Elizabeth Eslami's Blog, page 3
July 11, 2013
The Story and The Question
Excerpted from a talk I gave at Writers on the River in Corvallis, OR, May, 2013:
The Story and The Question
Say you want to write a story, or if you’re truly dedicated – and maybe even a little masochistic – say you want to write a novel. Where do you begin?
“I’ve got an idea for a novel.” – said every person you’ve ever met.
What could possibly be the problem with that? Isn’t it wonderful, all these people walking around, brimming with ideas for novels? The problem is that, “Idea for a novel,” for most people, is shorthand for a condensed version of plot. What people in the publishing world call a pitch. Eat, Pray, Love: A woman finds herself divorced and travels the world, healing and finding love again. That’s an example of a pitch. A pitch is fine and dandy, but here’s the trick of having an IDEA for a novel:
You actually have to write the novel.
You have to pile up three hundred pages of words, the right words, in the right order, every day for two years, or three or four, and make something vaguely bookshaped, something that kinda sorta looks like your idea… from four years ago, which, turns out, wasn’t enough to hang your hat on, much less three hundred pages on.
So… scratch that. Let’s begin with CHARACTER. Pretty good plan, and something you hear a lot about in writing workshops. Worry about plot later, begin with character. Someone fully imagined, someone you know down to his flat but oddly striated toenails. You’ve imagined his quirks, you’ve performed mock interviews with your character, who is a scuba diver named Barney Peltz from Jones Beach who smells of stress sweat and mildewed shower grout, whose trailer is full of wood paneling and cockatiels all named Bernice, and then… and then… What?
You realize you have a character, complete with a history and an encyclopedia of more quirks than you could possibly use, but you have no story. Plus, that thing about the cockatiels no longer works so well in chapter 6, when Barney begins rehabilitating bobcats.
Nearly every technique we know for beginning a novel is fraught with risk. Risk that we’ll run out of steam, that we’ll begin with something, but it won’t be enough to keep us going till the last page.
Start with THEME? Help us out, John Gardner.
"By theme we mean not a message -- a word no good writer likes applied to his work -- but the general subject, as the theme of an evening of debates may be World Wide Inflation." - John Gardner.
Now there’s a sexy theme! There are a lot of novels about race, about class, about mortality. How then can theme be enough?
How about if you begin with VOICE. But whose voice? Character’s voice? Narrator’s voice? A husky voice, a quavering voice, a saw through your bones voice, a Southern “I’m fixing to get Brittany from Super WalMart” voice. Can you write a novel with only voice? A tall order.
Begin with SETTING, but know before the last cab tears across the Brooklyn Bridge which of those 8 million people you’re populating your novel with, and why their story must be told here and now and nowhere else in this wide world.
No matter where you begin, there are still so many variables. Character, plot, voice – these are all essentials for constructing a novel, much as the tire, the steering wheel, the gas pedal are key components of a working automobile. But the engine – that’s what we’re really looking for.
What if we started somewhere else? From a place of curiosity and heartbreak and mind-rattling frustration.
“All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That – that is the raison d’etre of the art of the novel.” – Milan Kundera
“To try to understand it,” says Mr. Kundera. Writing is just that. To try to understand something, and not necessarily to succeed. It’s a messy business. We’re talking about an unanswerable question, the kind of question that sits at the core of you and only you, the kind that you’re willing to spend a lifetime worrying at, like a permanent splinter that keeps working its way down deeper into your heart.
When you write a novel, you’ll make certain decisions, and they will inevitably be the wrong decisions. You’ll have to change strategies, change characters, themes, ideas. So, if you’ve got that one thing, if you’re pinning it all on a single idea – the Uncle who fought in Vietnam, who had some interesting stories to tell – if that’s all you’ve got, believe me when I tell you it just ain’t enough.
Here’s where the sermon comes in. You must have something deeper and richer than a single character or a clever idea. You must have something inexhaustible, a fire that will burn even if you tear away all the kindling, a fire that will keep you warm for the years you will spend stacking these words.
That thing is your question, and only you know what it is.
The Question. Nabokov called it the “nerves of the novel… the subliminal coordinates with which to focus the plot.”
I like that he called it the “nerves” of the novel, don’t you? Because The Question is not the heart that fails, or the eyes that fade, or the tongue, dulled. The question is a live wire, connected to everything, providing juice for the whole body of the novel.
“Coordinates” works beautifully too because you can’t get lost. Change character, change setting, but let the question bring you back to the center, every chapter, again and again.
