An evening with a liar & a thief

I'll be reading from my novel Thief on October 1

This Friday I’ll be giving a reading and talk at the Bemidji Community Arts Center, located at 426 Bemidji Ave. N in the old Carnegie Library building.

I plan to talk about how fact and fiction came together in my novel Thief, and about how I transformed the sprawl of everyday life into what my novel needed. I’ll say this much right now: even though the real world shows up in the novel (including the statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe), I didn’t concern myself too much with truth.

The event begins at 5 p.m. with a reception. The reading/talk starts at 6 p.m. After the reading, I’ll be taking questions from the audience.

Hope to see you there!

Advice on writing a novel

Amanita muscaria mushroom

The other week in fiction class, we talked about Paul Scott’s definition of a novel, or how he thinks of novel as he is writing it.

Scott is the author of The Raj Quartet, a set of novels that was very famous years ago and that was made into a popular series on PBS. Scott says that images are not just details that flesh out a character’s world but are rather the “raw material” out of which a novel grows. Here are his words:

“A novel is a sequence of images. In sequence these images tell a story. Its purpose is not to tell you but to show you. The words used to convey the images and the act of juxtaposing the images in a certain way are the mechanics of the novel. But the images are what matter. They are the novel’s raw material….Constructing a novel — telling a tale, for me at any rate — is not a business of thinking of a story, arranging it in a certain order, and then finding images to fit it. The images come first [emphasis mine].”

We found this information in our class text, Alice LaPlante’s The Making of a Story, which is yet another reason I endorse the book so strongly.

I’d never read “Method: The Mystery and the Mechanics,” the essay by Scott from which this quotation was taken, but the brief excerpt made me want to read the piece in its entirety. I found a used copy of Scott’s book On Writing and the Novel online for a few bucks, and it’s now sitting on my nightstand.

From plumber to writer

John Grisham

John Grisham didn’t always know he wanted to be a writer. For a long time he didn’t even know he wanted to be a trial lawyer.

In an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, Grisham describes how he worked several “hard, dead-end jobs,” including as a plumber’s assistant and underwear salesman at Sears.

Read the full article to learn about the real-life experience that convinced Grisham to begin using his skills as a storyteller.

Yeats on YouTube

William Butler Yeats

In class the other day we discussed Peter Everwine’s poem “Rain” and the power of his auditory images. Not only does Everwine refer to the “sudden wail” of a loon, he also has these lines in his poem:

…I heard the steady sound of rain
and the soft lapping of water, and did not know
whether it was grief or joy…

Just the very use of the word “lapping” in a poem about a lake is evocative for me. When I read Everwine’s lines, I immediately draw a connection to another poem, “The Lake Isle Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
— W. B. Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

In class we also talked about the importance of reading poetry aloud, so in keeping with that idea, here’s a YouTube video — really just a recording — of Yeats. In it, Yeats first defends his elocution and then talks about his inspiration for “The Lake Isle Innisfree.” He was actually in London when he heard the sound of water dripping — and he thought immediately of the land around Sligo.

Yeats recites his poetry

(If you let the video play out, you will also hear Yeats recite “The Fiddler of Dooney,” “The Song of the Old Mother,” and parts of “Coole Park and Ballylee.”)

Yeats recited his poetry in this chanting (and possibly incantatory) way because he believed it would revive the ancient bardic tradition in Ireland and help connect the country to its past. To our modern ears it may sound unusual at first, but by listening to the recordings Yeats did for the BBC in the 1930s, we come into contact with this old — ancient — tradition.

I don’t know about you, but the recording galvanizes and thrills me.

Feral first drafts

The wild is beautiful.

What the heck do I mean when I say, “All first drafts are good”?

First drafts are often wild and messy and nowhere near their final state. But that’s exactly the point: they’re supposed to be wild and messy. That’s their role, their job. In fact, I might even say that the wilder and messier your first drafts are, the better — because it means you are taking chances, and risking something real.

Unless you have a mind that orders its thoughts in outlines and orderly sequences (in which case you are perfect and don’t need any advice from me) your ideas probably come to you in a free, natural and unfettered state. That’s the creative process, and that’s the creative mind at work. The goal of a first draft is to get some of that creativity down on the page, and it really doesn’t matter what form it comes in.

As soon as you get words on the page, a few things happen:

~The next step of writing can take place – gathering, sorting, shaping, plunging deeper.
~You are richer than you used to be because you no longer have just a blank piece of paper. You have a piece of paper with words on it – along with arrows, crosshatches, doodles and anything else that has to come out of your pen in order for you to write.

