a great one. Everyone writing a novel today should be familiar with FREEDOM, I think. Certainly if you're writing a literary novel. This has been widely reviewed as the book of the year, or the decade. Whether you like it or not (and I gave it four stars on Goodreads), you have to deal with it.

But how on earth to incorporate that novel into a ten-week class? This has been what's preoccupying me over break. I can't assign the whole book to read. There'd be an insurrection. We could read part of the book. Normally I'd suggest reading the opening 50 pages, but I think the beginning of Franzen's book is the least inviting part of it. Quite honestly, I think only he could get away with such an unsympathetic beginning. I considered having each class member read a different twenty pages and report back, but that would deny us all a certain narrative thrust. Then I considered kicking the student who proposed the idea out of the class and forgetting about the whole thing, but that seemed hostile.

So I have two weeks to go before class starts. Any suggestions?

about starting class

I love the fiction classes that start after the first of the year because everyone's so hopeful. It's a new year, people make resolutions. I'm always hopeful that I'll teach the best class possible. My students are hopeful that they'll achieve their dreams as writers. For many, this is the first time they've ever taken a writing class. So, I thought I'd throw in some tips.

1. Show up.

A successful writing class is as much about community and trust as it is the teacher. (Well, almost.) The better you know the other people in your class, the more free you'll feel in your writing, the more risks you'll be willing to take. If you don't come, you'll start to feel like an outsider. Of course it's hard, especially in the winter. But make it your priority for ten weeks.

2. Submit work.

There are few things I hate as much as having my work critiqued. I feel like I'm running down the street naked. But I always learn and I'm always so proud of myself afterwards. I've done it! You don't need to submit a lot. Hand in three pages. But get yourself out there. You'll be glad.

3. Listen to what people are saying during the "booth."

We may all be wrong. But we might be right about some things. Take notes. I'm always suspicious of people who don't take down notes when they're being critiqued. (I'm also suspicious of waiters who claim to remember whole orders.) Give yourself time to digest the critique. Listen to the good things!!!

I'll post some more suggestions soon. (My resolution for this year is to write more blog posts. )

But what do you think someone should bring to a new writing class?

about knowing when it's a story, or not

Early yesterday morning I went out jogging, alone except for a lot of hot deer and noisy crickets. Suddenly I rounded a bend and caught sight of six large men standing in a circle, looking down at something. I've seen enough episodes of The Sopranos to know that nothing good ever comes of interrupting large men who think they're by themselves. I kept on going, thinking to myself that if I heard someone running behind me, I'd faint and that would be the end of that.

Anyway, nothing happened...

about freezing

Freezing to death is probably not something on anyone's mind this sweltering July day in New York. However, I was thinking about it because recently I went to an exhibit on polar exploration at the American Museum of Natural History.

You may be familiar with the story of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. Amundsen was a Norwegian explorer so determined to conquer the South Pole that, growing up, he slept with his windows open to train his body to deal with the cold. Scott was both less...

on running

I've been silent these last few months, but not because I've been quiet. In fact, many good things have been happening and so I've been running, chasing after them. I have also, literally, taken up running, which is quite an accomplishment. I would not describe myself as a natural athlete. My preferred form of exercise is walking my dogs. Unfortunately, they're both getting old and don't want to take long walks in the woods. After our last excursion, when I had to carry my little white dog...

on becoming a writer

Please welcome a fellow Gotham teacher to Bloomer. Sonya Chung is the author of the debut novel, Long for this World. Here's a post by Sonya:

Students often ask me, "When did you know you were a writer?"  The question is so laden, so bursting with adolescent angst. 

And I don't mean that in any kind of condescending way. I have come to think that we never really grow up, not in our most tender, verdant souls; that adulthood is a very nice and useful idea that allows us to function in a...