Genre Trouble: The MFA I don’t have

Posted on March 14, 2012 by epbeaumont

I recently launched on the project of filing all of my written work in one place, since it was scattered all over my rather overstuffed apartment. My sister suggested that I pretend that I was going to get a new work space for each of my ventures. So in the course of pulling the writer’s office together…

… I turned up twenty-four archive boxes at least, the equivalent of eight file cabinets. Yes, Ernie, the real writer is the one who really writes, and I have passed the million-word mark more than a few times. A ream of paper is 500 pages, and it takes only four of those to make up the 2000 double-spaced, one-inch-margin pages that comprise a million words. A million words, it’s claimed, pave the road to mastery, or (less optimistically) make up the inevitable dross that we must produce on the way to finished work.

If each of those boxes has a million words in it (and that’s possibly an underestimate) then I’ve crossed that mark twenty-four times.

No MFA program on the planet requires that level of output.

My education has been the practice school of writing. That’s the secret: the more you read, and the more you write, and the more you lay what you write alongside what you read and admire, the better you get. At the outset of this last phase of fiction writing, some time in late 2003, I compared one of the chapters of a novel I wrote at 18 to one of my favorite chapters from War and Peace.  Of course my work fell short of that measure, but I took the time to ask why.

What was the difference between my journeyman work and Tolstoy’s masterpiece?

Tolstoy’s scene was utterly simple, and utterly quiet, and devoted entirely to the sensory details of the experience. I had just begun my theatrical training, and something connected with the things my teacher had been asking us:

What is the emotional truth of this character?

What is this character willing to give up for freedom?

And the wisdom of the Method, in its real form (not the self-indulgent histrionics that sometimes pass under its name) lies in the body and the senses, where our own memories live.

In the time since, I’ve written experiences that I’ve never had. I’ve written places that I’ve never visited and fooled people who lived there into thinking that I knew the view out their back window. No piece of paper in the world can replace those hours of work.

Overall, my experience with many people who have emerged from MFA programs has not been positive: they’ve been arrogant, the first to mistake critique for trashing, and (most devastating of all) not particularly productive. And they’re particularly vicious when blocked, and I don’t wonder at that: if you’ve paid over $50,000 for a piece of paper, who is some self-taught upstart to be writing when you’re not?

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Guest Post: Throwing Yourself into Editing

Posted on March 12, 2012 by epbeaumont

Today my colleague Becca Patterson and I are exchanging guest posts on the underrated adventure of editing. To see my post on editing, visit her blog, The Cat’s Mreauow. 

It starts when you look up and see just how much work there is to even get started.  You shake yourself pretending to limber up, but really you’re just taking a few more minutes to breathe before starting that long climb.  When you can’t shake yourself any more, you reach out and grab that first hand hold.  You lift your foot to the first rung.  It’s too late now.  If you back out you look a fool so you keep going.  Hand then foot then hand then foot.  You are aware of the progress, but don’t dare look back.  Hand then foot then hand then foot and soon, you are at the top.  All of a sudden things look different.  You’ve made it to the top.

The top is only the beginning.  From here you can see all the possibilities.  There in the distance is your house, the roof just barely visible through the trees.  You can see your car in the parking lot too.  The one thing you don’t want to do from here is look down, but that’s where you have to go.  Slowly you let go of the handholds and inch your way out on the platform.  Step by inch you move to the edge.  The adrenaline is taking hold now.  Your breathing is getting faster, your muscles are tensing up.  You know what you have to do, but there’s a part of your that doesn’t want to do it.

With a deep breath you silence that inner voice of doubt and fear.  One, two, three, go.  One last step and gravity takes hold.  You are pulled down faster and faster, speeding toward your destination.  And then, with a sudden deceleration, it’s all over.

