No Word Allowed

No Word Allowed

by Cathy Day Teaching Writing

A few months ago, I gave my Intro to Creative Writing class this assignment:

Create a story, essay, poem, or play that is composed in anything EXCEPT Microsoft Word (or any word processing program). You must type the text into some other kind of software or application or tool, such as Google Maps, Facebook, Flickr, Xtranormal, Power Point, Ebay, Survey Monkey, Blogger, etc. Basically: if it’s got a dialog box you can type in, then you can use it. Your piece must engage with, make use of the medium or mode you’ve selected.

At first they thought I was crazy, but I spent some time showing them examples: Continue reading →

“No Writing is Ever Wasted” by Lowry Pei

by Cathy Day Writing

I’ve “met” some extremely cool people since starting this blog, such as writer-teacher Lowry Pei. He’s the author of the novel Family Resemblances, as well as many short stories, essays, and book reviews. He teaches writing at Simmons College, and he blogs about teaching writing at On the Way to Writing.

NO WRITING IS EVER WASTED

by Lowry Pei

A bold statement, I know. I make it with a crucial condition attached: No writing is ever wasted, as long as you keep writing.

In 1975 I decided that since I had written a 300-page dissertation for my Ph.D., thereby proving I could make something of that size, I would try to make something I really wanted to write: a novel. Of course, after years of higher education in which I focused on novels as much of the time as I could (my dissertation was on Anthony Trollope), I immediately found I had no idea how to write one. So I set out to try anyway.

I did what I now think is the usual thing novices have to do: I had no idea how to create a story out of whole cloth, so I started writing a narrative that was part of my not terribly exciting life with the names changed. After most of a year, I had “finished” this cringe-inducing piece of work and showed it to a T.A. of mine, Kim Stanley Robinson, who has since become a deservedly celebrated science-fiction author. “Pei,” he said, “where’s the fiction in this fiction?”

Busted. Well, what could I do? I started over. This time I attempted to tart up my life experience by adding some things my own life didn’t have much of (action, sex), thinking, I guess, that if I sprinkled these fictitious jimmies on the autobiographical sundae, it would pass for what it wasn’t.

Of course that didn’t work either. Then a very kind person (Kathryn Marshall, the author of My Sister Gone) read this crappy manuscript and said I should try writing it in the first person. That, in the end, opened the door and led me actually to begin writing fiction; so five or six years after I first started trying, I finally completed something I could truly call a novel.

It wasn’t very good.

But all that writing wasn’t wasted because I finally knew what the hell I was doing. The next novel I wrote was Family Resemblances, which got published by Random House and thereby legitimized me as “a novelist.” I got all excited and wrote another novel; I sent it off to Random House and they promptly rejected it. A colleague of mine, the poet Bill Corbett, read it and said, “It didn’t come as a story.” He was right; it was more of a Chautauqua than a series of dramatic actions.

But all that writing wasn’t wasted; for one thing, it was apparently what I had to write, and I had to get it written in order to keep on writing. Meanwhile, it was teaching me more and more about writing. The narrative shifted among several viewpoint characters, which was a technical challenge I hadn’t taken on before. Though as a novel it was too much of a talk-fest with meditative counterpoint, that made it also a major lesson in crafting dialogue and interior monologue. And that wasn’t the last novel I wrote that didn’t work; later I wrote about half a book starring Karen, the protagonist of Family Resemblances (and its sequel, From the Next Room), that didn’t work. It started to feel forced and then it lost its forward momentum and died a natural death. In a word, so what? Was it such a bad thing to have discovered, through writing, that that story didn’t have to be told? I didn’t think so then and I don’t now. If anything, I think that effort taught me a major lesson about letting go. Writing can be very hard and require a large capacity for persistence, not to say stubbornness, but along with the stubbornness you have to learn when to let go. Just because you can write your way down a certain path as a writer, that doesn’t mean you should. And though writing stuff that doesn’t work is not a waste, it’s possible to lessen the amount of time you have to spend learning the hard way.

