Molly Gaudry's Blog, page 2

20 Lines Not Really About the Bal Masqué (Day 8/90)

I’m sitting here nursing a glass of pinot noir, pretending to be a writer who enjoys a glass of something when they’re working. 

But now I’m not really working.

I’ve just spent over half an hour searching for images of heart-shaped fletchings on heart-tipped arrows, like for a Cupid costume—a good one, preferably, but a cheap Halloween one would do, too—which is the image I wanted for this post because tonight I’ve been working on the bal masqué scenes.

What do you think—silk brocade?

This morning I started Aaron Sorkin’s MasterClass, and I like that he immediately admits he’s better on paper because it makes his super-awkwardness less awkward. 

I totally didn’t expect him to be at all awkward.

I feel better about myself.

A couple weeks ago after I finished all the seasons of GBBO, I needed something new to watch so started Dark Matter.

I sent this clip from the groundhog day episode to all the people I know who might like the show.

I love Android.

God help me, for some reason after I finished that I started The Vampire Diaries.

I’m on episode 30-something, having specifically chosen the show because it has 170-something episodes and I wouldn’t have to pick something else new anytime soon, but yeah, lol, what is this show even.

I’m never going to get to 20 lines.

I’m never going to finish this glass of wine.

I can’t believe Reiny is still alive and seemingly happy and healthy and still jumping on the bed and running around and stuff.

I mean, she’s really old, way older than Boo.

Today J and I, full of ironic but real-enough angst and ennui, totally uninterested in our lifestyle blogger burglar-murderer novel, started a new story we actually like.

It started out as a joke about how I’m a ghost that can’t shake vampires or zombies because they just keep coming, for years, decades even, but also there are boa constrictors, and a guy in a bison costume, and a cabin explosion. 

We are winning at this writing thing.

Cheers.

Day 8/90: Twenty lines not really about the bal masqué

I’m sitting here nursing a glass of pinot noir, pretending to be a writer who enjoys a glass of something when they’re working. 

But now I’m not really working.

I’ve just spent over half an hour searching for images of heart-shaped fletchings on heart-tipped arrows, like for a Cupid costume—a good one, preferably, but a cheap Halloween one would do, too—which is the image I wanted for this post because tonight I’ve been working on the bal masqué scenes.

What do you think—silk brocade?

This morning I started Aaron Sorkin’s MasterClass, and I like that he immediately admits he’s better on paper because it makes his super-awkwardness less awkward. 

I totally didn’t expect him to be at all awkward.

I feel better about myself.

A couple weeks ago after I finished all the seasons of GBBO, I needed something new to watch so started Dark Matter.

I sent this clip from the groundhog day episode to all the people I know who might like the show.

I love Android.

God help me, for some reason after I finished that I started The Vampire Diaries.

I’m on episode 30-something, having specifically chosen the show because it has 170-something episodes and I wouldn’t have to pick something else new anytime soon, but yeah, lol, what is this show even.

I’m never going to get to 20 lines.

I’m never going to finish this glass of wine.

I can’t believe Reiny is still alive and seemingly happy and healthy and still jumping on the bed and running around and stuff.

I mean, she’s really old, way older than Boo.

Today J and I, full of ironic but real-enough angst and ennui, totally uninterested in our lifestyle blogger burglar-murderer novel, started a new story we actually like.

It started out as a joke about how I’m a ghost that can’t shake vampires or zombies because they just keep coming, for years, decades even, but also there are boa constrictors, and a guy in a bison costume, and a cabin explosion. 

We are winning at this writing thing.

Cheers.

Ordering Fit (Day 2/90)

I’m not going to post updates every single day of my Moshfegh-inspired, Watt-oriented 90-Day Rewrite, but today, Day Two, I thought I’d share that I gave Day One a solid effort and ended up filling several pages in my journal. I short-answered the eleven questions about the coming week’s goals, and I filled in the blanks on the three-act template/outline provided by Watt. And I gotta admit, I understand this book and what I’m trying to say in it with newfound clarity.