You see, too, that it’s connected to plot. Which means, by the way, that we’re not arguing that you dispense with the building blocks of a novel; rather, that you let them grow out of the question. The question helps you see character, setting, plot, theme, voice, POV. It’s the novel as kaleidoscope. Or better: the question as binoculars through which you see the novel. The question is that knob that allows you to focus the plot.
Jim Shepard: “It is… the question to which the novel keeps obsessively returning.”
And here is my own notion of the question as a self-sustaining fire. The Question doesn’t burn out. You will return to it during those dark days when you’ll lose the novel – no one talks about that time, do they? – when you’re no longer sure where the book is headed, never mind if it’ll get there. That will happen when you write a novel or a memoir or a story collection. That’s when you need the question to sustain you. The Question is the engine. The Question is the beacon.
The Question must be…
1) general and grand.
General because it can’t be, “Will Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky knock boots?” You’re not asking about your specific characters or your particular plot. You’re not asking what happens next. Remember: character and plot, that stuff is preceded by The Question.
But, it must be grand, because it has to matter. Especially to you.
The Question…
2) cannot be answered.
By you. Not now, not in four years, probably not ever. Kurt Vonnegut, when asked why he wrote, said, “I write again and again about my family.” That all his work, no matter what the apparent subject matter, was really about trying to understand his family. The Question is what eats at you, the thing you’re willing to spend your career trying to answer.
The Question…
3) has to be something you feel in your gut.
Something that is endlessly interesting to you intellectually, but more importantly, something that is an emotional landmine. Because the emotional part has to come through in your writing. This is why when you begin a novel with only character or theme or setting, without The Question, it often feels lifeless. It’s a motley collection of organs without the nerves.
“Authors don’t create anything out of whole cloth. Like the patient on the analytic sofa, we fixate on particular stories and characters and themes because they speak to the fears and desires hidden within us. Our inventions inevitably take the form of veiled confessions.” – Steve Almond.
“Veiled confessions.” Well, if that’s not enough to scare the bejeesus out of any writer, I don’t know what is. He goes on to say, “The beauty of the artistic unconscious is that it allows us to sneak up on our own intentions or to disguise them altogether.”
But what if… we tried to be more aware of our confessions, our intentions? What if it’s simply a matter of reading more, and writing more, and paying close enough attention that we can find our subliminal coordinates? I’m not keen on the idea that we’re always mindlessly spitting out confessions on the page. And why the shame? Why not know exactly what consumes us, and put it out into the damn world anyway?
“Write what you can learn about. Alternately: Write what interests you. Because it interests you for a reason, and that reason probably has to do with the rough stuff of your inner life.” – Fiona Maazel
Can you ever truly forgive? Does a scar mean you’re weaker or stronger? When we start to see someone for who they are, do we love them more or less?
These are all variations of The Question. Note that there’s something general about them, something inclusive. Recognize them for their grandness, too. To speak of love or mercy is to be both general and grand. It is to attempt to throw a lasso around the world, to luxuriate in the impossibility of such a feat. For you, as writers, all that matters is that the question is already there, within you. You don’t have to go out to look for it.
“Does a human life, a “personality,” exist as a single thread that can be followed through time? Is the “me” of twenty years ago the same “me” that exists now? Will I still be “me” in twenty years? I find myself drawn to these questions, and the more I think about them, the more they feel uncomfortable and difficult to answer…” – Dan Chaon
Uncomfortable and difficult to answer. But it doesn’t mean you stop trying. Hemingway said, “For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.”
So, lest we venture too far afield into the abstract, let’s come back to earth. What if you’re sitting there, right now, worrying over the fact that you don’t yet know your question? What then? Write more. Read more. It is only by doing this that you can know what you care about.
Be attuned to the work you write and read. Your taste in literature is a barometer for where you are in life, for what you need. Sometimes we read aspirationally, we’re drawn to works that portray what we want to be in that moment in our lives, works that speak to questions we’re wrestling with consciously or subconsciously. Even our tendency to read escapist works tells us something about ourselves, that we’re looking for something that can take us away from our own thoughts and biases.
When you read the work of another author and feel gut punched by it, guess what… you’ve got a lead. Follow your queasy stomach. Ask yourself, what is the question this author keeps returning to obsessively? And why does it speak to me? What took this particular book beyond the realm of pleasure-reading to true nourishment? The best work, the work constructed around The Question, that is the work that feeds you.