I first learned that in the writing of Family Resemblances. Late in the first draft, near the end of the book, I was writing in a way typical of me, not knowing (and not wanting to know) what was coming next or how the book was going to end. There was a fork in the road of the story and I chose which way to go and started off in that direction. I was writing the same as before, I was well inside the world of the story as I had been for a long time, I could imagine every particular of the scene as it unfolded with no diminution of its reality. I obviously could write this. But the more I wrote my way down that road, the more I felt a nameless, unignorable sensation in my stomach. Its location felt very specific. It wasn’t a sharp pain or even an ache, but there was something ineffably wrong about it and it wasn’t going away, it was slowly getting worse. After perhaps twenty pages of this experience, I decided my stomach was trying to tell me something specific: This thing you’re writing right now? It’s not the thing you need to write. Don’t go this way. It will only take you farther and farther from where you want to go.

That was good advice. The tricky thing is that you have to learn when to trust it. You have to learn how to sort out the many passing somatic experiences that go on in the background of writing, the twinges of anxiety and dread, the fits of discouragement or euphoria, and figure out when the faint, fleeting, but definite feeling that something is not right means that something is not right. The only way to learn that is to act on the feeling and see what happens. When you discover that yes, it really wasn’t right, that that message was trustworthy, you have a brand-new powerful tool. As long as you keep writing. Otherwise, it’s as if somebody gave you a gorgeous new table saw but you never built anything with it.

The most powerful confirmation that no writing is ever wasted came about twenty years after I first started trying to write a novel.

After writing my apprentice novel that didn’t work (or perhaps simultaneous with it, I can’t remember for certain) I wrote many drafts of a long story which I thought wanted to be a novella (it was eventually published as “Vital Signs” in 1987). That story’s protagonist is an insurance agent named Tom, living in Columbia, Missouri. His wife is pregnant and he is possibly falling in love with his temporary secretary, though we never do find out what comes of that. He is definitely having some kind of existential crisis. Tom is descended from the protagonist of the apprentice novel, who also lived in Columbia, Missouri, and also worked at a mundane job, behind the counter of his camera shop. So that novel that didn’t work gave rise to “Vital Signs,” but my imagination wasn’t done yet. The fourth novel I wrote was about an insurance agent living in Columbia having, this time, an unmistakably spiritual crisis that became a strange journey into a shamanic underworld, a sojourn on the borderline between ordinary reality and another that’s equally real and totally at odds with the everyday. It was, I realized about halfway in, the novel I had been trying to write all along, even in the very first effort that didn’t work, the one I wrote in order to learn the basics of craft. So that initial impulse was far more powerful than I ever realized, and all that work had started something bigger than I ever imagined.

So much for writing being wasted. And this experience brings me to something I find strange and wonderful: it is possible to start to imagine, and start to write, a story that one is absolutely unable to complete at the time – a story that will only finally be written years later, when one has been through enough life experience, has written enough, read enough, matured enough, evolved enough to be the person who can at last write it. When you start that story not only can you not imagine where it will eventually go, you cannot imagine the person or the writer you will eventually become. But you will, and it will.

If you keep writing.

— Lowry Pei, March 2011

Lowry’s thoughtful comments on my posts have deepened my thinking about this subject, and apparently, the feeling’s been mutual. A few months ago, he started his own teaching blog, On the Way to Writing, “resources and meditations on writing and teaching writing.”

Here is his invitation.

After thirty-plus years of writing (fiction, especially novels, and non-fiction), teaching writing, directing writing programs, and working with teachers, I want to share my ideas and materials with whoever can benefit from them.

Basically, this incredible writer-teacher has opened up his file cabinet to us. You’d be crazy not to take Lowry up on this generous offer. Spend some time on his blog. You’ll be glad you did. There you’ll find essays like this one.

