Category — MFA Sunday School

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

You are a writer, and like all people who create things, you are going to run into rejection.  You will be rejected when you write a blog post and no one reads it/comments on it/or comments negatively.  You will be rejected when you query agents.  You will be rejected when you submit your work to magazines or publishers.  You will be rejected when you find an agent to take on your project and they are shopping it around.  You will be rejected when you ask for book blurbs or reviews of your book.  And finally, you will be rejected by the very people who take the time to read your work and don’t like it.

Enjoy!

The question at the heart of this is why put yourself through it knowing that this is the case?  That all writers are doomed to experience heaps and heaps of rejection with only a few tasty morsels of accolades to sustain them from project to project.  Why would anyone choose to live that way?

I think it was best explained by Ethel Merman and company in Gypsy:

The costumes, the scenery, the makeup, the props
The audience that lifts you when you’re down
The headaches, the heartaches, the backaches, the flops
The sheriff who escorts you out of town
The opening when your heart beats like a drum
The closing when the customers won’t come
There’s no business like show business
Like no business I know
Everything about it is appealing

Okay, so not everything about the writing life is appealing, but yeah,

The paper, the cursor, the comments, the books
The readers who get what you are saying
The rejections, the queries, the exasperated looks
It’s work when others think that you’re just playing
The blog post when you know you’ve said it best
The last manuscript passed on like all the rest
There’s no life like the writing life
Like no life that I know

Er, sorry, Mr. Berlin.

But truly, you write because you can’t not write.  And you work towards publication because you crave that connection with the reader, even if that connection comes in a package which by default includes rejection.

And no, there is nothing enjoyable about rejection.  Though I can’t find the story online, there is a famous one circulating out there about my old advisor at college who wallpapered his room with rejection letters from literary magazines, spit-in-the-eye to all those people who didn’t take his stories.  He ended up taking them down because they made him feel like crap, but the real spit-in-the-eye wasn’t laughing at rejection but not letting it stop him.  If he had stopped writing, if he had take all those rejections to mean that he wasn’t an amazing writer, he wouldn’t have had this long career as a novelist.

The reality is that rejection happens for many reasons beyond the quality of the project itself.  All editors and agents are looking at your work against all the other work they have in hand (or can predict having in the future) and they weigh it out, trying to make strong financial choices for themselves since publishing is about money and writing is about art.  Writing and publishing actually have very little in common.  What makes a good publication doesn’t necessary make for good writing, and good writing is often passed over because it can’t be marketed well.

When I was a literary magazine editor, I wanted to say no to every story that crossed my path because no’s were easier than yes’s.  A “yes” meant work on my end: I had to contact the writer and send a contract and pay them and edit their work and… “no” was just a form letter in an SASE.  Of course I also had stories I accepted for each issue, but I had to balance out subject matter and length and all sorts of things beyond a great story.  There were so many wonderful stories that I passed on, and when I had the time, I wrote each of those authors directly to let them know exactly what I loved and how sad I was that I couldn’t use it.  I knew it was still rejection, but hopefully it helped the sting.

So, first and foremost, reframe how you look at rejection of your work.  You have rejected dozens of things today.  You turned down all other outfits in your wardrobe to wear the one you have on.  You turned down all other breakfast options to consume the one in your stomach.  Think back in life to all the friendships you didn’t take and all the people you didn’t continue dating.  How many of those rejections were about the worth of the road not taken, and how many of them were choices you made without any meaning attached to the rejections?  I ate yogurt for breakfast, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like eggs or vegetarian bacon or cereal.  And I hope those breakfast foods aren’t silently crying because I didn’t pick them.  It has nothing to do with them or their worth and everything to do with what I was in the mood for in the moment.

And the same is true for your rejections.  They may have nothing to do with the worth of your work and everything to do with the mood or the needs of the beholder.

Knowing that, the exercise I presented this week to get past a bad comment is the very same one I use after I lick my wounds whenever I’m rejected.  Feel free to engage in this little greyish schadenfreude to get over any hurt feelings you’re experiencing, and then get back to writing.  Write a post, send another query letter, or take a deep breath and continue writing your book.