Once you find it, keep it close to you. Lean into it. Use it in the beginning just to get yourself in that chair, when you’d rather do anything else. Cling to it when you don’t have a clue what you’re doing.
Jim Shepard again: “We don’t know, exactly, what we’re doing when we’re starting something. We have a vague and skeletal and oafish idea that we articulate to ourselves as a justification for beginning, but that’s about it. It turns out, thank God, that what we end up with is more intricate and subtle than that. Mostly because it turns out that our intuition is a greater genius than we are. And mostly, too, because we’re not declaiming when we write fiction; we’re exploring. We’re turning characters that we’re getting to understand with more intimacy and confidence loose in certain situations, and observing their behavior, and what we believe and feel is then being mimed back to us. We’re in the process of teaching ourselves…”
You’re teaching yourself when you write. Loosen your grip. Let the work teach you what it will ultimately be. Surprise yourself. Having a question means you already have a built-in scaffolding, a safety net. Fumble around in the dark all you want, you’re still exploring with a purpose.
Interviewer to Wells Tower: Are you able to find those emotional goals yourself, or do you need other people, between drafts, to help you re-steer the boat?
Tower: “I don’t know if someone else can tell you. When you are revising or looking at that draft, you know where the real wood is behind the fiberboard. You know when you hit something that feels real and true and that needs to be said, and then you go back and try to make everything feel like that, which is hard.
I love that idea that in our own work, we can learn to distinguish between the real wood and the fiberboard. We’ve all had the experience of writing something we feel good about, only to return to it a few weeks or months later and cringe. That’s the blessing of time and fresh eyes. But even when you make massive changes, sweeping changes, don’t you often find yourself leaving one thing unchanged, whether it’s a paragraph or a piece of physical description, even a sentence or word? Something that you have no urge to touch or tamper with. That’s the real wood behind the fiberboard. And that, more often than not, is where you’ve come closest to bumping up against your Question.
“Then you go back and try to make everything feel like that, which is hard,” says Mr. Tower. Hard to say the least. But isn’t it a small and beautiful comfort to know that we have a compass point?
Note that he says, “I don’t know if someone else can tell you.” That’s true. Only you know. Your question is born from your own life, your grief and joy, from the art that makes you gasp and itch to be in the game.
Your question is your own ghost. No one else can help you identify it. Our job, as readers, is to watch you, the author, make a career of dancing with it.
The Story and The Question
Say you want to write a story, or if you’re truly dedicated – and maybe even a little masochistic – say you want to write a novel. Where do you begin?
“I’ve got an idea for a novel.” – said every person you’ve ever met.
What could possibly be the problem with that? Isn’t it wonderful, all these people walking around, brimming with ideas for novels? The problem is that, “Idea for a novel,” for most people, is shorthand for a condensed version of plot. What people in the publishing world call a pitch. Eat, Pray, Love: A woman finds herself divorced and travels the world, healing and finding love again. That’s an example of a pitch. A pitch is fine and dandy, but here’s the trick of having an IDEA for a novel:
You actually have to write the novel.
You have to pile up three hundred pages of words, the right words, in the right order, every day for two years, or three or four, and make something vaguely bookshaped, something that kinda sorta looks like your idea… from four years ago, which, turns out, wasn’t enough to hang your hat on, much less three hundred pages on.
So… scratch that. Let’s begin with CHARACTER. Pretty good plan, and something you hear a lot about in writing workshops. Worry about plot later, begin with character. Someone fully imagined, someone you know down to his flat but oddly striated toenails. You’ve imagined his quirks, you’ve performed mock interviews with your character, who is a scuba diver named Barney Peltz from Jones Beach who smells of stress sweat and mildewed shower grout, whose trailer is full of wood paneling and cockatiels all named Bernice, and then… and then… What?
You realize you have a character, complete with a history and an encyclopedia of more quirks than you could possibly use, but you have no story. Plus, that thing about the cockatiels no longer works so well in chapter 6, when Barney begins rehabilitating bobcats.
Nearly every technique we know for beginning a novel is fraught with risk. Risk that we’ll run out of steam, that we’ll begin with something, but it won’t be enough to keep us going till the last page.
Start with THEME? Help us out, John Gardner.
"By theme we mean not a message -- a word no good writer likes applied to his work -- but the general subject, as the theme of an evening of debates may be World Wide Inflation." - John Gardner.
Now there’s a sexy theme! There are a lot of novels about race, about class, about mortality. How then can theme be enough?