You’re Not Ready to Write a Novel: by Rebecca Rasmussen

You’re Not Ready to Write a Novel: by Rebecca Rasmussen

by Cathy Day Writing

If you would like to write a guest post for “The Big Thing,” by all means, let me know. Maybe we could trade? That’s what debut novelist Rebecca Rasmussen and I did. My essay on “Literary Citizenship” appeared on her blog, The Bird Sisters. I’m really looking forward to her book, which will burst into flight on April 12.

You’re Not Ready to Write a Novel

By Rebecca Rasmussen

You’re not ready to write a novel. If you can’t write a proper short story, what makes you think you can handle the scope of a novel? Why would you want to write a novel, when short stories are the far superior art form? Stick with what you know. Haven’t you heard of Poe’s unity of effect?

It seems unbelievable to me now that anyone was ever not in support of me writing a novel, but after attending two MFA programs, I have to say that the above statements are generally what a student of fiction can expect to hear over the course of their time in a writing program. The question now that I have written a novel that’s being published in April is why? Continue reading →

Debate is Not Hate

by Cathy Day CW Programs Writing

Let me be perfectly clear: I am not against MFA programs.

My essay in the Millions was originally titled The Big Thing: 10 Thoughts on Moving from “Story” to “Book.” Wisely, the editors re-titled my piece “The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia’s Novel Crisis.” Their provocative title prompted many people to read and share and discuss the essay-which is good. But perhaps it also raised the hackles of creative writing faculty-which is not good.

(BTW: Here’s a short history of the recent spate of MFA Program Critiques that have come out in the last year or so.)

Today I discovered this article by Elise Blackwell published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The real subject of this essay is the importance of geographic diversity in one’s literary upbringing. I support this idea wholeheartedly. As a native Midwesterner who earned her MFA in the South, I’m living proof that a writing apprenticeship doesn’t have to take place in an East Coast urban center as some might believe-and I tell my students this, year after year after year.

But for some reason, her wonderful argument was prefaced by pointing to “anti-MFA online hate,” and my essay was included as an example of said hate, a “dismissal” and a “strike to the heart” of writing programs.

This distresses and angers me. And I want to respond, because it’s important to my students-past, present, and future-that I not be unfairly categorized as some sort of zealot.

And this is why:

There’s a file on my computer called “Recommendations.” Right now, there are about 100 letters in that file written over the last 15 years. A lot of those letters were written in support of my students’ efforts to get jobs, scholarships, internships, to get into law school, into writers’ conferences and colonies, into all kinds of graduate programs.

But most importantly, I write a lot of letters on behalf of students trying for a dwindling number of open slots in two very competitive applicant pools: the academic teaching-position pool, and the MFA admissions pool. The letters I write for those students are read by creative writing faculty, and I need those folks in particular to hear me say this: I am not Anis Shivani.

My essay was not an attempt to tar and feather an entire discipline or those devoted to teaching within that discipline. I merely wanted to start a conversation among my fellow teachers of creative writing. I’m not someone on the outside of the ivory tower looking in, throwing stones. I’ve been inside this system for twenty years.

And in the last few years, I’d started noticing something:

  • A lot of young writers I knew (online and f2f) were graduating with MFA theses comprised of short stories and were having a tough time finding a publisher for those books. They were frustrated with their literary apprenticeship, with the realities of the publishing market, but also with themselves.
  • A lot of young writers I knew were trying to move from the writing of disparate stories and essays to the writing of books, but were struggling to do so. Some were motivated by the aforementioned frustrations, but in most cases, they were making this move because writing a novel or novel-in-stories was their lifelong dream.
  • A lot of young writers I knew said they felt discouraged from bringing novels and “big things” to workshop. Some of those young writers were my own students. Yes, my own undergraduate and graduate students said they regularly submitted short stories to fulfill my workshop requirements while writing longer works on their own, outside the workshop environment. Note: if I was blaming anyone in my Millions essay, I blamed myself. Front and center. Number 1 of my 10 thoughts.

