A friend teaching a class asked me to chime in about the process of writing my book. This is what I...

A friend teaching a class asked me to chime in about the process of writing my book. This is what I sent: 

I didn’t have a plan when I began writing the stories that became Naked Summer. I was too busy figuring out how to write a single story before attempting the next one. Partly this is because I drafted the core of that book during a two-year period in graduate school before gathering them together; when my program changed, I had an additional year to think about the stories as a book.

Only during my lean post-MFA years did I consider linking the collection in overt ways, but it frankly seemed forced. And, yes, I was thinking only of what might interest publishers, not what might best serve the manuscript itself. My book is linked informally or thematically instead. The books ends with a long story—some call it a novella, but I don’t—where echoes of earlier stories ripple forth: the narrator’s skeezy former boss in “Lost Lake” is the landlady’s ex-husband in “Naked Summer,” for instance, and that story’s protagonist interviews for a job at a company that employs the protagonist of “Shortest Distance.” Place helps, too. The stories are set in one small Indiana county.

I tried to find what my mentor, Kevin McIlvoy, called the “tuning fork” in the collection, that story to which the others might defer. The tuning fork story in my collection eventually changed because I withdrew it from the manuscript, along with another story, because they were about characters leaving Indiana and didn’t play well with the others. That’s when “Naked Summer” showed me how it might bring some semblance of unity to the book.

Finding a publisher was a long and frustrating process. Literary agents almost always praised the writing but—you guessed it—wanted to see a novel first. When I approached university presses, my luck was rather uneven. The stories were too much about Indiana, they said, or didn’t focus enough on Indiana. Two of the reviewers for one university press disparaged it as “K-Mart realism,” a classist term I despise, a leftover from Raymond Carver’s era. Another UP basically said: Why are you sending this to us? It’s good enough to be published in New York. Even the small press that eventually published the book had previously rejected an almost-identical version; I apparently kept poor records of where I’d sent the manuscript because I didn’t remember this and would not have submitted it a second time had I known. (I discovered this fact when searching my email account for a message from the publisher.)

I’m working on another collection now—five or six stories that will accompany a novella and will be intentionally linked. After Naked Summer and its difficult birth, I decided I would never again write a non-linked collection. It’s not on the front burner, though I hope to finish a draft within the next twelve months. I’m focusing my attention instead on what I hope is a lean, muscular novel of about 200-240 pages.

Some writers say that students should have a project in mind, or already in progress, before attending an MFA program, but I don’t think that’s required. I suppose it’s useful for writers who are already excellent and expect a book and a teaching job upon graduation. But in that case, it turns the MFA program into a job factory, not a place of learning and mistake-making, which is the greatest gift allowed by a two- or three-year graduate program: it allows writers the time to write and the opportunity to make risky and possibly wrong choices in an encouraging environment.

 

I adapted the first tuning fork story into a 114-page screenplay and realized it wasn’t really a short story. It’s now the novella I mention later in this piece.