But if you don’t allow yourself to write a first draft, and if you don’t welcome it with open arms and an open mind, you can shut down your creative process. Your internal editor – that nagging voice that tells you things “aren’t good enough,” or “aren’t right,” or “don’t flow” – can begin to take over. You can judge your words before they’re done being messy and wild. And judgment is just as harsh as it sounds: it can kill the wildness and the very life of a piece of writing, especially when it happens too soon.

Of course I’m not the only one who thinks this way. In The Making of a Story, Alice LaPlante devotes a section to this idea in chapter 13, “Learning to Fail Better.” The title of that section of the chapter is, “Perfection is Our Enemy,” and in it LaPlante says,

“The fact is that if you can convince yourself to sit down and write something shitty every day, you’ll get a lot more done that if you are determined to write the Great American Novel, or an award-winning essay or short story.”

So that’s what I’m trying to get at. Every single stinking, feral, crazy, messy first draft is GOOD.

Guide to MFA Programs

Poets & Writers Magazine

The new edition of Poets & Writers (Sept/Oct) contains the updated listing of “The Top 50 MFA Programs.” In addition, the magazine has included a new list of “The Ten Best Low-Residency MFA Programs.”

For the second year in a row, The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop occupies is the top dog among the 50 residential programs listed — in fact 98 percent of the list is “similar to last year’s.” Vermont College of Fine Arts has the top low-res program in the country according to the PW list.

I think this list is an essential tool for anyone considering an MFA degree because it contains innformation about the programs that really matters. For one, you can find out if the program provides “funding” for all of its students or not, and you can learn what kind of teaching load you can expect as a GA in return for that funding. (For instance, the teaching load at the University of Houston in Texas is “heavy” compared to other programs, but to find out just how many sections that means, you will have to go to the program’s website.)

Another item contained in the rankings is a designation of S for studio or A for academic, which gets at what kind of courses are required to earn the degree. Programs designated as S or studio place less emphasis on coursework outside of writing workshops. That seems very important to me. When I was debating about which grad program to attend, one of the crucial factors was the University of Iowa’s emphasis on workshop courses. I didn’t want to attend graduate school as a precursor to an PhD program — I wanted to focus on my fiction in a studio environment. It’s not that I didn’t study literature at Iowa; I took literature classes taught by Writers’ Workshop professors and a fabulous English and art history course called “Renaissance Image and Reformation Iconoclasm” taught by the incomparable Huston Diehl.

But because I wasn’t fulfilling a set of literature course requirements, I also had the opportunity to take French courses — and that was an essential part of my graduate education. I would have missed out on all of that if I had enrolled in the other MFA program that accepted me, and for me that would have been a tremendous loss.

The department will be displaying some information from the PW survey on our bulletin boards on the 3rd floor in Hagg-Sauer, so be sure to check for it in the coming weeks.

The other feature in this issue of P&W mag that might concern you is an article by Nancy Rawlinson called “The Dos and Don’ts of MFA Personal Statements.” She gives several good tips, but let me emphasize one right here: when you write a personal statement, be personal. Tell your story in a real and authentic voice so that someone reading your application gets a sense of who you really are. You need to stand out as an individual in a pile of paperwork, and your words are your only tools.

It’s good to be back on firstdrafty. I’m making one important change in the blog this season — I’m accepting comments! Let me know what you think and ask questions.

Two local jobs

Treefrog clinging to window

Looking for a job right now? Wondering what kind of job you might be able to get with your BFA or BA in the future? I found two advertisement for writing or arts-related jobs in the past week.

A local newspaper is looking for a reporter. The ad, which has been appearing in the Park Rapids Enterprise, states, “A Minnesota lakes are newspaper has an opening for a full time reporter to cover news events and meetings, as well as assignment work around the county. Evening and weekend work may be necessary. Writing, photography and English skillsa re required. This is the perfect opportunity to begin or further develop a career in journalism. Please send resume and cover letter by Feb. 17 to: Human Resources; Detroit Lakes Newspapers; P.O. Box 826; Detroit Lakes, MN 56502-0826.”

The second advertisement is for an executive assistant position here in Bemidji at the Region 2 Arts Council. The council “is seeking a self-motivated, organized person with strong computer skills for full-time position. Administrative support and MAC experience is preferred. Ability to work independently and assume a variety of duties. Send cover letter, resume and references by Feb. 22, 2010 to: Region 2 Arts Council; 426 Bemidji Ave. N; Bemidji, MN 56601.”