As Watt predicts, my current draft already has a three-act structure (that I wasn’t, until now, thinking of as such) and, as he says to shush his naysayers, of course it need not be told in order (mine sure isn’t). But to be aware of the beginning, middle, and end of the story you’re telling about a character can at the very least help you better realize what they’re thinking and feeling in each of their scenes (which are, in my book, scattered and fragmented within essays. But for my 90 Days, I’m not worrying about the essays). These 90 days ahead are simply helping to structure my final pass, before sending to Ampersand to print-and-ship, and I’m focusing for now just on the fiction, on the tea house woman’s story, on making sure I’ve brought her to life as best I can. Because despite the fragmentation of her narrative, this book—the third of the series—marks a significant departure from my first two: it’s stark realism, there’s no magic in sight, and instead there is a decaying house, a shit-bottomed dying father who no longer recognizes her, a revolving door of unimpressive lovers doing too little to distract from the sadness of this or the stress of inheriting a failing family business our woman never wanted in a town unable to maintain and retain its young people.

In the current draft, we meet the tea house woman in bed with a young lover. The next time she appears, we’ve flashed back several days to an awkward confrontation with her ex. Next, she’s giving the eulogy at her father’s funeral (some time after hooking up with the young lover). Later that night, she’s drunk in a bar. In the morning, she makes breakfast for a new lover she’s picked up in the bar. And then she’s alone.

Obviously, there’s more to it than that, but those are the basic points along the way. Moving forward, here are a few of Watt’s questions for today, and my thought-answers after yesterday’s discoveries:

1. Does the reader understand clearly why this day is unlike any other? Not yet. But I have no problem adding that it’s New Year’s Day, her father’s dead, she’s in bed with his nurse, and she doesn’t want him to stay but she also doesn’t want him to go, because until today her house has been filled with friends, neighbors, and New Year’s Eve revelers (attending the masked ball she opted not to cancel so as to celebrate her father’s life and her family’s longstanding NYE bal masque tradition).

2. Does the reader understand the dilemma? Is it universally relatable? Not yet. But if the answers above provide the facts of the story, then the tea house woman’s feelings about these details will be what helps readers relate. And the specific dilemma—which exists currently but isn’t apparent—is that even though she isn’t interested in love or marriage or children, her first marriage well behind her and with enough problems of her own now let alone someone else’s, she wanted to at least send her father off with the belief that she wouldn’t die alone. His fear, not hers. But she wanted to relieve him of it. Do we live for ourselves or for our parents? Our own happiness or our family’s? I think that’s universal enough, no? Not to mention exes that won’t go away.

3. Is there crucial information that still needs to be revealed? Yes. Even though I’m not going to reorder my story to make it chronological, I can still make it much clearer where we are in the story. The morning we meet her in bed is New Year’s Day. On Christmas Eve, she went to her ex’s for dinner despite her reservations. That night, when she gets home, her father’s dead. She spends Christmas day waking and taking away from their own families the people in town who can attend to his body—reverend, undertaker, etc. These people encourage her to cancel the annual NYE ball, but she insists it’s tradition (tradition, the thorn in her paw from the moment we meet her in this book, v. previous). Dec 30, she eulogizes her father/goes to a bar/hooks up with an out-of-towner home for the holiday, makes her breakfast. That day, Dec 31, she’s fully absorbed with all the last-minute prep for the ball (she’s dressed as Catherine the Great), and during the dancing her father’s nurse finds her, sad and lonely himself, and in the morning he’s still in her bed. That night, in bed alone, her house is dark, empty, silent. Happy new year.

And a change I still have to make, which I’ve known for a while: the tea house woman is a quarter Asian (the other quarters are Russian, Hungarian, and French). The racial identity essay around this character edit also needs to be revised. I’ve never written Asian characters. Everyone I know has read my tea house woman as Asian all this time. I never thought she was Asian. People think I’m joking. In Different Racisms, adoptee-like-me Matthew Salesses writes about his own journey of not writing Asian characters, then writing biracial Asian characters, then finally writing Asian characters. I’m still working on figuring this out for myself. Maybe when I finish this book, I’ll be a little closer.