Because there is no life like the writing life.

Homework: None this week!  Keep writing.

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

Hey kids, grab your permission slips and wear sensible shoes: we’re going on a field trip again today.

We’re getting closer and closer to that idea of showing, not telling.  I’d jump there immediately since I know it’s such a popular concept in writing, but I really think it will be more understandable if we circle around it for a bit rather than moving there directly.  Last time we went on an Observation Field Trip, we looked at human characteristics.  This time, I’m going to ask you to ignore every living being in the room and focus solely on the setting.

I want you to describe a room in such fine detail that if twenty years passed and you were asked to recall where everything was in this room, you could grab this description and answer any question.  Where are the electrical outlets?  Where are the windows?  How are the tables arranged?  Anything out-of-place?  Is there a missing salt shaker on a table, a picture askew?

The one catch is that you can only use words: no diagrams, no pictures.  You’re taking a snapshot, but you’re taking it with a word camera.

Once you get down the logistics, start embellishing your descriptions.  That table you’re leaning against, what does it feel like?  The air coming out of the vent, does it remind you of anything?  Getting in the habit of noticing all the small details around you will help you to build realistic settings as Wordgirl spoke about a few weeks ago because you’ll start incorporating those small details into the story itself.

Or into the post itself — this concept isn’t just important for novels.  Every blog post is a mini story about your life, and the more details you provide, the more your readers will be able to visualize what you’re saying.  People like to return to writing that grasps onto them.

Homework: Go out to a public space — a restaurant, coffeehouse, park.  Leave all distractions at home (especially… I’m sorry Wolvog and ChickieNob… kids).  Set the timer for twenty minutes and write down everything you notice around you.  Create a visual snapshot of the room using only words.  Then leave the room and hours later, have someone ask you a series of questions and see how well you can answer them using your description of the space.  If they ask you how many lights were overhead, do you have an answer?

This exercise is about:

• Seeing how good you are at seeing the small details. [OBSERVATION]
• Recording/remembering the small details for later use. [RETENTION]
• And in the future, you’ll utilize these notes to create vivid settings. [UTILIZATION]

See?  ORU — observation, retention, utilization.

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

Fixed form poetry is meant to free the mind by providing a structure much in the same way a house frees the person who lives inside to focus on things other than the elements outside. The next form we’re going to look at is the haiku.

Before you shrug your shoulders and say, “anyone can write a haiku,” I’m going to tell you that you’re correct. Anyone can write a haiku which is why they’re such a popular poetry form with the elementary school set. But few can write a good haiku. Few can use those 17 allotted syllables wisely.

Yes, I used the term syllables because I’m writing this as an American. Traditional haikus use 17 morae (not syllables) because Japanese is a language that is known for its moraic qualities. Think of mora as the length of the syllable. You can have long syllables or short syllables, and nowhere is this clearer than when you think about the different ways the British and Americans pronounce the same word.

What do college students live in? A dormitory. If you ask an American to say the word, they will give you four short syllables — dorm-i-tor-y — and we stress the first syllable slightly. If you ask someone British to say the same word, they will give you three syllables, with the third one held for two brief counts instead of one — dorm-i-try. Both words have four morae, but in one case (the British one), two mora are combined to make one syllable.

Do you see now why traditional haiku artists are cranky when we wave our hand and say, “Morae are too hard to work with! Let’s count syllables instead.” Morae are harder to work with inside English, though they aren’t as difficult to work with in Japanese, a very moraic language. There is more evenness in the time it takes to say each part of the word than there is in English.

We actually touched on this idea of morae back when we looked at meter in the villanelle lesson. Remember when I told you about the other poetic feet beyond iambs (trochee, spondee, pyrrhic, anapest, amphibrach and dactyl) — all of them are essentially counting morae. For instance, a trochee foot is three morae (though it has two syllables). It’s a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Helpless. Help is stressed and it counts as two morae. Your mouth forms the first mora (hel) and then your lips close to say the second mora (lp). The “L” in help actually travels between the two morae. Less is unstressed and brief, and it counts as one morae. The exact opposite happens with the iamb. You have an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. Again, iambs are comprised of three morae.