Editing is like that.  It’s a mix of exhilaration and fear as you work your way through the process.  It’s an intimidating process with a breath taking reward.  Just like jumping off the high board, it takes effort to get started.  You have to do the hard work of getting ready.  But once you take that leap, the process happens.  The trick is remembering the fun on the way down rather than the terror of staring out over the ledge.  Remember the feeling of relief and joy when it is all over, not the strain it took to get up there.  Keep the goal in mind – a better story – as you face the unedited version with all it’s errors and missing words and scenes.

Editing isn’t all throwing yourself into the wind.  You have to get up to the top first, but reading and understanding the problems in the story.  This is the time when temptation can sabotage you.  That little voice of doubt whispers in your ear that it’s too hard, the story isn’t worth it, you’ll only mess it up worse.  Learn to ignore that voice the same way you ignore the temptation to climb back down the ladder.  When you are at the top, ready to plunge into details and work of actually making the changes, take time to look around.  Notice the view.  From here, you can see the possibilities.  Here is where you learn how not to make the same mistakes in the next story.  Here is where you decide which way the story needs to go.  You decide which dive to perform.  Don’t let the possibilities paralyze you.  You have to take that final step, make that decision and go with it.

Don’t worry.  When you splash down you have plenty of time to look at your work.  If you don’t like the results, the ladder is still there.  Climb back up and try again.  Just like diving, or writing, editing takes practice.  The more you do it, the easier it becomes.  And yet, that thrill of plummeting through the air never goes away.

-Becca Patterson

http://www.mreauow.com

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Six Sentence Sunday, 11 March 2012 (The Reincarnations of Miss Anne)

Posted on March 11, 2012 by epbeaumont

It’s that stupid Vera, on about the data again.  She wants clarification of something or other.  They met, and Vera was talking, and Anne-Marie has to confess that she started thinking about her kitchen and the remodeling she’d like to do.  That’s so much more interesting than Vera and her process.

Anne-Marie is not interested in the process.  She wants the underlings to do the work and get it done, that’s all.  

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Flash fiction: The person in the mirror

Posted on March 9, 2012 by epbeaumont

Author’s note: In preparation for NaNoWriMo 2009, someone put up daily prompts on one of the forums. I did them in the spirit of warm-ups, but some of them turned into stories. Here is one such.

Prompt: I don’t know the person I see in the mirror anymore.

“Time was, I knew who I was.”

“What are you talking about?  You look the same as you ever did.  Better, even, since you’ve been eating well.”

“Yeah, these are good digs.  But things are… different.  I don’t know how to say it.  I listen to them talk about it and it’s not the same as I thought when I started.  I’ve seen the records now…”

“The records?”

“Famine last fall, remember?  Well, you could call it that, if famine means people going hungry.  But not an act of nature.  Certainly not an act of god, whoever that is.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  (Reaches for another roll.)

“It’s planned.  Surplus population, right?  Well, they’re getting that dealt with, sorted out, cleaned up—anyway, that’s what the reports say.  Efficiency, progress, all that.  Except… I don’t know the person I see in the mirror anymore.  I thought I believed in all that, you know, like the Brown Shirt Girl in the poster, but I’m not sure about any of it any more.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.  Food’s fine, here.”

(Process information: 10/14/2009 finished at 5:12 PM, 184 words, 7 minutes—made it up as I went along)


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Genre Trouble: Everybody is subcultural (Literary fiction is a genre too)

Posted on March 7, 2012 by epbeaumont

Until I started working with the National Novel Writing Month local community in the Twin Cities, my experience with peer-organized writing groups (as opposed to professionally led classes) had been nearly uniformly negative.

Now, I feel as if I’ve come home. And who are my compatriots? Genre writers all: science-fiction, fantasy, romance, detective fiction, horror, erotica. Now the fact of the matter is that these genres, these so-called sub-literatures, are far more representative of the whole human history of storytelling than is modern literary fiction. People have always told stories of extraordinary happenings or fantastical creatures, or the irruptions of the divine or the diabolical into ordinary life. The workaday life, the five minutes of Act 1, scene 1, is nowhere so interesting as the interruption thereof. And the fantastical, the vampires and werewolves and ghosts and mysterious strangers from the depths of Hades or the far reaches of the galaxy, come bearing the gifts of knowledge about ourselves, the things that we cannot admit in waking life about the world and how it really works.