Such a series of circumstances represented to me a puzzle worth solving. Why was this happening? Granted, not everyone agrees that these circumstances even exist, which is fine. But personally, I thought it was something worth investigating. And because I am a writer, I wrote about that investigation. I also started this blog as a way to share this investigation with others.

I’m not sure what (besides the headline of my essay, which was not written by me) would cause anyone to lump my inquiry into any category that includes “hate.”

Granted, Blackwell is careful to differentiate between me and Shivani. “The most extreme arguments” she says, “are akin to scenarios like Palin’s “death panels” in which groups of well-credentialed whitebread writers plot the exclusion of the interesting and talented.”

Yeah, wow, that’s not referring to me.

Instead, mine is the “softer imagination” that “blames a vaguer villain: workshop process among tables of people-pleasers.”

Well, my goodness, I’m certainly not the first person to assert that the workshop process has a downside. Mark McGurl in The Program Era calls it a form of retraction or “shame management.” Chad Harbach calls it the MFA vs. NYC divide. Even veteran creative writing teacher Madison Smartt Bell, in his introduction to Narrative Design, maintains that “there [are] enormous, crushing pressures to conform” in fiction workshops, but the pressure comes not “from any teacher but from the students themselves. It [is] a largely unconscious exercise in groupthink and in many aspects it really was quite frightening.”

None of these arguments represent “hatred” of MFA programs. They represent sound reflection and critical inquiry. The Creative Writing Program system keeps growing. Do we (and by “we,” I mean the thousands of people employed to teach creative writing in this country) do we really expect that such a boom will go unremarked upon? And does remarking on it constructively and rationally constitute a condemnation of said system?

I hope not.

For the last few days, I’ve been working on an AWP panel proposal on the topics I raised in my Millions essay, and I’m really excited about it. Three writer/teachers have committed to participate, most of them MFA program directors, and they are intrigued (not exasperated) by the perfectly healthy conversation that’s arisen out of my Millions essay. I hope that the panel is accepted so the conversation can continue.

Celebrating (and Celebritizing) Teaching Creative Writing

by Cathy Day CW Programs Teaching Writing

 

Today, Fiction Writers Review is running “Where Are We Going Next? A Conversation about Creative Writing Pedagogy (Pt. 1),” a co-written article by myself, Anna Leahy, and Stephanie Vanderslice. This lively, wide-ranging conversation took place during the summer of 2010 via email exchanges.

I just want to thank FWR for publishing this article. You might be wondering why it appears there and not in, say the AWP Writers Chronicle or a pedagogy journal. Well, the truth is, we did submit it to the Chronicle, but they passed, as is their right, of course. When we got the very kind rejection, we discussed what to do next. Where else do you publish an article about teaching creative writing? (I’ve discussed this problem at some length here.) Since most creative writing teachers don’t (won’t?) read pedagogy journals, we decided to shoot for more mainstream publishing venues. Our first priority was making these ideas “findable” and “share-able.”

I’d like to take this opportunity to make two suggestions that weren’t included in this conversation:

A keynote address on Teaching Creative Writing at the annual AWP conference. I would pay good money to hear anything Charles Baxter or Peter Turchi or Janet Burroway had to say about teaching. Why can’t Good Teachers be “celebritized” at AWP alongside the Good Writers?

More “teaching-creative-writing blogs.” This blog has invigorated my teaching in many wonderful ways, and it’s brought me many new friends. Yes, it takes time, and I know we all struggle to find the time to write, to teach, and to live our lives. In the midst of a busy life, why make time to write about teaching when it doesn’t “count” for tenure and promotion?

Because when you force yourself to articulate what you do and how you do it, your teaching improves.

Because. Teaching. Matters.

Anxiety + Community = AWP

by Cathy Day CW Programs Teaching Writing

"Are you somebody?"

[Note: This post has nothing to do with snow. ]

AWP is like my Facebook feed.