So, forgive me traditional haiku masters: since we are working in English and not in Japanese, I’m going to let everyone count syllables instead of morae. Because I’d rather have you focus on subject matter and the juxtaposition vs. get hung up on the sound of the words, especially since English doesn’t mirror Japanese.

So let’s go with the traditional count of 5, 7, and 5. In Japanese, it is 5 morae, 7 morae, and 5 morae. In English, we’ll count it as 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and 5 syllables (but now you can also understand why correct haikus often don’t follow that 5, 7, 5 syllable count — those poets are counting morae even in English.

Traditional haikus always work with juxtaposition of two images — the images push against one another and in effect, heighten one another. Let’s look at a famous haiku by Kobayashi Issa for a moment:

little snail
inch by inch, climb
Mount Fuji!

It’s also written less directly as,

O snail

Climb Mount Fuji,

But slowly, slowly!

Both are translations so they don’t fit the pattern when written in English though it does in Japanese (katatsuburi / soro-soro nobore / fuji no yama). But it’s a perfect example of that idea of “kiru” (which means cutting, and is the term used to explain the way the juxtaposition should be used).

It’s a snail, a tiny thing. And then the image pulls back and we see what he’s climbing — Mount Fuji, the largest thing. Tiny meets large and tiny becomes smaller whereas the large becomes huge. That is juxtaposition or the kiru of the poem. And all haiku try to employ some type of slash that gives the reader greater understanding of the two parts.

There’s additionally a second kiru. Mount Fuji is a spiritual place and Buddhists believe it’s a gateway since it reaches up into the sky. This is a tiny snail — the lowliest of beings. It oozes. And it’s climbing… wait for it until the last morae… Mount Fuji. It’s juxtaposing this spiritual space with the tiniest being and showing the importance of all life on earth. We are all struggling to climb the figurative mountain of life, regardless of size or circumstance.

There is one last part of kiru that will be familiar to you since we just studied sonnets (see, there is a reason for the order we approached these fixed forms!). Kireji is the term for the actual slash — the element that changes your understanding. For instance, the word that separates the two images that you’re juxtaposing. It’s the Japanese version of the “turn” or “volta” you saw in the sonnet! Kireji is a cutting word or piece of punctuation. It can be as simple as a comma or as complicated as a word.

The last part is the idea of “kigo” or using something from the natural world. In this case, we’re looking at a snail and we’re looking at a mountain. And we get a sense of the season, since kigo often refers to the seasonal element of the poem. In this case, it’s spring, a time of year when snails are plentiful. (I think… I know snails hibernate, but I don’t really know a lot about the life cycle of the snail.)

Homework: try your hand at writing a haiku now that you know more about the form, and make sure you post a link in the comment section below if you publish one on your blog so we can hop over to read it.

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

Everyone goes through it: writer’s block. It almost sounds like a disease, and it certainly feels like a disease; something akin to the verbal flu where your head is stuffy with unspoken thoughts and your eyes are runny from staring at the computer screen. Wanting to write and not being able to write sucks. Needing that connection that comes after you hit publish on a post but unable to come up with a single post idea sucks too.

I think there are two sides to writer’s block: (1) there are the times that you know what you have to write and you can’t find the words to say what you need to say.  And then (2) the times when you can’t find your entrance, your topic, your next great idea.  Both are frustrating, but I think they need to be treated differently.  In one case, you need a decongestant and in the other, you need an expectorant, and the mistake is taking the wrong medicine or bombing everything to hell with NyQuil.

Yes, NyQuil helps if really have all those cold symptoms, but too many times, we take it because we’re desperate for relief (and sleep).  Of course, if you believe people like my doctor, treating colds this way does more damage than good in the long run even if it works in the short term.  Treating a single symptom takes more time, takes long-term maintenance, but the tradeoff is that you rarely if ever get a cold because you have a strong immune system.  Treating symptoms you don’t even have takes less time and doesn’t require maintenance, but you end up missing more of life because your immune system is shot to hell.

Now apply all of this to writing.