How about if you begin with VOICE. But whose voice? Character’s voice? Narrator’s voice? A husky voice, a quavering voice, a saw through your bones voice, a Southern “I’m fixing to get Brittany from Super WalMart” voice. Can you write a novel with only voice? A tall order.
Begin with SETTING, but know before the last cab tears across the Brooklyn Bridge which of those 8 million people you’re populating your novel with, and why their story must be told here and now and nowhere else in this wide world.
No matter where you begin, there are still so many variables. Character, plot, voice – these are all essentials for constructing a novel, much as the tire, the steering wheel, the gas pedal are key components of a working automobile. But the engine – that’s what we’re really looking for.
What if we started somewhere else? From a place of curiosity and heartbreak and mind-rattling frustration.
“All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That – that is the raison d’etre of the art of the novel.” – Milan Kundera
“To try to understand it,” says Mr. Kundera. Writing is just that. To try to understand something, and not necessarily to succeed. It’s a messy business. We’re talking about an unanswerable question, the kind of question that sits at the core of you and only you, the kind that you’re willing to spend a lifetime worrying at, like a permanent splinter that keeps working its way down deeper into your heart.
When you write a novel, you’ll make certain decisions, and they will inevitably be the wrong decisions. You’ll have to change strategies, change characters, themes, ideas. So, if you’ve got that one thing, if you’re pinning it all on a single idea – the Uncle who fought in Vietnam, who had some interesting stories to tell – if that’s all you’ve got, believe me when I tell you it just ain’t enough.
Here’s where the sermon comes in. You must have something deeper and richer than a single character or a clever idea. You must have something inexhaustible, a fire that will burn even if you tear away all the kindling, a fire that will keep you warm for the years you will spend stacking these words.
That thing is your question, and only you know what it is.
The Question. Nabokov called it the “nerves of the novel… the subliminal coordinates with which to focus the plot.”
I like that he called it the “nerves” of the novel, don’t you? Because The Question is not the heart that fails, or the eyes that fade, or the tongue, dulled. The question is a live wire, connected to everything, providing juice for the whole body of the novel.
“Coordinates” works beautifully too because you can’t get lost. Change character, change setting, but let the question bring you back to the center, every chapter, again and again.
You see, too, that it’s connected to plot. Which means, by the way, that we’re not arguing that you dispense with the building blocks of a novel; rather, that you let them grow out of the question. The question helps you see character, setting, plot, theme, voice, POV. It’s the novel as kaleidoscope. Or better: the question as binoculars through which you see the novel. The question is that knob that allows you to focus the plot.
Jim Shepard: “It is… the question to which the novel keeps obsessively returning.”
And here is my own notion of the question as a self-sustaining fire. The Question doesn’t burn out. You will return to it during those dark days when you’ll lose the novel – no one talks about that time, do they? – when you’re no longer sure where the book is headed, never mind if it’ll get there. That will happen when you write a novel or a memoir or a story collection. That’s when you need the question to sustain you. The Question is the engine. The Question is the beacon.
The Question must be…
1) general and grand.
General because it can’t be, “Will Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky knock boots?” You’re not asking about your specific characters or your particular plot. You’re not asking what happens next. Remember: character and plot, that stuff is preceded by The Question.
But, it must be grand, because it has to matter. Especially to you.
The Question…
2) cannot be answered.
By you. Not now, not in four years, probably not ever. Kurt Vonnegut, when asked why he wrote, said, “I write again and again about my family.” That all his work, no matter what the apparent subject matter, was really about trying to understand his family. The Question is what eats at you, the thing you’re willing to spend your career trying to answer.
The Question…
3) has to be something you feel in your gut.
Something that is endlessly interesting to you intellectually, but more importantly, something that is an emotional landmine. Because the emotional part has to come through in your writing. This is why when you begin a novel with only character or theme or setting, without The Question, it often feels lifeless. It’s a motley collection of organs without the nerves.
“Authors don’t create anything out of whole cloth. Like the patient on the analytic sofa, we fixate on particular stories and characters and themes because they speak to the fears and desires hidden within us. Our inventions inevitably take the form of veiled confessions.” – Steve Almond.
“Veiled confessions.” Well, if that’s not enough to scare the bejeesus out of any writer, I don’t know what is. He goes on to say, “The beauty of the artistic unconscious is that it allows us to sneak up on our own intentions or to disguise them altogether.”