It’s where I go to feel connected to and learn from other writer-teachers. So many panel topics! So many great discussions! Sometimes I just show up to listen and learn, taking notes. Sometimes I propose a panel and start a conversation. It’s often energizing and enriching. I’m part of a community, a profession, a discipline. If this is what it feels like to have “a calling,” to be doing the thing(s) you’re supposed to be doing in life, then that is what I feel like when I’m there at AWP, on Facebook.

Continue reading →

Why I’m Watching Downton Abbey

by Cathy Day Writing

Because I’m working on a Big Thing, a work in progress that’s partially set in the Gilded Age and the Edwardian Era.

Because I need to time travel. I’ve been reading lots of biographies, histories, and fiction of and about the period. Sometimes I feel like Christopher Reeve’s character in Somewhere in Time, trying to will myself into the past. When I was writing The Circus in Winter, I practiced this same technique, immersing myself in movies and books and old-timey objects. (You wonder why the background of my blog looks like upholstery? Now you know…) In a period drama like Downton Abbey, the past is recreated with painterly precision, and I can study the brushstrokes.

Because Laura Linney introduces each episode. For episode 2, she reminds us of the limited options available to unmarried girls of modest means and how the typewriter changed lives. For episode 3, Linney discusses fashions in the context of social change, reminding us that “sometimes the engine of change doesn’t roar. It just quietly sits down to dinner.” The best historical fiction (on the screen or on the page) dramatizes individual lives taking place amid abstract “eras” and “movements.”

Because it stars Elizabeth McGovern as Cora, the Countess of Grantham. If, like me, you’ve spent the last few years reading biographies of Gilded Age women, then watching McGovern is like seeing two women at once: Consuelo Vanderbilt, the real person Cora is based on, and Evelyn Nesbit, the real person turned into a fictional character by E.L. Doctorow and played by McGovern in the movie Ragtime. Cora Crawley is no Evelyn Nesbitt, that’s for sure, but Cora, the heiress-auctioned-to-an-Earl, gets the happy ending Consuelo, the heiress-auctioned-to-a-Duke, never got. For further reading, I highly recommend Paula Uruburu’s American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the “It” Girl, (here’s a trailer for the book) and Amanda Mackenzie Stuart’s Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age.

Because of Maggie Smith. Period.

Because I love downstairs, too. The lives of the servants are just as interesting as the lives of those they serve. I hope the Bates and Anna story ends more happily than the end of Remains of the Day.

Because it’s a participatory event. On Sunday nights, I follow the live tweets of @edwardian_era, also known as Evangeline Holland, “Historian, Foodie, Novelist, Vintage Fashionista, and Edwardian enthusiast,” who blogs at Edwardian Promenade, a site that’s been an indispensible resource to me. Watching the show + following her twitter stream of info nuggets provides an intertextual, “Pop-Up Video” experience. When the Earl teases his mother about consulting the “stud book,” @edwardian_era tweets “stud book = Debrett’s” and includes a link to the Wikipedia entry, where I learn that it was the British equivalent of The Social Register. Bingo! How lucky is this? This show airs just as I’m writing about the period, and experts on the period are sharing their expertise as they watch the show. Wow.

Because relationships are inherently suspenseful. As Katie Roiphe says in her book, Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939, “Marriage is perpetually interesting; it is the novel most of us are living in.”

Because-I don’t know. I don’t know why I love period dramas. I asked my Facebook friends about this, and a friend suggested: “Women had much less power yet many women (myself included) can’t get enough of costume dramas. Is it that we relate, primarily, to the upper classes and imagine a life in which we had leisure, servants, beautiful clothes and went to balls, as a way to indulge our romantic selves, and then we can pull back, turn off the TV, and regain our authority?”

I don’t know. Maybe.