In the next months, I’m posting excerpts from my 2009 National Novel Writing Month manuscript, The Reincarnations of Miss Anne, which is closer to its real-life (mostly historical) sources than anything else I’ve written. There’s a terror to the veil being so thin—or the mask—that separates this extended dream from real life. I finished the month of November 2009 with this monster staring me in the face and asking me the question, Quo vadis?  Where are you going?

And I honestly don’t know the answer to that question.

I look at the stories I’ve written since, and the mask is very much more translucent: iridescent and full of shifting depths, behind the smiling face of a story of once-upon-a-time. The darkness in those stories is implied; I don’t say it’s our world that I’m telling, and in fact sometimes I don’t see it until I’ve finished the telling of the tale.

Francisco Goya, one of my favorite visual artists, has an amazing range, from sunlit portraits of Spanish aristocrats, to the the least flattering royal group portrait ever painted, to the impressionistic sketches of the Disasters of War, the Capriccios,  and the famous Black Paintings—the latter limned in pale paint on the black ground of the walls of his own house. When I saw those last three, I had a moment of truth: someone else has thought these thoughts and tried to tell the truth. In that moment, I also realized the limits of classical realism. The real nightmares cannot be depicted in realistic detail; no one hangs around to catalogue the dental work of the dragon.

Literary fiction sets about the portrait of the dragon from a completely different direction: by looking at the details of ordinary life. But make no mistake about it: we’re all on the same path, pulp troubadors or academic short story writers. The same abyss yawns under all of our feet, and the ribbon of the open road unwinds under our feet, enticing us toward the horizon with the magical words, “And then…”

Everyone is subcultural, and literary fiction is a genre too.

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Six Sentence Sunday, 4 March 2012 (The Reincarnations of Miss Anne)

Posted on March 4, 2012 by epbeaumont

In Utopia, no-place or Eutopia, the good place, dreams are solid as marble and blue as the sea.  Favilla Vogel, whose name means a bird, had been dreaming of flight.  She had her arms wrapped around someone whose face she could not see, whose back nestled into her chest and belly as if they were sleeping lovers or mother and child, someone who trusted her, for not once in the course of the dream did her partner in flight turn to see who it was to whom belonged the encircling arms.  Around them the crisp snap of drapery, like a silk flag in the wind or the more substantial flap of sailcloth in a stiff breeze—the sort of fair wind that would send your little skiff sailing across the open bay of Utopia, and make you burst into song.  

Which Favilla did—in a fine contralto voice—several times a week, on the stage of the Passionate Series of Song.  This twelvemonth they were staging The Loves of Vera Pavlovna, an opera from New Russia.  

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Flash fiction: Let’s play a little game

Posted on March 2, 2012 by epbeaumont

 

Author’s note: In preparation for NaNoWriMo 2009, someone put up daily prompts on one of the forums. I did them in the spirit of warm-ups, but some of them turned into stories. Here is one such.

Prompt (and title): Let’s play a little game.

Let’s play a little game. Suppose we imagine this is all a chessboard, see—you play chess where you come from, don’t you?  Great game, chess.  King and queen and big shots, and then the little guys—the pawns—and see, if a pawn is really lucky, see, she can cross the board and turn into a queen.

Okay, so it’s chess, see…

No, we are not the king or the queen.  Not us, baby.  We are the pawns, see, and we have to get to the other side of the board.  Not that our chances are particularly good, because we can only take teenytiny steps compared to the rest of them.  Bishop can zap you if he’s got a clear shot across the diagonal.  Rook gets you going down a row or a column, see.  Knights—now they’re scary, are knights, because they can do this little hooking thing, that’s their move. You think that wouldn’t be much, but sometimes you’ve got your eye on the bishop or the rook, and bang! some knight gets you.