But what if… we tried to be more aware of our confessions, our intentions? What if it’s simply a matter of reading more, and writing more, and paying close enough attention that we can find our subliminal coordinates? I’m not keen on the idea that we’re always mindlessly spitting out confessions on the page. And why the shame? Why not know exactly what consumes us, and put it out into the damn world anyway?
“Write what you can learn about. Alternately: Write what interests you. Because it interests you for a reason, and that reason probably has to do with the rough stuff of your inner life.” – Fiona Maazel
Can you ever truly forgive? Does a scar mean you’re weaker or stronger? When we start to see someone for who they are, do we love them more or less?
These are all variations of The Question. Note that there’s something general about them, something inclusive. Recognize them for their grandness, too. To speak of love or mercy is to be both general and grand. It is to attempt to throw a lasso around the world, to luxuriate in the impossibility of such a feat. For you, as writers, all that matters is that the question is already there, within you. You don’t have to go out to look for it.
“Does a human life, a “personality,” exist as a single thread that can be followed through time? Is the “me” of twenty years ago the same “me” that exists now? Will I still be “me” in twenty years? I find myself drawn to these questions, and the more I think about them, the more they feel uncomfortable and difficult to answer…” – Dan Chaon
Uncomfortable and difficult to answer. But it doesn’t mean you stop trying. Hemingway said, “For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.”
So, lest we venture too far afield into the abstract, let’s come back to earth. What if you’re sitting there, right now, worrying over the fact that you don’t yet know your question? What then? Write more. Read more. It is only by doing this that you can know what you care about.
Be attuned to the work you write and read. Your taste in literature is a barometer for where you are in life, for what you need. Sometimes we read aspirationally, we’re drawn to works that portray what we want to be in that moment in our lives, works that speak to questions we’re wrestling with consciously or subconsciously. Even our tendency to read escapist works tells us something about ourselves, that we’re looking for something that can take us away from our own thoughts and biases.
When you read the work of another author and feel gut punched by it, guess what… you’ve got a lead. Follow your queasy stomach. Ask yourself, what is the question this author keeps returning to obsessively? And why does it speak to me? What took this particular book beyond the realm of pleasure-reading to true nourishment? The best work, the work constructed around The Question, that is the work that feeds you.
Once you find it, keep it close to you. Lean into it. Use it in the beginning just to get yourself in that chair, when you’d rather do anything else. Cling to it when you don’t have a clue what you’re doing.
Jim Shepard again: “We don’t know, exactly, what we’re doing when we’re starting something. We have a vague and skeletal and oafish idea that we articulate to ourselves as a justification for beginning, but that’s about it. It turns out, thank God, that what we end up with is more intricate and subtle than that. Mostly because it turns out that our intuition is a greater genius than we are. And mostly, too, because we’re not declaiming when we write fiction; we’re exploring. We’re turning characters that we’re getting to understand with more intimacy and confidence loose in certain situations, and observing their behavior, and what we believe and feel is then being mimed back to us. We’re in the process of teaching ourselves…”
You’re teaching yourself when you write. Loosen your grip. Let the work teach you what it will ultimately be. Surprise yourself. Having a question means you already have a built-in scaffolding, a safety net. Fumble around in the dark all you want, you’re still exploring with a purpose.
Interviewer to Wells Tower: Are you able to find those emotional goals yourself, or do you need other people, between drafts, to help you re-steer the boat?
Tower: “I don’t know if someone else can tell you. When you are revising or looking at that draft, you know where the real wood is behind the fiberboard. You know when you hit something that feels real and true and that needs to be said, and then you go back and try to make everything feel like that, which is hard.
I love that idea that in our own work, we can learn to distinguish between the real wood and the fiberboard. We’ve all had the experience of writing something we feel good about, only to return to it a few weeks or months later and cringe. That’s the blessing of time and fresh eyes. But even when you make massive changes, sweeping changes, don’t you often find yourself leaving one thing unchanged, whether it’s a paragraph or a piece of physical description, even a sentence or word? Something that you have no urge to touch or tamper with. That’s the real wood behind the fiberboard. And that, more often than not, is where you’ve come closest to bumping up against your Question.
“Then you go back and try to make everything feel like that, which is hard,” says Mr. Tower. Hard to say the least. But isn’t it a small and beautiful comfort to know that we have a compass point?
Note that he says, “I don’t know if someone else can tell you.” That’s true. Only you know. Your question is born from your own life, your grief and joy, from the art that makes you gasp and itch to be in the game.
Your question is your own ghost. No one else can help you identify it. Our job, as readers, is to watch you, the author, make a career of dancing with it.