First, let’s treat Problem #1 — writing stuffiness.  The words are in your brain, the ideas are there, you just can’t commit them to paragraphs.  You’re spending a lot of time writing and then erasing.  Or you can technically write, but it’s all coming out as garbage.  Or you think it’s garbage, but think of it more like releasing excess mucous that it getting you closer to easier breathing.

Thomas Edison said: “I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”*  And that’s sort of how I feel about that type of writing.  It doesn’t work and you know it doesn’t work, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have worth.  It’s just the garbage you need to write in order to get to the perfect draft.  So the perfect version isn’t coming on your timetable; sorry about that.  But if you reframe the way you look at this time period, you’ll embrace it (even if you’re frustrated by it) because you know it’s one of those things you need to go through in order to get to that gorgeous, juicy writing.

Doctor’s orders: just keep writing.  Don’t delete.  Save all these drafts because you can sometimes mine from them later.  When you really get stuck, open a new document and without bringing anything over from the document you were working on, start trying to write the piece again utilizing only your memory.  When that fails, change something drastic: make your main character a boy instead of a girl, change the setting, or write the entire post in rhyme.  Sometimes that can knock loose the right words with a big change.

Those drafts that go unused aren’t throwaway, they’re all part of the process to bring you to the words you want.  Reframe how you think about writer’s block and realize that sometimes you need to go through these periods to record all the ways it won’t work in order to find how the piece will work.

Problem #2 — brain thickness.  You can’t seem to get ideas to penetrate your brain or ideas to start flowing, so the desire to write sits in your brain like thick, immobile mucous.

These are those times when you sit and stare at the screen, wishing you knew how to start that young adult novel you’ve sort of dreamed up.  Or you know you want to write, but you can’t think of anything to write about.  Or you need to turn in a 500-word article by Thursday, but you have no idea how to get it started.

Doctor’s orders: move away from the computer but not too far away.  Read a book in the same vein to get you in the mood (in other words, if you’re going to write a young adult novel, read some good young adult fiction).  Go watch a movie.  Go on a walk.  Skip over to a museum that you’ve been wanting to explore (but take a notebook with you — or better yet, your laptop).  Many times, just being ensconced in a related activity jars your brain to start the writing project you were wasting time not starting when you were just staring at the computer.  But even if it doesn’t have an instantaneous effect, don’t feel guilty about using this time or think of it as time you’re not working.  All of these moments are part of the process as well.

It is sometimes difficult for me to place reading a book over working on a chapter because at the end of working on a chapter, I can see progress.  Whereas reading the book may be enjoyable, but I can’t clearly see what I accomplished that day.  Still, taking in information and experiencing life and art feeds our writing.  It’s the fuel you put in your writing tank that works the engine.  At some point, you need to shut out the external distractions in order to get writing done, but when you’re feeling stuffy, it’s not the right time.  Thin the mental mucous with a related-activity expectorant.

Your immune system: Daily writing goes a long way to helping keep you in a project so you don’t always feel like you need to get back into it.  Follow these guidelines to ensure that you write a little bit every day.  Think of it as your literary vitamin.  During times when you absolutely can’t write, make sure you read something that could be construed as doing research.  That way, you’ll continue to think about your project even while you’re away from it.

Homework: none this week.  Just keep writing.

* It may actually be a myth that he said it, but it works well here.

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

Class, today we have a guest lecturer; a fellow MFA who utilizes setting in the most amazing ways in her blog posts (so I can only begin to imagine what I’ll encounter when I finally get to read her book).  Please welcome Wordgirl.

Wordgirl is the author of Bloodsigns — the current incarnation of a blog she originally began in 2007 in order to stretch her writing muscles, overcome writer’s block, and document her struggle with infertility that began in 2004. She received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana in 1998 and has taught composition and creative writing as an academic gypsy at various places: The University of Montana, Salish Kootenai College, The University of Minnesota, but most recently she spent 8 years teaching at a local Community College, a tenured position which she left in order to pursue IVF treatments, parent her stepson and finish her novel.  In 2009 she gave birth to her daughter.  She has an unpublished collection of short stories of the same name as her blog, numerous personal rejection letters, and a novel in progress about the 1862 Dakota Uprising.