Day 2/90: Ordering Fit

I’m not going to post updates every single day of my Moshfegh-inspired, Watt-oriented 90-Day Rewrite, but today, Day Two, I thought I’d share that I gave Day One a solid effort and ended up filling several pages in my journal. I short-answered the eleven questions about the coming week’s goals, and I filled in the blanks on the three-act template/outline provided by Watt. And I gotta admit, I understand this book and what I’m trying to say in it with newfound clarity.

As Watt predicts, my current draft already has a three-act structure (that I wasn’t, until now, thinking of as such) and, as he says to shush his naysayers, of course it need not be told in order (mine sure isn’t). But to be aware of the beginning, middle, and end of the story you’re telling about a character can at the very least help you better realize what they’re thinking and feeling in each of their scenes (which are, in my book, scattered and fragmented within essays. But for my 90 Days, I’m not worrying about the essays). These 90 days ahead are simply helping to structure my final pass, before sending to Ampersand to print-and-ship, and I’m focusing for now just on the fiction, on the tea house woman’s story, on making sure I’ve brought her to life as best I can. Because despite the fragmentation of her narrative, this book—the third of the series—marks a significant departure from my first two: it’s stark realism, there’s no magic in sight, and instead there is a decaying house, a shit-bottomed dying father who no longer recognizes her, a revolving door of unimpressive lovers doing too little to distract from the sadness of this or the stress of inheriting a failing family business our woman never wanted in a town unable to maintain and retain its young people.

In the current draft, we meet the tea house woman in bed with a young lover. The next time she appears, we’ve flashed back several days to an awkward confrontation with her ex. Next, she’s giving the eulogy at her father’s funeral (some time after hooking up with the young lover). Later that night, she’s drunk in a bar. In the morning, she makes breakfast for a new lover she’s picked up in the bar. And then she’s alone.

Obviously, there’s more to it than that, but those are the basic points along the way. Moving forward, here are a few of Watt’s questions for today, and my thought-answers after yesterday’s discoveries:

1. Does the reader understand clearly why this day is unlike any other? Not yet. But I have no problem adding that it’s New Year’s Day, her father’s dead, she’s in bed with his nurse, and she doesn’t want him to stay but she also doesn’t want him to go, because until today her house has been filled with friends, neighbors, and New Year’s Eve revelers (attending the masked ball she opted not to cancel so as to celebrate her father’s life and her family’s longstanding NYE bal masque tradition).

2. Does the reader understand the dilemma? Is it universally relatable? Not yet. But if the answers above provide the facts of the story, then the tea house woman’s feelings about these details will be what helps readers relate. And the specific dilemma—which exists currently but isn’t apparent—is that even though she isn’t interested in love or marriage or children, her first marriage well behind her and with enough problems of her own now let alone someone else’s, she wanted to at least send her father off with the belief that she wouldn’t die alone. His fear, not hers. But she wanted to relieve him of it. Do we live for ourselves or for our parents? Our own happiness or our family’s? I think that’s universal enough, no? Not to mention exes that won’t go away.

3. Is there crucial information that still needs to be revealed? Yes. Even though I’m not going to reorder my story to make it chronological, I can still make it much clearer where we are in the story. The morning we meet her in bed is New Year’s Day. On Christmas Eve, she went to her ex’s for dinner despite her reservations. That night, when she gets home, her father’s dead. She spends Christmas day waking and taking away from their own families the people in town who can attend to his body—reverend, undertaker, etc. These people encourage her to cancel the annual NYE ball, but she insists it’s tradition (tradition, the thorn in her paw from the moment we meet her in this book, v. previous). Dec 30, she eulogizes her father/goes to a bar/hooks up with an out-of-towner home for the holiday, makes her breakfast. That day, Dec 31, she’s fully absorbed with all the last-minute prep for the ball (she’s dressed as Catherine the Great), and during the dancing her father’s nurse finds her, sad and lonely himself, and in the morning he’s still in her bed. That night, in bed alone, her house is dark, empty, silent. Happy new year.