June 12, 2013
Tupelo Quarterly
Time to take the leap and submit your poetry and prose. You know you've been thinking about it.
Tupelo Press has long published beautiful books of poetry and literary fiction, and now they have launched a stellar literary magazine, Tupelo Quarterly , which aims to be -- as poet and Editor in Chief, Jessamyn Smyth, says -- "a home for all things beautiful, brilliant, and generous of spirit."
Amen. I think we could all use a little more of that.
I am delighted to serve Jessamyn as Senior Prose Editor, along with writers E.J. Levy and Eric Darton. Have a look at the ridiculously talented masthead here.
Our first issue launches in October, but in the meantime, submit your best poetry to our contest, judged by Ilya Kaminsky! The deadline is August 15th.
Come on, poets. Be brave and submit!
Tupelo Press has long published beautiful books of poetry and literary fiction, and now they have launched a stellar literary magazine, Tupelo Quarterly , which aims to be -- as poet and Editor in Chief, Jessamyn Smyth, says -- "a home for all things beautiful, brilliant, and generous of spirit."
Amen. I think we could all use a little more of that.
I am delighted to serve Jessamyn as Senior Prose Editor, along with writers E.J. Levy and Eric Darton. Have a look at the ridiculously talented masthead here.
Our first issue launches in October, but in the meantime, submit your best poetry to our contest, judged by Ilya Kaminsky! The deadline is August 15th.
Come on, poets. Be brave and submit!
May 8, 2013
The Weeklings Anthology
The Weeklings just released their first e-anthology, Revolution #1: Selected Essays 2012-2013. Edited by Jennifer Kabat, Sean Beaudoin, Janet Steen, and Greg Olear, this anthology features the work of some terrific writers, Robin Antalek, Lauren Cerand, Samuel Sattin, and Jess Walter, just to name a few. I've got a piece in there, too.
Best thing is that it's only $4.99, and the good people at The Weeklings believe in paying their writers, so all money goes directly to the authors.
Read more about why you should buy The Weeklings Revolution #1 here.
Best thing is that it's only $4.99, and the good people at The Weeklings believe in paying their writers, so all money goes directly to the authors.
Read more about why you should buy The Weeklings Revolution #1 here.
April 23, 2013
Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction
Delighted to announce that my short story collection, Hibernate, won the 2013 Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction!
Hibernate: Stories will be published by OSU Press in 2014.
About the book:
In this collection of stories -- winner of the 2013 Ohio State University Prize for Short Fiction and finalist for the 2011 Flannery O'Connor Award in Short Fiction -- characters slowly wake to hard choices. A Sudanese immigrant tries to start a life with his girlfriend in the United States, only to find himself pulled toward his mother's past. A group of American tourists visits an Indian Pueblo and realizes their tour guide isn't at all who they expected. Their ship moored on the ice, a captain and his men cling to the company of narwhals and Eskimos. Published separately in numerous literary journals, these stories form a dazzling landscape of the strange and joyful.
Hibernate: Stories will be published by OSU Press in 2014.
About the book:
In this collection of stories -- winner of the 2013 Ohio State University Prize for Short Fiction and finalist for the 2011 Flannery O'Connor Award in Short Fiction -- characters slowly wake to hard choices. A Sudanese immigrant tries to start a life with his girlfriend in the United States, only to find himself pulled toward his mother's past. A group of American tourists visits an Indian Pueblo and realizes their tour guide isn't at all who they expected. Their ship moored on the ice, a captain and his men cling to the company of narwhals and Eskimos. Published separately in numerous literary journals, these stories form a dazzling landscape of the strange and joyful.
April 12, 2013
Writers on the River in May
I'm so excited to be giving the first ever workshop for Writers on the River in Corvallis, Oregon! It's already sold out, but if you're interested in attending, contact these great people and get your name on the waiting list.
To read more about the workshop, click here.
On May 20th, the Monday before the workshop, I'll be giving a presentation, "The Story and the Question," which is open to the public:
In my workshop on the 25th, I’ll be talking about where and how to end a story or novel, so it only seems right that I first speak a little about beginnings. When you sit down to write, where do you begin? With character? Voice? Plot? Setting?
How much do you need to know – if anything – before you start committing those words to paper? Should you have a theme? Adopt (or already know?!) a particular style? Can you figure out some of this stuff along the way?
