Looking for Meaning in Fiction Today

Dear readers and writers,

This week, I read an essay in an old magazine about short stories today.  It came to the conclusion that writers are constructing their stories with intellectual dimensions that make it fascinating to read them, but without the heart and deep meaning that used to be found in stories. The author thought it a loss, and said that probably the stories won't prove as memorable to the readers.

 I thought about the novels and short stories that we read in my Theories of Fiction class last semester, and what I remembered best was--Tobias Wolfe.  Not exactly contemporary.  Somewhat minimalist but with loads of feeling buried just beneath the surface.  Two of the class members twisted the professor's arm to get permission to use stories by Wolfe.  He had wanted only very contemporary work at first, but he couldn't turn down these stories.  I'm glad.  Each of them made an indelible impression on me.  I chose to present a story by Amy Hempel called "The Afterlife."  It was highly minimalist, but there was a ton of feeling, buried a bit deeper than in the Wolfe stories but there, I thought.  Some agreed with me about the Hempel story, some did not.  But probably most of the class would view the two Wolfe stories as highlights of the course.  So meaning still means something important to the rising writers of the next generation, I'm pleased to find. What do you think?

cheers,
Laura

Thanks to Mark Coggins and Creative Commons/Wikipedia for the photograph of Tobias Wolfe.

Small Writing vs. Big Writing

Hi readers and writers,

I need to work on a biography that is almost finished and a novel that is about 1/3 done, the latter being a requirement for my MFA program, due by next May in its entirety.  So why is it that my mind skips away to rewriting a travel essay so I can submit it to a contest, polishing up a story about a CO who worked in an insane asylum during WW II to submit to another contest, reformatting a third story to submit for a June 1 deadline?  These contests are fine, but they're just putting off what I really need to do.

Write these books.  Concentrate.  I put my tailbone to the chair and I open the computer and then, my mind plays hooky.  I am getting tired of it, but still, day after day, I don't get down to the jobs I really need to do.

Anyone out there faced this problem and found some great solutions you'd like to share?  I bet I'm not the only one who procrastinates by "pretending" to write, working on the non-urgent jobs and avoiding the important ones.  How can I point my errant brain to what I need it to work on?  My problem is, any time I get too logical, I can no longer write (or I go into science-writing-style, using passive, chronological, logical, simplified, direct, no dialog, no "i").  But this situation is very stressful.  I'd love to get some good, constructive suggestions!

cheers,
Laura

The end of the music

Dear readers and writers,

I've been reading about Amy Hempel this weekend, in preparation for my class on Wednesday, and she talks about finding the first and last sentence in a story, how that guides the entire writing process.  I was fascinated.  I've started to love sentences, to revel in their intricacies or simplicities.

Then, I went on Facebook and saw that at St. Paul's Church, my friend LizBeth mourned the financial necessity to end the position there of the paid music director.  She said this was a bittersweet day as the choir sang out the beloved Jim French.  The end of the music.  Yes, something there calls me to a story.  I don't know when I will write it, because I only have the first sentence so far.

When music ends...that has always fascinated me, and many others, with the song "American Pie."  The day the music died.  The end of rock and roll.  Of course, music lives on, yes, that's true.  But when people who make it die, or lose their jobs, music disappears in one place.  It pops up somewhere else, later, not now, not here.  So that first sentence, "The end of the music," resonates, loaded with mystery and sadness.

regards,
Laura
Image from Creative Commons, with thanks.

One special detail is all you need

Something I have become more and more aware of is the way authors I enjoy use the special detail that conveys the whole picture.  Someone from my MFA program, for example, described an old Irishman as having eyebrows like hamsters.  Picture that!  You don't need any more details, do you?  I certainly didn't.  And this master detail that conveys it all shows in full bloom in stories by Chekhov.

Francine Prose, in Reading Like a Writer, decribed how Chekhov broke all the rules for short story writing but said she can't put his short stories down.  I started reading these stories, and I completely agree.  And I think that his use of the one detail is part of the reason the stories work so well.  Of course, Chekhov had other methods as well, including providing a slice of life instead of a nice neat ending.  But the telling detail is so well chosen in Chekhov stories that I often just stop and marvel about how much you can read out of a single detail.  If you haven't tried to describe things with ultimate economy like this, it takes a lot of thought.  You can't just remove all the details but one and have it convey it all.  That special detail has to bring the whole scene into focus, has to be the detail that implies the rest.  You may have to think about what it could be for a few days before you find it.  But it is very worthwhile.  People may read your story and say things like " Such economy of description!"  The underlying secret is not just economy, but worth per word!

Interview with Michael Jaime Becerra

LH: Michael, how did you get interested in writing?

MJB: My mother fostered my love of books with weekly trips to the library. It didn't matter what we were reading, so long as we were reading something. Left on my own, my childhood reading diet consisted of science fiction, comic books (Frank Miller's Daredevil runs were a favorite), movie-adaptation novels, and Mad Magazine. When I was in the fourth grade, I started emulating the kind of stuff I loved to read through a contest called The Book Fair that my elementary school would hold every year. When I was in junior high, my Book Fair entry was a story about a skateboard contest in outer space. It was a poor combination of influences--Thrasher magazine, Douglas Adams, and The Last Starfighter as I recall it--but through a fortunate series of events the book placed at the County Fair that year. Seeing my book, outside of my immediate world, in a glass case with a ribbon on it, had an immediate and lasting impression on me.

LH: Was that your first success?

MJB: While the junior-high skateboard book certainly qualifies, my first published work was a poem in Mosaic, the journal edited by the undergrads at UC Riverside. That poem was about a small moment--the narrator getting a beer for his father during a football game--but the publication gave me the confidence to continue writing about the world I knew: working-class families, Southern California, the meeting of Mexican and American cultures.