[Wordgirl steps up to the lectern to enthusiastic applause.]

When I got to Thirty-eight Street, I crossed over to the south side and walked along the bar fronts there. Cars were parking in front of the bars, and men and women were getting out to go in and drink. Behind the bars were sheds and then rows of small new houses built on new streets and beyond that an empty drive-in movie and a railroad spur and then the town stopped and the fields of winter wheat began. – From Richard Ford’s Wildlife

I believe it was Alice Walker who once talked about how crafting her novels and characters wasn’t so much about placing these created personas in a deliberately crafted scene so much as it was listening to the characters as they came to her — and follow their voices into the lives they were to lead. This seems to dovetail with the great fiction teacher John Gardner’s urging in his book The Art of Fiction that the creation of fiction is that of a vivid and continuous dream — and it is our work as writers to enter that dream — and continue to build a believable world and a believable set of characters so that our readers are swept up in the current of events that unfold — and in their being swept up in that narrative arc it’s our hope that they witness this transformation of our protagonist — and by witnessing that change — following that journey — become emotionally moved by it — so that when they leave our work, put it down, the world and the characters linger like a dream that they can’t shake upon waking.

In class so far you’ve asked yourself some questions about your own writerly voice, your characters — and now of course that you have these characters in hand the question becomes how to place them in a world — a setting, scenes … the bones of the fictional world so to speak. I’m going to be addressing the short-story here in particular, only because it was my focus for a number of years — and because I believe if you can write a short story you have every tool you need to move on to a novel.

The two short stories that I wrote for admission into my MFA program were stories that were loosely veiled pieces of non-fiction. At the time, it was easiest for me to follow the bones of an event that had actually happened to me (for in those days I took the Hemingway quote of ‘write what you know’ far too seriously) but what I can see in looking back on those pieces is that they were first drafts that were never allowed to develop fully — they did not have all of the essential components a piece of fiction needs: plot, character, tone, and form. “Plot is what happens in a narrative; character is who it happens to (or who makes it happen); and tone is what it sounds like. Form is the pattern of its assembly, its arrangement, structure and design” (Bell 25). … I had done the first part — which is I had sat with the characters and I had removed my inner critic and just allowed myself to enter the dream of what would happen if these characters were sitting with one another, and I imagine, for some of you — that’s where you are now.

The next step is to understand the importance of setting/scene in a piece of fiction (which is that matter of form/assembly)– and to begin to put them to work in your own piece. I like how Madison Smartt Bell puts it in his book Narrative Design — he says that the first part of the process of writing is imagination (which is where we are) — and the next, he suggests, is rendering — which is where we’re heading.

And while we’re at it — I can’t think of a better book to recommend in terms of structure than Bell’s book Narrative Design — which I still use. In it he revisits the triangle — do you recall this from any English Literature class? Imagine we’re beginning at the base of the triangle’s slope — this is the character’s beginning. As we follow the narrative, events happen, characters arrive and depart until we arrive at the critical moment of the story/novel — and then we have the falling action and resolution.

The bones of a story, the skeleton is comprised of scenes. Scenes are what determine the pace — dialogue notoriously speeds things up, exposition (and detailed descriptions of event) slow things down. Take a look at the excerpt from the Ford novel Wildlife that I included above. It seems deceptively simple at first because we have only a single character — and their interior monologue in the first person — but notice the vivid descriptions of Joe’s world in the last few sentences– what they reveal about his mindset, what he notices, what tone it sets — how it grounds us in a particular emotional place for what might come next in the novel.

Whether you happen to already have scenes in hand or are just working with characters this is a terrific exercise that allows you to see how detail anchors us in scene/ and allows for our readers to continual suspend their disbelief (that vivid and continuous dream idea again.)

Homework: I love the exercise from David Ray in What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers — The Five-Highlighter exercise. Using five different colored highlighters, mark a text (first a piece of fiction that you admire and consider successful, and then your own) with different colors for each sense impression, for example blue for visual, red for auditory, green for taste etc. Find passages that use all five senses — and then see how your own scenes match up.