I’m going to argue that you begin with a question that you know you’ll never be able to answer. A question that means enough to you that you’re willing to fumble towards it for 350 pages. Nabokov has a fancypants description for this: “the subliminal coordinates with which to focus the plot.” Jim Shepard calls it “the question to which the novel keeps obsessively returning.” Call it whatever you want, but this is the question you are writing the book to figure out. The question is the eternal engine. Once you know your question, you are ready to begin.
This presentation will last roughly one hour and will move fluidly between an informal lecture and audience Q & A. We will likely look at several examples of these novel-generating questions and consider possibilities for our own.
Presentation: The Story and The Question: May 20, 2013 6:30-8pmDennis Hall at First Presbyterian Church, 114 SW 8th St.Corvallis, OR
Workshop: May 25, 2013 Meet @ 9:45am for all day workshopImagine Coffee House (Community Room) 5460 SW Philomath Blvd.Corvallis, OR
To read more about the workshop, click here.
On May 20th, the Monday before the workshop, I'll be giving a presentation, "The Story and the Question," which is open to the public:
In my workshop on the 25th, I’ll be talking about where and how to end a story or novel, so it only seems right that I first speak a little about beginnings. When you sit down to write, where do you begin? With character? Voice? Plot? Setting?
How much do you need to know – if anything – before you start committing those words to paper? Should you have a theme? Adopt (or already know?!) a particular style? Can you figure out some of this stuff along the way?
I’m going to argue that you begin with a question that you know you’ll never be able to answer. A question that means enough to you that you’re willing to fumble towards it for 350 pages. Nabokov has a fancypants description for this: “the subliminal coordinates with which to focus the plot.” Jim Shepard calls it “the question to which the novel keeps obsessively returning.” Call it whatever you want, but this is the question you are writing the book to figure out. The question is the eternal engine. Once you know your question, you are ready to begin.
This presentation will last roughly one hour and will move fluidly between an informal lecture and audience Q & A. We will likely look at several examples of these novel-generating questions and consider possibilities for our own.
Presentation: The Story and The Question: May 20, 2013 6:30-8pmDennis Hall at First Presbyterian Church, 114 SW 8th St.Corvallis, OR
Workshop: May 25, 2013 Meet @ 9:45am for all day workshopImagine Coffee House (Community Room) 5460 SW Philomath Blvd.Corvallis, OR
February 1, 2013
Lion Fever in The Weeklings
Remember the mountain lion that walked from South Dakota to Milford, Connecticut?
I wrote about him -- the ensuing hysteria, fear, excitement, and the assumptions made by the media and the public -- in my first piece for The Weeklings:
Read Lion Fever in Connecticut.
I wrote about him -- the ensuing hysteria, fear, excitement, and the assumptions made by the media and the public -- in my first piece for The Weeklings:
Read Lion Fever in Connecticut.
December 19, 2012
Tremors
Honored to have a story in this gorgeous anthology out February 1st, edited by Persis Karim and Anita Amirrezvani.
August 10, 2012
The Bandages Come Off
For some reason, I’m the one standing up here, but the truth is, if we’re going to talk about writing, if we’re going to dissect a story, we should be on our knees. Not to worship – although yes, reading a great story is like being inside a cathedral, the power of the words hushing you, turning your head this way and that. We should be on our knees because we’re in this thing together. I have no monopoly on storytelling. You have stories – you’ve brought them with you, whether you know it or not – and I will have failed you if I remain standing behind a podium or on a stage instead of on my knees right here with you, our hands in the dirt. The truth is that if we want to get into this thing – this process of writing – we better be ready to get down and excavate.
I’m not trying to be flowery when I say these things. At any reading I’ve ever done, there is always someone who asks me, “What advice would you give to someone trying to publish?” I tell them to forget at first trying to publish. I tell them to read and keep reading until they find some book, some writer, who sets them all aflame. Then practice getting close to that flame. Get your hand closer until you go from discomfort to sizzling palm, until you say, I cannot write as well as this writer and it makes me sick. Are you there yet? Yes? No? Either way, read some more.
I tell my students that Sherwood Anderson, now no more than dust and bone fragments in a box, will teach them more than I ever can sitting across from them with some flimsy handouts. Read and read and read and then, Step 2: write fearlessly. What does that mean? To write fearlessly? Not to dump your diary on the page like a pepper shaker. Keep your diary. But dump your passion on the page. Dump your blood.
Look, you’re going to leave this talk and go eat a cheeseburger somewhere and go home and feed the cat and sleep and dream, but remember this one thing, if you remember nothing else I say: No one has ever read something and said, you know, there was too much passion in this.