And a change I still have to make, which I’ve known for a while: the tea house woman is a quarter Asian (the other quarters are Russian, Hungarian, and French). The racial identity essay around this character edit also needs to be revised. I’ve never written Asian characters. Everyone I know has read my tea house woman as Asian all this time. I never thought she was Asian. People think I’m joking. In Different Racisms, adoptee-like-me Matthew Salesses writes about his own journey of not writing Asian characters, then writing biracial Asian characters, then finally writing Asian characters. I’m still working on figuring this out for myself. Maybe when I finish this book, I’ll be a little closer.

Jane Smiley, Narrative, and a Healthy Dose of Self-Doubt

For a few months now, I’ve been picking up and putting down Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel. Yesterday, after ruminating on this list of what I read in 2018, and after filling many, many journal pages about this week’s revision goals, I returned again to Thirteen Ways and clicked with something Smiley says in the second chapter, in response to E. M. Forster’s disdain for readers who read for suspense, for “what he seems to think is the lowest common denominator of art”—i.e., “what happened then?”

Narratives are as common as prose; they are the way humans have chosen to pack together events and emotions, happenings in the world and how they make us feel…. Because narrative is so natural, efficient, and ubiquitous, it, like prose, can be used in myriad ways. The time sequence can be abused however the writer wishes to abuse it, because the human tendency, at least in the West, to think in sequence is so strong that the reader will keep track of beginning, middle, and end on her own…. and because the novel requires narrative for organization, it will also be a more or less popular form. It…is, therefore, depending on one’s political and social views, either perennially compromised or perennially inclusive.

It’s that last line that got me. I texted it to a handful of friends who, like me and with me, have been struggling with and debating the merits of so-called “experimental” fiction. A few of us had been lured to the University of Utah’s Ph.D. program by the idea that, finally, we could write how we write and our peers would know how to read our work on its own terms, analyze it, and workshop it productively. A consequence, for instance, of being a verse novelist in a poetry M.F.A. program—which I loved, to be clear—was that I only ever got to workshop up to a few pages/poems at a time. Imagine being in a fiction workshop and needing to pick 1-3 pages from your story or novel to bring in. This is not to say, though, that my lines didn’t get sharper as a result of those same poetry workshops. So anyway, when I was accepted and came to Utah to visit and sat in on a workshop, I knew I’d finally be able to feel like a writer at home in the world among like-beaked friends. A weirdo among weirdos. But then I got here and dove into a comprehensive education on literary history that helped me to bigger-picture contextualize all those seemingly one-off topical literature courses I’d taken in my B.A. and M.A., and by the time my comprehensive exams were behind me I confirmed for myself my long-building suspicion that my definition of “experimental” had been limited, that, in fact, the overwhelming majority of the Classics taught earned the honorific for being, in their own historical moments, wonderfully experimental in their own ways, breaking from traditions and conventions of their day. And some of us, I won’t name names, fell in love with some of those so-called “conventional” novels. Questioned our own writing and began to think less of our own “experiments,” realizing how derivative and egotistical we could seem in a single swoop. As I said above, we are struggling—all still committed to being weirdos, but far less assuredly. And so I texted:

I’m reading Jane Smiley and she argues that popular novels don’t insist on a hierarchy of readership, don’t exclude any kinds of readers (people who just want a good story, etc) and depending on who you are, you either view such novels as “perennially compromised or perennially inclusive.” I like that.

And the responses I got were: “Same!” and “Me too!” and “I like it a lot,” etc.

As someone with six-figure student-loan debt, who is just a few months shy of holding four college degrees (which feel as if they are the minimum qualifications to be eligible for employment), I am at this moment living on a fellowship that I’m grateful for even though it’s not enough to cover basic living expenses and daily it seems I’m watching my credit card debt rise while my credit score falls. This fellowship relieves me from teaching, which really means it just frees me up to take on more side hustles (one of which is teaching), all of which are necessary for future employment and over half of which are non-paying—coaching veterans, reading scholarship applications and serving on other campus committees, reading for and judging literary contests, blurbing books, reviewing books, selecting and editing and publishing others’ books while trying to write my own, traveling to other cities for readings and talks and conferences, assistant editing for a peer-reviewed academic journal, tutoring in the community, teaching in the community, and even flipping clothes online (which is the most lucrative of the above but can be the most time-consuming). It’s not the service I mind. I want to do it. But I’m also not rolling my eyes when I read about “millennial burnout” or nonwhite burnout or “dead black batteries,” or another young writer out there who says she just wanted to try to write the kind of novel that could lead to a living writing books—the kind of novel that sells. Which, now that I’ve found Smiley’s language for it, seems slightly less shameful. The kind of novel that sells because it does not willfully exclude.