LH: What kind of things do you most enjoy writing?

MJB: I write literary fiction primarily, sotries set in my native El Monte, California, though I've been known to branch out into Mexico onoccasion. I feel most comfortable when the story has a start in reality and then quickly takes on a fictional life of its own. Those are the most enjoyable moments for me, using a real-life setting in a completely fictional context.

LH: Do you have an agent? Tell us about your experiences with/without agents.

MJB: My agent took a look at my manuscript at the suggestion of a client, and I feel quite lucky that she saw the promise of my work. Arriving at the point was difficult, in some ways the most difficult part of the process because so much of it was beyond my control. I always tell people that the agents will always be there, and that they shouldn't be approached until the work is truly ready to be published. It also seems crucial that one research the agent(s) to whom they are sending work. Who else does this person represent? What sort of work do they sell on a regular basis?

LH: What are your thoughts about marketing? Do you have any great tips on how to do it well?

MJB: I think the best martketing occurs in person, meaning that an audience may be more likely to connect with a writer and that writer's work if they have a sense of honesty, approachability, and understanding from the writer. I genuinely enjoy doing public readings, meeting with reading groups, visiting classrooms, etc. From a marketing standpoint, each of these appearances is an opportunity to build one's audience, to build one's brand as well.

LH: If you could go back in time and start over, tell us one thing you have learned that would help you to succeed better/faster/with less struggle.

MJB: With my novel, I would have started out with a better sense of direction than I originally did. My first year of so was spent starting and retreating, and restarting and retreaing again. Had I sat down and outlined the opening chapters of the book, as well as doing some more defining of my characters, I feel that I could have saved myself plenty of time and trouble. For me, such planning gives me the sense of having a road map into the book.

At the same time, I think one should remain open to the unforeseeable. If the characters and their story demand something that the author did not envision for them, the author has to be open to elling the story as truly as possible.

LH: Any other thoughts to share?

MJB: Character is king, or queen, as the case may be.

Here is a sample of a novella I wrote: http://atlengthmag.com/?p=75

Here is an interview I did with Willow Springs a few years back:

http://www.ewu.edu/willowsprings/interview/becerra.html

LH: Thanks for letting us have your thoughts about writing, Michael.

Interview with Martha Ronk

LH: How did you get interested in writing?
MR: I read a great deal as a child, taking books from the public library to read in stacks through the hot Ohio summers. I liked creating sentences and diagramming sentences and rearranging sentences and analyzing literature and studying Latin. I wrote a dissertation on Milton for my PhD and have taught Shakespeare at Occidental College for many years; teaching literature has made me awed by writing.

LH: What was your first success?
MR: My first book, “Desire in LA,” was selected at random for a contest sponsored by the University of Georgia, published 1991. A recent success: I had work chosen for a Norton Anthology, “American Hybrid.”

LH: What kind of books or articles do you most enjoy writing?
MR: I like conceiving of an entire project in which the poems are all related to one another by theme, approach, style, or form. At the moment I am working on “Transfer of Qualities” (quotation from Henry James) in which people and objects transfer qualities with one another—the manuscript is made up of prose poems, short essays, and short “fiction” pieces. In an earlier book, “Why/Why Not” (Univ. of CA Press), I had Hamlet and the phrase “to be or not to be” in mind for each of the sections. In fiction, I like obsessive narrators.

LH: Do you have an agent? Tell us about your experiences with/without agents.
MR: Poets mostly don’t have agents. My work has been published by means of literary contests offered by University Presses or by request from a publisher. If I try for another work of fiction, I would ask all the fiction writers I know for advice; my own fiction, “Glass Grapes and other stories” was published by a small press, BOA Editions, because one of the editors had published one of the stories in his anthology.

LH: What are your thoughts about marketing? Do you have any great tips on how to do it well?
MR: For publishing poems in literary journals, it is most important to know the journal and the editorial approach so that the work you send is fitting and appropriate. Most journals have instructions on how many poems to submit and when. I also think that it is important for all authors to attend conferences, to read at bookstores (and other venues), to attend readings. For poets, the major meeting is the Associated Writing Programs meeting in spring every year. I have had the opportunity to be an editor for Littoral Books, a small press here in LA, but we published 10 books of poems, and for several literary magazines; I learned a great deal working with other writers.


LH: If you could go back in time and start over, tell us one thing you have learned that would help you to succeed better/faster/with less struggle.
MR: I would start earlier. It also helps to begin with a community formed in graduate school, in one’s city, in publishing ventures with others, in other projects. Writers help support one another and since there is little financial support, this aesthetic support is crucial. I also wish I had tried fiction earlier; it was writing my fictional memoir, “Displeasures of the Table,” that got me to thinking that I might try fiction. For me fiction offers more opportunities for the comic.

LH: Any other thoughts to share?
MR: Writing is the most interesting and exhausting thing I do. And every time I read a great piece, a poem (C.D. Wright, for example) or a novel (I just finished “The Book Shop” by Penelope Fitzgerald with ironic, wry sentences) I am eager to write more, to find yet another juxtaposition of words. Each one offers something of a solution to the mystery of how it is done.

I have chosen photographs for the covers of my books; I have written a number of poems about photographs and I love black and white photographs and decided early to use photographs on the covers (although I didn’t have a choice for my last, “Vertigo” from Coffee House Press). My website is through Occidental College, English and Literary Studies Department at

http://departments.oxy.edu/ecls/07%20webpage/ronk/. LH note: Martha Ronk's most recent poetry book, Vertigo, is a National Poetry Series winner, selected by CD Wright.