But I think it’s because of something like this: Downton and Gosford Park writer Julian Fellowes was asked, “What’s our fascination with turn-of-the-20th-century life about?” and he said:

“It’s almost our world. When you look at something going on in 1640, you don’t see a connection. But when you look at 1900, you see our world but apparently a simpler form of it where somehow everyone knows the rules, whereas we increasingly have a sense that none of us know the rules. And we’re in a slight state of social chaos. And it seems beguiling to watch an ordered world where everyone knew what they were doing.”

Or as Richard Drew at The Atlantic says: “For me, Downton Abbey is as complex and fascinating a study of the early 20th century as, Mad Men is of the 1960’s.”

And the last (and best) reason why I’m watching Downton Abbey: Because it’s helping me “get inside” my character, a young woman of that time and cultural milieu. In other words, I get to watch great public television and call it “research.”

How I Taught Myself to Write a Novel

by Cathy Day Writing
night road
E.L. Doctorow famously compared writing a novel to driving a car. “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

My first book, The Circus in Winter, a novel-in-stories, was written over the course of twelve years-one story at a time-and thus provides a wide-ranging experience as the reader observes me trying on different aesthetic approaches. There was one narrative hurdle, however, that I couldn’t seem to surmount: sustaining a plot for more than 25 pages. The book contains many big, maximalist stories that span large spans of time, even multiple generations, but I always compressed them until they fit into the short story form.

When I published the book in 2004, the inevitable questions arose: Why is that story a story and not a novel? What are you working on now? And please say it’s a novel, right? I resented this insistence on novel, novel, novel until I asked myself why I felt so much disdain for the form and for its fans. People who love to read-myself included-love being “inside” a story for three days or three weeks, entering John Gardner’s vivid and continuous fictional dream. Certainly this kind of loving is what brings most of us to writing fiction in the first place: the desire to create a reading experience that we ourselves value. As much as I enjoy the 30-minute thrill of short stories, I was raised on novels. I spent my youth living inside them, a perfectly normal dissociative state that allowed me to blessedly not be me for short periods of time. I think most writers are familiar with this condition, and it’s one of reasons we like losing ourselves in stories-those we read and those we write.

Everyone seemed to want me to grow up and write a novel. I had an idea for one, but to be perfectly frank, I had no idea how to do more than write a short story. Then I happened upon an interview by Karin Lin-Greenberg (who would, one year later, become a student of mine at the University of Pittsburgh!) with fiction writer Dan Chaon. I’d long admired his short stories, but he’d recently published his first novel, You Remind Me of Me. How did he move from story to novel, I wondered.

Chaon said, “This seems simple-minded, but the architecture of a novel is really important. In some ways, with a short story, when you’re writing it, you can just feel your way. It’s like being in a house in the dark and you can find the walls and you can figure out where you’re going-If a short story is like being in a darkened room, then a novel is like being in a darkened field-it was a process of finding the architecture of the novel before I even knew what was going to happen in it. The process of finding a story is more intuitive for me.”

These comments resonated strongly with me. Maybe writing a novel necessitates that you know more up front-the big picture, the shape, the arc, maybe even the rough plot-unlike writing short stories, where you are strongly encouraged not to know too much.

E.L. Doctorow famously compared writing a novel to driving a car. “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” True for some, perhaps, but I’m one of those map loving, visual memory people who drives with at least a hazy picture of the route in her head. In writing and in life, I tend not to do well in the face of uncertainty, so, as I moved from story to book, I looked for an already mapped narrative route.

For me, the answer was to write a nonfiction novel.

Instead of wondering fearfully what would happen past page 25, I started with an already lived plot, the architectural bones around which I shaped a novel-length reading experience. I embarked on my next book project in the investigative mode of documentarian-accumulating 350+ pages of very raw material/journaling/”footage” over the course of a year, followed by an intense six-months in the editing booth/at the word processor. (I can’t tell you the joy I felt inside when I saw numbers like “52” and “173” appear in the top right corner of my document.) Then, I spent a few more months on final edits, and boom, I’d written a book in two years. This was Comeback Season, a book that didn’t do well, really, but from which I learned a great deal.