James Patterson and Alan Watt on Outlines

Yesterday, I called Rachel and at some point we started talking about Ottessa Moshfegh, which led me to search online for the name of the how-to book she used to start writing Eileen, and I found it: Alan Watt’s The 90-Day Novel. Impulsively, I bought it and The 90-Day Rewrite. Today, I’m scrolling through Rewrite and thinking about a few of the suggested questions to keep in mind during this first week of revision: (1) What do I want to express through this story? (2) What is the most effective order of events to tell it? (3) Do I have a worthy antagonist? There are eleven questions total, but I’m happily stuck on these three. By the end of the week, I really do hope to have answers.

In related news, for Christmas I got a subscription to MasterClass, and I started with James Patterson’s. Actually, I started with Margaret Atwood’s, but skipped to Patterson. One thing I appreciate is that he’s transparent about not being here to make great works of literature. Instead, he’s gonna tell you about his own process—a streamlined, efficient one—for writing books that sell.

At this point, perhaps one of the largest-order challenges I could pose to myself is to write a plot-driven novel. So, because I’m open to giving it a try, I’m ready to absorb all the advice that’s out there. Like Moshfegh, I consider it an experiment and also just want “to write a novel to start a career where I could live off publishing books.” Except in my case, I just want to supplement my salary to be able to pay off Lit Pub and student loan debt in time to maybe retire if I live to be 80.

Anyway, Patterson makes writing commercial fiction seem doable. And he says to begin with an outline. Watt’s 90 Day Rewrite also says to begin with an outline. For Patterson, the real work happens in the outline—mapping the entire trajectory of the story, layering onto it the protag’s emotional journey, and writing each chapter toward what you want your reader to feel, which he says is a cat-and-mouse game readers want to play. For Watt, now that we know what we’re working with, we can reorder what we have and map these moving parts onto a traditional three-act outline. Day One’s exercise is to do this, to fill in the blanks on the outline template he provides. So. Here goes nothing. Day One.

Books I Read in 2018

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Sweet Tomb by Trinie Dalton

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

Women and Power by Mary Beard

A History of the Wife by Margaret Yalom

The Faithful Servants by Margery Sharp

Blud by Rachel McKibbens

Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson

Fables by Sarah Goldstein

Whereas by Layli Long Soldier

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen

Bestiary by Donika Kelly

A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham

Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith

Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing

Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey

Song by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Feathers, Claws, Fins, and Paws by Jennifer Schacker

Strike A Prose: Memoirs of a Lit Diva Extraordinaire by Tim Jones-Yelvington

Lessons on Expulsion by Erika L. Sanchez

Look by Solmaz Sharif

Essential Shakespeare Handbook by Leslie Dunton-Downer

Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay

There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyonce by Morgan Parker

The Future by Neil Hilborn

MACNOLIA by A. Van Jordan

Nothing Is Okay by Rachel Wiley

Autopsy by Donte Collins

Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora

Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair

Someone’s Dead Already by Tongo Eisen-Martin

Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar

The Crown Ain’t Worth Much by Hanif Abdurraquib

Wild Is the Wind by Carl Phillips

Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes

Betwixt-and-Between by Jenny Boully

Not Here by Hieu Minh Nguyen

No Matter the Wreckage by Sarah Kay

Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh

Ron Carlson Writes a Story by Ron Carlson

The Professor Is In by Karen Kelsky

The White Book by Han Kang

Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith

Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process edited by Joe Fassler

Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction by Benjamin Percy

The Zurau Aphorisms by Franz Kafka

Contemplation by Franz Kafka

American Innovations by Rivka Galchen

Margaret Atwood by Margaret Atwood

Snow White by Donald Barthelme

Hard Child by Natalie Shapero

Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz

How to Be Happy by Eleanor Davis

A Woman Is a Woman Until She Is a Mother by Anna Prushinskaya

A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk

Encyclopedia of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu

Get in Trouble by Kelly Link

Break Any Woman Down by Dana Johnson

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs

Why Art? by Eleanor Davis

Here by Richard McGuire

We Are Never Meeting In Real Life by Samantha Irby

Belly Up by Rita Bullwinkel

The Miniature Wife by Manuel Gonzales

Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose

Drifting House by Krys Lee

We the Animals by Justin Torres

The Boat by Nam Le

Man V. Nature by Diane Cook

One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg

Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine by Kevin Wilson

Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith

No One Tells You This by Glynnis MacNicol

A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley

Somebody with a Little Hammer by Mary Gaitskill

If They Come for Us by Fatimah Asghar

Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade

Meeting with My Brother by Yi Mun-Yol

Mundo Cruel by Luis Negron

All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones

The Case of Peter Pan: Or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction by Jacqueline Rose

How Winter Began by Joy Castro

Benjamin Percy on Urgency

I'm only two chapters into Benjamin Percy's Thrill Me, but I love it already. I remember many years ago he came and lectured on craft during Fall for the Book, my MFA program's annual festival of reading and writing and writers. I hung onto every word. Some of that talk was about structure, about borrowing other writers' successful structures — typing their stories, absorbing the rhythms of their sentences, sure, but also, bigger picture, absorbing their structures, already tried and true. He then said to go ahead and just map your own story onto those structures. Sentence by sentence, scene by scene. Where they describe setting, you describe setting. Where they write dialogue, you add dialogue. Where they introduce a new character, you introduce one. I might be totally misremembering his advice, but that is what I took away that day. And it is advice I've attributed to him and passed on to my own students over the years. I am hoping, really, really hoping that one of the chapters in Thrill Me will be about this, so that instead of paraphrasing Percy I can direct students instead to his own advice in his own words. 

But until I do (or don't) get to that chapter (this extra layer of suspense is not lost on me, in the context of this post), I thought I'd write here, briefly, about what he says re: urgency. (Also not lost on me is the fact that the tissue holder pictured above is made out of cement, which is funny to me and maybe only to me, but anyway, one of the small things you're reading for in this chapter is the answer to the question: "How do you make a tissue dance?" You'll have to read Percy's essay to find out, though, because that's how/where so much of the power of his point comes through.)  

In this chapter, Percy gives us clear guidelines: 

Establish a Clear Narrative GoalHuman UrgencyCreate Obstacles that Ramp Up the TensionCreate Lower-Order GoalsTicking ClockDelay Gratification and Withhold Information

As I've written in an earlier post, I love craft books because you can grow with them. Of the six points above, which Percy explains in detail, it's the 5th I needed to be told/reminded of today: 

"I work well under deadline. There is something about the watch on my wrist, the calendar on the wall, that energizes me. Because I have only so much time. This kind of urgency carries over to fiction, where a ticking clock — a sense of time running out — can make the pages seem to snap by with the speed of a second hand."

Toward the end of this section, he adds, "There is an expiration date, of course. What if Cinderella had until midnight . . . seven days from now to woo her prince? What if Jesus was in the wilderness for four thousand days instead of forty? What if the teenagers in Superbad had to lose their virginity before they graduated from PhD programs in Germanic literature instead of during their remaining days of high school?" 

For my purposes, this advice helps redirect my focus on the bal masqué scene or scenes for Fit Into Me that I have not yet written but started to recently think about here, although maybe I was already thinking about it here. Taken together, all of my recent blog posts on craft point to one thing: write these scenes.

Write them vertically: follow the characters home, live in their bodies.

Write them fantastically: because tonight she's in costume; tonight, she's Catherine the Great, and, later, when the costume's off and she's straddling her lover who says, "Jesus, it's a bloodbath," she's Aphrodite looking down at the body of Adonis gored through the groin.