Here’s something I wrote recently, fearlessly. And when I say fearlessly, I mean that I was fearless writing the words – I did not stop them – but I was terrified to let them be published. My ego said, my secret shame said, why would anyone care what I have to say? I took my ego and my secret shame outside and beat them to a pulp. They pissed their pants, and I hit send. Be brave. It’s okay to look foolish. Hit send.
By now you realize there is nothing glamorous about this. I write; I have written. What I do is go into a room, wrestle my butt into a chair, tug on my face, eat potato chips, write some words, delete those words, write new words, re-arrange the new words. Hate it, fall in love with it, do it all over again.
Here’s what I don’t do. I don’t walk around waving my arms, saying, “You know, I love the idea of being a writer.” You know what? Being a writer means being poor and anxious and vulnerable and competitive and grasping. It's not at all romantic. If you want a fantasy gig, try Iron Man, flying around with flames shooting out of his feet. It makes no sense to talk about all the great American novels you’re going to write if you’re never going to write them. If you want to write, sit down, uncurl your fingers, and for heaven’s sake, write.
I don’t wait for inspiration or muses or bugs landing on my shoulders, whispering in my ear. Here’s what I also don’t do: aim for perfection. The biggest mistake my students make is that when I ask them to write something, they start acting like their world is made of glass. They get scared. When the stories come, they sound like they’re being told from inside a gym sock. It’ll get closer to perfect when you revise, but for now, just begin. Screw caution. Write with muscle. Write about work, write about what’s happening in the world or what’s happening in your bedroom. Aim to make someone feel something.
Go word by word. Write the way that Spiderman gets around. Let one image unfold into the next. A student wrote this sentence: “Those words haunted her, and soon it made her crazy enough to be checked into a mental institute.” I wrote this sentence as another option: “Those six words, thick and heavy as asphalt, haunted her, took her down a road so far and fast she couldn’t turn her head, took her, finally, to a place without windows.” Those words, what words? Give them weight, a number, connect them to the tangible. From asphalt grows the road, Spiderman’s web. From the road grows the journey (far and fast), the inevitability of “crazy” conveyed by the fact she can’t turn her head. She can’t see any other options. Mental institute just sits there. Make it “a place without windows,” and we feel what a mental institute could be, what it would mean for this character. One image unfolds into the next.
You know what breaks my heart? On more occasions than I’d like to admit, someone will approach me and say, “I should sit down with you and tell you some of my stories, let you write them down.” When I ask this person why she doesn’t write her stories herself, she always says, “Oh, I can’t. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the gift, the way with words.”
If you have a story to tell – and you know you do – tell it. Write it. Get it down. Don’t leave your children to a stranger, to some uncertain moment in the future, what you imagine to be the perfect hour. Take off the bandages and describe what you see, scabs and dried blood. This is what good writing is, the things we don’t yet realize we need to see. If the bandages are tight, slice through them with your pen. Watch the ink stain the muslin. Be brave. Get down on your knees.
- Excerpted from a talk I gave at the Nye Beach Writers Series, May 2012.
July 21, 2012
Three Great Writers You Should Be Reading Right Now
Author Victoria Johnson recently published her own letter to herself at sixteen, A Life Without Pictures, which you can read here. I loved participating in this series with writers Harrison Solow, Signe Pike, Thaisa Frank, and many more. Victoria's piece is the series finale, but the series itself doesn't seem to want to end. "What advice would you give to your sixteen year old self?" Three brave and brilliant writers answered the question: Chris Clarke, author of Walking With Zeke, wrote this godawful gorgeous response. Jessamyn Smyth, quadruple-threat writer and editor of poetry, prose, short fiction, plays (and more!) wrote this piece, Skinless. Read it and be gut punched, awed, electrified. Last but not least, Dale Favier and Glimmer. God, this will break your heart. Dale is the author of two collections of poetry that you'll want to buy after reading this,
Opening the World
and
Not Coming Back
. If you want great writing, gobble up everything you can by Chris, Jessamyn, and Dale. Track down their stories, books, and blogs. I promise you this: Theirs is the kind of writing that makes you want to leap up and run around the block three times. Barefoot.
June 12, 2012
Escaping into Montana's Rattlesnake National Recreation Area
I can't think of a better way to spend a week than hiking Montana's Rattlesnake National Recreation Area just outside of Missoula. I wrote about it for the Escapist Traveller here.