The king’s not much, he can’t take but a step in any one direction, but he’ll kill you sure as anything if you get too close.  And the queen takes no prisoners.

Damn, it’s dark out there.  How much oxygen you got left there?  Not bad.  OK, that’s good for the night.  I think there’s another tank back there.

We’re pinned down for the night, though.   No, don’t think further than that.  Pawns can only move a step at a time.

Let’s play a little game.  Suppose we got a chessboard—well, we don’t, but just imagine.  OK, see it?  I’ll play black, you play white.

Oh all right, if it’s silver and blue where you come from, fine.  Suit yourself.

(Process information: 10/14/2009 finished at 5:05 PM, 298 words, 11 minutes)

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Genre Trouble: Loose Baggy Monsters, or the Lasagna Theory

Posted on February 28, 2012 by epbeaumont

The overture: two epigraphs

A good play, like a good lasagna, should be overstuffed: It has a pomposity, and an overreach: Its ambitions extend in the direction of not-missing-a-trick, it has a bursting omnipotence up its sleeve, or rather, under its noodles: It is pretentious food.

Tony Kushner, from the essay On Pretentiousness, in Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, A Play, Two Poems and A Prayer, pp. 61-62

A picture without composition slights its most precious chance for beauty. . . . there may in its absence be life, incontestably, as “the newcomes” has life, as “Le Trois Mousquetaires,” as Tolstoi’s “Peace and War,” have it; but what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?

Henry James, Preface to the New York edition of The Tragic Muse (1908)

***

First movement: What I like in a novel

What I like in a novel… is everything.

Continue reading →

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Six Sentence Sunday, 26 February 2012 (The Reincarnations of Miss Anne)

Posted on February 26, 2012 by epbeaumont

The harbor at Utopia is shaped like a crescent.  Twin arms of white-and-gold headland wrap tenderly around the bay like the horns of the moon, like a mother holding a beloved child.  Favilla Vogel looks out over the water, as she rises from her bed under the great window.  The weather in Utopia is delicious for sleeping, nights cool enough to make the weight of a sheet and perhaps a blanket quite pleasant, and the warmth of a lover’s skin not unendurable.  

Favilla loves the morning more than any other time.  it’s the sweet interval between dream and life.  

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Flash fiction: Had a bad day

Posted on February 24, 2012 by epbeaumont

Author’s note: In preparation for NaNoWriMo 2009, someone put up daily prompts on one of the forums. I did them in the spirit of warm-ups, but some of them turned into stories. Here is one such.

Prompt (and title): Had a bad day.

The glass is shattering in sheets now, as they drive the armored cars into the lobby.  It’s insulated, but it wasn’t built to stand up to this, so it shatters across, and when we’re lucky it crumbles.  You don’t want the kind that isn’t safety glass, because it comes apart into huge daggers—hence the need for armor.  They’re shooting back, of course, but it will be short work once we’ve got our makeshift helicopters onto the roof.

At some point in all this, we’ll get behind cover and grab a bite to eat.

Except this one’s not as planned.  There’s Magda in her flak jacket and the helmet that she’s got to fit because she has on two knitted hats under it.  “There’s something nasty on the tenth floor,” she says.

“Fuck,” Raffi says. “I thought somebody already got that.

Magda spits and makes a swipe at the soot on her face.  “No, it got them.”  She tosses the ammunition belts over to us.  “We salvaged those and lost Leo in the process, so don’t lose them.  It’s getting ugly, kids.”

Raffi says, “Well, boss lady, that would be the understatement of the week.”

She grins, though her eyes don’t come to the party.  “Had a bad day.”  Spits again, and I notice that the soot or whatever is all over her mouth.  “Christ, this tastes like shit.”

“You didn’t join the revolution for the food, did you?”

“Shut up, Raffi.”

(Process information: 10/14/2009 , 242 words)


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