Twelve years spent trying to write one perfect sentence after another, one perfect story after another, vs. two years spent (first!) writing a really shitty first draft, followed by (second!) revising that shittiness, and (third!) editing, tweaking, cutting, clarifying, controlling, polishing that shitty draft into a shiny new book of which I am extremely proud.

Next time: the first in the series, “This is How You Do It.”*

*”It” = better encourage and accommodate big projects within a semester, within a busy life.

Is this a writing class?

Is this a writing class?

by Cathy Day Teaching Writing
When I was young, I obsessed about craft as a writer and teacher, because I thought craft alone could save me and save my students. I learned (and then taught) the methods of characterization, effective use of dialogue, how to use setting to create mood and atmosphere. Et cetera.

In class, I never, ever talked about the writing process itself.

In “Unconscious Mind,” an excellent essay about craft and creativity that introduces his textbook Narrative Design, Madison Smartt Bell says:

“The great defect of craft-driven programs is that they ignore the writer’s inner process. Creativity, the inner process of imagination, is not discussed. So far as the craft-driven workshop is concerned, creativity is sealed in a black box; you’re supposed to remember that the box is there, but there is a tacit agreement not to open it in public.”

Here’s the problem, as I see it: in order to create an environment in which Big Things can be written and discussed, you have to move away from the straight-up craft-driven workshop. You have to acknowledge and talk about the creative process itself. You just have to. I mean literally: how do you get all that story on the page? It would be like training your body to run a marathon without also training your brain.

What I learned the hard way as a writer was that craft knowledge was not enough. I needed that other kind of creative writing book. The non-craft kind. You know, the self-helpy sort that talks about the boring day-to-day-ness of it, the goofy shit you find yourself doing when inspiration strikes, the obsessive rituals, the dogged regimen and fierce will that are required, all the ways in which you must talk yourself into embarking on (and sticking with!) the protracted journey that is the writing of a Big Thing.
 
This semester, I’m teaching a section of Advanced Fiction. My students and I are preparing to embark on National Novel Writing Month. At the beginning of the semester, I asked them to read this great article, “How to Write a Great Novel,” and respond to these questions:

What do you notice about the different ways that these writers get their stories out of their heads and ultimately into the books you read. What process and methods and tricks do they use? Do you see any pattern or similarity in how they work?

This is what we came up with.

1. It’s okay to have a plan, a blue print, an outline. (Banks and Ishiguro and Pamuk).
2. Pay attention to your obsessions. Save stuff until it starts to assume some kind of shape. Maybe you don’t just need a writing desk. Maybe you also need a wall (Danticat and Mantel). Maybe you need a card catalogue (Chaon).
3. Don’t work on a word processor, which encourages endless fussing. Consider hand writing on paper, notecards, blue books, napkins, etc.
4. Consider talking out loud and recording yourself (Powers and Baker).
5. If you do write directly into the computer (McCann), manipulate the machine’s capabilities to your advantage (Rice, Baker). And once you get it into the computer, then get it out of the computer so you can move it around (Atwood) or listen to it (Danticat) and see it (Lippman).
6. Remove yourself from distraction. Write on the subway (Wray) or in the bathroom (Diaz) or in your sugar shack (Banks).
7. Embrace the bountiful array of products available at your local Office Supply Store. Get out the scissors and tape (Ondaatje), the colored index cards (Chaon), the binders and flow charts (Ishiguro), the thumbtacks (Danticat).
 
One day not long again, I set aside some class time so that my students could work on their visual aids. The class meets in a room that’s lined with computers and has small tables set up in the middle. Some students went work at the computers, others sat at their tables to draw their outlines. One student was using crayons and colored markers. I sat down at a table to write thumbnail scene sketches on blue and yellow post-it notes.
Someone came into the room, looked around, and asked, “Is this a writing class?” and I looked up and said, “Yes. Yes it is.”