Write them plainly: because, truly, the tea house woman's life is ordinary. And it's the essays, which I'll attend later — the nonfiction around her story — the prose tercets — that are stylized, that braid and twist and rhyme and intertwine and fade into these fictions I need to see through now.

Leslie Jamison on Commonness

In this craft/inspiration anthology, I also found and loved "On Commonness," Leslie Jamison's ode to Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay." In this essay, Jamison discusses simplicity — which I must admit I've never thought about in relation to Carson's books. Jamison points out that:

"Carson's mode of self-awareness doesn't apologize for its emotion She simply acknowledges that, whenever we feel, we do so in a way that anticipates the gaze of others — as well as anticipates the empathy or lack of empathy we'll encounter there. I feel some version of this happening when she writes:

When Law left I felt so bad I thought I would die. 
This is not uncommon. 

"These lines feel willfully melodramatic. [. . .] Carson's language is so surprising — you already know she can take any feeling and give it to you in some crazy, stylized way. Instead, she says, 'I thought I would die.' It's so willfully plain."

I love this: you already know she can take any feeling and give it to you in some crazy, stylized way. Yes. But Jamison's extended focus on some of Carson's most direct lines is exactly what I needed to read right now. I love both of these writers, so to get them together, one writing about the other, is like a double dose of medicine.

Earlier, I wrote about Lev Grossman's essay on fantasy in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I've only seen the TV and film versions of their books, so the experience of reading Jamison's essay on Carson is entirely different. She's writing about one of my favorite writers, and showing me something new, something I hadn't considered, something that, now that I see it too, makes me shout, Yes! This!

"I really believe that there are extraordinary things to be said about deeply ordinary experiences. When I teach nonfiction, the biggest student conundrum around personal writing is: Why would anybody care about what happened to me? There's shame around just having lived an ordinary life. And it's not like they're wrong — it is going to be harder for them to get a book deal, say, for their memoir of living in the suburbs. But the paralyzing anxiety I hear students articulate, and also feel in myself, is what 'this is not uncommon' speaks to. The experience of trying to find words for an emotion that mattered so much, even while recognizing it's the most common thing in the world." 

Lev Grossman on Fantasy

A few weeks ago I checked out a ton of craft books. One I'll mention quickly today, because I read it quickly, is an anthology of essays that are less about craft and more about inspiration — about that book or that passage that transformed readers into the writers they would become. This anthology is titled Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process. 

One of my favorite essays is Lev Grossman's "Into the Wardrobe, into the Self." Having watched the first two seasons of The Magicians on Netflix, I felt particularly in tune with what he says about the influence C. S. Lewis had on him. Here's one of my favorite passages:

"The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a powerful illustration of why fantasy matters in the first place. [. . .] There's a sense of anger and grief and despair that causes Lewis to want to discard the entire war, set it aside in favor of something better. You can feel him telling you — I know it's awful, truly terrible, but that's not all there is. There's another option. Lucy, as she enters the wardrobe, takes the other option. [. . .] 

"But I bristle whenever fantasy is characterized as escapism. It's not a very accurate way to describe it; in fact, I think fantasy is a powerful tool for coming to an understanding of oneself. The magic trick here, the sleight of hand, is that when you pass through the portal, you reencounter in the fantasy world the problems you thought you left behind in the real world."

For a few different reasons, I needed to read this. Fellow teachers, this is a very teachable essay. And even as I sit here imagining all the scenarios that end with me giving this essay to a student, I am thinking of it as a teacher who's still (and will always be) learning and absorbing new lessons, too — especially those that find me when I need them most.

Because Fit is nonfiction with flights of fictional fantasy (even if that fantasy operates in the realist mode), I've been worrying lately about the role of these fiction fragments. Overthinking, I realize now. What Grossman says here is all I need — all that matters is, in fact, how the tea house woman, in her story, encounters different versions of my own problems. And because her story is the center and mine is marginal and inferior, her problems must be the more interesting. The ones I need to revisit, vertically, before pushing forward and reimagining mine.